Notes on the Divine Comedy

Beneath the Poet’s Tongue

PREFACE

The stars of luminous Night shed their many-coloured beams upon the slumbering Earth. Enwrapped is she in false hopes and dreams, in the illusions men call life. But, lo, the great circle of the Zodiac turns, and the hour of awakening approaches. The sun has drunk deep from night’s cup, and hand in hand with Sirius, he rises above the lip, crowned with ire and splendour, dazzling the eye with blazing light. While below, the many kinds of star-struck men still slumber on.

The drama unfolds, the mighty heart of cosmos stirs, the air thrills, and the waters swell to lood the plains with life. All that once was still begins to move. The sins of the wide world are washed away as if they never were. The rivers low; the lower of the dell lifts its head to wakefulness; the scented garden is bathed in morning’s dew; the choirs of creation sing as the singers of the forest alight upon the bough; and the mists that veil the valley loor rise to melt once more to nothingness.

Life from Light; Light from Life; Light and Life enjoined.

Behold the blindfold pilgrim, lost upon the way, bewildered by the chequerboard of life. Good and bad fall thick upon his path. The dark threads of material life bind him fast and countless doubts en-cloud his mind. Sin and vice are his sorry lot. O, where the purity of silent peace? Where the certitude? Where the aid of sweet companionship, as alone he wanders the worried world? Where the eternal light and life that set men free?

May the hour of turning come. May the Lady of the Divine Spaces pierce the clouded regions and send him respite’s ray. May all the powers of divine providence protect him. May the song of joy save him from his sorrow; and may gnosis be his redemption. For whom but Thee O Lord, whom but Thee and She who is Thy Grace, can lift man’s heart and mind to life and light? Who but Thee and She can rescue him from the Shadow of his Destiny? INTRODUCTION

Mercifully, divine principles are always veiled. They are expressions of divine power, and as such no mere man or woman can behold them as they are in themselves and survive the experience. The Hidden God remains as He is in Himself: Hidden. Coverings, increasingly dense as we descend, safeguard the beholder; and during the subsequent ascent, or way of return, these are removed one by one, step by step, or rung by rung on the ladder of being, according to the pilgrim’s inner abilities and attributes. Both descent and ascent have been allegorised in all sorts of ways, and have attracted to themselves an almost ininite variety of symbols – symbols themselves being another manifestation of the veils and protective coverings that conceal, more or less, the inexhaustible expressions of Divine Light and Life. Just as words too, as every poet attests, cover and conceal the forces attendant upon inspiration. The descent is sometimes represented as abduction, or as an exile, an imprisonment, a falling asleep, or a forgetting, and so on. The ascent is sometimes an awakening, a pilgrimage, a light, a journey, a voyage, a scaling of a mountain or the climbing of a ladder, and all the rest. But these and others like them are symbols and not the thing itself. Few are ready for the actual return. It is not for the faint hearted; and there are impediments. Those who show the signs of readiness are in a certain sense

1 set aside from other kinds of men. They are, as it were, chosen. They are earmarked for special attention; and are prepared for an experience – some might say an ordeal – not granted to others. They send forth a call; and in a lash it is answered. Their destiny is bright indeed; but the way to its fulilment is often – nay, always – somewhat less than bright. For each destiny also has its shadow, the dark and devouring monster that bars the way and leads the vanquished protagonist back to Earth and all that it entails. But of course these too are but symbols of something, and not the thing itself. Some of these sorts of ideas can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, and were subsequently worked up further by the Neo -Platonists. In fact they can and have been traced back much further than the Greeks, but to do so here would take us too far from our present purpose. What follows in these introductory relections is intended to reconstitute something of the mental atmosphere in which Dante began his great poem. And in doing so ideas similar to those we generally attribute to Plato – though received by Dante indirectly through the works of others – will be seen as in no small way contributing to that atmosphere. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as we proceed it will also be apparent that the Bible played a major part, together with the tenets and theologies of the Catholic Church. So too, the classical myths; and along with them the classical writers and poets who were in some respects thought of by Dante as his predecessors. Added to these were certain Islamic elements which perhaps had entered the Europe of his day with the returning crusaders.

2 We must include too all sorts of vision stories and allegorical journeys to the otherworld, stories which were no more popular than during the period usually referred to as the Middle Ages. And when in addition to these we notice the almost ever- present theme of politics; and the constant allusions to the biographical details of Dante’s life in Florence and of his subsequent exile, we can easily understand why the many kinds of men and women have understood his great poem in many different ways. It is inevitable that to some extent his readers have found in it something of themselves, something of their own lives and preoccupations. Many commentators rightly consider Dante’s ability to bring together all of these and other elements into a uniied, multi- faceted and multi-layered vision to be evidence of his unique genius. Throughout our history of literature it had never been done before; nor, they say, has it been successfully attempted since. Even when the way of return is considered to be little more than a fascinating intellectual theory, it can be, has been, and still is understood in a host of different ways. But when the path becomes much more than this, that is, when the high-born one punctures the surface, then the aspects are further multiplied, and his opportunities to discover and realise higher truth increase exponentially. Such a pilgrim takes whatever they can take, and from wherever they can uncover it. They understand that facets of the light can be found everywhere. And thus, from their point of

3 view, all roads, though they may appear disparate on the surface, point in the end to Rome. So, to some he is predominantly a theological poet whose primary aim was to set out the dogmas and debates of medieval Christianity. In contrast to this there are those who prefer to concentrate on the technical aspects of his poetry, giving emphasis to his innovative style and use of language and so on. Some consider ethics to have been his overriding concern, while others stress his portrayal of the corrupt and corrupting politics of the time, particularly those concerning Church and State. Some are drawn to the personal, to the contemporary, to the biographical particulars of an individual life, while others ind in his work universal truths applicable to all. Some commentators have seen in his poem a mystical journey from Heaven to Hell and back again; and they say that he has turned this journey into a kind of sacred drama. Others have taken the view that a poet can only truly write about themselves, and so have adopted an exclusively psychological approach. Some read him literally, while others see real or imagined allegories everywhere. Still others delve in the Commedia for hidden messages within its structure, rhyming patterns and its use of numbers. That The Divine Comedy can be read literally and allegorically seems undeniable. Although there has been debate among commentators and academics about its authenticity, Dante’s letter to Can Grande della Scala makes this clear. “The meaning of this work is not simple. . . for we obtain one meaning from the letter of it and another from that which the letter signifies; and the first is called the literal, but the other

4 allegorical or mystical. And to make this matter of treatment clearer, it may be studied in the verse: ‘When Israel came out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from among a strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion.’ For if we regard the letter alone, what is set before us is the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt in the days of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, we are shown the conversion of the soul from the grief and wretchedness of sin to the state of grace; if the anagogical, we are shown the departure of the holy soul from the thralldom of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may all be called in general allegorical, since they differ from the literal and historical. The subject of the whole work, then, taken merely in the literal sense is ‘the state of the soul after death straightforwardly afirmed,’ for the development of the whole work hinges on and about that. But if, indeed, the work is taken allegorically, its subject is: ‘Man, as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of his free choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing Justice’.” The letter also asserts that: “The aim of the whole and the part is to remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and to guide them to a state of happiness.” Reading closely what Dante has to say here and elsewhere about allegory, and taking account of his example of the biblical story of the Israelites’ light from Egypt, some might conclude that perhaps the type of allegory Dante appears to have in mind

