Cold Open:

Go to Hell!

…with me. Please. I’m going to Hell today and I’d like you to join me.

We won’t stay long. Just taking a tour.

Taking a tour of Florentine Dante’s version of Christian hell, - as he wrote about it in his 1321 epic poem, the Divine Comedy.

One of the most influential literary works ever written in the Western World.

Dante depicted Hell as being made up, primarily, of nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth, where various types of sinners face a variety of horrifying punishments.

From sitting in lakes full of shit-slush… to being bitten by magical snakes… to being literally chewed up in Satan’s mouth for eternity, the punishments Dante came up with were… nothing if not imaginative.

Dante’s depictions of Hell were highly influential to Christian theology which has highly influenced Western Culture significantly. When you picture Hell - IF you picture Hell - you likely picture imagery influenced heavily by Dante.

Ever wonder where many of the dirtbags whose lives we’ve explored in other Timesuck episodes go when they die? Dante had some thoughts. There were specific circles reserved for the likes of, for example, the Milwaukee cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, Killer Clown John Wayne Gacy, the Night Stalker Richard Ramirez, the Co-Ed Killer Ed Kemper, and other serial killers.

Ever wonder if they’re getting punished somewhere by a demonor some other kind of monster? I do.

Dante clearly wondered about this kind of thing as well.

He placed a lot of people he either knew - or knew of and didn’t care for - into Hell. He seemed to clearly be pleased with his vengeful thoughts of their eternal suffering. TOTALLY get it! I’ve entertained thoughts of vengeance for as long as I can remember having thoughts.

They’re pretty fun fantasies, I gotta say.

In Dante’s hell, the sinners of each circle are punished for eternity in a fashion fitting their crimes. The first circle is for unbaptized virtuous pagans, the second for the lustful, the third for the gluttons, and so on.

And all this came out of Dante’s mind - a very religious and pretty twisted mind. And, when he wrote it, an angry and bitter mind.

Dante grew up in Florence when it was a city-state and basically a war zone between two opposing political groups. Dante would later enter politics himself and then be exiled when a rival group came to power.

And he wrote the Divine Comedy from his exile.

Dante’s political enemies would make their way into his Inferno. If he couldn’t punish them in life he could at least punish them on the written page and imagine them suffering immensely down with the Devil below.

His epic poem was his personal shit-list, full of people he thought should burn in hell for whatever reason. It was also his personal Burn Book, a chance for him to show off how good he was at poetry compared to the all-time masters.

It was a sweeping declaration of the supremacy of the Christian God— and maybe - the first buddy road trip story.

So let’s go to Hell! Join me down below in this week’s shit-covered, fire- raining, monster-filled “hitchhiker’s guide to the Underworld” edition of Timesuck.

PAUSE TIMESUCK INTRO

I. Welcome! A.Happy Monday: Happy Monday, Meatsacks!

Welcome to the Cult of the Curious.

Hail Nimrod, Hail Lucifina, Praise Bojangles, and glory be to Triple M.

Nimrod needs our help today. Apparently, he may be stuck in Dante’s Hell.

You’ll meet him down there later.

I’m Dan Cummins, the Master Sucker, Lucfina’s masseuse and waxer, and you are listening to Timesuck.

B.Charity: Quick reminder that thanks to you Space Lizards, Bad Magic Productions donated $12,200 to No Kid Hungry dot org.

Keeping kids fed! Thanks for helping us do that.

To find out more, or to donate more than you have already, go to https://www.nokidhungry.org/

Link in the episode description.

C.Maverick Plug: Quick message for any Couer d’Alene slash Spokane, Washington area dudes in need of a barber. My buddy Michael - awesome dude - is the owner of Mavericks in downtown CDA at 418 Lakeside in the Innovation Den by CDA Coffee.

Great vibe and great barbers. Beards, ‘staches, fades, whatever you need. They just opened a new location on Ramsey in the same little strip mall as Pokéworks and Mangia Pizza.

Great cuts by great dudes.

Go to mavcuts.com to book with Michael or any of the other great barbers. So easy to set up an appointment. Kyler and I have been going there for a few years now and it’s always solid.

D.Merch: New edition of the Timesuck serial killer yearbook series in the store today at Bad Magic Merch dot com. Sexy cow lovah - Joachim Kroll tee. Certified Piece of Shit.

I’m pretty sure wearing it gets you 50% off whatever you order from Kroll’s Cafe. The world’s most disturbing diner.

E.Segue to Topic: And now for something a little different.

We don’t often cover great works of literature on Timesuck, though we have covered written texts before - like the lost books of the Bible, way back in episode 83.

Today’s episode of Dante’s Inferno will probably feel more akin to the previous Sucks on the Greek or Egyptian gods than it will to that episode, though.

While Dante Alighieri [alla gare-ee] certainly didn’t invent Christian theology or even its symbolism, a lot of what many consider to be standard Christian Hell imagery - does comes from his Divine Comedy, not the Bible.

Dante gave a really dense book - the Bible - that’s mostly instructions and genealogies - a compelling narrative: the story of one man’s journey through hell and then purgatory and into heaven - an attempt to both find his missing love and understand the nature of Divinity.

Let’s burn Meatsacks! It’s Inferno time.

PAUSE TIMESUCK INTERLUDE

II. Intro/Establish Premiss:

Dante’s Inferno is the first of a three part epic poem chronicling a journey through the afterlife.

The three parts together - the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso - Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven - make up the whole work - the Divine Comedy.

It was written in the early 14th century by one Dante Alighieri [alla gare- ee].

It is believed that he started to write it prior to 1308 and completed just before his death in 1321.

But because there were so few records back then, the exact dates are uncertain.

So why did it take him SO MANY YEARS to write it?

LAZINESS!

He was a lazy, pity-party sad-boy who filled his inkwell with tears and mixed those tears with his sad-boy-poopy-pants-juice to make some stinky sad-boy ink.

Bet you didn’t know THAT, did ya?

That was pretty crazy and not true.

We don’t know exactly why it took him so long.

Probably partially because he had a real hard time finding an Apple store or Best Buy or somewhere else where one could buy a laptop. He couldn’t even find an old Sears catalog to order an old typewriter from. He couldn’t even find an old five and dime to buy himself some whiteout for corrections!

Dude had to QUILL-AND-INK-IT - which I’m sure made the revision process just a WEE BIT laborious.

MAN that would be tedious.

I think about how many notes revisions I make every week for Timesuck. How many parchment rough drafts that would be. If I had to quill and ink these notes, we’d be kicking out about…. two episodes a year.

Speaking of parchment - that was another thing that made writing hard back then - paper didn’t exist as it does now.

You couldn’t just go buy a big ream of printer paper or typewriter paper from the drug store.

Paper wasn’t commonly found in Europe until around 1450, well over a century after Dante died. Before then, it was sheepskin parchment or calfskin vellum!

Had to find a vellum dealer.

Pelts were first soaked in a lime solution to loosen the fur, which was then removed. While wet on a stretcher, the skin was scraped using a knife with a curved blade. As the skin dried, the parchment or vellum maker adjusted the tension so that the skin remained taut. This cycle of scraping and stretching was repeated over several days until the desired thinness had been achieved.

Such a pain in the ass to create just a few sheets of parchment.

Because of all the labor involved here - because you couldn’t just slaughter cattle and sheep indiscriminately to make more paper when you needed it, it was really expensive. http://cdalebrittain.blogspot.com/2017/02/writing-in-middle-ages.html https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/making/

I’m guessing a lot of ancient middles ages writers made it to the end of their books - THAN had an idea that would make their story way better - and then thought about how it would take months or years to rewrite it and just did a little internal, “Ah, fuck it… No one will ever know what it was supposed to be other than me anyway. GOOD E-NOUGH.”

So WHY did Dante write a giant book it would’ve taken so much effort to write?

Essentially, because he was pissed off and suddenly had a lot of time on his hands.

He’d been exiled from Florence - the city-state and republic he loved dearly - and he was venting.

He’d also quarreled with some of his fellow exiles, and he was alone, out of work, and pretty bitter towards at a lot of different people.

So, he wrote about the people he didn’t like… burning - or otherwise being tortured - in Hell.

Let it out, Dante! Let it out!

Sounds like fun. I bet he had a pretty good time writing it.

Literary revenge and judgement was only PART of his motivation.

He was also confused about how he had ended up exiled and alone later in his life and was he trying to wrap his head around it all. He was experiencing a real big “How the Hell did I get here?” He was trying to make sense of everything.

He was having a sort of existential crisis and he was trying to get his head around the meaning of life and the religion he based that meaning on.

ANDDDDDD - he also wrote it because he was a love-sick sad-boy.

His giant poem was part true love story - he’d been haunted by a long held infatuation with a woman he barely knew - and he wrote a book about literally traveling through Hell to try and find her in Heaven.

Whatever motivated him - the book he ended up writing is now widely considered to be the greatest product of Italian literature and one of the greatest literary achievements of all time. It would inspire many a Renaissance artist. And their art continues to inspire us to this day.

Very important book - AND….. Dante didn’t make a dime on it.

How ‘bout that shit?

He’s believed to only finished shortly before he died at around the age of 56, and even if he HAD finished it and then lived on for many years - he still probably wouldn’t have made any money.

At least not directly off of book sales.

The printing press hadn’t been invented yet when Dante wrote Inferno. Wouldn’t be invented until 1440 and used commercially until 1450, 130 years after Dante’s death.

The Divine Comedy wasn’t printed until 1472.

Before the printing press, copies of books were generally made by monks - who made copies one by one, scribing each copy by hand on that damn parchment and vellum.

REAL hard to build up a nice library back in Dante’s day.

Before the printing press, it would cost more than an average laborer’s entire yearly wages to buy just a single book.

The Divine Comedy, for many years, was for royalty, teachers at prestigious academies, and either the wealthy or those supported by someone wealthy.

MOST people did not own any books at all. If you own, like, two or three books, your living larger than most Middle Ages peasants.

But what about the Bible? Didn’t most peasants at least own a Bible?

Nope.

While most of Europe was Christian, it wasn’t like being a Christian today. You didn’t have a bible. Your priest did. You most likely couldn’t read.

They didn’t exactly take literacy censuses back in the middle ages but some sources I’ve found guesstimate that around the time when Dante was alive - the late 13th and early 14th centuries - only about ten percent of European men could read and only about one percent of women could.

Not much of a book market when only about one in twenty people can read, and not many of them can afford to buy a book. https://spartacus-educational.com/ EXnormans13.htm#:~:text=It%20has%20been%20estimated%20that,m ost%20likely%20to%20be%20literate.

Dante was the rare author in his day.

Super rare. As rare as it was to be able to read, it was much, MUCH rarer to be able to write.

I picture medieval peasants watching him write and reacting like they’re watching a wizard perform some powerful magic.

(Medieval Peasant - British) “Welllll…. look at that!

Look at all those symbols and lines and such.

They have meaning, they do! Special magic meaning!

Me lord swears he can look at those symbols and then WORDS FORM right inside his head!

These wizards can make symbols other wizards can turn into words.

And no matter how many times you READS THEM, the symbols remain! They don’t disappear like a regular witch’s spell or some- fing.”

And YES - I know that was a British peasant which makes no sense since Dante was Italian.

Sorry.

I just don’t know how old timey Italians were supposed to speak. No matter what era, when my mind goes to Italy, only Mario Brothers comes out.

(Mario brothers accent) ““Welllll-uh…. look at-uh that-uh! Look at- uh all of the-uh symbols-uh and-uh da lines and-uh such-uh. They- uh have-uh da meaning they do-uh! Special meanings-uh! Me-uh lord-uh swears-uh he-uh can-uh look at those-uh symbols-uh and then-uh da WORDS-uh FORM-uh right inside his-uh head-uh! He’s uh wizard-uh!”

Refocusing now - how DID one make a living writing really expensive to copy books in Italy back at the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th century when almost no one could read?

That is a REALLY hard question to answer.

It doesn’t seem that they DID make a living. At least not from book sales.

There were no Stephen King, Agatha Christie, or Danielle Steele equivalents back then.

And if you’re thinking, “Who the Hell is Agatha Christie? The British mystery author who died in 1976 has sold over two billion copies! Don’t you DARE disrespect Agatha! https://www.biography.com/writer/agatha-christie

Dante didn’t have a chance to sell books like Agatha.

Like a painter back decades before the Italian Renaissance began, an author/philosopher like Dante either had a wealthy patron willing to literally pay them for their thoughts, or they had a job separate from writing, or worked as a teacher.

They wrote less for money, and more for status. They wrote to impress their fellow well-to-do and intellectual friends. To leave a legacy of great works of art behind.

And, I’m sure they just wrote because they were inspired to do so. They wanted to get their thoughts down on paper and had the time and means to do so.

A little later on, artists like Leonardo da Vinci would be paid, and paid well, for their art.

But for an author? Not so much it seems. They have been rare poets paid by for writing going all the way back to ancient Greece, buy, REALLY few and far between it seems.

So how DID Dante pay the bills?

His father is thought to have been a money lender, which meant he was likely wealthy, and Dante was his first born son, which meant he could’ve been given a large inheritance - PROBABLY was given one - which then could’ve allowed him to live as a sort of noble, rubbing shoulders with Florence’s elite, drinking wine and discussing the nature of life, and arguing the politics of the day.

He may have also made some money as a politician. He was heavily involved in politics which we’ll get into.

Luckily for us, whatever the reason - he did write, and while no surviving original manuscripts of the Divine Comedy are known to exist, some 14th century copies are still around.

Once it started getting printed long after Dante’s death, then it became popular.

The Divine Comedy was a huge success because it was simultaneously deeply personal while also reflecting on the nature of the entire world and the afterlife.

It connected an era of European thought that consisted mainly of works about church doctrine with a new era of European thought— the Renaissance.

It also was one of the first literary works written in common Italian— in a time when great works were written only in Latin, in accordance with the church’s will.

VERY few people could read Latin.

The Divine Comedy was also popular because Dante’s big book discussed more than religion. He included references to Italian politics, which would have interested contemporary readers.

Dante was VERY active in his Florence politics, and had strong opinions about corruption in the church, loyalty to rulers and how to act morally when in positions of power.

III.RESET PREMISS:

Okay.

To reset a bit - in this suck we’re going to explore the epic poem genre to learn a bit about the art form that Dante’s Inferno, and entire Divine Comedy, would contribute to.

We’ll also learn more about who Dante may have been, and what was happening in Florence during his life.

And then we’re going step by step through the levels of hell with Dante, his ghost-buddy Virgil, and a bunch of monsters, historical personalities, and mythological figures— along with a bunch of other people Dante, for one reason or another, didn’t care for.

Let’s start with laying down some poetic context— what exactly is an epic poem?

IV.The Epic Poem Genre:

BORING.

It’s fucking boring. And so were all the other poems written a long time ago.

MOVING ALONG!!

Now let’s go over what Dante’s life was like in Florence.

JK!

Gosh Dang, poets. I was joking around. Don’t get upset. I’ve heard you’re very sensitive.

An epic poem is a long, often book-length, narrative in verse that retells the heroic journey of a single person or a group of people!

While Dante’s poem did have a rhyme scheme, many epic poems don’t rhyme at all. They ARE all written in some kind of verse scheme, giving them different literary structure than a non-poem story.

If I was going to write the Inferno, I would’ve went harder on the rhyming than Dante did, but that’s just me. I would’ve made the rhymes more evident and obvious.

But that’s because I live in 2021 and therefore are so much smarter than he was, you know? You all agree, right?

Literature has come so far since he died it’s really not fair to compare what took him years to do and what I can whip up in just a few seconds:

“Deep down in Hell’s Underground, the Devil and his demons like to ground and pound, Souls get chomped on and it’s always too hot, nuts get kicked and no one owns a yacht.

You might get your nipples flicked in a way you don’t like, You won’t get any water to drink, not even after a really long ride on your bike.

That’s the Devil for ya, he’s a REAL piece of shit. And if you don’t like that - tough titty - cause Hell don’t ever quit.”

Damn!

Did you fucking hear that???

Dropping FIRE BARS, son! Shiiiiiiiiiit. That took me less than one minute to write and it rhymes WAY more than the Inferno.

You know I know I’m being ridiculous right now, right? Know that I know that.

Back to epic poems. Epic poems are old!

The oldest story ever written that we know of was an epic poem - the epic of Gilgamesh. More on that in just a bit.

Many of the world's oldest written narratives are in epic form.

Like mythology— and often epic poems do deal with mythology— epics were some the most powerful tools used by ancient rulers when building the reputation of their cities, societies, empires, and religions.

They were powerful expressions of the rise and fall of those organizations, preserved long after the people and the government structure are gone.

They were stories to be told and retold over and over by one storyteller after another.

They typically chronicle a time beyond living memory, when extraordinary men and women dealt with gods or other superhuman forces and gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants.

The epic poem tries to help the poet and their audience to understand themselves as a people or nation.

They’re been created all over the world.

Ancient poets have used them to reflect on enormous themes— war, betrayal, sex, adventure, and humanity. They were originally composed by bards and memorized, so they could be recited when people were hanging out indoors during the cold months.

In ancient times, they were passed down orally, as in the case of the ancient Greeks.

Epic poems tend to go heavy on the battle scenes, often listing out the weapons and the actions of the troops in great detail. Gotta keep people entertained and also reinforce the values of victory and strength.

Many of them in addition to the Divine Comedy also featured a ton of trips to the underworld. We looked at something like 20 epic poems - almost all of them took a side-quest to the underworld at some point.

We meatsacks have ALWAYS been fascinated by death and darkness.

Unsurprisingly, epic poems could be and were used oftentimes as a type of propaganda, painting one culture, empire, city, whatever as noble, heroic, and aligned with the gods - while a rival is painted as evil and horrific and in need of conquering.

