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The presence of an underworld in so many mythologies in ancient times has offered much food for thought in later centuries. In Italy, around 1300 A.D., lived a man who began questioning his own value system. Dante Aligheiri was then about 35 years old. What did he really believe? What seemed to him truly good, truly evil? He pondered, examined his conscience, and pondered some more; then he sat down and wrote The Divine Comedy, one of the finest poems in world literature. He borrowed from the classical view of the Underworld and incorporated into it Christian tradition. He divided the afterlife into three sections--Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. For our purposes here, we will be looking at or describing one realm only--the Inferno or Hell.

Dante's Hell lies inside the Earth. The upper regions lie close to the Earth's surface while the deepest part is at the exact center of the Earth. There are nine circles; each circle is smaller than the one above and contains a different class of sinner. Lesser sins are punished in the top circles of the cone while the sins become greater and the punishment harsher as the circles narrow. Lucifer himself is in the center of the lowest circle which is a frozen lake.

L6e4g1 While Dante was writing from a Christian tradition, he nevertheless included many ideas from Greek mythology. The five rivers of the Greek Underworld appear--four in The Inferno, and the fifth, Lethe, as the transition from Purgatory to Paradise. Here, too, Charon acts as ferryman, arguing against accepting Dante because he was not dead. Minos, transformed into a bull-monster, coils his long tail around each sinner to fling him into whatever circle or category he belongs. Many other mythological characters (not all of whom have been covered in our lessons so far) are included--Chiron, Cerberus, Hector, Helen, Ulysses, Antaeus. What follows is a stroll through Dante's Hell.

The first part of The Divine Comedy is "The Inferno." Dante sees himself traveling through the nine circles of hell, watching with horror the sinners assigned to each circle. It is a graded hell, with the lesser sins punished near the entrance, and the greatest sins punished at the very bottom of the pit. Like most Europeans in the year 1300, Dante was a Roman Catholic, but his Hell reflected his value system, not that of the Church. How he incorporated this value system into "The Inferno" will be sketched out in this next part.

We begin in a kind of vestibule, outside of Hell proper. The first sinners we see are the opportunists: people who on earth were for neither good nor evil, but only for themselves. Dante despised them and placed them in the vestibule in a kind of isolation. Here, stung by insects (since they reacted to stimulus on earth), they race forever after a banner (since they were committed to no cause on earth).


* We cross the Acheron River and come to Circle I. Here are the good pagans--people who lived good lives before the birth of Christ. They suffer no physical punishment, but rather a spiritual one: Since they do not know God on earth, now they are forever deprived of the sight of him.

* On to Circle II. Here are the carnal sinners--people who sinned through passion . . . the illicit lovers . . . the unfaithful husbands and wives. Their punishment, of course, fits their crime: as they permitted themselves to be tossed by the storms of passion on earth, so now in Hell they are tossed forever by actual winds and gales.

* Circle III. Here the gluttonous wallow in mud and dirty slush. As they enjoyed eating on earth, now they are eaten by Cerberus, a horrible three-headed dog. As they enjoyed delicacies on earth, now they live in the indelicate--in the muck.

(Are you beginning to see Dante's structure? As we move deeper into hell, we come to the more serious sinners. And always, the punishment fits the crime: it is relevant.)

* Circle IV. Here are the hoarders and wasters. In life they worked without meaning; now they work without meaning in death, pushing huge boulders against each other.

* Circle V. This is the home of the wrathful, the angry, who hit each other on earth, and now spend eternity hitting each other; and of the sullen who sulked on earth and now "sulk" beneath soft, bubbling mud.

L6e4g2 (At this point in "The Inferno," Dante pauses, for this is the end of Upper Hell. The next four circles are Lower Hell. From here on, Dante looks with loathing at the sinners, for each sinner in Lower Hell represents a serious and heinous evil.)

* Circle VI. Here are the heretics, people who deliberately rejected the teachings of their religion. They lie in burning tombs and, on Judgment Day, the lids will be nailed down forever. As they chose to conceal themselves from God, so they will forever be concealed from Him and all beings.

* Circle VII. The domain of the violent. Here are murderers--violent against their neighbors--simmering in a river of boiling blood. Here are the suicides--violent against themselves--changing into trees since they rejected their human form. Here are the blasphemers, the sodomites, the userers--Violent against God, Nature, and Art--lying on a steaming sterile desert, bathed in a constant rain of fire.

* Circle VIII is a bit different. It is divided into ten bolgias, or ditches. In each ditch lies a particular kind of sinner but all ten kinds are guilty of fraudulence and hence (to Dante) are despicable. In descending order, the sinners are seducers and panderers; flatterers; simoniacs; fortunetellers; grafters and swindlers; hypocrites; thieves; evil counselors; sowers of discord; and falsifiers. Their punishments vary, but always they are relevant. The fortunetellers, for example, have their heads on backwards: as they tried to see ahead, now they can only look back. The thieves have their bodies stolen by reptiles and must steal to regain them. The falsifiers are disfigured by disease, as their lies disfigured the world.

(By now you should be feeling a small tickling thread of guilt and terror--for are we not all represented to some degree in Dante's Hell? And the punishments, always relevant, seem horribly right.)

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* Circle IX. The final circle is reserved for those sinners who are guilty of treason. Here, too, the sinners are ranked according to their guilt: first the treasonous against kin, then the treasonous against country, then the treasonous against guests and hosts, and finally the treasonous against their masters. All are encased in ice--as their cold hearts suggest they should be. The worst treachery, of course, is treachery against God, the master . . . and at the very pit of Hell are three sinners: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius--in the three mouths of Satan himself, being devoured and chewed and ravaged throughout eternity!


Dreadful, isn't it . . . and rather wonderful, too? Set out like this, one can easily grasp Dante's value system. Sins of the flesh seemed minor to him; carnal sin, gluttony, anger--these deserved Hell, but only Upper Hell. Sins of violence were more important; sins of fraud were more important still, for fraud is violence against the mind and heart. And sins of treason were the most important of all . . . for they are a kind of violence against all that is best in humanity. Keep these points in mind as you do the written work for this lesson. There is a section based on Dante's concept of Hell.

Throughout the centuries, man has thought and surmised much about what happens when we die. Where do we go? What do we do? Does the way we live our lives on Earth have any bearing on what's waiting for us on the other side of death?