5 approximates the ‘correspondences’ often associated with the Hermetic writers. As we contemplate a set of ideas presented to us, for example in a work of art, it is sometimes the case that in addition to the straightforward literal meaning, we are able to also recognise in them a higher or more profound meaning. This has in some circles led to the categorisation of ideas as either esoteric or exoteric, terms which mean inner and outer. The inner or esoteric meanings of Dante’s poem exist alongside, within, or above the lower exoteric or outer meanings. They are not ‘things added after the event’, but an integral part of the whole. To use a musical metaphor – or rather, a musical correspondence - all notes have overtones and undertones naturally ; and the vibrations responsible for them exist whether or not we are able to perceive them. There are some who assert that this is wholly in keeping with their conviction that Dante was a member, a leading member at that, of one or more of the secret brotherhoods that were active during his time. This fact alone, they say, means that we should give more stress to the esoteric, mystical and initiatory elements of his poem. It may be worth noting here that one commentator, Aroux, who considered Dante a heretic, held the view that the Inferno is really the sphere concerned with the world and worldly matters; Purgatorio is the sphere of rebirth and renewal; and Paradiso is the place reserved for the perfected. If indeed this is the case, then it would not be too far from the beliefs sometimes associated with the Greek mystery teachings

6 as expressed on this occasion by Thomas Taylor in his account of the Eleusinian Mysteries: ‘‘The ancients by Hades signiied nothing more than the profound union of the soul with the present body; and consequently, that till the soul separated herself by philosophy from such a ruinous conjunction, she subsisted in Hades even in the present life;” On the face of it Dante’s poem describes a descent into Hell, then an ascent up through Purgatory to Paradise. It is from one perspective - there are as we have already noted plenty of others - a fall from an original state of innocent goodness to that of vicious evil; and then a climb back again, having gathered experience and understanding of both. Dante’s experience and his transformative understanding of the contrasting states are gained on his journey through inner vision. It is sometimes said that there are three possible paths, or rather, that there are two paths plus the refusal to follow any path. Human nature, they say, along with the corresponding conditions of the material world, provides men with the opportunity to ascend to eternal life surrounded by light and joy and beauty, descend to destruction amid their opposites, or commit to neither and remain, as it were, stranded among the lukewarm. The Book of Revelation declares that this lukewarm-ness is not good: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.

Because thou sayest, I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art the wretched one and miserable and poor and blind and naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold reined by ire, that thou mayest become rich; and white garments, that thou mayest clothe thyself, and that the shame of thy nakedness be not made manifest; and eye salve to anoint thine eyes, that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I reprove and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with me in my throne, as I also overcame, and sat down with my Father in his throne. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.” Dante’s spiralling ascent from below up through Purgatory to the high realms of eternal life and light follows on from his descent through Hell. Even among Christians this name has been applied and misapplied to a variety of places. Usually it refers to a place or state of torment in which the unrighteous exist. However, there are also times when it is described in terms akin to the so-called pre-Christian underworld where it was thought by some that the souls of both righteous and unrighteous exist after death. This latter conception might explain how it could be said that Christ descended into Hell during the period between his cruciixion and his resurrection to lead righteous souls from there to Heaven. It is also thought that some of the secret

8 brotherhoods of the time taught that not all who are in the lower regions are imprisoned there eternally. Arturo: “For some at least there eventually comes a time when their inner state improves, they repent, they are puriied, their conditions are transcended and enlightened. They make themselves worthy to be liberated from there to a higher place or condition. This teaching was interpreted by its originators both macrocosmically and microcosmically.” The descent by Christ into Hell was a concept known to many of the early Church Fathers and was also a belief prevalent in the Middle Ages. It has come to be known as ‘ The Harrowing of Hell’ . The term harrow comes from the Old English hergian meaning to harry or despoil and refers not merely to the idea that Christ descended into Hell, a concept which can be found among believers as early as the Apostles Creed, but to the later tradition that he triumphed over Hell, releasing some of its captives, particularly Adam and Eve, and some of the righteous men and women who had lived during the time of the Old Testament. As we shall see, in Dante’s poem one of the poet’s guides, Virgil, seems to conirm this event and tells him how he once saw in the lower realms “…a powerful one, crowned with a sign of victory.” The old traditions are full of divine as well as heroic descents into Hell. Many of these were well-known by Dante, and while it is not possible to assign any close equivalences between them – after all, the purpose and circumstances of the descent were often different – nevertheless, some of these underworld

9 journeys and missions undoubtedly contributed to the mental atmosphere in which he was writing. It is also clear that many of them are rooted in ideas about death and rebirth. There was also, prior to the writing of the Commedia, a Christian tradition of visionary journeys to the otherworld. From the Church Fathers on, these stories of the world beyond often involved the grafting of all kinds of foreign concepts on to Jewish and Christian narratives ranging from Enoch to St Paul. Widespread fear of the terrors associated with Hell and Purgatory reached their height in the West during the medieval period; and the Church was not slow to manipulate and reinforce them in order to strengthen the clergy’s hold over the minds of men. Amid an atmosphere which today we might consider religious fanaticism, a traditional form began to emerge. Generally, though not exclusively, the vision begins with a separation of the soul from the body. Often the visionary appears dead, but something stops his kin from burying him – perhaps his body retains a little colour, or there is evidence that he may still be breathing. He usually remains in this state for three days, during which time his soul views the otherworld, sometimes travelling through its various realms or partitions. Often he is accompanied by a guide - a guardian angel or a saint for example – who protects him from any dangers he might encounter, and often instructs him, enlightening him about the meaning of the events and places he beholds. Sometimes the protection is provided or added to by an object which emanates a magical force. A good example of this is the light-radiating ball which protected Charles, King of Swarbia,

10 during his visions of Hell in the 9th century: “Immediately I was carried away in spirit, and he who carried me away was most glorious to see. In his hand he held a ball of thread emitting a beam of the purest light, such as comets shed when they appear. He began to unwind it and said to me, ‘Take the thread of this brilliant ball and wind and tie it irmly on the thumb of your right hand, for by it you will be led through the inextricable punishments of the infernal regions.’ Saying this, he went before me, quickly unrolling the thread of the brilliant ball, and led me into very deep and iery valleys that were full of pits boiling with pitch and brimstone and lead and wax and grease.” The plethora of such literary accounts during The Middle Ages came to an end, pretty much, after the publication of Dante’s Commedia, completed a year before his death in 1321. The torments of Hell and Purgatory, along with the joys of Heaven, found their culmination in his great poem. He took materials bequeathed to him by countless traditions, from far and near, ancient and contemporary, and remoulded them, shaping them into a new and, many have argued, a yet to be surpassed vision of the Christian otherworld. As already noted in brief, Dante’s poem involves on the one hand narratives drawn from the ancient pre-Christian classical and biblical worlds; and on the other, comprehends the fears, hopes and expectations of the medieval Christian believer: for the righteous, a promise of eternal life in a state of blessedness; for the unrighteous, eternal damnation and suffering in Hell. His poem brings together the sometimes hard lessons we draw from the past, and our aspirations for a future happier state

11 through the metaphor of the journey, the path, the way, the voyage of life. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid had, at about the time of the birth of Christ, related Juno’s descent to the underworld: “There is a downward path, gloomy with fatal yew trees: it leads through dumb silence to the infernal regions. The sluggish Styx exhales vapour, and, by that way, the shadows of the newly dead descend, entombed with full rites, and the ghosts of those, at last, given proper burial. The wide, thorny waste is cold and pallid, and the newly arrived shades are ignorant of the road that leads to the Stygian city, where black Dis has his cruel palace. The roomy city has a thousand entrances, and open gates on every side, and as the ocean accepts the rivers of all the world, so this place accepts all the souls, and is never too small for any populace, nor notices the crowds that come. There the bloodless shadows wander without lesh or bone. Some crowd the forum, some the house of the ruler of the depths, others follow their trades, imitating their previous lives, and still others incur punishment.” Virgil was writing at around the same time as Ovid. His work, particularly the Aeneid, had a signiicant inluence on the Divine Comedy, and particularly on the Inferno. In his Georgics, written earlier than the Aeneid, Virgil tells of Orpheus’ descent to the underworld in search of Persephone. The following is from Dryden’s translation: “…He even entered the jaws of Taenarus, the high gates of Dis, and the grove dim with dark fear, and came to the spirits, and their dread king, and hearts that do not know how to soften at human prayer.