Ancient half-time motivational “Let’s get out there and rip their fucking heads off - DO IT FOR RUDY!” - kinds of stories.

“Let’s fight like legends! Make the heroes of the ancient stories proud - tonight we dine IN HELL, SPARTA!” - kind of shit.

Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting ones written before Inferno. https://interestingliterature.com/2017/06/10-of-the-best-epic-poems- everyone-should-read/ https://poets.org/glossary/epic

A.The Epic of Gilgamesh (~2000 BCE): The oldest epic poem that has survived to the modern era - and the oldest surviving work of literature in the world - is the Epic of Gilgamesh.

It’s a story at least around 4,000 years old. Older than the Bible. The oldest surviving tablets date back to 1800 BCE.

The oldest Old Testament text fragments - on some pottery shards - date back to around 1000 BCE.

https://time.com/44631/noah-christians-flood-aronofsky/

Based on an Assyrian king, the Epic of Gilgamesh recounts the travels of a young god-king named Gilgamesh whose arrogant practices hurt his populace until a wild man created by a goddess, challenges his power.

It was composed in ancient Mesopotamia - modern-day Iraq- and used many of the narrative conventions of epic poetry— things like the idea of a “quest”, in this case, Gilgamesh goes on a quest for eternal life - overcoming monsters - and there is divine intervention.

It was written on old clay tablets. Back when carrying around just one book could really fuck your back up.

“That’s quite a limp you got there, Bob, what happened?”

“Fucked my back up REAL good. Tried carrying a book, my myself, on a five mile hike.”

B.Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (8th Century BCE): The Iliad [ il-ee- uhd ] and The Odyssey are probably the most well-known epic poems in the western world.

The earliest fragments of these poems come from the 4th century BCE, but it’s believed to have been written in the 8th century BCE based on linguistic and other archaeological evidence.

https://www.openculture.com/2018/07/archaeologists-think-theyve- discovered-oldest-greek-copy-homers-odyssey-13-verses-clay- tablet.html

We covered these tales briefly in our Greek Gods suck (#162).

Very little is known about their author Homer, thought to have written both poems. https://poets.org/poet/homer

The events kicking off the Illiad - though the actual poem begins in the middle of the Trojan War - get started when Helen of Sparta, the most beautiful woman in the world, is abducted by Paris of Troy.

If a straight dude is writing a big ass story - it’s almost always about a girl, isn’t it?

Dudes - chasing our boners around since the beginning of human history.

Hail Lucifina!

War follows the abduction, and the Greeks and the Trojans fight the Trojan War for ten years until they’re in a stalemate: the Greeks aren’t strong enough to penetrate Troy’s walls, but the Trojans aren’t strong enough to repel them.

The Greeks’ best fighter is Achilles, who’s told before he arrives at Troy by the gods that he could either go to Troy and die young as a hero or die of old age but without any fame or recognition.

He chooses the second, making the Iliad [ il-ee-uhd ] an important text about free will, destiny, and creating one’s legacy.

These themes would come into play in many epic poems to come.

The Iliad [ il-ee-uhd ] covers the last few weeks of the Trojan War and begins with the famous lines:

“Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage, Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls Of heroes into Hades' dark, And left their bodies to rot as feasts For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done. Begin with the clash between Agamemnon-- The Greek warlord--and godlike Achilles.”

Pretty cool. Not as rhyme-y as what I would do, but, you know, different times different styles I guess.

I probably would’ve wrote something, just spitballing here, like:

“Achilles was a dude who could get really, really mad, If he came out you with a sword, you wouldn’t be very glad.

He fights so good because he’s like a god, that’s why he has a really rock hard bod.

He’ll sent you to Hell, which will not be swell, He’ll cut off your head, which will make you super dead.

Then End.”

I really feel like I’m getting the hang of this epic poem stuff.

Anyway, the Iliad [ il-ee-uhd ] ends with the death of the Trojan’s best warrior, Hector, at Achilles’s hand, and we know that Troy will soon fall and that Achilles will also die soon.

The Odyssey is the sequel to the Iliad [ il-ee-uhd ], and it follows the warrior Odysseus as he tries to find his way home from Troy across the Peloponnesian sea.

https://www.biography.com/writer/homer

For our next epic poem, we head to India.

C.The Mahabharata (350 BCE): Written around 350 BCE, The Mahabharata [muh-hah-bahr-uh-tuh ] is one of the longest pieces of literature of all time and a pivotal literary text in the formation of Hindu identity. It’s the longest epic poem known and has been described as "the longest poem ever written.”

HIGHLY recommend that when venues open up, you go to a poetry open mic and insist on reciting it in it’s entirety.

Its longest version consists of over 200,000 individual verse lines and long prose passages. At about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahābhārata [muh-hah-bahr-uh-tuh ] is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad [ il-ee-uhd ] and the Odyssey combined.

The average novel today? Around 90,000 words. The uncut version of the Stand, Stephen King’s largest single book - roughly 500,000 words.

Big poem. Big, big poem. https://thewritelife.com/how-many-words-in-a-novel https://stephenking.fandom.com/wiki/ The_Stand:_The_Complete_%26_Uncut_Edition

The oldest surviving copy of the Mahabharata [muh-hah-bahr-uh- tuh ], the Spitzer Manuscript, written on palm leaf fragments, comes from around 130 CE. https://www.ancient.eu/Mahabharata/

Narrated by the sage Vyasa [vee yasa] , the poem follows a human incarnation of the god Vishnu.

The main story revolves around two branches of a family - the Pandavas and Kauravas [kor rova] - who, in the Kurukshetra [coor-rek shet-truh] War, battle for the throne of Hastinapura [?].

It follows their descendants dealing with the choices their ancestors made.

It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four “goals of life.” It also contains one of the first instances of theorizing about "just war".

The author, Krishna-Dwaipayan Vyasa, is himself a character in the epic— something we’ll see with Dante, too.

The panoramic view of everything from spirituality to morality have had an impact on Indian society for thousands of years.

- Sorry if I mangled some of those words.

I could only find Indian speakers saying them, and if I try to emulate them, I end up being the white dude doing a condescending Apu from the Simpsons voice. And then I’m a racist somehow, which is a bummer, because next to doing an over-the-top Scandinavian accent, an over-the-top Indian accent would be really fun.

Why do actual racists have to fuck things up for goof balls like me who just want to make fun of everything!?! https://www.ancient.eu/Mahabharata/

1. Virgil’s The Aeneid (19 BCE): Now fast forward a few hundred years to the Roman Empire.

Here’s where the truly propaganda-esque nature of epic poetry comes into play.

The Aeneid [ih nee id] was written from 30 to 19 BCE, at the height of Emperor Augustus’s reign in Rome’s imperial period and details the creation of the most mighty empire in the world— Rome. August was the heir to Julius Caesar, and the first Roman Emperor.

It was written by the Roman poet Virgil— and if that name sounds familiar, it’s because Virgil shows up as a character in the Divine Comedy.

He plays the role of Dante’s spirit guide through the afterlife.

Virgil’s Aeneid [ih nee id] is basically a sequel to Homer’s Illiad [ il- ee-uhd ].

Picking up after the end of the Trojan War, the Aeneid [ih nee id] describes a Trojan warrior, Aeneas [ih nee us] , who travels from Troy to Carthage.

In Carthage, he has a brief relationship with Queen Dido [ dahy- doh ] - which also “explains” the Roman Empire’s later sour relationship with Carthage.

The Aeneid [ih nee id] presents that rivalry basically as coming from a lover’s quarrel.

More dick chasing.

After he abandons Dido [ dahy-doh ], Aeneas [ih nee us] travels to Italy, where he founds the city of Rome.

How is this propaganda? Virgil’s purpose was to write a myth of Rome’s origins that would legitimize the success of the Roman Empire.

To do that, Virgil works backward, connecting the political and social situation of his own day with the inherited tradition of the Greek gods and heroes, to show the former as historically derived from the latter.

He basically says, “Of course order and virtue -aka Rome - has triumphed over other PRIMITIVE Italian peoples. It happened in Aeneas’s [ih nee us] time and it’s happening now! Our noble culture is destined to conquer so much more! Manifest Destiny! Roman Style! WOLVERINES!”

Going ahead briefly, it’s clear that Dante loves Virgil— he puts him in his poem as a central figure— but Dante would also use a passage or two of Inferno to flex on Virgil.

We’ll get into more of that later. https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/

One more epic poem in the lead-up to Dante’s masterpiece.

D.Beowulf (~750 CE): Around 750 CE, an anonymous author composed Beowulf - an epic poem in Old English consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines.

Some may know Beowulf as Britain’s national epic. The oldest surviving English poem from the Anglo-Saxon period, Beowulf gives the reader insight into the history of England and what eventually became British Literature.

https://www.bespokeclassroom.com/blog/2016/11/17/3-reasons-to- teach-beowulf

It’s also celebrated as a national text in most Nordic countries.

It deals with events of the early 6th century. Although originally untitled, it was later named after the Scandinavian hero Beowulf.

It opens in Denmark, where King Hrothgar’s [Roth gars] splendid mead hall has been ravaged for 12 years by nightly visits from an evil monster, Grendel, who carries off Hrothgar’s [Roth gars] warriors and devours them.

How unfortunate. That’s a ROUGH dozen years.

How are you supposed to run a kingdom if for TWELVE GOD DAMN YEARS, some dickhead evil monster keeps devouring your warriors!?!

You can’t run an effective empire under that kind of constant stress and anxiety.

(Noble) “Your highness! The peasants are still awaiting a word from their king regarding how we shall deal with the drought that continues to ravage our kingdom. When will you address them?”

(King) “I don’t know, Arch Duke Get-Off-My-Keister!!

Haven’t had a lot of time lately to contemplate our impending food shortage. Been a LITTLE preoccupied with the EVIL MONSTER DEVOURING MY FUCKING MEN THE PAST DOZEN YEARS!”

Beowulf, a visitor, offers to help Hrothgar [roth gar] out. That night, Grendel comes from the moors, tears open the heavy doors, and devours one of the sleeping Goths.

He then grapples with Beowulf, whose powerful grip he cannot escape. Grendel wrenches himself free, tearing off his arm, and leaves, mortally wounded.

Fuck yeah. That’ll teach that monster!

In the second part of the poem, Beowulf has succeeded to the throne and fifty years of his peaceful rule has passed.

But now a fire-breathing dragon ravages his land and the aging Beowulf engages it. The fight is long and terrible and a painful contrast to the battles of his youth. Beowulf is also deserted by his kinsmen except for a young man named Wiglaf [wig loff].

Beowulf kills the dragon but is mortally wounded. The poem ends with his funeral rites and a lament.

Sad but also awesome. Dying shortly after slaying a dragon.

There are definitely worse ways to go out.

Many would later translate Beowulf, including Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien, whose 1926 translation was published in 2014.

The oldest surviving copy of this epic comes from around 1000 CE., written on that sweet parchment. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50114/beowulf-modern- english-translation

After looking at some of its predecessors, now let’s look back at Dante’s Diving Comedy.

V. Dante’s Inferno Anatomy and Influence:

How was it written?

The full poem consists of 100 “canto [ kan-toh ]” - a sort of basic structural component like a paragraph would be in a novel - which are grouped together into three sections, called “canticles” [ kan-ti-kuhls ] which sadly have nothing to do with testicles - Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

There are 33 canto [ kan-toh ] in each canticle [ kan-ti-kuhl ] and one additional canto [ kan-toh ], contained in the Inferno, which is the introduction to the poem.

Most of the cantos [ kan-toh ] range in length from about 136 to about 151 lines.

The poem has a rhyme scheme called terza rima [turr zuh ree muh] , which consists of rhyming triplets in the form ABA, BCB, CDC, and so on.

Not as complex, really, as my earlier personal poetry examples, but, from one poet to another - respect.

The number three plays a big role in the Divine Comedy.

This is because three was thought of in Christian theology as a divine number - thirty-three was the age they thought at the time that Jesus died - we actually don’t know for sure.

The holy trinity of the father, the son and the holy ghost are three that are also one.

Jesus is betrayed three times… three shows up so often in the Bible.

And you know who else likes the number three? The ILLUMINATI!

Wake up, Sheeple!

33rd degree Mason anyone?

Was Jesus a freemason? He was a carpenter. Carpenter - mason - pulling string now from one picture to another in by basement bunker and yelling “A-ha!”

What does it all mean!?! Is Jesus the head of the illuminati? Was the Bible written by lizard people!?! Should we be worshipping lizards?

HOW DEEP DOES IT ALL GO!?!?!

Only Tom Hanks knows for sure. And maybe Roy Disney. And probably Pat Sajak.

Those QAnon motherfuckers are probably sipping on some scared kid’s adrenochrome right now. And yes I know Roy is supposed to be long dead which is EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO BELIEVE!

Sorry.

Blacked out for a few moments.

Where were we?

So why is it called the Divine Comedy? Is it supposed to be funny?

Not really. It doesn’t even include one fake sponsor or make fun of anyone’s names or have any wiener jokes. Comedy IS subjective though.

In Dante’s time, a comedy was a work that started badly and ended well — which does happen in the Divine Comedy.

This was a departure from previous poems, which were mostly tragedies — plots that flowed from a promising beginning to a destructive end.

Tragedies were considered more elevated and sophisticated.

Comedy, meanwhile, was a “lower” style, with plots that started out unhappy and became happy.

Along with this “low” genre, Dante also chose to write the poem in vernacular Italian - the common tongue of a people, not the Latin of scholars and religious writers.

Departing a lot from the mainstream here.

No one believed this could be done well in Dante’s time. It even inspired some controversy after he died. Dante may have even been acknowledging how risky of a move it was when he called his work a comedy to begin with. https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/inferno/context/

In the beginning, Dante just called his work the Comedy.

After his death, Dante would become known as the “divine poet” and in Venice in 1555, the adjective “divine” was added to his work, making it in the Divine Comedy.

It didn't take too long for Dante’s work to be recognized after his death. By 1400, there were no fewer than 12 full-length commentaries devoted to explaining the poem’s meaning in detail.

A dozen may not sound like a lot, but, very few people wrote anything back then. And it was super rare to have other writers writing about your writing.

Giovanni Boccaccio [bo cotch oh] , an important Italian Renaissance writer and poet, delivered the first public lectures on The Divine Comedy between 1373 and 1374.

Dante’s poem was the first “modern” classic to be taught alongside the ancient classics in university courses— a regular guy from Italy being taught alongside the greats like Plato and Aristotle.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dante-Alighieri/The-Divine- Comedy

But sadly, Dante wouldn’t get to see this, dying long before his fame began.

Let’s get into his life a bit now before tackling the INFERNO.

VI.Life of Dante Alighieri:

https://www.biography.com/writer/dante https://exhibits.library.villanova.edu/dante-illustrated/dante-s-biography

Most of what is known about Dante’s life comes from his own writings. He didn’t really gain a significant amount of fame until quite some time after his death, so when he was alive, no one thought to write a lot about him.

He was born in Florence, which was then the Republic of Florence, in 1265.

Florence as a city was established by Julius Caesar back in 59 BCE. The Republic of Florence formed in the 12th century and would last as an autonomous nation all the way until 1533 CE.

I also forget that for centuries after the fall of the Roman empire, much of Italy was divided into various city-states. During the Renaissance that would follow shortly after Dante’s death, Venice, Milan, the Papal States, and the kingdom of Naples were four of the other five major city states of the Italian Peninsula.

We don’t know what day Dante was born in Florence but documents recorded that it was under the sign of Gemini - so between May 21st and June 20th.

He’d remain a devoted citizen to Florence all his life. Even after Florence would kick him the fuck out and he became an angry sad-boy.

He once fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines [gib-uh-lins], a banished Florentine political party supporting the Holy Roman Empire.

One of his mentors was Brunetto Latini, member of the Guelph [gwelf] Party that supported the Papacy over the Holy Roman Empire in the power struggle between the emperor and the pope.

It’s complicated, but basically, the Holy Roman Emperor thought he should hold the most power in Europe, and appoint who HE wanted to appoint for various positions. But the Pope felt that HE, as God’s representative, was the most powerful man on Earth and the Emperor should bend the knee to HIM. Pope versus King, secular versus celestial, who gets the final say on shit, basic power struggle that flared up on and off for a few centuries in Florence, other city states, and elsewhere in Europe

Latini was a wealthy noble, a skilled orator, and a noted politician in Florence. He worked for a time as a type of lawyer, and also a high ranking politician. And if he was Dante’s mentor, Dante’s family was probably part of the upper crust of the city of, at that time, around 30,000 people.

Another poet who helped shape Dante’s style was another friend and mentor - Guido Cavalcanti [like it looks].

Guido’s spent most of his life trying to save a noblewoman, Princess Peach, from an evil tyrant - a monster listed in old sources as either Bowser or King Koopa.

Wait. That’s not true. I’m thinking of another famous Italian. Mario.

Guido Cavalcanti is considered the first major poet of Italian literature and had he not existed, very possible Dante would not be known to us today. He is thought to have taught Dante how to write in the common vernacular and not Latin.

And he was part of a whole group of poet philosophers in Florence.

Another who perhaps inspired Dante’s poetic style the most was another poet named Guido - Guido Guinizelli.

He was the founder of the Dolce Stil Novo— a style of love-themed poetry being written in Florence and elsewhere in Italy in the 13th century.

The Dolce Stil Novo would popularize a way of referring to a woman, the object of the narrator’s affections, as a creature from paradise.

In poems using this style, the woman is described as an 'angel' or as 'a bridge to God'.

I get it.

Dudes back then were a lot like dudes now - straight dudes anyway - so captivated by the female form.

Such a primal desire.

