On Good Friday 1300 AD, in Dante’s thirty-fifth year, he goes astray from the
straight road into the Dark Wood of Error. Seeing the Sun (Divine Illumination)
lighting the Mount of Joy in the Distance, he attempts to climb up the
mountainside but is blocked by three beasts of worldliness: the Leopard of
Malice and Fraud, the Lion of Violence and Ambition, and the She-Wolf of
Incontinence. When his hope is nearly lost, the shade of the Roman poet Virgil
(a symbol of Human Reason) appears to him. Virgil has been sent by Beatrice in
Heaven to lead Dante from error; he explains that to defeat the beasts it is
necessary to take the harder route through Hell (where sin is recognized),
Purgatory (where sin is renounced), then to Heaven to revel in the light of God.
Dante accepts and sets off with him. The Poets pass through the Gate of Hell
(inscribed with the famous line, Abandon all hope ye who enter here) and step
into the Vestibule, where they see the torments inflicted on the opportunists
and those who took neither side in the Rebellion of the Angels. They are not
officially in Hell nor Heaven because their actions in life were not good enough
or bad enough to warrant a place in either. They must forever pursue a banner
just out of their reach while being stung by wasps; the blood and pus flowing
from their wounds is feasted upon by worms and maggots. (The punishments in
Inferno always fit the crime. The wasps signify the sinners guilty consciences
and the worms and maggots, their moral filth.) The Poets wish to be ferried
across the river Acheron by the boatman Charon, but Charon realizes that Dante
is still living and refuses them passage until Virgil makes a good argument for
Dante’s case. Charon reluctantly agrees, but Dante faints out of pure terror and
only awakes when he is on the opposite bank. Upper Hell, for those who committed
the least serious sins, is made of five circles, each containing fewer sinners
and smaller than the one before it. The first of these is Limbo, where
unbaptized children and virtuous pagans are placed. Virgil is one of these
souls, who lived decent lives but died before Christ came (in Dante’s mind,
belief in Christ was necessary to enter Heaven). They are not tormented but must
spend eternity without hope. Dante and Virgil tarry in Limbo to talk with other
great poets of the ancient world. (Dante must have had tremendous pride in
himself to have imagined walking with Homer and Ovid.) Entering the second
circle, where the torments begin, the Poets are blocked by Minos, the beast who
judges the damned and condemns each soul to its proper level of Hell, but Virgil
convinces him to let them pass. (Dante fused pagan mythology and Christian
beliefs together in his Hell quite often.) They then see the souls of the
carnal, swept around by tempests much as they allowed their reason to be swept
away by passion in life. Here they meet Paolo and Francesca, who were murdered
by Francesca’s husband before they could repent from their sin of adultery.
After hearing their story, Dante faints again. Upon recovering, Dante and Virgil
enter the third circle, where storms of stinking snow and freezing rain fall and
form slush under their feet. Cerberus, a three-headed dog, guards the gluttonous
souls and chews at them. One of the gluttons, Ciacco, a Florentine like Dante,
prophesizes Dante’s later exile. (It becomes apparent later that the damned can
see far into the future but cannot see the events of the present. Thus on
Judgement Day, the last day, their powers will become useless.) The fourth
circle is guarded by the monster Plutus but Virgil again manages to talk his and
Dante’s way past him. (I assume that this means Human Reason can always outwit
anything hellish.) The circle is filled with souls of hoarders and wasters, who
are eternally at war with one another. They are in Hell because in thinking of
nothing but money they destroyed the light of God within them. It is now past
midnight on Good Friday, and the Poets proceed to the fifth circle, the Marsh of
Styx. This is the last circle of Upper Hell. The souls of the wrathful attack
one another in the marsh and the souls of the sullen lie entombed beneath the
slime. The Poets stand at the edge at the edge of the marsh and Phlegyas, the
ferryman of Styx, rushes across thinking they are new souls to torment and does
not want to give them passage when he finds out they are not; Virgil (once
again) convinces him otherwise. They are ferried to Dis, the capital of Hell,
which marks the boundary between Upper and Lower Hell. The gates of Dis are
guarded by Rebellious Angels, whom Virgil is powerless against (Human Reason
alone cannot cope with Evil) and sends up a prayer for divine aid. Virgil’s fear
is made worse by the presence of Three Infernal Furies (symbolizing remorse). He
calls on Medusa to turn them into stone, tells Dante to turn away and shut his
eyes in order not to glimpse this evil, and even places his own hands over
Dante’s eyes. Sudddenly a Heavenly Messenger approaches, proceeded by a great
storm (symbolizing God’s power). He throws open the gates of Dis and then
returns to Heaven. The Poets are now free to enter the sixth circle, wherein the
souls of the heretics (specifically, those who denied the belief in the
immortality of the soul) are entombed in iron tombs heated by fires. These tombs
will be closed forever on Judgement Day and the heretics will be sealed forever
in a death within a death. The Poets continue through the sixth circle, where
they meet one Farinata degli Uberti (who would have been a political foe of
Dante’s had he not died a year before Dante’s birth), with whom Dante discusses
politics, and his friend Guido Cavalcanti?s father Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti.