The insubstantial shadows, and the phantoms of those without light, came from the lowest depths of Erebus, startled by his song, as many as the thousand birds that hide among the leaves, when Vesper, or wintry rain, drives them from the hills, mothers and husbands, and the bodies of noble heroes bereft of life, boys and unmarried girls, and young men placed on the pyre before their father’s eyes: round them are the black mud and foul reeds of Cocytus, the vile marsh, holding them with its sluggish waters, and Styx, conining them in its nine-fold ditches. The House of the Dead itself was stupeied, and innermost Tartarus, and the Furies, with dark snakes twined in their hair, and Cerberus held his three mouths gaping wide, and the whirling of Ixion’s wheel stopped in the wind…” The Aeneid tells of Aeneas’s epic journey, including his time spent in the underworld. Famously, before entering there Aeneas needed to procure the golden bough in order to secure safe passage; for while it was remarkably easy to enter Hell, it was much harder to return. The following is from Kline’s rendering: “…The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labor lies. To few great Jupiter imparts this grace, And those of shining worth and heav'nly race. Betwixt those regions and our upper light, Deep forests and impenetrable night Possess the middle space: th' infernal bounds

Cocytus, with his sable waves, surrounds. But if so dire a love your soul invades, As twice below to view the trembling shades; If you so hard a toil will undertake, As twice to pass th' innavigable lake; Receive my counsel. In the neighb'ring grove There stands a tree; the queen of Stygian Jove Claims it her own; thick woods and gloomy night Conceal the happy plant from human sight. One bough it bears; but (wondrous to behold!) The ductile rind and leaves of radiant gold: This from the vulgar branches must be torn…” In spite of Dante’s various condemnations of Muhammad and of Islam in general, the inluence of ideas lowing in both directions between East and West means that we must also take into account Muhammad’s Night Journey as another possible inluence on Dante’s starting point. Asin Palacios has identiied remarkable similarities between the topography of Dante’s Divine Comedy and that of the various legends surrounding Muhammad’s guided visions of the Islamic Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. As far as the Inferno is concerned he also points out many instances where the details of crimes and punishments are almost identical. Some controversy still remains as to whether Dante received these ideas directly from Islamic sources, or indirectly through Christian writers like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. It is certain however, that mystical ideas associated with Suism came into Europe with returning participants in the Crusades. It is also certain that Christian mysticism shared with its Islamic

14 counterpart certain Neo-Platonic tendencies. However, whether all this was the case or not we must be careful not to limit our response to a great work merely to the identiication of its literary or intellectual sources. Such approaches will never do justice to the inspiration that produced it. We need to stretch with the poet, expand our hearts and minds, as he expanded his. Analysis is a thing of lower intellect; but poetry is in itself the result of synthesis. True appreciation and understanding requires a reaching out, upwards from within, to a unifying principle which will bring together the text, the mind of the poet and that of the reader. And thus the vision of the poet may be re-animated; and the luminous realities recorded by him in the text may be realised once again, but this time by the reader. The ability to stretch one’s mind to embrace higher realities is a form of inner vision. The development of this kind of intuitive inner perception is an important part of the ascent. It brings to mind the advice of Plotinus, another writer of importance for those seeking an understanding of Dante’s mysticism: “Let us lee then to the beloved Fatherland…The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The Father. What then is our course, what the manner of our light? This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birth-right of all, which few turn to use.” The idea is that part of what the Greeks referred to as the soul

15 appears to incline away from its pristine state, downwards to a lower state where it is eventually and temporarily bound to an earthly body. During the process its sense of self and unity is, as it were, scattered. It all but forgets its prior state – that existence which Plotinus refers to as the Fatherland – and so it, as one who is in a dream, suffers along with the body. Synesius puts it thus: “Part, too, by heavy bondage, down is bound. To wed an earthly form upon this ground, Disjoin'd from love parental, doom'd to drink Misty forgetfulness and cares, that shrink Before the sight bounded by joyless earth. In wonder cheerless, seeks its heavenly birth.” Plato argued that during our previous existence we are exposed to the true forms or essences of things, in contrast to their relected appearances in the world of the senses. He concluded that when we are ready and able to do so, we begin to seek the way of return. The soul’s desire to return to its former state is born of the residual memory of its prior condition, dim as the remembrance might be at irst. Augustine, among others, gave this so-called ‘theory of reminiscence’ a Christian context: “Nor do we say that we have found what we had lost unless we recognise it; nor can we recognise it unless we remember it. But this, though lost to the sight, was retained in the memory…. How, then, do I seek You, O Lord? For when I seek You, my God, I seek a happy life…. For a happy life is joy in the truth. For this is joy in You, who art the truth… and there do I find You whenever I call

You to remembrance, and delight in You.” Arturo: “While due care must be taken to distinguish between different kinds of memory, it is certainly the case that there are shining memories of truth and beauty locked away in the vaults of the true Self. And when the appropriate hour arrives they can and do manifest in the human awareness, at least to some extent. But such blessings are not conferred very often, for we are not always ready for them. We must irst prove ourselves deserving. We must also have something to learn from them; and of course, we must be able to cope with them. Alas, few there are who can bring these sorts of memories through to the here and now without distorting them in some way or another.” In common with traditions originating in the East, Dante’s journey through Hell, as well as his ascent through Purgatory to Heaven, meant traversing distinct regions. Dante’s universe is comprised of a hierarchically arranged series of states or realms of being. His version of Hell was not a single location, but a number of them, with each one partitioned off from the others. He divides and subdivides them in a rather complicated way, describing each of the main divisions as a circle. Similar circles also divide the regions of Purgatory and of Paradise. For Dante, divine power, in the form of light and of life itself, lows from God who is beyond time and space. In a manner described by Etienne Gilson as an “illuminative cascade” , His power lows down through the spheres: empyrean, starry and planetary. At each step an angelic servant of God rules on His

17 behalf, moving, regulating and superintending the spirits of its realm in accordance with its nature. Each angelic being receives the divine command from above and transmits it to the below. At each step down, as the divine powers travel further and further from their source, the conditions are darker, more sluggish, and know less love than those prevailing in the circle above. Peace, beauty and divine power inconceivable by man below characterise the highest regions. The higher ruling angels partake of their sublime essences. In addition to these, ranks of lesser angels distribute light and life throughout each heavenly circle. These angelic beings themselves form hierarchies according to their place and purpose within each realm. There are also presiding guardians and supervisors of the lower regions, an inverted hierarchy of dark and monstrous beings, darker and more demonic the further one descends until inally reaching the infernal city of Dis, a city whose ruler, Satan, Dante places in the bottom realm or circle. Much of Dante’s thinking on these spirits and their roles appears to have originated with ideas attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. Neither space nor, it should be said, inclination allows for a treatment of medieval angelology here. While there may be proit in understanding the signiicance to the medieval mind of the Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim, it is suficient for our present purpose to mention that the seraphic order of angels was believed by some to be associated with love, and the cherubim were thought to be distributors of light or wisdom.