I’m not embarrassed at all to say my favorite thing to look at is a beautiful, nude, female body.

Is a nice sunset fun to gaze at? Sure! Does it beat a great set of hips, ass, and breasts - women’s curves - combined with a beautiful woman’s face?

Nope!

Hail Lucifina and that sweet, syrupy, primal lust she radiates!

Of COURSE those ancient horny dudes saw women as bridges to God. That plays.

Dante would use that imagery a lot.

Dante also uses the Divine Comedy as an opportunity to tell readers about his family— readers meet his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida [cah cuh guida], in Paradiso.

Would have been very awkward if he put Grandpa Cacciaguida [cah cuh guida] in hell. But also pretty funny.

Dante also wrote that he was proud of his distant ancestors, who were descendants of Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.

He doesn’t mention his immediate family in the Divine Comedy— no mother, father, brother, or sister.

Why not? No idea. No one knows.

In an earlier work, the Vita nuova, Dante does refer to having a sister. And his father is the subject of some insulting sonnets exchanged jokingly between Dante and his friend Forese Donati.

Dante's father, Alighiero di Bellincione, was also a member of the Guelphs [ gwelf ].

The Guelphs [ gwelf ] had lost an important battle to their rivals, the Ghibellines [gib-uh-lins], in the middle of the 13th century, but Alighiero was not exiled along with the rest of the Guelphs [ gwelf ], suggesting that either Alighiero was protected by his social prestige or that he was in such low standing that he wasn’t considered worth exiling.

Dante would grow up in a world like this— full of exiling and other political punishments.

One day you could be in power and the next day you could wind up banished with your property seized, which would eventually happen to Dante.

The fight between the Guelphs [ gwelf ] and the Ghibellines [gib-uh-lins] seemed as fated as the legendary battles between the Greeks and the Troys.

And these political parties would fight literally. Not talking about heated arguments. Talking about swords, arrows, hangings. They took that shit seriously.

In 1266, when Dante was still a baby, a force of Guelphs [ gwelfs ], supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines [gib-uh-lins] at Benevento, expelling them from Florence.

So the party of Dante’s father was back in power and Florence was on a new path.

Dante grew up in a city brimming with postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.

Expansionist dreams reminded Florentines of the legendary civilization of ancient Rome that gave Florence its birth.

Not only was Florence extending its political power, but it was exercising intellectual dominance in the region as well— an intellectual dominance that Dante would contribute to.

Back to his family and early life.

Dante’s mother, Bella, died when Dante was young, sometime before he reached 14 - some sources say seven, some day ten. His mother’s genealogy is unknown, but it’s thought that she belonged to the wealthy Abati family long-time Florentine nobles.

After his mother’s death, Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. Together, they had a son, Francesco, and a daughter, Gaetana.

Alighiero died sometime before 1283.

And he left his children modest yet comfortable properties in Florence along with other properties in the country.

Sooooo… dude had some money. Guessing money was not a big concern for Dante while he lived in Florence.

Around the time of his father’s death, Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277. And sources say the Donati family was ALSO a wealthy family in medieval Florence. Fuck yeah, bro! Noice! Got some money from dad, mom’s fam has money, got some money from the wife’s family. Plenty of money to buy all the parchment and quills and ink a middle ages poet could want.

Dante and his wife would have four children. Maybe. It’s hard to find records for one of them. Jacopo, Pietro, Antonia - real. And MAYBE Giovanni.

Dante and his wife may not have loved one another. Lot of literary nerd speculation about this. He didn’t put Gemma in his epic poem - he wrote about Beatrice. Noble arranged marriages didn’t always get love thrown into the mix.

While he married Gemma, possibly for financial and status reasons - it seems he was in love with this Beatrice lady.

And the love he felt for her seems to have helped motivate the man write a lot of poetry.

Beatrice would play an important role in the Divine Comedy. She’d become one of the most celebrated women in literature.

Beatrice appeared in many of Dante's works, actually. Outside of the Divine Comedy, Dante wrote at least six other books of far lesser fame that we know of.

Beatrice was first canonized in the Vita nuova - a book of Dante’s love poems written from sometime before 1283 to roughly 1293. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vita_Nuova

And she later returned in the Divine Comedy as the woman credited with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”

The Vita nuova narrative is pretty simple.

Dante first sees Beatrice when both are nine years old, setting off Dante’s eternal love for her.

Later on, as teenagers, they run into each other here and there and when Beatrice doesn’t greet him one day, Dante expresses anguish that she’s making fun of him. Then he retains himself and says he’s only going to write about her virtues. Later on, she dies and Dante mourns her, temporarily replacing her with another young woman, but finds he can only be loyal to Beatrice.

In the last chapter, Dante expresses his determination to write at some later time about her “that which has never been written of any woman.”

The Divine Comedy would keep that promise.

Now - was she a REALLY a real person? Or just a fictional character in a poem.

Beatrice was PROBABLY a real person.

If she did exist, she is thought to have been the real person of Beatrice "Bice" di Folco Portinari. There isn’t a lot of evidence out there about her life but most scholars seem to think her father was a banker and she was married to another banker, Simone dei Bardi.

So she probably had a LOT of money.

Florence, in Dante’s time and for quite a while afterwards, was one of the premier banking cities - if not THE premiere banking city - in all of Europe, possibly in all the world.

The Renaissance would soon be born in Florence, lot of that wonderful art funded by Florence banking patronage. Like those Medici ILLUMINATI members!

Lot of conspiracy theorists love to speculate about the Medici bankers of Florence, patrons of the Renaissance. Might have to suck them some day.

Dante claims to have met a "Beatrice" only twice, on occasions separated by nine years, but was so affected by the meetings that he carried his love for her throughout his life.

Dante first met Beatrice when his father took him to the Portinari house for a May Day party. They were both nine years old at the time.

Dante was instantly in love with her and remained so throughout his life even though she married another man. In spite of this, he maintained a deep love and respect for Beatrice, even after her death in 1290 at only the death of twenty-five.

Her death would lead him even more seriously into poetry and philosophy, as he attempted to preserve her memory.

Crazy how much that childhood encounter affected him.

Clearly, he idealized her in a way you only can when you’re not around someone a lot to see their flaws. So easy to build them up into mythical proportions.

I wonder what his actual wife thought of all his Beatrice poetry? I can’t imagine Gemma loved it.

“Dante dear, will you be joining us for dinner tonight? Or are you too busy writing love poems for that fucking Beatrice slut!?! Spaghetti’s on the table if you wanna tuck your boner away and join the fam.”

Dante, based on the company he kept, where and when he lived, and what he created, was clearly highly educated. He’d obviously studied the classics taught at that time. He was very familiar with the Bible as well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca.

Aside from all this education, Dante was just plain ol’ smart.

Scholars say he was super intelligent and someone who possessed loads of self-confidence.

He supposedly had an insanely good memory.

There’s a spot in Florence, currently marked by a plaque, where Dante supposedly liked to sit and write his love poems about Beatrice while watching the construction of the Duomo aka that massive Florence Cathedral.

According to an old anecdote, as he sat there, he was once asked by a passerby what he ate for breakfast.

“Eggs,” replied Dante.

A year later, the same man walked past Dante again, sitting on his favorite rock, and tested the poet’s notorious memory.

“How?” asked the man, to which Dante quickly responded: “With salt.”

NOICE! I like some salty eggs as well. Maybe a little pepper, some tobacco sauce if I’m feeling saucy.

I definitely couldn’t remember what I’d had for breakfast a year ago though. Hard to remember last week’s breakfast choices. https://www.thelocal.it/20160121/10-strange-things-you-never-knew- about-dante

By the time he was eighteen, as Dante claims in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of writing verse. He sent an early sonnet, which would become the first poem in the Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day.

Had enough dough to buy PLENTY of ol’ parchment.

He received several responses, but the most important one came from a hero of his— the poet Guido Cavalcanti we met earlier.

It was the beginning of an important and complicated friendship.

In chapter 30 of the Vita nuova, Dante states that Cavalcanti was the person who advised him to write in the Italian common tongue, not in Latin.

Dante even dedicated the Vita nuova to Cavalcanti, writing that he was his best friend.

Later, however, when Dante was appointed to a position in the Florentine government, he was pressured to agree with a decision to exile Cavalcanti.

Damn. Helped kick his best bud out of the republic.

Cavalcanti then contracted malaria during his banishment and died in August of 1300.

Guessing that led to a BIT of guilt.

This was hard on Dante. In Inferno, he composed a monument to his great friend, recording how indebted he was to Cavalcanti.

And then he also spends time talking about the more complicated side of their relationship— their opposing political views.

Politics. FUCKING politics. Dante’s obsession and the bane of his existence.

In 1295, Dante became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries - to which philosophers could belong - which opened his way to public office.

He entered the public arena at a very dangerous time when once again, Florence was a divided city.

The ruling Guelf class of Florence was further split into two parties— “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and “Whites,” to which Dante belonged.

Two buildings owned and named after Corso Donati still stand today in Florence. The black Guelphs continued to support the Papacy, but now the white Guelphs were AGAINST papal influence in the city states ‘cause they didn’t like the new pope, Boniface the 8th.

The Whites gained the upper hand in this power struggle and exiled the Blacks.

So much pope drama in this Suck! So much exiling. Feels like any time an argument was settled back in Florence, someone got exiled.

“Okay. You’re right. I couldn’t see it - BUT - pineapple does go very well with Ham on pizza.”

“You’re damn right it does, Guido. Now grab your shit and get the fuck out of Florence. You know the rules.”

By around 1300, Dante became an influential speaker AGAINST papal intervention in affairs of the city-states.

And then Pope Boniface VIII would detain Dante in 1300. I’m sure he got a real tongue lashing. Luckily he didn’t get tortured and killed.

In November of 1301, while Dante was still detained, the exiled Black Guelfs secretly reentered Florence and terrorized the city for six days. The Black Guelfs returned to power, making things very dangerous for the White Guelfs like Dante who’d opposed them.

And in January 1302, Dante was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so - he was condemned, along with three other former White Guelph officials, for crimes he had actually not committed. Didn’t matter what they’d actually done - they were on the losing side of another politcal beef and they were out.

On March 10th, 1302, Dante and fourteen other White Guelphs were condemned to be burned to death.

Good thing he didn’t show up.

Political bullshit! So annoying back in 1302 and still annoying today. At least today we’re not burning people to death for political differences. Progress I guess.

At first, after receiving his sentence, Dante was passionate about returning. Now around the age of 35, he wanted to reunite with the White Guelfs. He wanted to lead them in a military campaign against the Black Guelfs, but his efforts proved pointless.

He also wasn’t able to rally some other exiles, the Ghibellines [gib-uh- lins], to help him on his quest since he’d previously helped exile them. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dante-Alighieri/Dantes- intellectual-development-and-public-career

Most sources say that Dante would remain in exile for the rest of his life. Alone. All his property thought to be taken from him.

The only good news that came from exile was the fact that his wife and children remained behind in Florence and he would never see them again.

And I’m guessing he was PUMPED.

Freedoooommmmmmmm!!!!

Finally!! So much more time to fantasize about Beatrice. Maybe try and find a NEW Beatrice.

I don’t know that he was excited about that.

He might have been super sad.

Its thought his wife ended up in a convent in Ravenna later in his life.

His three sons, Jacobi, Giovanni, and Pietro were also exiled from Florence thirteen years after their father, in 1315. Or at least two of his sons were if Giovanni wasn’t real.

So much exile!

Dante and his sons may have reunited in Ravenna. After Dante’s death, his son Jacobi would bring a copy of the Divine Comedy to the Lord of Ravenna. He’d return to Florence in 1325, four years after his dad’s death. He actually would win back his dad’s confiscated property in 1343 before the damn plague took him out in 1348.

Dante’s other son, Pietro, also was able to return to Florence but didn’t stay there and died in Treviso.

And we know very little about his third son, Giovanni, because he might be a fake ass dude.

Dante’s daughter is thought to have become a nun like her mother. https://www.geni.com/people/Giovanni-Alighieri/6000000090557924824 https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Alighieri https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonia_Alighieri

The years following Dante’s exile were difficult

He wandered from place to place - as he himself repeatedly says in the Divine Comedy, that “bitter is the taste of another man’s bread and… heavy the way up and down another man’s stair.”

He likely had to rely on the patronage of those who appreciated his works to get by.

He was received honorably in many noble houses in the north of Italy.

He ended up in Ravenna, welcome there by its prince and he worked for the prince in some capacity. And he died returning from Venice on September 14th, 1321, of malaria on some type of diplomatic mission for Ravenna.

He was thought to be around the age of 56.

After his death, Dante was given an honorable burial attended by the leading men of letters of the time.

He was buried at a church in Ravenna, where he’d been living.

Florence would later decide when they entered Renaissance mode that they wanted to bury Dante in their own city, and they built him a spectacular tomb.

Michelangelo and even Pope Leo X campaigned for the poet’s remains to be returned to his hometown, but the sneaky Ravenna monks simply sent an empty coffin, having found a hiding place in a cloister wall for Dante’s bones.

And those bones weren’t discovered until 1865. Discovered by accident during some construction, and his bones were then re-buried in the Ravenna mausoleum – though they were moved during the World War II out of fear the tomb would get damaged in the bombing.

His bones remain in Ravenna. Fuck Florence. They didn’t want him life - too little too late now!

It wasn’t actually until 2008 that Florence passed a motion officially pardoning their most famous resident.

Alright, meatsacks!

Now that we've investigated the life, works and some of the motivations of the man who both wrote and starred in today's subject, let's get to his greatest achievement…

VII.MIDROLL BREAK HERE

PAUSE

…right after a quick sponsor break.

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Thank you for listening.

NOW - it’s Divine Comedy time.

PAUSE

VIII.Plot Overview:

…the plot of Dante’s The Divine Comedy is actually pretty simple.

Dante is miraculously enabled to take on a supernatural journey, which leads him through hell, purgatory, and paradise.

He has two guides: Virgil, the Roman poet, who leads him through hell and purgatory. And then Beatrice, his lost love, who takes over at the end of purgatory and leads him to paradise.

Yeah she does. HAIL LUCIFINA!

But of course it’s not like that.

These fictional encounters take place around Easter in the year 1300.

In the poem, Dante knows he’s about to be exiled— even though in real life, he’d already been exiled— so he uses the story to explain how he, personally, coped with the impending calamity and suggests some solutions for Italy’s troubles, too.

Despite the important historical context of the work, the Divine Comedy — and its first of three parts, Inferno — is far from a simple political allegory.

It’s the product of a mind that spent decades grappling with writers like Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil— so much so that Dante felt like he could actually have conversations with them, and did in Inferno.

Now let’s meet the characters in Dante’s trilogy of afterlife— Inferno.

IX. Characters of Inferno:

A.Dante: Dante is 35 years old when his journey starts, possibly the age he was when he was exiled. The real Dante was more like 43 when he started writing the poem.

Dante’s fictional version of himself is more sympathetic, fearful of danger, and confused morally and intellectually than the real-life Dante was.

Though initially sympathetic to the suffering of sinners, as the poem progresses, Dante gradually learns to abandon his sympathy and adopt a more pitiless attitude toward the punishment of sinners. He starts to view punishment as a reflection of divine justice.

Sure, why not.

Probably a little easier that way. You can either try and analyze the justice or injustice of it all - worry about the fairness - OR just let your mind go to place of, “This doesn’t make any sense to me but what do I know? God punishes in mysterious ways. Grind ‘em up, demons! Yip, yip, yaw!”

Both metaphorically and literally, as Dante journeys through these afterlife realms, he grows closer and closer to God. The physical journey shows him things— like sinners being punished— that he needs to see in order to develop spiritually.

Dante— the poet— thought this was a representation of the universal Christian quest for God, making the character of Dante sort of an average “everyman” type.

Readers learn that Dante the character has committed some kind of sin - which he doesn’t specify - and that he’s involved in Florentine politics somehow, but the poem doesn’t say much else about its narrator.

Interestingly, Dante’s character speaks of feeling like he ranks among the great poets that he meets in hell and purgatory, but then also makes it clear that he’d prefer Beatrice and God’s love more than to be known a great poet.

Interesting thought about the sacrificial nature of art.

Can you be an all time great artist AND have time to devote yourself to romantic love?

Maybe Dante the writer struggled with this? Artists have struggled with balancing their art with the rest of their life and continue to struggle with this today. Most of my comic friends are single. Or have had divorces like myself.

I’ve listened to many a comic struggle with balancing getting up on stage enough to get better at their craft with being home enough to have a family life or dating life of some kind.

Comics struggling with that in the 21st century just like poets struggled with it in the 13th and 14th centuries.

The more things change, huh?

It’s interesting to note the gap between Dante the character and Dante the writer in Inferno.

Dante the character, for example, is excited to see Brunetto Latini, one of his old mentors, in Hell. The Hell that Dante the writer put him in.

Weird.

If you wrote a book about Hell and then put one of your friends in Hell, would they be flattered you’d included them in your book? Or pissed that you clearly judged and condemned them?

I don’t think my wife Lynze would like it.

“Baby! You ASKED me to put you in my book. You said you wanted to be included. I think writing you in as an evil succubus demon who tries to seduce men into giving their souls to Satan is pretty cool. Why are you so mad about it?”

Dante the character is sympathetic and kind to the characters he meets, but Dante the writer is the one who devised so many excruciating torments that are punishing them.

The next most important character in the epic is the Roman poet Virgil. B.Virgil: We talked about Virgil and the Aeneid [ih nee id] earlier.

And, according to Dante, he’s down in Hell.

And the reason is pretty fucked up.

The image of Virgil that appears in Inferno— sort of like a shade or spirit— has been condemned to an eternity in Hell because he HAPPENED to lived prior to Christ’s appearance on Earth and therefore prior to the possibility of Christian redemption.