They reach the inner edge of the sixth circle and find rubble that was formerly
a cliff but which was destroyed in the great earthquake that shook Hell when
Christ died. The stench that arises from the seventh circle is so powerful that
they seek shelter behind a tomb to accustom themselves to the smell. Virgil uses
this time to describe the divisions of Lower Hell. It is now two hours before
sunrise on Holy Saturday. (Virgil is somehow able to track the motion of the
stars, which cannot be seen in Hell as they are a symbol of God’s shining hope
and virtue.) While descending the rocks, Virgil manages to trick the Minotaur,
who tries to block their way. The souls of the violent against neighbors are
wallowing in a river of blood inside the seventh circle. Many tyrants and
war-makers are punished here. Centaurs patrol the river and menace the Poets as
they try to pass, but Virgil convinces Nessus the Centaur to bear them across.
Nessus deposits them in the second round of the seventh circle, the Wood of
Suicides. Their souls have been trapped in trees whose leaves are chewed off by
Harpies, causing them to bleed. Other souls of the violent against themselves
are chased through the Wood by packs of dogs who tear them to pieces. In round
three of the seventh circle, blasphemers (the violent against God), sodomists
(the violent against Nature, the child of God), and usurers (the violent against
Art, the child of Nature and thus the grandchild of God) are scalded by rains of
fire on a plain of burning sand. (The unnatural rain is a fitting punishment for
their unnatural actions.) Dante walks along the banks of a rill flowing across
the plain and converses with Ser Brunetto Latini, whose writings Dante greatly
admired and from whom he learned numerous literary devices. When the Poets come
within hearing distance of the waterfall that lunges from the seventh into the
eighth circle, three Florentines rush over to Dante and begin speaking of
Florence’s present tate of degradation. At the top of the waterfall Dante
removes a cord from his waste and drops it over the edge, signalling the
approach of a great monster. The monster is Geryon, the Monster of Fraud, who
will fly them down the cliff. As Virgil negotiates for their passage, Dante
examines the souls of the usurers. He sees them crouching on the edge of the
burning plain with purses (bearing the coats of arms of prominent Florentine
families) hanging from their necks. Returning to Virgil, he mounts Geryon’s back
with him and they fly around the waterfall and down the cliff. Geryon deposits
them in the eighth circle, Malebolge (Evil Ditches) which consists of ten
bolgias (ditches/pockets); those guilty of simple fraud are punished therein.
Stone dikes running from ditch to ditch will serve as bridges on which the Poets
can cross them. The first bolgia contains the souls of panderers and seducers,
eternally driven by lashes from horned demons. The souls of the flatterers are
sunk in excrement. The souls of simoniacs (those who corrupted the Church by
making a profit from it) are in the third bolgia, jammed upside-down inside
tube-like holes in the ground with fire scalding the soles of their feet, and
are jammed farther into the holes as new sinners arrive to take their places.