Dimitri: “O Thou Father of us all, to Thee we send forth our adoration. Though Thou knowest all that is and all that is not, Thou alone are unknown, hidden amid the unfathomed beyond, from whence cascades Thy Radiating Light. Thou art the irst beginning and the inal end of things. Thy Light maketh the dawn and the sunset; and Thy steeply slanting rays are mighty at the noon of day. Thy Will and Word cause the gods to exist. Thou givest height to the sky, depth to the waters, and thou hast stretched out the broad plains of the Earth. Glory be to Thee, the Highest God.” As the divine power reaches Earth the same order applies, or at least should apply to the Church, the State and to the lives of individual men and women. Free will is, according to Dante, the greatest gift bestowed by God upon human nature. Man has the freedom to follow or deny the higher ideals as they should apply to him, and as in turn he should apply them in regulating his portion of God-given power. Unfortunately however, for high-born men a yet further descent is possible: one which takes them yet further from their origin and deeper and deeper into vice and sin. For they are often led to use that which is entrusted to them, not in the pursuit and expression of high ideals, but for selish gain: they corrupt and pervert its purpose. They put it not in the service of light and life, but in servitude to low desires and greedy ambitions. Arturo: “Like the archetypal prodigal son, mankind continues on its path of selishness and sin, a path which leads unsuspecting men and women further and further from home, contrary to the will of their loving Father.”

Dante spends a lot of time and space in the Inferno describing the ways in which the Church, the State and individuals have misused their God-given freedom, causing them to stray from the true path. There are for Dante clear correspondences between the perversion of what ought to be pure, ordered and high ideals, and the hellish conditions experienced as a consequence. It is perhaps an understatement to say that Dante thought both Church and State to be in need of reform. He considered some of the men in positions of religious and political authority to be in thrall to the dark powers. He believed Church, State and individuals alike had perverted the divine purpose. The leaders of spiritual and temporal life were directing men not towards the light, but towards greater and yet greater darkness. They had taken the left-hand branch of the so-called Pythagorean ‘Y’. It was his conviction that in order to restore proper alignment with the divine will, Church and State ought to be separated, with each having authority appropriate to its own sphere, spiritual or temporal. The Church needed to free itself from its pursuit of wealth and material power. The Empire needed to free itself from its pursuit of spiritual authority. Only then would man be truly free to order his life upon the supreme example personiied in Christ. Dante placed his hopes for reform in the new spirituality as represented by the Franciscan and Dominican orders. It is possible to see in Dante’s treatment of Church and State, a correspondence with human nature itself. It seems that at times the Church represented for Dante man’s spiritual aspect, and the temporal State corresponded to his material life and the

20 awareness associated with his involvement in the material world. Like man, Church and State had strayed. It ought to have been the case that the Pope derived his authority directly from the divine. The Emperor, guided by the living principles of the true faith, ought to have derived his authority from the Pope. Thus should divine, transcendent revelation have become concrete, tangible and ixed in the form of righteous human endeavour. The wills of Pope and Emperor, though operating on different levels, should be aligned and in full accord with the divine plan. Advanced mystics are not escapists; and nor are they ascetics. Each element of human nature has its place and purpose. However, these need to be harmonised; and only when such an alignment is established can both fully do their part in realising the divine purpose. The will of man, and therefore his actions, may be directed by his higher reason or by its opposite. The former leads the mind to freedom. Will, when it is directed from below in pursuit of purely selish material ends, inevitably carries the mind to sin and all that it entails. Just as there have been various schemes for ranking the virtues, there are also many ways in which men have classiied their opposites. Dante identiies each level of Hell with a different vice; and as the levels are descended each successive vice or sin is more heinous than that of the previous level, until the city of Hell itself is reached where dwell the eternally damned. However, the sin of pride pervades all the circles of his version of Hell, the sin he most associates with its ruler, Lucifer or Satan. In each of the circles he meets and often converses with spirits,

21 many of whom were while they lived well-known igures, legendary, historical and contemporary. More than a few of them were known to him personally. Within each distinct partition different lessons are being learned and punishments endured by the spirits existing there. It is as if the spirits Dante meets on his way are types or examples of men whose state is perfectly in line with the conditions prevailing in the particular region in which they are encountered. As far as he is concerned they are where they belong. They are in their place. They are who they are. In general, the lowest partitions of Hell contain those who are guilty of wilful malice: those who when they lived actively sought to do harm to others. The sins of these men were seen by Dante as worse than those relatively milder sins characterised by incontinence or a lack of self-control, although he believed these lesser sins were still suficient to warrant imprisonment in Hell. The irst level below that of the Earth was a kind of antechamber to Hell proper, and was reserved for the lukewarm. Next was a Limbo in which were imprisoned the virtuous spirits who did not know Christ because they had lived before the birth of the Saviour. It may be noted in passing that the symbolic birth of ‘the Christ within’ was considered to be a critical stage on the path of return by some of the esoteric brotherhoods active in Dante’s time, at least one of which, some commentators claim, counted Dante as a prominent member. However, few if any of such groups have been able or perhaps

22 willing to tell what this symbol refers to, what this birth really is, as it is in itself. In spite of this it may be the case that Dante knew its actual signiicance intuitively. Dimitri: “For the mystically-minded, Christ is the star of high heaven; He who saves; the bringer of the blesséd hour; redemption’s steeply slanting ray. He is the mighty restorer, the great consoler; He makes the blind to see and the lame to walk. He is the star of light and life on the horizon; the bringer of living waters to the wilderness of the world. From a slightly different point of view, He is too the resurrected one; the living ish in the starry waters of Bethlehem; He is the child who rises from the deeps and becomes the Man. He is the splendour and the glory of the father and the mother. He is the ire and the lame; He is lord of the octave, and lord of the mystic dance. He is the treasure of the heart; and the sun of power arising out of fullness. Never shall His Covenant be broken.” While they lived on Earth the true, inner nature of some of the spirits Dante meets may have been concealed from others due to the many illusions of the world; but now, beneath the sway of divine justice, their true place and position in the afterlife is clear and ixed. The internally vicious can no longer deceive others or themselves. Here, excuses for their vices hold no weight. Here, it is useless for them even to try to minimise their faults or exaggerate their virtues. They can no longer hide their crimes nor shift the blame, and so are compelled to suffer the just consequences of their former actions. Dante’s inspiration may have owed something to Augustine and

23 his followers here. The argument is that by refusing to commit themselves to divine goodness, by turning away from divine light, by spurning the outstretched hand of divine love, men place themselves in evil conditions. The Divine Comedy shares with Augustine’s Confessions an understanding of the frailties of human nature and of many of their consequences. Also, neither Dante nor Augustine shirks their own personal responsibility for their own condition. Both men assert that while they were free to follow the right path, their misuse of that free will led them to the sorrows of vice and sinfulness. The Confessions expresses it as follows: “…and I departed further from You, and You left me to myself: and I was tossed about and wasted and poured out and boiling over in my fornications: and You were silent, O my late-won joy. You were silent, and I, arrogant and depressed, weary and restless, wandered further and further from You into more and more sins which could bear no fruit save sorrows.” This is the state in which the Dante of The Divine Comedy inds himself at the outset. What was the remedy? How could he escape the gloomy wood of fear and sin? How could he ind again the true path? He and many of the thinkers he admired asserted that philosophy, and the wisdom which is in its gift, was the answer. In Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, a book well known by Dante, the personiied goddess Philosophy both diagnoses the disease and prescribes for its cure. She addresses the writer thus: “‘Now,' said she, 'I know the cause, or the chief cause, of your