What a crazy thing to believe! That God would be that blatantly insane and whimsical when it came to who got to go to heaven and who didn’t. That he would just fuck over all the millions and millions of people who lived before the time of Christ.

How much would that suck if A) God existed and B) had a bunch of weird, shitty, arbitrary rules like that? Like he was some miserable low-level bureaucrat obsessed with technicalities.

(Droll, Heaven Gatekeeper) “Listen, bud. I’m not SAYING you’re a bad person. In fact, you seem just fine. You lived a VERY virtuous life, did unto others as you wanted those to do unto you, yadda, yadda.

BUT - here’s the thing, bud.

You died BEFORE Jesus. Read the fine afterlife print. No getting around that. No can do.

I don’t know how good you are at math, bud, buuuuuut….you died in 19 Bee CEE! Add 33 years of Jesus’s life to that, and that puts you about 52 years SHY of any shot at Heaven.

Try not to get all bent out of shape about it, Bud. You’ll be in a very mild version of Hell. Take solace in that.

It’s the best we can do for you, Bud.”

Unfairly condemned Virgil has received orders to lead Dante through hell on his spiritual journey.

He’s a wise, resourceful, commanding presence - BUT - he’s also not really all that capable of protecting Dante from Hell’s dangers.

Makes sense. You can write up all the rules you want for Hell, but, demons, you know? Not great at following the rules.

Critics generally consider Virgil an allegorical representation of human reason - both in its immense power and in its inferiority to faith in God.

Dante needs Virgil to succeed in his journey because he needs Virgil’s common sense and wisdom. But his failure to protect Dante at times it thought to symbolize that reason is powerless without faith - an important tenet of Dante’s moral philosophy.

Dante very much a man of the times here. So many Italians’ identities at this time heavily intertwined with the Catholic church.

In the fullest sense of the word, Virgil acts as Dante’s guide, showing him not only the physical route through Hell but also reinforcing its moral lessons.

At one point, he sums up for Dante what hell’s all about: "that the inhabitants of the infernal region are those who have lost the good of intellect; the substance of evil, the loss of humanity, intelligence, good will, and the capacity to love."

He forgot to add, “Or unfortunate victims of bullshit technicalities like me. What. THE. FUCK!?! Are we just gonna pretend that this shit makes sense???”

Dante the character and Dante the poet seem to regard Virgil differently.

Dante the character regards Virgil as his master, constantly swearing his admiration for, and trust in him.

Dante the poet, however, often makes use of Inferno to prove his own poetic greatness in comparison to the classical bards who preceded him… including Virgil.

Dante the poet is doing a little bit of flexing, especially when he literally leaves Vigil behind in purgatory.

While Dante respects Virgil enough to include him the story, he also suggests that his poem outlasts Virgil entirely.

At least that’s what the literary experts tell us.

Dante did take a long time to write it. Plenty of time to think about every detail and include a lot of symbolism.

https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/inferno/character/virgil/

C.Beatrice: Now onto Beatrice.

Aside from getting God’s love, finding sweet Beatrice is Dante’s primary goal in the Divine Comedy.

Such a romantic!

All this symbolism and philosophy written because a boy fell in love with a girl when he was a nine. A girl who, if he did write it about who he thought he wrote about it, died almost twenty years before Dante began writing it.

Reminds me of a girl who lived next door to me when I was a toddler. Sarah Sergeant. I’m told she was my first friend and we’d play together through the fence that separated our yards. Then we moved to Alaska for a while when I was around three. When I came back to Riggins when I was eight, Sarah had moved away, but visited her grandma down the street a few weeks here and the next summer. Then I only saw her a few times years later in passing when we were teenagers but we never hung out again.

After she left that one summer, I listened to Starship’s 1986 Sarah song. My mom had the tape.

“Sarah…. Sarah…. Storms are brewin’ in your eyes. Sara, Sara, no time is a good time for goodbyes… oh Sara! Love me… like no one has ever loved me before - AND Sarah!”

You get it.

I was over it by the time I was in college. But I get a little of what Dante did here. Sarah became my dream girl for years because I didn’t actually know her.

So I made her perfect in my mind.

Beatrice is actually the one who asks an angel to find Virgil and ask him to guide Dante through hell and purgatory to her.

She has a limited role in Inferno but becomes more prominent in Purgatorio and Paradiso.

D.Other Characters: And there are many other characters that come up while Dante is in hell including many from mythology.

Many are famous historical characters, from dictators and religious leaders to warriors and poets, while others are his own political enemies, and sometimes friends and acquaintances.

There are also giants, serpents, centaurs, and more— many of whom help Dante and Virgil keep on moving out of hell.

So many hijinks for them to overcome! It’s like the first buddy road trip movie ever.

Similar to a video game, Dante’s Inferno also has a number of “end bosses” - guys who represent evil that increases as Dante descends through the levels of hell.

The last end boss is, of course, Lucifer. Not getting that high score unless you beat the Devil.

And if ever were to turn Inferno into a musical, I think, for the battle with Satan, you'd have to throw down some Stryper, right?

TO HELL WITH THE DEVIL VIDEO PLAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsNhNdnwgZg START AT :44

FUCK YEAH. You’re welcome.

Lucifer is the prince of Hell and resides at the bottom of the ninth (and final) circle of hell, beneath the earth’s surface, with his body jutting through the planet’s center.

Did I mention how with each circle of Hell, Dante went down further towards the Earth’s core? Yes. That’s how this Hell works. It’s inside the Earth, which even Dante knew wasn’t flat over seven hundred years ago.

An enormous giant, Lucifer has three faces but does not speak. His three mouths are busy chewing three of history’s greatest traitors: Judas, the betrayer of Christ, and Cassius and Brutus, the betrayers of Julius Caesar.

Pretty funny how Cassius and Brutus get thrown in there with Judas.

Shows were Dante’s mind was.

I’m sure the ancient world had serial killers, serial rapists, and serial kid diddlers, but THOSE guys aren’t getting nibbled on by Beelzebub. Cassius and Brutus are.

I wonder if Cassius or Brutus ever brought that up to Satan.

“Satan. Satan! Hold up. A few words please, and then you can get back to gnashing your teeth!

What about emperor Nero? He supposedly slaughtered Christians, killed his own mother, and even destroyed much of his own city in order to have an excuse to update his palace? C’mon! He also allegedly beheaded his first wife; kicked his second – and pregnant – wife to death; and then married a young boy who resembled his second wife, had him castrated, and forced him to dress as a woman. And I’M THE GUY GETTING GNAWED ON BY THE DEVIL!?! C’mon!?!”

ALSO - interesting that they’re getting chewed on by Satan in Hell for betraying a dude who, thanks to the dying before Christ died to forgive everyone’s sins, is ALSO in Hell, just like Virgil.

NOW - let’s get into the details of this epic poem.

X. Plot of Inferno: Inferno opens with Canto [ kan-toh ] 1 shortly before dawn on Good Friday in the year 1300.

A. Canto [ kan-toh ] 1 and Canto [ kan-toh ] 2:

Inferno starts with some of the most famous lines of all time.

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

NOT as rhyme-y, BUT sounds cooler than those bars I threw down earlier. I’m not too proud to admit that.

Traveling through a dark wood, 35-year-old Dante Alighieri has lost his path and is now wandering, frightened and alone, through the woods.

Suddenly, he notices the sun shining down on a mountain above him, — Mount Delectable— and he attempts to climb up to it but finds his way blocked by three beasts—a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf.

These three beats are pretty much directly taken from Jeremiah 5:6.

They symbolize the three kinds of sins that’ll send you to hell— incontinence is represented the she-wolf; violence and bestiality represented by the lion, I guess - not sure how the lion came to represent bestiality, maybe had a lot of dudes wanting to fuck lions back then; and fraud and malice represented by the leopard.

The three beasts drive Dante back and, frightened and helpless, he returns to the dark woods. He thinks he can’t climb the mountain because he’s somehow unworthy.

Night falls, and then a ghost-man appears. The ghost man claims he was born in the time of Julius Caesar.

Dante recognizes him— its Virgil.

Virgil says he’s here to guide Dante back to the path, which’ll take him to the top of the mountain.

Then, in Canto [ kan-toh ] 2, Virgil gives him some bad news and some good news.

The bad news is that their path will take them all the way through Hell.

The good news is that Dante will eventually reach heaven, where Dante’s beloved Beatrice awaits him.

Dante’s then hesitant to follow Virgil, because, A) he’s a scary ghost- man and B) he’s certainly not a Christian.

But Virgil tells him that it was Beatrice, along with the Virgin Mary and Saint Lucia, who sent Virgil to Dante when Beatrice saw that Dante was lost in the wood.

Convinced, Dante heads after Virgil. He must find his long lost love. He must continue to stalk the woman who many not have wanted anything to do with him when she was alive.

Imagine that? What if we someday found evidence that Beatrice WAS real and that she hated Dante and wrote in her diary about a weird, married creep who was obsessed with her.

“March 6th, 1285 CE. Dearest Diary. Caught Dante staring at me at the market again today. God that man gives me the heebie jeebies. Not as bad as yesterday when I caught him staring intensely at me while clearing beating off in an alley across the street from the cafe where I had lunch, but still creepy. I hope he’s exiled soon.”

B. Gates of Hell:

Dante decides to trust Virgil which leads to Canto [ kan-toh ] 3, the gates of hell.

Virgil leads a reluctant Dante through these gates to the world’s most evil place.

The gates bear an inscription often translated as “abandon all hope, you who enter here.”

Sounds familiar.

If you’ve ever ridden on Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, when you first descend into the main meat of the ride, you pass a sign that says, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

Nice, ROY DISNEY!

Way to STEAL FROM DANTE YOU UNSCRUPULOUS MOM- KILLING MONSTER.

JK.

As they approach, Dante hears cries of torment and suffering— the cries of the “uncommitted.”

These are the souls of people who took no sides in life. Opportunists who were for neither good nor evil, but were merely concerned with their own wellbeing.

Dante the writer uses the opportunity to tell us about some of the people he thought took no sides.

Remember - he was guy kicked the fuck out of Florence and sentenced in absentia to die because of taking a strong political stance. He had strong feelings about those who wouldn’t commit to one side of a debate.

In this level are Pope Celestine V, whose “cowardice” in selfish terror for his own welfare, in Dante’s eyes, served as the door through which so much evil entered the Church”. He was Pope eight years before Dante was exiled.

He resigned after just five months, regarded by pretty much everyone as a pretty worthless pope.

Also just inside the gates of Hell are outcasts who took no side in the Rebellion of Angels, the biblical fallout between God and Satan.

These souls reside on the shores of the Acheron river - the border of Hell.

Naked and aimless, they spend eternity racing around in the mist in pursuit of a waving banner representative of their shifting self- interest, while they’re relentlessly chased by swarms of wasps and hornets.

Hell wasps. Sounds terrible. I hate wasps so much. I’ve been stung so many times by those little monsters. I’ve poured gasoline on their nests numerous times and burnt those bastards alive.

I feel like if I ended up in Hell - the wasps I’d burned would be coming for me. And I couldn’t burn ‘em again because I’m guessing Hell wasps are pretty flame resistant.

On the ground, maggots and worms drink the putrid mixture of blood, pus and tears that the uncommitted souls leave behind.

Dante the character is shocked - these souls are suffering so much and he’s not even really in proper hell yet.

After passing through the gates, Dante and Virgil reach the ferry that will take them across the Acheron [ ak-uh-ron ] River.

The ferry is piloted by the famous Greek ferryman of the river Styx, Charon [kair-uhn], a repulsive creature with blue-grey skin and a tusked mouth.

And I love that even though this creature’s name is spelled, C-h-a-r- o-n, it’s pronounced, “Karen.” Reminds me of our continually outraged, “I need to speak to your manager!”, time-traveling Karen.

(Karen) “Are you fucking SERIOUS?!

WHAT!?!

Who does this Dante think he is - or whatever old Greek or Roman dumbshit wrote this - giving some Hell monster my fucking name?

Who’s in charge around here!?!

I want to speak to the manager, or author, or Satan or whoever’s running this shit show! Who forgot to pay the AC Bill! Ow! Who let these Hell wasps in here!?! Get your hands off of me! I’ll throw YOU in the ninth circle of Hell, dick!”

Anyway - Dante’s Charon says there’s no way he’s going to take Dante to hell— Dante’s still alive. It’s against the rules!

What kind of operation do you think we’re running here, Dante? Hell is for demons and the DEAD!

Virgil says that Dante’s on a divine journey and Charon HAS to take him.

Virgil is like, (Italian Mafia accent)

“Yo, Charon. Can we step away and talk in private. Homeboy has a major hard on for this chick named Beatrice. This is like, some epic Romeo and Juliet shit.

Sorry. That reference will make perfect sense in a few more centuries.

What I’m saying is, this is some true love shit. You don’t want to stand in the way of true love do you Charon?”

(Karen) “Alright, whatever. I still want to speak the manager, but, I’ll like, take him into Hell and stuff.”

C.1st Circle of Hell - LIMBO: Now we’re in Canto [ kan-toh ] 4.

The first circle of hell, AKA Limbo.

Limbo, according to Dante, is basically an inferior form of heaven.

In terms of hell, it’s the best it gets.

Limbo houses virtuous non-Christians and unbaptized pagans, including Virgil and many of the other great writers and poets of antiquity, who died without being able to become Christians because Jesus wasn’t alive yet.

That bullshit technicality stuff we talked about earlier.

Dante asks Virgil if anyone’s ever left Limbo, and Virgil says that he saw Jesus descend into Limbo and take Adam, Abel, Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, and Rachel into his all-forgiving arms and transport them to heaven as the first human souls to be saved.

This was called the “Harrowing of Hell” and happened in CE 33 or 34.

But that was IT! No one else should hold their breath.

I love that there were years attached to this.

“Uh…. God hasn’t been down here in awhile. Last time I saw him, I think he popped down in arounnnnnd ’71-72. He grabbed James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, annnnnd I think he picked up Jimi Hendrix cause he wanted some guitar lessons.”

The duo keeps going.

As they travel through the first circle of the abyss, they come across a handful of the greatest poets of all time: Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan [ loo-kuhn ].

And Dante says that they accept him as one of their own.

NOICE!

Dante just put words in the mouths of the greatest poets in history before him telling him that he is just as good as any of them. No short of confidence with this dude.

Dante and Virgil continue and reach a great castle, surrounded by a flowing brook and seven gates, symbolizing the seven virtues — chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.

I forgot what temperance meant, and it's “abstinence from alcohol.”

Whaaaaaat? Why is that listed as a virtue? What happened to turning water into wine!?!

Jesus liked a drink. He was virtuous. C’mon, Dante!

Virgil tells Dante Downer that the castle’s where the wisest men of antiquity live.

After passing through the seven gates, they come to a beautiful green meadow where Dante meets a number of historical figures, many of them associated with the Trojan War and the Roman Empire.

He meets Julius Caesar, Electra, the mother of the founder of Troy, and elite Romans of all kinds.

Funny again that Caesar isn’t in heaven considering the dudes who betrayed him are seen as on par with Judas for being the worst of the worst.

Dante meets Saladin, a Muslim military leader known for his battle against the Crusaders, as well as his generous, chivalrous, and merciful conduct.

He encounters a group of philosophers, including Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato.

And then he moves onto the second circle of hell: lust.

HAIL LUCIFINA!

Is the second level of Hell some kind of demon orgy?

PLEEEEASSE let it be a demon orgy!

D. 2nd Circle of Hell - Lust: Canto [ kan-toh ] 5.

The second circle of hell, Lust, is the first circle of incontinence— that broad range of sins we mentioned earlier that would send you to hell.

In this case, incontinence doesn’t mean shitting yourself, but rather fleshly sins that originate from unbalanced passions, emotions, and desires.

The sins of lust are also called “carnal malefactors [ mal-uh-fak-ters ].”

The second circle of hell is where the real punishments begin.

Dante describes it as “a part where no thing gleams.”

Doesn’t sound like a sexy orgy.

At the border between circles one and two, a creepy ass monster named Minos sidetracks Dante and Virgil.

Minos is the king of Crete in Greek mythology but in Inferno, he’s a giant, grotesque serpentine beast. He’s essentially the St. Peter of hell - deciding where the souls of the sinners get sent for torment.

After hearing a given sinner’s confession, Minos curls his tail around himself a specific number of times to show the circle of hell where the sinner’s headed.

Virgil talks his way out of an altercation with Minos and the duo continue.

Inside, Dante and Virgil watch as the souls of people who were overcome by lust swirl around in a violent and continuous storm, never finding peace or rest. It mirrors how they were carried away by their passions in life, but now they can see the bright, voluptuous sin as it actually is— “a howling darkness of helpless discomfort.”

Because the sin of lust takes two to tango, Dante puts this sin as the lowest on the totem pole because it isn’t a selfish sin.

As you can guess, lots of people from history show up here— Cleopatra, Achilles, Paris, Dido, and Helen of Troy, to name a few. All people who cheated on their spouses in life.

There’s actually so many noblewomen in this circle that the fifth canto [ kan-toh ] is often referred to as the “canto [ kan-toh ] of queens.”

I bet a lot of the cult leaders we’ve covered would end up here.

Father Yod - he’d be “Balling, baby.”

Maybe he and the rest of the Yahowha 13 band would be playing some of their old songs to add to the torture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19Knfvn-g-E PLAY STARTING AT 2:30

(when he’s done singing “take you home”, sing) “C’mon along baby - gonna make HELL SO MUCH WORSE!”

PRESS STOP

Did you remember how bad they were? Never forget. Never forget the sonic torment of Father Yod’s Yahowha 13.

Overcome by pity and anguish for the poor souls trapped in the second circle of Hell, Dante faints.

