The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

An Amateur?s Progress

1st Circle - (Limbo) Where the good, non-Christians dwell, suffering no physical torment. Unfortunately, they have no hope of ever seeing God.

2nd Circle - Where the lustful are punished by being whirled about in a dark, stormy wind.

3rd Circle - Where the gluttons are punished by being mired in filthy muck and are battered by cold and dirty hail, rain and snow.

4th Circle - The prodigal and the miserly clash here by rolling heavy weights against each other with their chests

5th Circle - Where the River styx, like a swamp, provides a place for the wrathful to tear and mangle each other on the banks and for the slothful to suffer by lying beneath the slime.

6th Circle - Where Arch-heretics on the way down to the 6th circle, burn in tombs.

7th Circle - The violent, for hateful acts against God, self, or one?s neighbor. (First Round) Punished by immersion in a river of boiling blood (The River Phlegethon), are murdering thieves and tyrants.

(Second Round) The suicides have been turned into trees and bushes that bleed when broken. The Harpies (ugly birds) feast on their leaves, creating great pain.

(Third Round) A stretch of burning sand upon which flames rain eternally on the blasphemers, the usurers, and the sodomites.

8th Circle - Here are found 10 stone ravines on the flight downward:

1. Pimps and panderers walk naked in opposite direction to a line of seducers, all of whom are constantly whipped by demons.
2. Flatterers are immersed in excrement.
3. Simonists are immersed, head-down, in holes that somewhat resemble baptismal fonts, and their feet are constantly burning.
4. Soothsayers weep as they walk with their heads twisted completely around, forcing them to walk backward to see where they?re going.
5. Grafters are thrown into boiling pitch. Deep fry.
6. Hypocrites march sadly in golden cloaks. They step on Caiaphas, crucified to the ground, as they pass him. The Poet warns about how he might fail to describe with truth the horror of this place which can hardly be told in words.
7. Seventh bolgia. Thieves run around naked pursued by vile snakes. When the snakes bite them, they flame up and turn to ash which falls to the ground, then reforms itself back into the person, or else the sinner and the biting snake/reptile exchange bodies or merge into a new creature. It seems, for having been a robber, one is repaid by being robbed of his self.
8. Deceivers burn within individual flickering flames. One, divided at the top, is shared by Ulysses and Diomed.
9. Sowers of scandal and schism, are mutilated, ripped open, bloody, with entrails spilling out
10. Falsifiers are punished by affliction with diseases of various kinds and are arranged in various positions.
    

9th Circle Traitors are frozen in an immense plain of ice. At the center, the 3-faced Lucifer stands frozen in the ice. In each of his 3 mouths, he chews one of the three worst sinners of all mankind, Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius.

It was in the 9th Circle that the Pilgrim met a soul whose body was still alive in the world above, and possessed there by a demon, until that body dies a natural death.

© 1999 Herman Fontenot

Click on any number to go forward to another of the five articles on The Divine Comedy: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

References found on the World Wide Web:

This amateur takes no responsibility for the content or availability of any of these references, nor does he necessarily agree with the viewpoints expressed.

• The Digital Dante - Columbia University
  Information and resources regarding the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Includes complete texts of his major works and images of medieval art related to them, scholarly articles, questions for discussion, and a bibliography. Also contains links for current events regarding Dante and his works.
• Renaissance Dante in Print (1472-1629) - Impressive collection of rare texts by Dante Alighieri housed at the University of Notre Dame and the Newberry Library. The texts are shown in their original form along with extensive commentary, biographical information, indexes, and supplementary material.
• The Deep Passage: Dante, Longfellow, and Pinsky - Wen Stephenson / The Atlantic Monthly Company Information about analyses and translations of Dante Alighieri's works, by poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Robert Pinsky, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly. Includes commentary, the transcript of an online conference with Pinsky, excerpts of Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno, the texts of four sonnets by Longfellow, and an excerpt of Longfellow's translation of Dante's Paradiso.

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