24 sickness. You have forgotten what you are…. You are overwhelmed by this forgetfulness of yourself… You do not know the aim and end of all things… You have forgotten by what methods the universe is guided; hence you think that the chances of good and bad fortune are tossed about with no ruling hand. These things may lead not to disease only, but even to death as well. But let us thank the Giver of all health, that your nature has not altogether left you. We have yet the chief spark for your health's ire, for you have a true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe: you do believe that its government is not subject to random chance, but to divine reason. Therefore have no fear. From this tiny spark the ire of life shall forthwith shine upon you. But it is not time to use severer remedies, and since we know that it is the way of all minds to clothe themselves ever in false opinions as they throw off the true, and these false ones breed a dark distraction which confuses the true insight, therefore will I try to lessen this darkness for a while with gentle applications of easy remedies, that so the shadows of deceiving passions may be dissipated, and you may have power to perceive the brightness of true light. When the stars are hidden by black clouds, no light can they afford. When the boisterous south wind rolls along the sea and stirs the surge, the water, but now as clear as glass, bright as the fair sun's light, is dark, impenetrable to sight, with stirred and scattered sand. The stream, that wanders down the mountain's side, must often ind a stumbling-block, a stone within its path torn from the hill's own rock. So too shalt thou: if thou wouldst see the truth in undimmed light, choose the straight road, the beaten path; away with passing joys! Away with fear! Put vain hopes to flight! And grant no place to grief! Where these

25 distractions reign, the mind is clouded o'er, the soul is bound in chains.” As we shall see later, Dante had his own goddess of divine philosophy personiied in the shape of Beatrice. Boethius, though writing in the sixth century, was one of those whose writings straddled the pre-Christian and Christian traditions, as did the Christian Neo-Platonist Augustine before him. Later, others like Albertus Magnus and his disciple Thomas based much of what they reasoned as Christians on their interpretation of the teachings of the hugely inluential Aristotle. Alongside ideas we usually attribute to Plato, Aristotle provided many Christian thinkers with the philosophical foundations for many of their beliefs. During the period leading up to Dante’s lifetime there were among Christian theologians, preachers and writers arguments and discussions aplenty about the relevance of Aristotle and his followers. To many his so-called pagan philosophy, if interpreted in the light of Scripture, shed much light on how best to live the Christian life. Space denies us more than a few cursory examples, but these include Aristotle’s arguments on the validity of human reason and logic; that virtue requires the making of a conscious choice; on the dangers of excess and deiciency, leading to an emphasis on the temperate middle way; that the way to virtue is not necessarily pleasant or easy; that justice, though it may sometimes appear harsh, aims at securing the Good, and so on. So inluential was he for Dante the thinker that he referred to him in his Convivio as “the master and guide of human reason.”

We have already noted that the Church was during Dante’s lifetime undergoing something of an intellectual renewal. Franciscan and Dominican spirituality was providing something of a counterbalance to the temporal and political tendencies of a corrupt Church. Spiritual, intuitive elements came more and more to the fore during this renewal; and Dante allied himself with these renovating movements. Mysticism of various kinds was part of them. However, care is needed when it comes to this term, for it has meant many different things to the many kinds of men. There is too little space here to deal with its many facets; and anyway, it’s almost impossible now to deine such words in a way that will produce general agreement. One of its meanings can be traced back to the Greek Mysteries. The name mystai was used to refer to initiates of the so-called lesser mysteries. It was said that through a course of rigorous training and through their participation in the mysteries, initiates are able to reach beyond symbol, stretching their awareness to higher and previously hidden realities. Thus could man behold the agents of divine power, their operations and the conditions in which they dwell, all of which were necessarily hidden to the uninitiated. It is also noteworthy that the Eleusinian mystery rites and teachings were centred on a descent to and return from the underworld. Demeter descended to the underworld in search of her daughter Persephone who, it was believed, had been abducted by its ruler, Hades. They were said to have had three phases: the descent, the search, and the ascent. Given his remarks in the Can Grande letter, elsewhere in other works,

27 and in the Commedia itself, it seems likely that Dante considered that these sorts of classical myths were also intended to be interpreted allegorically or mystically. By the 2 nd Century AD Christian writers were using the term mistikos to refer to the secret, hidden, allegorical or mystical aspects of scripture. It seems from the Can Grande letter that Dante uses the term in this sense. However, in contrast to the Greeks the Christian mysteries were the mysteries of salvation; and their participation was realised through the holy sacraments. Plato had laid the philosophical ground for Christian mysticism. His allegory of the cave was in part a call to transcend the shadows on the wall, the illusions of material life. He argued that this was achieved by contemplating the higher regions of truth and beauty and goodness by means of inner vision, or by in his words ‘the eye of the soul’ . Important too is his account of Er’s vision of the judgement of souls in the afterlife, an account which includes a description of the descent and ascent of souls to and from Earth, and a vision of the terrible suffering experienced as a consequence of past evil actions. Thomas Taylor in his ‘Platonic Philosopher’s Creed’ explains and summarises the purpose of this suffering: “I also believe that the soul is punished in a future for the crimes she has committed in the present life; but that this punishment is proportioned to the crimes, and is not perpetual; divinity punishing, not from anger or revenge, but in order to purify the guilty soul, and restore her to the proper perfection of her nature.”

And there is also, in the Symposium, Diotima’s so-called ‘Ladder of Love’, which enabled future attempts to understand the mystical ascent as a series of stages. These stages were also implied in the Platonic differentiation between three grades of virtue: civic, cathartic and theoretic, each of which needed to be realised and transcended during the ascent. However it was rare for Christian mystics of Dante’s time to know anything of Plato’s philosophy irst hand. While Christian, Islamic and Jewish mysticism looked to the ancient Greeks as they formulated their vision of the soul’s ascent, more often than not they gained access to Platonic philosophy not directly, but through the mystical writings of Plotinus and the Neo- Platonists. Plotinus reckoned himself to be the faithful interpreter of Plato’s doctrines; and it was through his writings that Platonism exerted most of its inluence. We have already noted his advice to ‘lee back to the Fatherland’ by means of inner vision. However he further asserted that desire for the good is what drives the soul on during its ascent. “So we must ascend again to the good, which every soul desires. Anyone who has seen it knows what I mean when I say that it is beautiful. It is desired as good, and the desire for it is directed to good, and the attainment of it is for those who go up to the higher world and are converted and strip off what we put on in our descent.” Though his contact with them was indirect, the inluence of these sorts of ideas on Dante’s thinking is clear, just as it was on many of the writers and thinkers he admired.

29 The inal aim of mysticism is often said to be union with God, the ultimate step in a series of rungs on the ladder of ascent. According to a deinition that is sometimes attributed to St. Bonaventura, mystical theology is: "…the stretching out of the soul into God by the desire of love." St. Bernard of Clairvaux was a man of many parts who among many other achievements was famous for transforming the Cistercian order. So devoted was he to the Virgin Mary that he was thought – in legend at least – to be the author of the Salve Maria. As far as his actual writings are concerned, he is perhaps most celebrated for his commentary on the Old Testament Song of Songs, sometimes called the Song of Solomon. Famously, the song expresses in a poetic manner the yearning and desire of two lovers. It has been variously interpreted: by Jewish commentators as the love between God and Israel, and as a celebration of the Jewish exodus from Egypt; and by Christian interpreters as the love that binds together Christ and His Church. There were some, including perhaps Dante himself, who saw love as the higher octave of desire. And that desire for the Good – and later on, the love of the Good – is what drives the soul on its way of ascent. Because of its relation to Solomon, the Song of Songs has also been interpreted by some as an allusion to the love of wisdom; and by others as describing the so-called alchemical marriage. Here’s part of Bernard’s interpretation of the song’s title: “The title runs: "The beginning of Solomon's Song of Songs." First of all take note of the appropriateness of the name "Peaceful," that is, Solomon, at the head of a book which opens with the