Before moving on to circle three, I should add that our own Timesuck God Lucifina is rumored to regularly stop by this circle of Hell and distract Minos and rescue some of the poor souls who’ve ended up here.

She then takes them to Nimrod’s Heaven, aka, his Alpha and Omega balls, and lets them get to some heavenly fucking.

Hail Lucifina!

E.3rd Circle of Hell - Gluttony:

Now we’re now in canto [ kan-toh ] 6.

After Dante comes to, the duo move it along to the third circle of hell - gluttony.

Dante notices the smell immediately. No bueno.

The souls of gluttons are overseen by a giant three-headed worm- monster named Cerberus [ sur-ber-uhs ], also known as “the great worm.” Virgil, thinking quickly, fills the monster’s mouths with mud and he and Dante proceed safely.

Huh. Seems like a pretty easy monster to outsmart.

As they progress through the circle, they noticed that sinners here are punished by being forced to lie in a putrid slush of icy rain, shit, and decay.

It’s described as “a great storm of putrefaction [ pyoo-truh-fak-shuhn ].”

The vile slush symbolizes personal degradation of one who overindulges in food, drink, and other worldly pleasures.

Son of a bitch. I might end up there. Why are donuts and Cheetos so delicious! Why does whiskey keep tasting better and better the more you DRINK!?!

The sinners are so deeply lodged in the slush that they can’t see the other sinners nearby— representing the gluttons’ selfishness.

Dante gets political a bit in this circle.

He speaks to a character whose name in Italina means “hog” - thought to be one of his political contemporaries. No one knows exactly who Dante was dissing here.

In the first of several political prophecies in the Inferno, this Hog “predicts” the expulsion of the White Guelphs [ gwelfs ] - Dante's party - from Florence by the Black Guelphs [ gwelfs ], marking the start of Dante's long exile from the city.

Dante the character’s not thrilled about the information Dante the author already knows and he and Virgil move on.

F. 4th Circle of Hell - Greed: Canto [ kan-toh ] seven. Fourth circle of Hell.

It’s greed.

The fourth circle is guarded by someone named Pluto. Unfortunately not related in any way to the cute and continually happy Disney dog.

Historians think Dante was referring here to Plutus - god of wealth in classical mythology - and not Pluto, the classical ruler of the underworld who was more akin to Lucifer who will show up later.

It’s a little confusing.

Inferno is a lot like Shrek, in that it combines a great deal of characters from past works into something new.

Dante’s version of Pluto fucks with Virgil and Dante by uttering the cryptic phrase "The door of Satan, the door of Satan, proceed downward!"

That’s a creepy phrase to utter. You should yell that a stranger and then leave. Maybe after you get something to eat at a drive through - "The door of Satan, the door of Satan, proceed downward!"

That’ll give that barista or fast food slinger something to think about.

Virgil knows Dante’s not ready to get right to Satan, though, so he pushes him into the fourth circle.

Here they see people being tormented for displaying greed.

They are divided into two groups, the avaricious [ av-uh-rish-uhs ] and the prodigal [ prod-i-guhl ] —those who hoarded possessions and those who lavishly spent it. The people are unrecognizable because their greed has forced them to lose their individuality - BUT Dante says he does recognize some cardinals and popes.

Can’t not take a few more political shots.

These sinners are forced to joust with heavy stones as weapons. They push the stones with their chests, symbolizing their selfish drive toward accumulating a great fortune.

The following lines are sort of a beautiful and terrifying look into human nature. Dante writes:

Here, too, I saw a nation of lost souls, far more than were above: they strained their chests against enormous weights, and with mad howls rolled them at one another. Then in haste they rolled them back, one party shouting out: "Why do you hoard?" and the other: "Why do you waste?"

I feel like some past Suck subjects might be found in this circle, like the Bloody Benders, HH Holmes and Belle Gunness. Killing for that money!

(Belle Gunness) “Hoingy Boingy! Uff duh. UFFFF duh. Killing lonely men for da money and now jousting in Hell, ain’t life funny, ya?”

Virgil and Dante now proceed onto the 5th circle and canto [ kan-toh ] eight.

G.5th Circle of Hell - Anger:

The fifth circle of hell addresses the sin of wrath.

The land of the angry as fuck and the “sullen”— those who didn’t express their anger in life.

Who might be here from the Suckverse?

So many have had so much wrath, but, since they also tended to commit so much violence, another circle of Hell awaits the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh aka Noodle McDryWeen, the Columbine shooters, and so many serial killers.

So many Suck subjects committed so many sins, it’s hard to figure out which circle to put them in.

Minos the giant, grotesque serpentine beast would just have to sort them out I guess.

The fifth circle contains another of hell’s rivers— the river Styx, a swampy, fetid cesspool in which the wrathful spend eternity struggling underwater with one another.

Meanwhile, the sullen lie bound beneath the Styx’s waters, choking on the mud, unable to express themselves.

Interesting look at those who feel so much anger but don’t express it in life.

This was the last circle for the sins of incontinence - things get a lot worse from here.

Dante and Virgil catch a ride across the river Styx.

As they traverse the river, Dante and Virgil watch the hoards of angry assholes fighting each other and the sullen masses gurgling below.

Then out of the water pops up a writhing soul named Filippo Argenti - a prominent Florentine politician from the well-known Adimari family who happened to be one of Dante the writer’s political enemies.

It’s thought that Filippo confiscated Dante’s property after Dante’s expulsion from Florence. As the duo watches, Filippo is “seized” by the wrathful souls and dragged away.

Just as Argenti enabled the seizing of Dante's property, he himself is “seized” by all the other wrathful souls.

Nothing like dishing out some literary revenge against your political opponents.

After this, Virgil and Dante see some lights up ahead, which Virgil says is the city of Dis [diss]. H. The City of Dis: Dis is the old term for the king of the underworld— like Pluto or Hades.

Dis can also be interpreted as Lucifer. Basically, they’re headed to Lucifertown. Devil City.

As they approach Devil City, Dante sees high towers that resemble fiery red mosques.

Some symbolism there for sure.

It would be for a Christian writer at this time to label Islam as evil - Muslims were one of the most consistent enemies fought by Christian medieval states.

Crusades had been waged against them. Many Christians painted Muslims as evil adversaries.

And as we were reminded of last week, a lot of Muslim rulers didn’t care much for Christians either.

The walls of Dis are guarded by a bunch of fallen angels.

After approaching the gates, Virgil is unable to convince the demonic guardian angels to let them enter and pass through.

Canto [ kan-toh ] nine begins with Dante getting threatened by the Furies, deities of vengeance from Greek mythology.

Not a warm welcome from Devil City security.

Virgil tries to talk them down, but the Furies start attacking him. Then they threaten to sic Medusa on the dynamic duo and Virgil covers Dante’s eyes to protect him, but it’s looking like they’re done for….

… when a huge angel appears, directly from heaven!

What the Hell is he doing there?

He opens up the gates for the duo by touching it with a wand and then rebukes the devils for not letting the travelers in. Then he vanishes.

Noice!!

This interaction is believed to symbolize that humanity can have all the instruction and reason and science it wants - symbolized by Virgil - BUT… if they don’t have faith - AKA sweet angels to save them - they’re doomed.

Virgil now warns Dante that they’re entering the “bad neighborhood” part of hell and from now on, Dante shouldn’t make eye contact with any of the souls they come across.

That’s when you know you’ve really fucked up. When you live in one of Hell’s worst neighborhoods. When you’re jealous of souls being tortured in gated communities in Hell’s comparatively posh suburbs.

I. 6th Circle of Hell - Heresy:

Canto [ kan-toh ] 10.

The group arrives at the 6th circle of hell.

This is the level that houses the heretics—those that doubted the dogma of the Christian religion.

Oh boy.

The Pope must have loved it when he made it to this part of the story.

Dante the poet name-drops Epicurus, a famous classical Greek philosopher who believed that the the soul dies with the body.

Epicurus and his ilk are trapped in flaming tombs… forever.

Epicurus getting SEVERELY punished for not believing in a soul before Christianity was even a thing. Dude lived in the 4th century BCE.

Feel like God could maybe cut him a break.

As the pair navigate through a giant flaming graveyard, they come across a flaming tomb that houses a pair of Epicurean Florentines.

To no one’s surprise, these Florentines are more political figures Dante hated.

The first person was a Ghibelline political leader named Farinata Degli Uberti who died the year before Dante was born, in 1264. Dante was not a big fan.

Poor Farinata was actually condemned for heresy years after his own death. Farinata died at Florence in 1264. In 1283 his body and that of his wife, Adaleta, were exhumed, tried, and… wait for it…. posthumously executed.

Haha! I am continually amused by just how completely fucking insane our species can be.

Digging up a dude who’s been dead just shy of two decades and his wife’s corpse, too. Guessing she’d been dead for about the same amount of time.

Convicting their corpses.

“I sentence you both to death! But like, MORE death. Guards! Hang them until they are much more dead than they currently are!”

According to Boccaccio [bo cotch oh] in his commentary on Dante, the Inquisition discovered, among other things, that Farinata denied life after death:

“He was of the opinion of Epicurus, that the soul dies with the body, and maintained that human happiness consisted in temporal pleasures; but he did not follow these in the way that Epicurus did, that is by making long fasts to have afterwards pleasure in eating dry bread; but was fond of good and delicate viands, and ate them without waiting to be hungry; and for this sin he is damned as a Heretic in this place.”

Whoa. Dude was sent to the 6th circle of Hell for eating food he enjoyed when he wasn’t hungry?

Shit. Sounds like I’m getting sent AT LEAST this far when I die. I do that every day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farinata_degli_Uberti

Now onto canto [ kan-toh ] eleven.

We’re still in the sixth circle, the level for heresy.

Dante sees two more famous figures— Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Pope Anastasius II.

According to some modern scholars, Dante got it wrong. He meant to say the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I, who was a notorious believer in monophysite [ muh-nof-uh-sahyt ] Christianity, which held that Christ was not a human being but was altogether divine and had simply taken a human body during his time on earth. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anastasius-I https://www.britannica.com/topic/monophysite

Not a big deal to many of us living in the modern day, but the Pope didn’t care for this view.

No agree to disagree with the Pope. Agree or burn, motherfucker, burn!

Back to Dante’s journey. They prepare for a descent into Lower Hell.

Virgil takes the time to explain the layout and mindset of Lower Hell, in which the sins of violence and fraud are punished.

In this conversation, Virgil asserts that there are only two legitimate sources of wealth: natural resources and human labor and activity.

He says that usury, the sin punished in the next circle, is an offense against natural resources and human labor, because usury is the sin of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest. Virgil says it’s a form of blasphemy, because both natural resources and human labor (and humans) come from God.

Sounds like Dante maybe didn’t like the interest he had to pay on some loans and was pissed about it.

Also sounds antisemitic.

The Jewish community in Florence wasn’t formally founded in 1437, but right around the time Dante was exiled, a number of Jews were moving into Florence, and many of them were money lenders. Maybe Dante owed one of them some money.

After having a little discussion about bank loans while in Hell, Dante and Virgil then descend a jumble of rocks to reach the seventh circle of hell.

On the way, they try to evade the Minotaur [ min-uh-tawr ].

But the Minotaur [ min-uh-tawr ] sees them, catches up with them and bites the fuck out of Dante.

Virgil tries to assure the monster that Dante is not his hated enemy, Theseus [ thee-see-uhs], the mythical king and founder of Athens.

But the Minotaur [ min-uh-tawr ] doesn’t listen because he's a dumb, angry, easily confused monster.

He’s not worried about who he bites - he’s a monster in Hell! He’s one of the punishers, not one of the many worried about further punishment.

The Minotaur charges at Dante and Virgil and they then run as fast as they can into the seventh circle.

J. 7th Circle of Hell - Violence:

Dante’s Canto [ kan-toh ] 12 begins with our heroes in the 7th Circle of hell.

The theme here is violence.

There are three rings within this circle for the three houses of violence — violence against others, violence against the self, and violence against God, art and nature.

Oh boy. SO many past Suck topics are gonna be stuck in this level. Most of our serial killers, I’d imagine.

Ed Kemper definitely committed violence against others, himself, and nature. He attempted suicide multiple times while awaiting trial for killing his mother and others, he tortured animals and set some fires as a kid, and he killed ten people including his grandparents and mom.

“MOTHER! Why can’t I find you in Hell to put your head on a HELL STICK!?!

Why do I BURN MOTHER!?! Is it because of the windpipe fucking???”

http://edmundkemperstories.com/blog/2020/01/15/1997-ed-kemper- parole-hearing/

Dante and Virgil make their way to the border of the first ring of the seventh circle and come across another of Hell’s rivers - the river Phlegethon [ fleg-uh-thon] - one of the rivers of Hades. It’s made out of boiling blood and fire.

Shitty river.

Generally I like rivers. Fun to raft on, fun to fish on. This river sounds awful though. Probably not very good fishing. Probably don’t want to eat what you catch in a river of boiling blood.

Crammed in the bubbling blood-waters to blister in pain for eternity are the souls of those who were violent towards people and property.

Chikatilo can probably be found calmly backfloating down this river.

(Chikatilo) “What is big deal!?! Chikatilo like it here. No one care where I jerk soft shame cock. Hell is much too like!”

Also included in this river are all the murderers, the war-makers, the plunderers, and the tyrants.

Sort of made for Hitler, really. And also the Young Turks from last week.

Centaurs [sen tors] - half-men and half-horse people - patrol the ring. Their job is to shoot arrows at anyone that tries to crawl out of the boiling river.

Getting shot with arrows really doesn’t sound too bad if you’re already in a river of literally boiling blood that’s also on fire.

If I’m burning alive anyway, I’m charging one of those centaurs. Fuck arrows.

One of the centaurs [sen tors], Nessus, offers to guide the poets along the Phlegethon [ fleg-uh-thon] river. Along the way, he points out a bunch of Greek and Italian tyrants and other historical and mythological figures writhing in agony.

In 1485, Florentine Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy, and I couldn’t help but notice… that one of the murderer dudes stuck in that boiling blood river?? - looked A LOT like my dad.

Like - IDENTICAL.

Not sure if that means anything, but definitely put some more notes about it in an ever-growing, very concerning, GIGANTIC file of possible murder clues I’ve been compiling on my dad.

Probably nothing here - but you never know. Growing body of evidence and all that.

Anyway, after a little river ride in what must have been a hot ass boat, the duo moves on to the next ring.

The beginning of canto [ kan-toh ] 13 finds the two in a strange forest.

Dante is told all the trees used to be people - they’re the people who have attempted or committed suicide and have been damned to spend eternity in hell for violence against the self.

In hell, these souls are transformed into gnarled, thorny trees and bushes and then fed upon by Harpies - hideous clawed birds with the faces of women.

Pretty harsh.

Dante and his contemporaries didn’t have a good understanding of how crippling clinical depression could be back then. Not much tolerance towards suicides.

In this forrest, Dante also sees profligates [ prof-li-gits] - people who are unprincipled or promiscuous.

Hail Lucifina!

Maybe NOW we’re gonna stumble upon a Hell orgy. Sexy ass goth girls, lots of tattoos and latex. Suicide Girls kind of kink vibe. So great.

But nope.

Souls stuck here are being chased and torn to pieces by dogs. One of the dogs spotted, rumored to have one eye and three legs. Looks to be a pit bull. Responds to “Bojangles.”

Interesting.

Dante speaks with Pier della Vigna, a former advisor to Emperor Frederick II, who’s a tree.

In life, Pier della Vigna fell into disfavor with the court, was accused of being a traitor, then was blinded and imprisoned before he killed himself.

Feels like his oppressors did most of the heavy lifting when it came to his suicide. Seems like he got screwed here.

Dante the writer once again uses the opportunity to play politics a bit — Pier’s presence in the seventh circle, as opposed to the ninth circle, which is for traitors — means that Dante believes Pier was innocent of the accusations made against him.

Dante also learns that the suicides have a unique fate in store for them after the final judgement.

This day of judgment, also known as the final judgement, is when Jesus, the Son of God, will judge "the living and the dead" before destroying the old heaven and earth, which are corrupted of sin— according to a Christianity.

BUT - the suicides won’t be allowed to be resurrected before they’re judged - they’ll have to maintain their tree-form. Still get chewed on by Harpies. Since they threw their bodies away, their own corpses will hang from the tree’s limbs.

Yikes!! Oh my HECK! Gosh Dang, Jesus!

Real harsh here. The murderers get their cases sent to Jesus’s court of appeals but suicides never get a new trial or a pardon. Fucking WHAT?

Onto canto [ kan-toh ] 14.

Now they’re in the third round of the seventh circle of hell - for those who were violent against God, nature or art.

It’s basically a giant desert that rains fire.

It’s a recreation of the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah - cities that God destroyed in the Old Testament for being too sinful.

The blasphemers— those who were violent against God— have to lie on the ground and face the sky while flames rain down on them. The sodomites— those violent against nature— have to run in circles, enduring the torment of “nature,” or in this case, raining fire. Finally, the usurers— the ones who were violent against art— crouch huddled and weeping, mirroring how they were inactive in life.

Not a real progressive view on homosexuality back at the dawn of the 14th century in Italy. By “sodomites”, he means “homosexuals.”

And they’re being punished more severely than murderers.

If you want to be REALLY punished in Hell - kill someone.

If you want to be really, really, REALLY punished in Hell - stick your ween in someone’s butt. Someone who WANTS it stuck in there.

Onto canto [ kan-toh ] 15.

Still in the flame desert.

In canto [ kan-toh ] 15, Dante meets his old teacher, Brunetto Latini.

Dante addresses Latini with genuine affection and expresses distress at his position in hell. Some scholars theorize that Dante did this to refute suggestions that he only placed his enemies in hell.