(Baptismal fonts in Northern Italy were constructed similarly in Dante’s time,
and by making a mockery of baptism the simoniacs are punished likewise.) Dante
(good Catholic that he is) makes a heated denouncement of these sinners, and
afterwards is carried up a ledge to the fourth bolgia by Virgil. They stand on
the bridge over the fourth bolgia and gaze upon the souls of fortunetellers and
diviners. In life these people wished to see into the future through forbidden
methods, so their heads are placed backward on their shoulders – they can never
see in front of themselves and can only walk backwards through eternity. In the
fifth bolgia are the souls of the grafters, sunk in boiling pitch and guarded by
demons who tear them with grappling hooks if they dare to rise above the
surface. These demons present the only physical danger to Dante during his
journey (some have surmised that this is due to the fact that Dante was exiled
from Florence on false charges of grafting). Virgil hides Dante behind some
rocks while he negotiates with the demons leader, Malacoda, and is guaranteed
passage to the next bridge, as the one intended to be crossed lies shattered.
When two of the demons are tricked into the pitch by a couple of wily sinners, a
rescue is organized by the remaining demons while Dante and Virgil take
advantage of the confusion to sneak away. Fearing pursuit by the demons, the
Poets slide down the bank of the sixth bolgia to hide. There they see the souls
of the hypocrites moving slowly round a narrow track, weighted down by outwardly
beautiful robes that are actually made of lead. (Excellent symbolism here – in
life their outward appearance was that of bright holiness, but now their
consciences bear the weight of their ugly, terrible guilt.) The Poets find that
Malacoda lied to them about the existence of the bridge and are obligated to
climb up the opposite bank to exit the seventh bolgia. They walk the length of
the bridge across the seventh bolgia and observe the souls of the thieves. These
souls are trapped in the coils of reptiles who bind their hands behind their
backs and pierce their veins. Some sinners appear to Dante as humans, others as
reptiles; he watches as one of the reptiles latches itself onto one of the
humans and exchanges forms with him. The eighth bolgia contains the souls of the
evil counselors – those who abused their God-given gifts for evil purposes – who
are completely engulfed in flames. Dante speaks to a flame and finds that the
souls of Ulysses and Diomede, soldiers in the Trojan war, are contain within and
listens to the story of Ulysses’s last voyage. He then speaks to a lord of
Romagna, discussing its tragic state of affairs. The Poets continue to the ninth
bolgia, where they see the sowers of discord. Because in life they separated
what God had intended to be united, they are hacked at and torn apart by a demon
bearing a bloody sword. They are divided into three classes: sowers of religious
discord (Mohammed is chief among these), sowers of political discord, and sowers
of discord among kinsmen. Virgil hurries Dante onto the bridge over bolgia ten,
where they observe the falsifiers. These souls are subjected to various kinds of
corruption (disease, filth, darkness, stench) as they corrupted society in life
by their falsifications. They are divided into four classes: alchemists
(falsifiers of things), evil impersonators (falsifiers of persons),
counterfeiters (falsifiers of money), and false witnesses (falsifiers of words).
Dante observes two of the falsifiers quarrel with one another until he is
reprimanded by Virgil. The Poets approach the Central Pit, which contains
Cocytus, the final circle of Hell. The Pit is guarded by half-buried Titans,
placed here because they symbolize earthly passions that men must strive to
overcome. One of the Titans helps the Poets by lowering them to Cocytus in the
palm of his hand. Cocytus is a frozen lake and the souls guilty of treachery
against those to whom they were bound by special ties are frozen to varying
degrees within. This ice is divided into four concentric rings: Ca?na (named
for the biblical Cain, it contains the souls of the treacherous against
relatives), Antenora (for the treacherous to their country, named for the Trojan
who betrayed his city during the Trojan war), Ptolomea (named for Ptolemaeus
Maccabeus who murdered his father-in-law, for the treacherous to guests and
hosts), and Judecca (named for Judas Iscariot, reserved for the treacherous to
their masters). Satan himself is in the very center, beating his huge wings in a
vain attempt to free himself from the grip of the ice. He has three hideous
faces (a mockery of the Holy Trinity) and chews a sinner in each of his mouths -
Judas, Cassius, and Brutus. To exit Hell, the Poets climb down Satan’s hairy
flanks until they pass over the center of gravity and emerge at the Mount of
Purgatory on the other side of the world to finally gaze at the stars.