30 token of peace, with a kiss. Take note too that by this kind of opening only men of peaceful minds, men who can achieve mastery over the turmoil of the passions and the distracting burden of daily chores, are invited to the study of this book.” After puriication, or peaceful mastery over the passions, Bernard insisted on the importance to the mystical ascent of divine love and grace, and in this respect he considered the Virgin Mary to be the mediator: “She would become the mother of that love whose father is the God who is love; and when that love was brought to birth he would place his tent in the sun, that the Scripture might be fulilled: ‘I will make you the Light of the Nations, so that you may be my salvation to the ends of the earth’.” Dimitri: “O Holy Mother, inviolate, heart and sceptre of God, bearer of the Sun, Blood of our blood, Thou art the giver of Life to all created things. What exists which is not the issue of thy womb? We stand among the crowded choirs to send forth our praise to Thee. Thy immortal beauty lifts our hearts and minds to Him. Thy living waters pour forth in streams to wash the self to purity. As a mother nurses her precious child, Thou holdest in Thy arms the re-generated man. O, let us give thanks to Her who offers all the vase of eternal life. Glory be to Thee, the Queen of Highest Heaven.” While it was clear that God, at least as He is in Himself, is unknowable, something of His divine nature is accessible in His creation, much as something of the painter is present in the painting; or as something of the thing is apparent in the thing’s reflection. God is the Cause; Creation, as an emanation of the

31 unknowable One, is the effect; and it was said that at least something of the cause can be discerned in the effect. This line of thought led to the conclusion that because each man is part of Creation and is stamped with its imprint, something of the Creator can also be discovered if a man goes within himself in search of the divine. The Augustinian mystical philosopher and theologian Richard of St Victor was able to write in the twelfth century: "If thou wishest to search out the deep things of God, search out the depths of thine own spirit.” All the mystics declare that the higher a man rises in vision the less able he is to express his mystical experience in words. However, it is often said that a certain kind of symbolic language can point in its direction. It may even be the case that he is unable to retain anything but a fragmented memory or impression of the higher level when he returns from his ecstatic, visionary light back to his normal awareness. While the thing itself is anything but vague, sometimes the inability of the human mind to crystallise or fully realise mystical experience leads to all sorts of vague and nebulous impressions. In his Symposium, Plato considered initiation as an ascent achieved under the supervision and instruction of a guide. With or without a guide however, instinct and rationalism based on material reason and the physical senses can only take a man so far. Beyond this he must achieve an intuitive stretch based on inner vision. Arturo: “In such matters it is remarkably easy to be misled.

However, we each have our own guardian angel, and this is our surest guide.” We have already noted the ancient belief that man’s progress from the lowest to the highest states was achieved in stages, with each phase superintended by the appropriate agent or agents of divine power. Writing in the 4th Century A.D. Augustine set his interpretation of these stages within a Christian framework. They were seven in number: life at its most basic, life of the physical senses, rational life, virtue, trust in God or peace, the utmost desire for Truth, and inally, the vision of Truth. For Augustine it is religion which, after a man has reached the rational stage, leads and guides him on to higher and still higher states. "And this it doth, at one time more swiftly, at another more slowly, according as each is capable by love and merits." Some Christian mystics have tried to establish correspondences between the stages of progress and those of the Passion of Christ. Although there are various versions, these often include: the washing of the feet, the scourging, the crowning with the crown of thorns, the way of the cross, the cruciixion, the laying in the tomb, and inally, the resurrection.

On the other hand, others have drawn comparison with the seven days or stages of Creation, a process which begins with potential-containing chaos, and ends with the manifestation, ordering and alignment of cosmos, sustained and regulated under divine law. Some of the most devout alchemists sought to discover, through

33 the successive stages of their work, the primordial state of purity and innocence existing before the so-called Fall. These sorts of ideas have remained inluential to the present day. Theosophists refer to the elements of the seven spheres or the seven symbolic planets from which, they say, the candidate needs to free himself, step by step, in order to complete his return to the purity of his original state; and Blavatsky, drawing on very old sources, has also linked these steps with those implied by the cycles of cosmic and universal history. But to return to the subject at hand: the stages of Christian mysticism can be seen in what Catholic theology refers to as “initiation into the sacred mysteries”, by which they mean the seven sacraments. The following is from the Catholic Encyclopaedia: “By Baptism we are born again, Conirmation makes us strong, perfect Christians and soldiers. The Eucharist furnishes our daily spiritual food. Penance heals the soul wounded by sin. Extreme Unction removes the last remnant of human frailty, and prepares the soul for eternal life, Orders supplies ministers to the Church of God. Matrimony gives the graces necessary for those who are to rear children in the love and fear of God, members of the Church militant, future citizens of heaven.” Some may ind proit in considering what these actually signify - or at least, what they used to signify long before the Christian era; for each of them are echoes from a much earlier time, before the true laws regulating the mystical way of ascent had been forgotten. Arturo: “We should always try to avoid over-complications. The

34 whole process is from one point of view at least quite simple. First, there is a cleansing or puriication; second, the instruction of the puriied; and inally the perfection of the instructed. These three steps correspond to what some have called veils, mystic rites, sacraments, or even states of being. It is an ascent from ignorance to wisdom, from darkness unto light, from brutishness and restlessness to the purity of silent peace. The further along the path of ascent we progress, the more receptive we become to the guiding light of our guardian angel. The ascent is not easy, and nor is it quick; but each impediment, each barrier we overcome on the way, brings us closer to our goal; and when we are able to make safe and direct contact with that light, it is then possible for our progress to be accelerated. All creation, which includes man, is rooted in the powers of the Divine Unity of the Primal Peace, with their correspondences folded within the hidden depths of the highest and purest elements of the Eternal Self. Through this root man is puriied, through it he is illuminated, and through it he attains the so- called mystical union with the Divine.” The communion of the mind in the higher regions, or heavenly circles in Dante’s terms, is experienced as a state of blessedness. The higher the pilgrim travels the more light he encounters; and the more conscious he becomes that God is its ultimate source. The lower he descends the more pity he feels for the inhabitants of the dark and tragic realms through which he travels. They have through vice and rebellious sin placed themselves in places more distant from higher truth, in wastelands of sorrow that know not the joys of the higher life, that know not the pure and holy love that brings a man to God.

It is thought by some that even more so than Augustine, perhaps the main conduit for Christianised Platonic and Neo- Platonic ideas about the mystical ascent was Dionysius, usually referred to as pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Though they may have reached Dante through the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux and others, they appear to have signiicantly informed Dante’s thinking during the composition of the Divine Comedy. In the following passage Dionysius is proclaiming the importance of sacred scripture in guiding man to discover something of the nature of God. The translation is that of Luibheid: “…we must not dare to resort to words or conceptions concerning that hidden divinity which transcends being… let us be drawn together toward the divine splendour… The things of God are revealed to each mind in proportion to its capacities; and the divine goodness is such that, out of concern for our salvation, it deals out the immeasurable and ininite in limited measures. Just as the senses can neither grasp nor perceive the things of the mind, just as representation and shape cannot take in the simple and the shapeless, just as corporal form cannot lay hold of the intangible and incorporeal, by the same standard of truth beings are surpassed by the ininity beyond being, intelligences by that oneness which is beyond intelligence. Indeed the inscrutable One is out of the reach of every rational process. Nor can any words come up to the inexpressible Good, this One, this Source of all unity, this supra-existent Being. Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it is gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name. It is and it is as no other being is. Cause of all existence, and therefore itself transcending existence, it alone could give an authoritative account of what it really is…