OR - he did it to show how powerful of a sin the church at that time thought sodomy was.

Latini was a great, wonderful dude by Dante’s account, BUT, he stuck his pee-pee-noodle in some poop holes, and now he’s trapped in the 7th circle of Hell forever.

Mysterious ways!

After a chat with Latini, it’s onto canto [ kan-toh ] 16.

The dynamic duo encounter three men who were Florentines whom Dante admired.

This canto [ kan-toh ] is all about how to save Florence from its current political instability.

Since I can’t imagine many of you REALLY need to hear more about early 14th century Florentine politics, let’s skip it.

Canto [ kan-toh ] 17 opens up on revealing that a dark shape rising up from the filthy depths of the abyss at the end of Canto [ kan-toh ] 16, is the monster Geryon [jerry-un]

Geryon [jerry-un] is the grandson of the offspring of Medusa and a giant.

He oversees the eighth circle of hell - where fraud is punished.

Dante describes Geryon [jerry-un] as a monster with the body of a dragon, the tail of a scorpion, hairy arms, and the face of a just and honest man.

So, for fraud… that tracks.

Virgil announces that they must fly down from the cliff on this crazy monster's back, and soon they are swooping into the great abyss.

K.8th Circle of Hell - Fraud: Canto [ kan-toh ] 18 starts in the 8th circle.

This circle of hell is known as the Malebolge [mal uh bolge] — a word that means “evil ditches.” It’s divided into 10 “bolgias" or “evil pockets” separated by great folds of earth with bridges between them.

The pockets are for all different kinds of types of fraud.

The pockets leads to a well, which forms the neck of a funnel, that we’ll get to in a bit.

Dante and Virgil are soon surrounded by panderers and seducers.

Their punishment is to line up in two lines, one on each edge of the ditch, and to receive lashings from whips via horned demons for eternity.

Not a bad deal for hardcore masochists.

Ol’ Albert Fish would LOVE this level of Hell.

(Fish) “Showbiz! Smack my fat bottom with everything you got, demon-y bearcat! Put your back into it Beelzebub’s bimbos! I can’t cum unless my ass is covered in blood and my mouth if full of peanut butt butter!”

In the group of seducers, Virgil points out Jason, the Greek hero who led the Argonauts to fetch the Golden Fleece.

He gained the help of the king's daughter by seducing and marrying her… only to later desert her for another woman.

They pass across the first bridge to the second ditch.

The second ditch if for insincere flatterers.

Those who abused and corrupted language to play upon the desires and fears of others— basically, manipulators and kiss-asses.

Interesting that ass kissers are in a worse part of Hell than murderers. I think this says more about Dante than it does some Christian-based notion of Hell.

Dude clearly had HAD IT with kiss asses and manipulators. Guessing some of those types got him exiled from Florence.

Their punishment is to lie in a river of human shit where they fight and howl at each other.

Dante, of course, runs into someone he knows from Florentine politics in this turd stream.

Canto [ kan-toh ] 19 now.

From a creepy bridge of mangled earth, Virgil and Dante look over ditch three in the 8th circle of hell.

There Dante finds the simoniacs [si-moh-nee-ak] those guilty of simony [sahy-muh-nee] or the practices of selling church offices, favors, or other sacred things.

People who, basically, try and charge for salvation.

Agree with Dante here. The 8th circle of Hell seems about right for these assholes.

Most of the Cult Leaders we’ve Sucked would be, I imagine, stuck in this Hell ditch.

Dante expresses his distaste for the corrupt among the church pretty thoroughly here.

These sinners are dumped unceremoniously into holes head-first and then their feet get set on fire. The heat of the fire is proportional to their level of guilt.

Dante writes, and let’s add some background music now to liven this up a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ_r1H9vHkI Play at beginning

"Rapacious [ ruh-pey-shuhs ] ones, who take the things of God, that ought to be the brides of Righteousness, and make them fornicate for gold and silver! / The time has come to let the trumpet sound for you…”

Feel that foot fire Jim Jones, Tony and Susan Alamo, and David Koresh! Stay in those Hell Holes blasphemers!

Meanwhile, the character of Dante, at this point in Inferno, seems to be making his peace with all this punishment. He felt bad for a lot of people earlier, but now he’s developing more of a “Who am I to challenge the wisdom of God - fuck ‘em,” mentality.

Now we’re in canto [ kan-toh ] 20 and the fourth ditch.

Dante and Virgil cross as spooky bridge to see sorcerers, astrologers, and diviners— basically anyone who claims to tell the future— getting punished.

They’re punished by having their heads twisted backwards, so they permanently look like that girl from the Exorcist.

Pretty sweet horror imagery here. Very cinematic. I like it.

They have to walk backwards for all eternity, unable to see their own future just one step ahead. For good measure, they’re also continually blinded by their own tears.

Even though Dante was getting cool with the idea of punishment, this sight moves him to tears. He expresses that it’s horrible that these people are being punished this way.

Virgil wants none of that and says, “Here pity only lives when it is dead; / for who can be more impious [ im-pee-uhs] than he / who links God's judgment to passivity?"

Essentially, he says, “If you disrespect God this is what you fucking deserve!”

The sinners of this pit are a bunch of soothsayers and magicians from history— including the prophet Tiresias [ tahy-ree-see-uhs ], an ancient Greek who was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo himself.

Watching your ass David Blaine.

Easy on those illusions if you don’t want to end up in a Hell ditch.

You too birthday party magician.

That “pick a card, any card” Devil bullshit is gonna set your soul on fire. Gonna burn that silk shirt of yours the fuck off your warlock chest.

Soon we’re in canto [ kan-toh ] 21. The fifth ditch.

The duo crosses another bridge and finds themselves in a special, personalized hell for the worst of the worst… corrupt politicians.

The politicians are submerged in a lake of boiling tar— representing the dark stickiness of their corrupt deals.

I had to wonder if Dante helped inspire politicians to be tarred- and-feathered centuries later, but appears politicians were already being tarred-and-feathered in England over a century before he wrote this book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarring_and_feathering

These Hell-bound politician’s souls are guarded by demons called the Malebranche, which means “evil claws,” who tear them to pieces with… you guessed it… evil claws.

They also use grappling hooks, especially when any of the politicians try to climb up to the surface or get out of the tar.

Suddenly one demon throws a senator from Tuscany into the tar, scaring Virgil and terrifying Dante. Virgil makes Dante hide and goes up to the demon who did the tossing— a demon who turns out to be the leader of the Malebranche, an end-boss demon named Malacoda, or “evil tail.”

Virgil asks if they can pass.

Malacoda says fine, sure, you can go, but he gives them some bad intel that sets them up.

He tells them that the bridge across the sixth ditch is shattered— yet another result of the earthquake that shook Hell at the death of Christ in 34 CE— but that there’s another bridge further on.

Malacoda then sends a squad of his demons, headed up by Barbariccia, to escort the poets.

These demons add a sense of dark, satirical humor to the end of the 21st canto [ kan-toh ] when one of the demons rips-ass and Dante says, “and he had made a trumpet of his ass”.

Noice!

Not even Dante was above the occasional fart joke.

Canto [ kan-toh ] 22 continues dealing with folks struggling in this corner of Hell.

Dante encounters more politicians he doesn’t like.

The Malebranche [male branch] are nice enough to pull the politicians out of the tar so Dante can have a word, and then they use the opportunity to slice up the politicians to bits with their claws.

One of these politicians escapes and dives back into the tar. Then a couple Malebranche [male branch] go after him but they get stuck in the tar, too, and start flapping around.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled hell programming to give you five minutes of Charlie Chaplin-style physical comedy.

Virgil and Dante try to sneak away from the pissed-off demons but they don’t get that far before the Malebranche [male branch] realize that it’s all Dante’s fault that they got stuck in the tar, since he was the one that wanted to talk to the politicians in the first place.

They start going after the duo, and Virgil scoops up Dante and slides out of danger into the sixth ditch— the land of the hypocrites.

Canto [ kan-toh ] 23.

The punishment for hypocrites that they have to walk in circles forever while wearing heavy robes made of lead that are painted to look like gold but are actually worthless.

Their outward appearance shines brightly while underneath, they’re heavy and useless.

Very symbolic.

The big spender here is Caiaphas [ kay-uh-fuhs] the priest who confirmed Jesus’ death sentence, who lies crucified on the ground while the other sinners tread on him as they walk in their super-heavy cloaks.

Things just keep getting more brutal as the poets descend deeper.

They climb down the ruined rocks of that bridge destroyed by the great earthquake, after which they cross the bridge of the seventh ditch where they come to an enormous hole.

It’s a big pit full of magical snakes.

Yep.

It’s even worse than your average, Indiana-Jones style run-of-the-mill snake pit because this snake pit is where thieves go to get punished.

Good thing none of these snakes can fly since snakes can’t do that.

Hehe.

JK!

Who would ever think flying snakes aren’t real!?! What kind of Can Dummins would EVER THINK THAT!?!

Inside the pit, thieves sit around while vipers attack them.

When bitten, the thief transforms into some kind of animal or object and then they undergo a painful process to reconstitute themselves into their human forms.

Just as they stole another’s property in life, now their identities are stolen constantly.

Sounds really painful.

Like always, Dante meets some not-so-happy folks.

He comes across Vanni Fucci, a former thief who identifies himself reluctantly as he’s currently busy with being bitten by a serpent on the jugular vein.

He then immediately bursts into flames and is reformed from the ashes like a phoenix.

Then rinse and repeat that shit forever.

In his pain and suffering, Fucci lays down a dark prophecy about Dante.

More exile, banishment stuff.

Canto [ kan-toh ] 25 begins with Fucci hurling an obscenity to god— possibly a hand gesture for good measure— for which he is immediately swarmed by serpents.

But that’s not punishment enough for being mean to God, so then the centaur Cacus [cau cus] arrives on the scene.

For some reason, Cacus has a fire-breathing dragon on his shoulders and snakes covering his horse body.

He’s got all kinds of shit going on and he fucks up Fucci up real good.

Then Dante meets five thieves from Florence. These shades of sinners destined to bite each other and turn into mangled mutations forever.

Soon we’re in canto [ kan-toh ] 26 - the eighth pouch of the eighth circle.

The eighth pouch is for evil counselors and advisers.

Maybe all the Boy Scout leaders found guilty of pedophilia - maybe this is where they go? Those dudes were pretty evil counselors.

Not sure these are the type of people Dante had in mind.

This Hell Ditch was full of people who used their positions to get others to engage in fraud. Everyone gets their own personal bubble of fire.

Odysseus and Diomedes [ dahy-uh-mee-deez ] - Odysseus’s fighting companion in the Trojan War - are burning eternally in the eighth circle of hell for using the Trojan Horse.

The Trojan Horse, AKA “super fraud.”

You can’t even use fraud against enemies in war? It feels like Dante would’ve been a terrible military planner.

Dante also uses this opportunity to flex on Homer and has Odysseus narrate a story about his last journey— a tale that Dante the poet made up entirely. Odysseus tells Dante about how he set off to sea again and died in a shipwreck.

Literally adding a sequel to the Odyssey. Ballsy.

Now we’re onto canto [ kan-toh ] 27.

Dante gets political again - complaining for awhile about the Pope and Florentine politics.

Again… let’s skip it. I think you get how Dante felt about local politics.

Canto [ kan-toh ] 28, the ninth ditch.

In this pocket, divisive individuals or architects of discord are punished - sowers of scandal and schism.

People who like to get other people riled up and then watch the world burn.

People who like to watch the world burn? Does that include people who WANT to watch the world literally burn - like doomsday preaching cult leaders? Maybe Jim Jones is in this ditch?

The sinners in the ninth chasm are damned to walk around the chasm until they arrive at a devil who slashes them with a long sword. Their bodies are sliced and mutilated in proportion to their divisive lives, as their sin was to tear apart what God had intended to be united.

These souls were then forced to drag their horribly mangled bodies around the ditch, and as soon as their wounds started to heal, the demon tears them apart again.

That sounds especially awful.

Dante the poet places the prophet Mohammed in the religious schism part of the 8th Circle of Hell.

Not inflammatory at all, Dante!

Dante really goes after it, even condemning Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali.

Again - no love lost between Christians and Muslims in the 14th century.

There are also more Italian and Roman politicians that Dante didn’t like. These folks have their tongues cut out, their limbs cut off, their throats slit, their noses cut off and their ears gouged out.

All kinds of horrible shit.

Dante sees Bertrand de Born here, a French knight who lived from 1140–1215.

The knight carries around his severed head by its own hair, swinging it like a lantern.

Bertrand is said to have caused a quarrel between Henry II of England and his son Prince Henry.

Bertrand’s punishment was decapitation, since dividing father and son is like severing the head from the body.

Now we’re in canto [ kan-toh ] 29.

Still in the 8th circle of hell— fraud. Now we’re in the tenth ditch.

So much creative punishment going on in this circle.

Their current ditch is the hell for the falsifiers. These are people like alchemists, perjurers, and counterfeits.

Because they’re a “disease” on society according to Dante, they’re condemned to experience every disease known to man at the same time.

That sounds EXTREMELY unpleasant. Genital warts AND colon cancer on top of some syphilis, scabies, measles, jock itch - throw in some plague and bursitis, hand job warts, sprinkle in some malaria - maybe a sinus infection - and, well, you get it. Everything.

While some lie face down on the ground in submission, others run around tearing each other apart.

I bet when you already have literally every disease you don’t even care about being torn apart.

Now in canto [ kan-toh ] 30, Virgil and Dante are suddenly approached by the spirits of two imposters running rabid through the pit. One sinks his tusks into the other’s neck and drags him away like a wild animal with its prey.

Next Dante meets counterfeiters.

They’re afflicted with a terrible disease that seems like dropsy— an illness where the body retains too much fluid— which gives them bloated stomachs, an inability to move, and an unbearable thirst.

Then one of the counterfeiters points out the perjurers, who suffer from burning fevers.

The counterfeiter who pointed out the perjurers and one of the perjurers start yelling at each other.

They go back and forth with this verbal abuse until Virgil rebukes Dante for listening to the exchange.

Dante expresses sincere shame and Virgil forgives him. L. Well of Malebolge: Now they come to the well of Malebolge [mal uh bolge] - the portal to the final circle of hell - the ninth.

A bunch of giants guard this passage.

Among the giants, Virgil identifies one named motherfucking Nimrod! A giant said to have tried to build the Tower of Babel and unite mankind.

And Nimrod shouts out some unintelligible gibberish at Dante.

What the SHIT, NIMROD!?!

Our Timesuck God Nimrod is not only down in Hell but is at the entrance to the NINTH CIRCLE OF HELL???

Hmmm.

Nimrod is OBVIOUSLY WORKING UNDERCOVER OR SOMETHING!

He CLEARLY is just gathering some intel so he figure out how he wants to renovate his own butthole Hell or something.

Nimrod and other giants - many of them giants who fought with Greek Gods - are stuck in place in the ground and their upper bodies chained in place.

There’s also a giant named Antaeus [an-tee-uhs ].

He didn't join in the rebellion against the Olympian gods and isn’t chained, but still condemned—just for being a giant.

Also coming from Greek mythology, Antaeus [an-tee-uhs ] was an African giant who was invincible when in contact with the earth but was lifted into the air by Hercules and crushed.

Luckily, because his hands are free, Virgil convinces Antaeus [an-tee- uhs ] to give them a lift down to the ninth circle of hell.

Antaeus [an-tee-uhs ] takes the poets in his large palm and lowers them gently to the final level.

M.9th Circle of Hell - Traitors:

Now we’re in canto [ kan-toh ] 32.

The ninth circle of hell, baby! The dark heart of all this darkness.

Where traitors chillax.

Literally chillaxing.

At the bottom of the Hell is a great frozen lake— Cocytus [cuh sight us] .

Sinners are frozen inside.

Though all residents are frozen in the ice, those who committed more severe sins of treachery are frozen deeper in the lake.

The lake of ice is divided into four concentric rings - or “rounds" - of traitors corresponding, in order of seriousness, to betrayal of family ties, betrayal of community ties, betrayal of guests, and betrayal of lords.

Each of the four circles are named after an individual who personifies the sin.

Round 1 is named Caina, after Cain, the biblical figure who who killed his brother Abel.

In Caina, those who betrayed their kin stand frozen up to their necks in the lake’s ice.

Round 2 is named Antenora [an tuh noor-uh] , after Anthenor [an tuh noor] of Troy who was Priam’s [prahy-uhm ] counselor during the Trojan War.

Those who betrayed their country and party stand frozen up to their heads.

Dante goes a little apeshit in this section of Hell and rips a dude’s hair out, just for not telling him who he is.

Hell’s rubbing off on him. He’s getting in on the torture. Virgil tells him to calm the fuck down. Not his place.

Turns out the dude whose hair he ripped out is another dude from Florence whose politics he didn’t like.

Of course! He can’t let that go. In exile, I imagine thoughts of how unfair him getting kicked out was consume him.

Canto [ kan-toh ] 33 starts with one of the more fucked up scenes in the poem.

The duo comes across a man named Count Ugolino [oo guh lee noh].

Count Ugolino [oo guh lee noh] is just gnawing away at the head of another soul nearby— a head that belongs to another damned traitor, Archbishop Ruggieri [rue gi air ee].

In life, according to legend, when Ruggieri [rue gi air ee] imprisoned Ugolino [oo guh lee noh] and his sons, denying them food, Ugolino [oo guh lee noh] was driven to eat the corpses of his dead children.

So now he just chews on Ruggieri’s [rue gi air ee] head-meat forever.

Fun.

Round 3 - the third ring of circle nine - is named Ptolomaea [tall oh may uh] , after Ptolemy, who murdered his house guests. Ptolemy invited his father-in-law Simon Maccabaeus [ mak-uh-bee-uhs ] and his sons to a banquet and then killed them.