Many scripture writers will tell you that the divinity is not only invisible and incomprehensible, but also “unsearchable and inscrutable," since there is not a trace for anyone who would reach through into the hidden depths of this ininity. And yet, on the other hand, the Good is not absolutely incommunicable to everything. By itself it generously reveals a irm, transcendent beam, granting enlightenments proportionate to each being, and thereby draws sacred minds upward to its permitted contemplation, to participation and to the state of becoming like it. What happens to those who rightly and properly make this effort is this. They do not venture toward an impossibly daring sight of God, one beyond what is duly granted them. Nor do they go tumbling downward where their own natural inclinations would take them. No. Instead they are raised irmly and unswervingly upward in the direction of the ray which enlightens them. With a love matching the illuminations granted them, they take light, reverently, wisely, in all holiness. We go where we are commanded by those divine ordinances which rule all the sacred ranks of the heavenly orders. With our minds made prudent and holy, we offer worship to that which lies hidden beyond thought and beyond being. With a wise silence we do honour to the inexpressible. We are raised up to the enlightening beams of the sacred scriptures, and with these to illuminate us, with our beings shaped to songs of praise, we behold the divine light, in a manner beitting us, and our praise resounds for that generous Source of all holy enlightenment… it is the cause of everything, that it is origin, being, and life. To those who fall away it is the voice calling, "Come back!" and it is the power which raises them up again. It refurbishes and restores the image of God corrupted within them. It is the sacred stability

37 which is there for them when the tide of unholiness is tossing them about. It is safety for those who made a stand. It is the guide bringing upward those uplifted to it and is the enlightenment of the illuminated. Source of perfection for those being made perfect, source of divinity for those being deiied, principle of simplicity for those turning toward simplicity, point of unity for those made one; transcendently, beyond what is, it is the Source of every source. Generously and as far as may be, it gives out a share of what is hidden. To sum up. It is the Life of the living, the being of beings, it is the Source and the Cause of all life and of all being, for out of its goodness it commands all things to be and it keeps them going… This is the kind of divine enlightenment into which we have been initiated by the hidden tradition of our inspired teachers, a tradition at one with scripture. We now grasp these things in the best way we can, and as they come to us, wrapped in the sacred veils of that love toward humanity with which scripture and hierarchical traditions cover the truths of the mind with things derived from the realm of the senses.” While it was amid ideas such as these and others like them that Dante was inspired to write his Divine Comedy, there is in his great poem also evidence of a vision which transcends that of his apparent sources. Its essence may be pointed to, but not communicated directly from one to another.

Guidance may at certain times prove to be crucial. Ultimately however, it is we who must make the effort. And however itful the results might be at irst, it is we, in the here and in the now, who must of our own free will embark upon the ascent. So in one sense the matter in hand is less a matter for Dante as it is a

38 matter for us. It is we who must climb the mountain of Self; it is we who must make the stretch, upwards from within; it is we who must learn to expand our hearts; for in the already quoted words of Dionysius: “The things of God are revealed to each mind in proportion to its capacities.” However, the starting point for the pilgrim of Dante’s poem was one of incapacity: a state of ignorance, corruption, fear and sin. He could only escape to ascend the ladder of being by understanding fully the causes and consequences of error and vice. Only then could he purge himself of their curse, climbing up through Purgatory to the realms of divine light and life, to the blessèd regions of his original home. Throughout his journey he was guided by the light of divine truth and grace, at irst indirectly and from afar, but later, as he climbed to the higher spheres, through direct contact with its presence.

The Gloomy Wood

THE INFERNO

The notes, relections and speculations on and about the early cantos of the Inferno will be laid out a little more fully than for those that follow; for it is hoped that by the time they arrive the direction of travel will be clearer, and so the need for detail will be less. It is signiicant that the action in Dante’s great poem begins at night before the dawn of Good Friday, the day of death foreseen by Christ in Gethsemane as the hour of sorrow approached: “Then he cometh to his disciples, and saith to them: Sleep ye now and take your rest; behold the hour is at hand, and the Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands of sinners.” However, life follows death, as for Christians Eastertide follows Holy Week; and so it is also important to note that the sun is in Aries, the position traditionally associated with the Creation. Solar symbolism runs throughout the Commedia, and its inluence on proceedings persists throughout each of the three phases of Dante’s journey. Dante was well aware of astronomical precession, and knew full well that the sun was no longer in Aries at the commencement of spring. In spite of this however, and in line with the ancient traditions, he chooses to associate the beginning of his poem and that of his pilgrimage with a commemoration of the Creation and of the beginning of spring at the point at which the sun crosses the equinox in the constellation of the Ram. There are many aspects to the symbolism associated with the constellation of Aries, and there was already a Christian tradition which placed Christ’s resurrection at this precise moment. In this sense Christ was the golden ram represented in Nature by the birth of spring at the equinox when the moon was full, associating him

41 with the pre-Christian child of light, born from winter’s cave, he who was always destined to wax greatly, he who would make war with the giants on behalf of the Father who is ever hidden in the heaven of hiddenness. The beginning of Longfellow’s translation goes as follows: “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” The very irst word, ‘Midway’, introduces a theme which will run throughout the Divine Comedy in one way or another. It points in the direction of Aristotle’s virtue as the mean or middle way. It points too to Isiah 38: “In the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of Hell:” It points to the mid-point of the equinox when day and night are of equal length. Perhaps also, it points to the mid-life years which often usher in psychological and physiological changes, leading us naturally, though not always smoothly, to give greater emphasis to the spiritual aspects of our lives. It is often during this time that we take stock, adjust the balance, and begin our quest anew. For more than a few, life really does begin at forty – or in Dante’s case at thirty- ive. From yet another perspective it points to the Neo-Platonic cycle of life produced by the way of descent and the way of return. It has already been noted that from this point of view the so-called soul of the heaven-born descends to conjoin with the body and all that it entails; and only when it is able to separate itself from the prison of the lower material senses, is it free to return to the heavenly spheres by way of what has been termed a mystical ascent. This U-shaped

curve of descent followed by ascent has a mid-point at the bottom of the U. This is the point of potential when, if we wish it so, the descent ends, and the ascent begins. The phrase ‘ I found myself’ has been variously translated: some render it as ‘I came to myself’ and others as ‘I came around’, or ‘ I woke’ . Some interpret the phrase as referring to the dreamlike quality that some inner visions have. Others, not without reason, point to the dreamlike illusions created by the physical senses and by the subsequent shadows on the wall, central to Plato’s cave metaphor. However, another interpretation might signify the often shocking realisation that our true condition may not be exactly as we might have thought. Men have a remarkable ability to trick themselves, to tell themselves that they are this or that in spite of all the evidence. They can often go to great lengths to avoid sincere self-examination. They will do almost anything to avoid submitting themselves to the searching ray of conscience. Consequently, at some stage most seekers continue to count themselves among those who seek the light of truth and virtue long after they have wandered from that path. When it comes to us, the realisation of our true condition removes any self-engendered, comfortable ambiguity. The new-found clarity is akin to waking from a dream; or to a sudden coming to our senses. We are what we are, and we are no longer deluded by what we had previously preferred to think we were. We realise that we have been living our lives as one who labours in the darkness of night, one who has turned away from the light of God. We are as one of those of whom the psalmist sings: “Rise ye after you have sitten, you who eat the bread of sorrow.”