Sounds like a dick move.

In Ptolomea [tall oh may uh], those who betrayed their guests spend eternity lying on their backs in the frozen lake, their tears making blocks of ice over their eyes.

Even the release of tears is off-limits for these bad guys.

Here, Dante encounters Fra Alberigo [all burr ego] , a friar who asks Dante to remove the visor of ice from his eyes.

Like the others, he tells Dante his story.

In 1285, Alberigo [all burr ego] invited his political opponents— who happened to be his brother and his nephew— to a banquet.

Then Alberigo’s [all burr egos] men murdered them both.

And then - Dante finds out that this Alberigo [all burr ego] fellow is SOMEHOW STILL ALIVE. Like - still up on Earth.

Alberigo [all burr ego] explains that a living person's soul can fall to Ptolomea BEFORE they actually die.

Up on earth, a demon inhabits their body until the body's natural death.

Message here?

Keep your eye on your grandparents!

Is Nana still Nana??

OR - is she a soulless demon wearing nana’s skin like a cheap Nana-suit!?!

Stab her and find out!

JK!

Please don’t do that!

The message here is that some crimes are so bad, the afterlife comes for the soul before the body is even cold - and THEN throws it in the frozen basement.

Maybe here Dante’s just trying to explain how, if you’re not careful, you can become so bad you’re not even human anymore.

I’m sure people who’ve listened to the majority of the serial killer episodes here can relate to that.

OR - maybe Dante - who in exile, has to stay as a guest in a lot of different people’s homes - and he just really wants to BE TREATED BETTER BY HIS FUCKING HOSTS! So he makes being a bad host one of the worst sins imaginable.

I feel like this says more about Dante than it does about some Christian-based vision of Hell.

Round 4 is named Judecca, after Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus.

In Canto [ kan-toh ] 34, Dante follows Virgil into Judecca [jew deck uh] into the lowest depth of hell.

As they enter the ring, Virgil says, “the banners of the King of Hell draw closer.”

Dante immediately notices that, unlike other parts of hell, Judecca is completely silent.

All of the sinners here are fully encapsulated in ice, distorted and twisted in every conceivable position.

Entirely immobilized.

Traitors to their benefactors are trapped here.

The duo quickly realize that it’s impossible to talk with any of them, so they move on to the center of hell.

N.Lucifer and the Center of Hell: A huge, mist-shrouded form lurks ahead, and Dante approaches it.

It’s the three-headed giant Lucifer, the end-boss, plunged waist-deep into the ice where he fell when God hurled him down from heaven.

Dante describes him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ_r1H9vHkI PLAY AT WHATEVER POINT IT LEFT OFF AT

“... he had three faces: one in front blood-red; and then another two that, just above the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first; and at the crown, all three were reattached; the right looked somewhat yellow, somewhat white; the left in its appearance was like those who come from where the Nile, descending, flows.”

I would’ve written this a little differently. Maybe something like,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ_r1H9vHkI PLAY AT WHATEVER POINT IT LEFT OFF AT “The Devil is a monster with three heads, yo, and all of them suck. So don’t kill or rape - be a good host, ya know - don’t be a schmuck. Or one of those heads will eat you dead and you’ll be stuck, In the ninth level of Hell forever, you silly treacherous bad boy fuck.

Alright.

Admittedly - not my best work there.

BUT - it rhymes better than Dante I think - SO POETRY-WISE - I did a better job than he did. I think we can all agree on that.

What the three faces of Satan symbolizes has been up for debate for hundreds of years.

Most people agree that the symbolism of three is a bastardization of the holy trinity— the father, the son, and the holy spirit.

Satan is sort of like a reverse-God: impotent, ignorant, and full of hate, in contrast to the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving nature of God.

If it seems weird that the God who lets all these sinners be tortured for eternity is all-loving, remember that Dante thinks God’s punishment of sinners is a courtesy to them.

Agree to disagree with Dante here. Never really a courtesy to be tortured, I think. I don’t think anyone who has ever been tortured for ANY REASON at all has thought, “THANK YOU! Thank you for this GREAT COURTESY! This if fitting! Good call!”

Satan is frozen here, punished, because he wanted to be as powerful as God.

I don’t really understand that. What’s the big deal? Who cares what Satan wanted? If God is all powerful, why is God threatened by anyone or anything?

I could easily be missing some important point here.

Satan was the first sinner who paved the way for the punishments faced by all the rest, as the crash of his body in hell excavated the underworld in which the damned are held.

Way to go, Satan, you fucking dick! You ruined everything.

Satan can’t talk here in the lowest realm of Hell.

He was given got the opposite of what he wanted: stuck in place with no power, no voice, no authority.

In one of his mouths is Judas, who betrayed Jesus Christ, and in the other two are Cassius and Brutus, who betrayed Julius Caesar.

We already went over this.

These fuckers get gnawed and gnashed on for the rest of time.

Virgil and Dante, after witnessing Satan himself, begin their escape from Hell by clambering down Satan's ragged fur, feet-first.

Virgil tells Dante to hold on to him as he climbs Satan's back, waiting for a moment when the wings are open so that they can have a safe passage down.

When they reach Satan's genitalia, the poets ride down the final river of hell, the river of forgetfulness known as Lethe.

Dante wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ_r1H9vHkI PLAY AT WHATEVER POINT IT LEFT OFF AT

When we had reached the point at which the thigh revolves, just at the swelling of the hip, my guide, with heavy strain and rugged work, reversed his head to where his legs had been and grappled on the hair, as one who climbs.

I thought that we were going back to Hell. “Hold tight,” my master said — he panted like a man exhausted — “it is by such stairs that we must take our leave of so much evil.”

Oh my Heck!

Just repelling down Satan’s pubes. What an adventure! It’s not every day you get to traverse your way down the Devil’s ball hair.

Dante doesn’t explain Satan’s genitalia in any detail. Too bad. Would’ve been fun if he and Virgil spring boarded off Satan’s pecker into purgatory or something.

Maybe pull a triple gainer as he dives on out of Hell.

Dante and Virgil go past Satan’s balls - or lack thereof, some think by not mentioning his nuts Dante was implying he didn’t have any - and they pass through the center of the universe and of gravity, and from the northern hemisphere of land to the southern hemisphere’s ocean.

Hefty concepts for the 14th century.

Virgil is pumped about the trip between hemispheres and now explains a bunch of nonsensical physics to Dante.

Finally, Virgil climbs through a hole in the central rock, turning around — Dante is afraid that Virgil is going back through hell, but both of the poets find themselves on their feet and standing on the other side of the world, having passed the mid-point of the earth.

They can see Satan's legs on this side, his body still frozen in the ice above.

Without pausing to rest, the poets make the long journey to the other side of the world where they are delivered though a round opening into the world under the stars.

They emerge from Hell on Easter morning, just before sunrise.

And many have expressed their disappointment over this anti- climactic end with Lucifer.

Why isn’t there an end-boss fight? Why didn’t he dick dive?

Because that’s God’s job - to fight Satan, not dick dive - and God already punished Lucifer.

From here, Dante would move forward to two more large poems about the afterlife in search of Beatrice - first through purgatory and then to heaven.

THIS is the end of Dante’s Inferno, the opening third of The Divine Comedy we were tasked by our Space Lizards to suck the fuck out of.

Check out the entire Divine Comedy to see how the story unfolds.

https://historylists.org/art/9-circles-of-hell-dantes-inferno.html

So what the fuck was this whole journey really supposed to mean, anyway?

Why take this Hell Tour?

O.Themes: The primary themes of Inferno have been pretty much agreed upon by most literary critics and scholars.

They are: the perfect nature of God’s justice, evil as the contradiction of God’s will, and the nature of storytelling.

1. Perfection of God’s Justice: Let’s start with the perfect nature of God’s justice.

The inscription over the gates of Hell in Canto [ kan-toh ] III, “abandon all hope, you who enter here,” explicitly states that God was inspired to make Hell because he sought Justice.

He was sick of humanity’s shit.

Hell exists to punish sin, and the suitability of Hell’s specific punishments testify to the divine perfection that all sin violates.

This is really the crux of Dante’s message.

God is good! He is so good, he has the most perfect ways to make you feel super bad forever, so try really, REALLY hard to be good, okay?

Somewhere in this weird arguably horrific angry-dad lesson is supposed to be some sort of balance. Sinners receive punishment in perfect proportion to their sin and to pity their suffering is to demonstrate a lack of understanding in God’s love.

OR - in Dante’s Inferno - sinners receive punishment in perfect to proportion to how much their particular sin chapped Dante’s ass personally.

2. Evil as the Contradiction of God’s Will: The next theme is a little more complicated.

It’s the idea that evil is the contradiction of God’s will.

Basically, Dante says that there’s no objective baseline for good or bad, just the ever-changing will of God.

Accepting a bribe can land you in the eighth circle. Murder’s a sixth circle punishment.

How does Dante come to conclusions like this?

According to scholars, while murder is much more disruptive to organized society, Dante illustrates that God doesn’t care about human beings’ happiness or the harmony of life on earth.

It’s all about God’s will in heaven.

Huh. Sucks for us down here.

Using that logic, Dante considers violence LESS evil than fraud.

Of the two sins, he feels that fraud is in greater opposition to God’s will.

Or something like that.

I should state that Inferno is NOT a philosophical text; its intention is NOT to think critically about the nature of evil but rather to teach and reinforce Christian doctrines Dante found relevant and important.

It’s basically one long text that ends with Dante saying, as God, in regards to God’s punishments - “because I said so.”

3. Storytelling as a Way to Achieve Immortality:

The third theme of the Inferno is the idea of storytelling as a way to achieve immortality.

There’s no hiding how proud of himself Dante is in having written this poem.

Several shades in Inferno ask the character Dante to retell their names and stories on Earth upon his return.

They hope, perhaps, that the retelling of their stories will allow them to live in people’s memories, maybe even offer some improvement to their state.

Dante as a character doesn’t always do it.

But the poet Dante was all about advancing his own legend. And he did that with this book.

Dante’s Divine Comedy was partially a big flex.

A big, “Oh you think YOU can write an epic poem? Bitch, I can write the most epic of ALL epic poems. Get ready for more ancient mythological allusions and contemporary political references than you can count - all intricately woven into epic hero’s journey motherfucker!”

https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/inferno/themes/page/2/

And where did Dante head next on his journey?

XI. Purgatory: After Inferno, Dante makes his way to purgatory in the Purgatorio section.

In Roman Catholic doctrine, purgatory is the place or state of suffering inhabited by the souls of sinners who are paying for their sins before going to heaven. Some forms of Western Christianity, particularly within Protestantism, deny its existence.

The Catholic Church holds that “all who die in God's grace and friendship but still imperfectly purified” undergo the process of purification “so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.”

This is where praying for your dead relatives comes in handy, because praying for them can expedite their process.

There’s no REAL, concrete, this-is-what-it-means-100% scriptural basis for purgatory, by the way. Mostly just heavy interpretation of 2 Corinthians 5:10 “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.”

In the Purgatorio, Dante and Virgil keep going on their journey.

They climb through different levels of Purgatory.

They meet more historical figures and encounter more heavy symbolism.

The theme of the work changes, as Dante stops seeing souls that need to be punished and starts seeing other characters as pilgrims on a quest of spiritual purification.

This next section offers a more sympathetic and psychological view of sinners, like in a passage when Virgil explains that sin ultimately derives from distortions of love.

Dante realizes, as obedient Christians tend to do, that life is a pilgrimage, and that he must learn to reject the deceptions of the temporal world.

At the end of the section, Virgil says Dante’s ready to keep going on his own.

Dante reaches a beautiful forest where a woman named Matilda explains that Dante is in the Earthly Paradise, or the Garden of Eden, in which human beings were originally created and lived in innocence.

In a stream, Matilda washes away Dante’s memories of his sin so he can proceed to heaven.

https://www.litcharts.com/lit/purgatorio/summary

XII. Paradise: Dante arrives in paradise, or heaven, in the Paradiso - the final section of the Divine Comedy.

In heaven, Dante and Beatrice finally get to spend time together, although she appeared briefly at the end of Purgatorio.

Fourteen different cantos are dedicated to Dante and Beatrice fucking the shit out of each other.

“Beatrice, oh Beatrice, I journeyed through Hell to suck in your sweet taste,

Beatrice, oh Beatrice, hop on over yonder, and sit on my stalker’s face.”

That kind of stuff.

JK!

Gosh Dang.

Begone Lucifina! You’re gonna get me stuck in one of the lower levels of Dante’s Hell!

No. Beatrice, who’s thought of by scholars to represent theology, outlines the structure of the universe for Dante.

Paradise is depicted as a series of concentric spheres surrounding the Earth

Dante loves rings.

Within these circles, Dante can discern the human form of Christ.

The Divine Comedy ends with Dante’s flash of understanding about how the circles fit together— and how humanity relates to divinity— but Dante can’t describe it.

Bummer.

Wonder how many pieces of parchment he burned through TRYING to describe it before he finally just went, “Ah, fuck it! I’ve been working on this damn book for over a decade. Let’s just wrap it up.”

God bestows the answer to basically the meaning of life - that we don’t get to hear - upon him in a flash of light and Dante's soul is, finally, at one with God's.

“But already my desire and my will were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed, by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars."

And that’s the gist of all of it!

We could’ve spent many additional hours digging into more of the details.

But that felt like a good two hour overview.

XIII. No Hell In the Bible:

Now - it’ interesting question time!

So - how much did Dante influence the modern Christian view of Hell with his Inferno? How much of our vision of Hell comes from Dante and other non-Biblical authors, and how much comes from the Bible itself?

Hell - as most of us Westerners think of it today - actually isn’t definitively mentioned in the Bible.

Four different words in the Bible have been TRANSLATED into the English word Hell: The Hebrew word Sheol [sheel]. The Greek words Hades and Tartarus. And Gehenna [guh henna] , a Hebrew word transliterated into Greek.

But none of those words necessarily meant what we think of now AS Hell. None of these terms translate as eternal, fiery punishment.

How crazy is that?

My Pentecostal pastor Grand father - not Papa Ward - Grandpa Bill - he seemed to have REALLY missed that back when he was preaching.

It’s literally never scripturally described as we think of it today. Interpreted - yes - but interpreted, I think, influenced by literary, non-Biblical, works.

Within scripture, it’s interesting to track how the conception of the afterlife has changed over the centuries.

Ancient Jews didn’t believe in Hell because they didn’t believe there was any soul to be punished. They traditionally did not believe the soul could exist at all apart from the body.

On the contrary, for them, the soul was more like the “breath.”

The first human God created, Adam, began as a lump of clay; then God “breathed” life into him - Genesis 2:7.

Adam remained alive until he stopped breathing. Then it was dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

Ancient Jews thought this was true for us all. When we stop breathing, our breath doesn’t go anywhere.

It just… stops.

To refer to this, ancient Jews used the term "Sheol" [sheel] in the Hebrew Bible - a term scholars use to refer to the Old Testament and a few other important Hebrew religious texts.

Then, into English, Sheol has been translated as "grave" and transliterated into "Hades".

And it is generally agreed that both sheol and hades do not typically refer to the place of eternal punishment, but to the grave, the temporary abode of the dead, the underworld.

Six feet under. A hole in the ground.

But Jews began to change their view over time.

About two hundred years before Jesus, SOME Jewish thinkers began to believe that there had to be something beyond death—a kind of justice to come.

This view of the coming resurrection dominated the view of Jewish thought in the days of Jesus. It was also the view he himself embraced and proclaimed throughout the New Testament.

So what did Jesus think about Hell?

In traditional English versions, Jesus does occasionally seem to speak of “Hell” – for example, in his warnings in the Sermon on the Mount: anyone who calls another a fool, or who allows their right eye or hand to sin, will be cast into “hell” (Matthew 5:22, 29-30).

But the word Jesus actually used was “Gehenna” [guh henna].

The term originally did not refer to a place of eternal torment but to a notorious valley just outside the walls of Jerusalem, believed by many Jews at the time to be the MOST unholy, god-forsaken place on earth.

On actual Earth.

A place where, according to the Old Testament, ancient kings sacrificed some of their children to foreign gods by burning them alive.

ALSO - in the ancient world - whether Greek, Roman, or Jewish - the worst punishment a person could experience after death was to be denied a decent burial.

And many scholars think that Jesus developed this view into a repugnant scenario: corpses of those excluded from the kingdom would be unceremoniously tossed into the most desecrated dumping ground on the planet.

That was Hell. Literally Hell on Earth.

Jesus did not say souls would be tortured there, but that they simply would no longer exist. https://time.com/5822598/jesus-really-said-heaven-hell/

OTHER passages, however, do SEEM to suggest that maybe Jesus believed in Hell as we know it today.

Most notably, Jesus speaks of all nations coming for the last judgment in Matthew, chapter 25: versus 31-46. He says that the wicked— those who refused to help those in need— are sent to “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

Still though - translation problems.

Does this verse point towards a Hell similar to Dante’s? OR - does it mean the wicked will be buried in the cursed land where idolators used to burn their children? In “Gehenna” [guh henna]?

The closest we may get to the Biblical hell being a physical place is in Luke, verse 26, which describes “a great chasm” between heaven and hades that is “set in place” so that no one can cross from one side to the other. https://www.christianity.com/wiki/heaven-and-hell/what-is-hell-a- biblical-guide-of-its-existence.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_Hell

Still - Hell here is a very vague idea.

It’s also described as a place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth” in Matthew 13:50, and a place that is down or below the earth in Psalms and Proverbs.

Kind of.

Once again - translation problems.

In addition to “Hell”, a grave is also “below the earth.” Sent to Hell? Or just dead and buried? No longer possessing breath.

Even if Hell is what is being referenced in all these verses - the Hell spoke of is still a vague concept. It’s certainly not what is often described from an Evangelical viewpoint.

For example, the primary Evangelical organization in the UK, the Evangelical Alliance, produced a report in 2000 entitled, 'The Nature of Hell'. It was not an unsubstantial document and it had 22 conclusions. Here's the thrust of their argument:

“Hell is separation from God. Hell involves severe punishment, though Scripture used is often metaphorical. Hell is a conscious experience of rejection and torment. Hell involves degrees of punishment and suffering in hell related to the severity of sins committed on Earth. Hell is a realm of destruction, which could be of actual existence of individual sinners or to the quality of their relationship with God. Hell is eternal though not necessarily as a ceaseless conscious experience.” https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Blogs2/Yeshua-Explored/Hell- and-evangelicals

Did you catch that part about hell involving degrees of punishment related to the severity of sins on earth?

That’s 1000% Dante! That is NOT taken from the Bible. There is no reference, for sure, of degrees of punishment and suffering no matter how you try and translate various words.

The visions of a place beneath us where demons torment the dead in all manner of disturbing ways - that vision comes from the 14th century, not the first. It comes from Dante, not from the disciples of Christ.

Interesting stuff, right? Speaks to how powerfully Dante’s influence can still be felt together, seven centuries after his death.

Now let’s recap..

XIV.Recap: Dante’s Divine Comedy is a poem that has flourished for centuries and is still considered a classic.

Its powerful symbolism and shocking depictions of life after death has continued to astonish generations of readers.

Dante pulled from his life experience in his writing— the loss of his love, Beatrice, his struggles with the pope and Florentine politics, and ultimately his exile.

All of these themes run through the Divine Comedy and Inferno in particular.

The plot is relatively simple. Dante loses his way in a dark forest and comes across the Roman poet Virgil, who guides him through the nine circles of hell. The punishments get more intense as they go, from thrashing around with other souls in lakes of shit to walking around flaming deserts to having your head permanently twisted around 180 degrees.

Along with that is the constant torture inflicted on the punished by Satan’s minions— a whole cast of centaurs [sen tors], giants, demons and serpents.

As a literary work, Dante’s Inferno is so many things. Propaganda for the Church, Dante’s personal shit-list of Florentine politicians he didn’t like, a big rant against the corrupt papacy, a walk-through of the many, many ways in which people can have the shit beat out of them. An evaluation of evil. What are the worst things a person can do?

The punishment people suffer in Inferno is disturbing and surreal, equal to anything you might come across in a modern horror film.

For more than a hundred years it has been a staple in schools and universities and it has continued to provide inspiration to poets and artists in our time. It’s one of the texts that has shaped how we think about hell in the popular imagination.

How would you structure your Hell if you wrote something akin to Inferno? Who would you place in the lowest levels? Would you base punishments on what has affected you personally? Or would you try and be more objective, and really try and think about the worst things a person can do?

Would a child murderer be placed in a lower circle than an adult murderer? Would an architect of a genocide be placed in a lower circle than a serial killer?

Who’s placed in the lowest level? Who is Satan gnashing his teeth on?

Would everyone stay in Hell forever? Or for different lengths of time depending on what they did? A hundred years for every murder? A thousand? Ten-thousand?

Or - would you not send anyone to Hell? Would you destroy it?

I think examining Dante’s Inferno is a good way to examine the concept of crime and punishment. What are the crimes and what are the punishments in your worldview?

I’m not sure who I’d punish the most. Out of the dirtbags we’ve sucked, I want to throw Joseph Duncan, Bob Berdella, and David Parker Ray into the lowest pit right away. Why do those names jump out? Are they any worse than Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Gary Ridgeway, Richard Ramirez, Ed Kemper and so many others?

Should Hitler be punished more than John Wayne Gacy?

Who should be punished more - Cambodia’s Pol Pot? Or the Three Pashas of the Young Turks?

I really don’t know.

When do you max out on evil?

I don’t think it’s with the guys who betrayed Julius Caesar. But I don’t know who it should be.

Time now for Today’s Top 5 takeaways.

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS INTRO

XV.Top Five Takeaways

1. Number One: Number one! Dante’s Inferno is one of the most influential pieces of literature of all time. Together, with the other two parts of the Divine Comedy, it helped unify and popularize the Italian vernacular language, and it gave Christian values its own epic poem.

2. Number Two: Number two! Dante Alighieri, the author and narrator of Inferno, lived in tumultuous times at the end of the thirteenth century in Florence when being in politics meant that you could be on top of the world one day and exiled with your property seized— or worse, executed— the next. After being exiled himself, Dante used Inferno as his personal shit-list of people he thought should be in hell, including several popes.

3. Number Three: Number three! Each of the punishments doled out to the sinners is directly related to the kind of sins they committed in life. Shove cake and candy in your face in this life, eat shit forever in the after life.

4. Number Four: Number four! Dante climbed down Satan’s pubes to get out of Hell. Just wanted to make sure you didn’t forget about that.

5. Number Five: Number five! New info! Charlie and the Chocolate factory is thought to be a modern reimagining of Dante’s Inferno.

Not even kidding.

In Willy Wonka’s tour through the candy factory, he and the kids take a unique river boat ride —where Gene Wilder goes off on a monologue that easily could fit in Dante’s Inferno.

Is the magical chocolate making facility actually Hell?

Wonka’s words seem to describe a descent into hell as he says, "Are the fires of Hell a-glowing, is the grisly reaper mowing?"

There are more comparisons.

As we learned in Inferno, the different levels of hell have punishments that reflect the sins.

In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the kids are punished in a way that relates to their respective “sin.”

For example, Augustus Gloop eats enormous amounts of chocolate on the reg. In the factory, he almost drowns in a river of it.

Or Violet Beauregarde, who commits theft for stealing gum and is promptly turned into a blueberry, her identity stolen.

At the end of Dante's Inferno, Dante climbs up Satan and ascends out of Hell...

In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie ascends off into the sky in a glass elevator.

Is Willy Wonka Virgil? He is Charlie’s guide.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/christopherhudspeth/this-willy-wonka- and-the-chocolate-factory-theory-is-dark-as

Many modern works owe a lot to Dante and his Comedy. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, authors of two of the most important 20th century works Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia have expressed their indebtedness to Dante.

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS OUTRO

XVI.Final Announcements

A.Episode has been sucked!: Dante’s Inferno has been SUCKED! Good luck ever viewing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the same way ever again.

And you’re welcome for the poetry.

B.Thank you to Timesuck Team:

Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions Team for all the help in making Timesuck! Queen of Bad Magic Lynze Cummins, Reverend Doctor Joe Paisley, the Script Keeper Zaq Flanary, Sophie “Fact Sorceress” Evans, Bit Elixir, and Logan “Art Warlock” Keith running BadMagicMerch.com and working on our socials along with Liz Hernandez!

And again - the new and improved customer service email for BadMagicMerch.com is [email protected]

Thanks to all of those who’ve joined the Cult of the Curious private Facebook group -Yip yip yaw you curious motherfuckers!

Thanks Liz Hernandez and her All Seeing Eyes running the Cult of the Curious Facebook page.

Thanks to Beefsteak and our moderators on Discord! Easy to link to Discord from the Timesuck app.

And thanks to all of your Space Lizards playing Timesuck Trivia on the app. Early into round 8, with 1477 points, Bailey96hannah is in the lead as I record this.

C.Next Episode Preview: Next week on Timesuck.

Are you ready to head down under? Throw some shrimps on the barbie? Wrestle sharks? Get stung by box jellyfish?

Even more importantly, are you ready to learn what the fuck a “brumby” is?

Next week on Timesuck we head to Australia— specifically Western Australia, and we go back to a tough few years in its long history: when World War I veterans returned from combat and were given plots of land to farm by the government only to have all their plans royally fucked up…

By emus.

Yup.

This powerful bird— the only bird with calf muscles, and I don’t know why I find that so disturbing— today numbers around 60,000 or 70,000 and that’s with efforts made to curb their reproduction and limit the land they can roam on. Back in the 1930s, it wasn’t uncommon to see flocks of emu— called “mobs”— numbering around 20,000.

And all those emu loved to eat the wheat crops that the farmers were growing and would fight them for it.

The big aggressive birds love anything shiny and can kick at you and scratch you with their talons. It really is more of a dinosaur than a bird.

The Aussie farmers getting kicked decided they weren’t going to lose their farms without a fight.

And they grabbed some machine guns.

The government joined in and sent out a mission of three military men plus a camera crew to document the “Great Emu War.”

Emus were planned to be killed in the thousands.

And then things didn’t go as planned.

Did the emu win the Great Emu War?

You’ll have to tune in next week to find out. .

D.Segue to Timesucker Updates: And now let’s head on over to this week’s Timesucker Updates!

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES INTRO

XVII.Timesucker Updates

1. Starting with an Israel Keyes update. I mispronounced the name of a town only two hours away. That I’ve been too. Damn it. Top Shelf Lizard Sack Sham Slam - Space lizard name, not real name, shares this and so much more. He writes:

Dear Mothersuckmaster,

Was super psyched/disheartened to hear you discuss the town I live in, during the Israel Keyes suck, Colville, WA. First off, it’s not ‘Cole-ville’. It’s pronounced ‘Call-ville’. There is absolutely no way you’d know that unless you asked someone. Don’t sweat it.

Anyway, thought you should know some even scarier things regarding the Israel cult shit. They still have a compound around here up on the Columbia river and even own a winery. There are about 7-8 families up there all with the last name Israel and they’re all WAY anti-government and all have super weird hippie names like Honesty, Fortitude, Confidence, and Victory. One dude even named his kid Success and it seems that kid has done everything conceivably possible to live that name DOWN. He has never held down a job, is constantly in trouble with the law, and has wrecked more cars and county and private property than is normal for even your average screwup. He’s been tasered a few times and spends about two nights a week in county lockup. They won’t keep him in there though because he is shit-house crazy.

People around here still talk about the Keyes family and all that weirdness. I asked around about it and most people were just like, “That was a weird fucking time, man. Just fucking weird.” Being born and raised in Spokane I never really heard about it. But it’s strange to hear about it after all this time.

Also wanted to share a Cummins law experience that should dispel any doubts that the government has you on record. Albeit completely unintentionally.

I work in federal law enforcement up here in Stevens County. For the sake of safety of both myself and my job I’ll decline to say which federal agency, but we’re a big one.

Anyway, one night I was listening to The Joachim Kroll Suck (of course) in my work truck when I suddenly got a text from one of my partners also working that night. He said, “Dude, I don’t know what in the flying fuck you’re listening to, but you’ve been hot- miking that shit for the last ten minutes and the radio ladies are really upset.”

Sure enough, the poor radio dispatcher ladies had been subjected to tales of “peanut-butt butter” and “show biz!” for the better part of ten minutes. My leg had been accidentally pressing the radio transmit button next to me and I hadn’t felt it because my wallet was in my cargo pocket. Those poor ladies.

Anyhow I got called in to my boss’s office the next day and he asked me what in the hell had happened that night and I told him what I was listening to and he just laughed and asked me, “Ya mo Timesuck?”

So, while that could have really fucked me there, it ended up turfing out.

Also, all of our radio transmissions are recorded by some nerd think tank in DC, so take heart and know that your mush-mouthed sultry voice is immortalized digitally in some archive somewhere and they know about Kroll’s deviance in ways they never wanted.

Hey, if you read this on the Suck, please exclude my name but just know that you’ve got some real fans up here. Managed to get most of my shift listening to TimeSuck and if you could give a shout out to Charlie 16, Charlie 33 and Charlie 22, they’d know exactly who you’d mean and would really get a kick out of it.

Btw, just to make this extra creepy, you and I were born on exactly the same day, and actually lived in Spokane at the same time while you were at GU. So, yes we should get an apartment together. Fuckin JK.

You’re the best! Been a huge fan since Crazy with a Capital F. Still waiting for the Merch store to start making those greetings cards. Hope to see you back again at the Spokane Comedy Club really soon! Our best to your family and everyone at the Suck Dungeon. Really glad this email was so long.

Your faithful Space Lizard, Shamslam

2. Now for another true crime update. Super Sucker Ryan Moore has reason to believe my dad might be the Zodiac Killer. He writes:

So with all the talk of Dan's dad being a serial killer I was wondering just what if he really could be a serial killer so after about 30 seconds of searching for stuff online I'm pretty sure he's actually the Zodiac Killer.

First off- he was presumably actually alive in the late 60s-early 70s.

Second off- we weren't there with him during that time frame, so maybe he was out murdering people and sending letters.

Third- the pictures from a couple weeks ago where he was in all of the crime scenes does look suspiciously like the composite sketch of the Zodiac. I've attached a photo of the two side by side. Both are white males with glasses and a similar haircut.

Fourth- Maybe when Dan was a child he was spoken to in ciphers which really is the cause of his mushmouth.

Seems pretty rock solid to me.

-Ryan Moore.

3. Now for the first Armenian Genocide Update coming in from Meatsack Instructor, Kathryn Yeager. Kathryn writes:

Hey Dan, I just wanted to say thank you for covering the Armenian Genocide.

I am a social studies teacher and one my first day of student teaching the first thing one student ever said to me was, "Have you ever heard of the Armenian Genocide?" It may seem like a weird question to ask a teacher the student was Armenian/Iranian. I said yes because I knew it had happened and knew that the Turkish government denied it ever happening.

Until your podcast I did not know the details and now that I do it puts that question into even greater perspective. This student was almost definitely the descendent of survivors which after listening to your podcast just awes me that anybody survived that horror. Your episode made me think about her and I hope she is doing okay. She'd be a senior in high school right now.

Thank you for the show. Thank you also for your comedy because it is something my mom likes to and is something that we enjoy together. Much love. K

(Kathryn)

4. Another Armenian Genocide Update from an Armenian American meatsack, Oshin (o’ sheen) arakelian. O-Sheen writes:

Suckmaster and crew, I just wanted to take a moment and say thank you from the bottom of my heart for shining a light on the Armenian genocide on the last episode of Timesuck. I’m a full blooded Armenian American descendant from genocide victims and survivors.

My great grandmothers entire family was wiped out as ottoman/ Turkish soldiers decimated their entire village. She was hidden in a forest at the age of 3 and was picked up by Russian soldiers and given to another Armenian family on there way to neighboring Iran. If you’re interested I can always expand as her story was/is truly remarkable filled with unimaginable heart breaks. On behalf of Armenians space lizards world wide I’d like to crown the suck master and all crew honorary Armenians. Hail Nimrod, hail lucefina and praise bojangles. Thanks again Oshin [osheen] A!

5. Heavy stuff. Let’s end with some silliness. Super Sucker Charles Jenkins got Cummins Law’d in front of the Law. He writes:

Cummins' Law got me out of a ticket! O Great Profit of Nimrod, can't go deep into personal details right now, just know that shit is a little fucked up for me. I was pulled over on the way to work tonight while listening to the Rhodes suck. I paused the Timesuck app when I saw blue lights behind me and went to a sphincter factor of ten. My tags are expired and I don't have a license at the moment. (It's a much, much longer story than this one.) Just as this awesome, polite officer of the law is getting into my bullshit, my phone decides to broadcast through my car speakers one of your bullshit ads for Captain Whiskerhorn. I have an android and cant hit pause on my lock screen and my phone decided not to take my thumbprint. For what seemed an agonizingly long time I'm struggling to put my password in my phone to shut your ridiculous gob up. The look on this cop's face was priceless. He was just done with me. I could have been jailed tonight, but I believe you helped me out with your asinine nonsense. I've been trying to straighten my shit out but it has been difficult due to certain circumstances. I've never been arrested and have no record. Thanks for keeping it that way. Everything you do is terrible, worst things I've ever heard 5/5 stars. (Charles Jenkins)

B.THANK YOU: Thanks everyone for the messages, and for continuing to listen, spreading the Suck - all the stuff.

Hail Nimrod to you all!

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES OUTRO

XVIII.Goodbye!

A.Goodbye!:

More Bad Productions content throughout the week if you’re interested.

Campfire horror with Scared to Death late Tuesday nights.

SO many laughs with Is We Dumb Wednesdays at Noon Pacific Time.

Also - if you want less darkness - little inspiration nuggets every morning Monday - Friday with Incredible Feats.

Please don’t try to descend into and then out of Hell this week with an ancient Roman poet as your guide, you might not escape like Dante did. Stay up here on the surface, sand keep on sucking.

PRIMARY SOURCES: https://www.sutori.com/story/top-10-interesting-facts-about-dante- inferno--gHLHNEM4EK8MTHh3VmZKEaRL https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/inferno/facts/ https://www.mentalfloss.com/biographies/authors/605690-dante- biography-facts-quotes-divine-comedy-inferno https://www.coursehero.com/lit/Inferno/things-you-didnt-know/ https://www.thelocal.it/20160121/10-strange-things-you-never-knew- about-dante https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180604-dante-and-the-divine- comedy-he-took-us-on-a-tour-of-hell https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dante-Alighieri/Legacy-and- influence https://www.futurity.org/dante-divine-comedy-hell-1299902-2/ https://dlcl.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/files_upload/lummus-inferno- influence_1.pdf https://medium.com/@andrewdagher/the-influence-of-dantes-inferno-on- j-r-r-tolkien-s-the-lord-of-the-rings-13a4e795d99b https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/dantes-enduring- influence https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/2017/09/26/four-ways-dante- still-matters-today/ https://www.123helpme.com/essay/The-Influence-of-Dantes- Inferno-223153 https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/inferno/context/ https://www.thegregorian.org/2013/5-spiritual-lessons-from-dantes- divine-comedy