The path immediately begins afresh; it is a truer, more honest path; the way is steep; and each step is contested. The pilgrim of the Divine Comedy is at a loss as to how this could have happened. The following is from Durling’s prose translation: “I cannot really say how I entered there, so full of sleep was I at the point when I abandoned the true way.” So Dante begins his journey in a state symbolised by the dark forest, rendered by some as the gloomy wood. Following his ‘coming to himself’ he travels in darkness along a terrifying valley. Signiicantly, he likens his passage along it and his relief at reaching its end to that of a drowning man who only just escapes death and inds the shore. There are some men whose desire to know is strong; but such desire will only take them so far, and no further. Without commensurate virtue they are recognised by the gods as dangerous trespassers and are repulsed. The rash, the arrogant, the presumptuous or the selish man, driven by such a desire, can sometimes attempt to enter regions which are beyond the limits of those he is qualiied to enter. Ulysses, the Latin name of the Greek Odysseus – of whom more will be noted later – was for Dante just such a igure. Most of what Dante knew of Ulysses was by way of Cicero, Horace and of course Virgil’s Aeneid where he is depicted as a cunning and fraudulent womaniser. Consequently, he is presented by Dante in the Divine Comedy as the type of the heroic adventurer whose quest was tainted by rashness, duplicity and cunning selishness. From this point of view Ulysses’ ambition threatened the divine order and almost caused the sun to shine in the underworld, with all that that would entail. The gods responded to the threat by causing a shipwreck in which all Ulysses’ crewmen were drowned. Dante

44 constantly compares and contrasts his own quest to that of the lawed Greek hero. It seems that to Dante his passage through the valley of the gloomy wood and that of the shipwrecked mariner are in essence the same sort of journey: “And like one with laboring breath, come forth out of the deep onto the shore, who turns back to the perilous water and stares: so my spirit, still leeing, turned back to gaze again at the pass that has never yet left anyone alive.” At dawn he sees a hill at the end of the valley upon which light is shining and he makes his way towards it. Perhaps this hill is the holy hill, Sion, of which the psalmist sang: “I cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill. Selah. I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.” And again: “Send forth thy light and thy truth: they have conducted me, and brought me unto thy holy hill, and into thy tabernacles.” And further: “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place?” This hill or mount, which Dante associates poetically with the light of the sun, is perhaps reminiscent of the ray or beam alluded to by Dionysius, noted earlier, the divine ray of light, the so-called ‘dolce raggio’ which uplifts and enlightens.

Arturo: “This ray of light stretches from the heights of heaven all the way down to the here and now. Direct, unmediated contact with this light is a great turning point on the path, and is the key to real progress.” The position of the sun and stars, recollecting and relecting the original forces of the Creation, were auspicious: “And up the sun was mounting with those stars That with him were, what time the Love Divine At irst in motion set those beauteous things; So were to me occasion of good hope,” However, one by one, three creatures bar Dante’s way: a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf. The reference here is also a biblical one. In Jeremiah it is told how the children of God had descended into lustfulness, hypocrisy and many other sins. They had rebelled; they had wandered far from the way of truth and virtue; and they had refused the loving hand of correction. Both the people and their leaders had hardened themselves against their Lord; and the just consequences of their actions were dire: “But they all alike had broken the yoke, they had burst the bonds. Therefore a lion from the forest shall slay them, a wolf from the desert shall destroy them. A leopard is watching against their cities, every one who goes out of them shall be torn in pieces; because their transgressions are many, their apostasies are great.” Volumes have been devoted to identifying the speciic sins or obstacles symbolised by these three creatures. However, unless we

46 are granted access to the particular source of a writer’s inspiration, perhaps the inner meaning of some of his symbols will forever remain a mystery. Until such time it may be helpful to think of these three as representatives of the three main divisions of Dante’s Hell. It may be safe to speculate further that the inluences of these three infernal regions act in such a way as to oppose our progress. With this in mind it is possible to interpret them, for now at least, as follows: the leopard’s spotted coat represents deceit, lies and those species of fraud which oppose, corrupt and distort the light of higher truth; the lion as an image of rebellious and violent destruction contrary to the harmonious, creative forces directed by Divine Will; and the ever-greedy wolf as the incontinent desires and insatiable lusts, which disturb the equilibrium that leads the mind to peace, and at their worst may even threaten to extinguish the lame of selless love. From a slightly different perspective we might see them as the worthy opponents of truth, beauty and goodness. It is at this point that the irst of Dante’s guides appears: Virgil, the poet of Classical Rome. Dante admired Virgil as a man and as a poet; and the sixth book of the Aeneid was a particularly important inluence and inspiration for him during the writing of the Divine Comedy. It is in this part of the Aeneid that Virgil is thought by some to make reference to the initiation pattern of the Eleusinian mysteries. Virgil tells Dante that the path to the summit of the holy hill cannot be found here in the wasteland, at least at present. The opposition of the she-wolf which bars the way will not allow safe passage.

He explains to Dante that at some point in the future a hero and saviour will come, a greyhound which will pursue the ierce she-wolf back to the Hell from whence it had been loosed. And in so doing the hero shall bring rule and order to the empire. Most commentators consider this image to be rooted in the politics of the day. However, while this may be true, there are also very old ideas which connect the dog with the typical guide and protector of souls, both in the here and now as well as in the hereafter. And as far as bringing order to the empire is concerned, it may be worthwhile too to note that divine order is imprinted on creation from the beginning; and that establishing an appropriate rule and order is important on every level, including that of the individual, wherever he may ind himself. Until such a hero appears on the scene then Dante must travel by another way, and Virgil offers to be his guide. Virgil however is one who did not know Christ, living as he did before the Saviour’s birth. Consequently he can guide Dante only so far up the hill, and cannot take him all the way to the blessed spirits who dwell in paradise. During the higher stages of his ascent Dante must be guided by another. This will of course be Beatrice. Durling renders Virgil’s explanation as follows: “To whom then if you shall wish to rise, there will be a soul more worthy of that than I; with her I shall leave you when I depart; for that Emperor who reigns on high, because I was a rebel to his law, wills not that I come into his city.” The other way Virgil has in mind will take the pair through the infernal regions. It seems that in order to make one’s way to the happiness of heaven, one must irst gather to oneself an understanding of the sorrow-producing vices, and having properly

48 understood them, be purged of them. Only thus, it is said, can we arrive at a full appreciation of the meaning of the heavenly states. Dante is unsure if he is strong enough. He is uncertain of his inner virtue. He understands that the stage in the path he is about to endure will be an arduous one. He likens it to war. The way will be perilous and the pitiful sights he intuitively knows he will behold ill him with dread. He calls upon the muses and his high genius to help him commit to memory, without error, the contents of his vision. He questions Virgil as to his itness for the journey. He compares himself unfavourably with Aeneas, founder of Rome, whose heroic journey took him through the otherworld; and also with St. Paul who had been ‘caught up to the third heaven’ . Both had gained direct knowledge of the otherworld prior to their deaths, divine knowledge which, as Paul declared, it was not permitted for man to utter. “I not Aeneas am, I am not Paul,” Virgil understands Dante’s fear of the coming trial and the seeker’s doubts that he is ready. He tries to allay them by revealing to Dante who it was that had sent him to help. Durling again: “I was among those who are suspended, and a lady called me, so blessed and beautiful that I begged her to command me. Her eyes were shining brighter than the morning star; and she began to speak gently and softly, with angelic voice, in her language: ‘O courteous Mantuan soul, whose fame still lasts in the world and will last as far as the world will go, my friend, not the friend of fortune, on the deserted shore is so blocked in his journey that he has turned back for fear; And I am afraid that he may be already so lost that I have risen too late

49 to help him, according to what I have heard of him in Heaven. Now go, and with your ornamented speech and whatever else is needed for his escape help him so that I may be consoled. I am Beatrice who cause you to go; I come from the place where I long to return; love has moved me and makes me speak.” The reference to the morning star is an echo of the symbolical astrology which makes of the morning star Venus a igure of Christ: the one who at dawn rises above the horizon of light and life after his death below in the darkness of the night. Dante the thinker then reveals through the words of Virgil something of the ruling hierarchy. Virgil divulges that it was the Blessed Virgin who initiated the command to provide Dante with assistance. The cult of The Virgin was strong in the middle ages. She was variously the ‘Virgin of Israel’, the ‘Queen of Heaven’ and the ‘Divine Mother’ of all that lives. She took on many of the attributes of the ancient goddesses. She was like Isis the loving mother of light and life, embodied in the person of the divine child who was destined to conquer. She was also the archetypal interceder in Heaven, moved to assist the worthy aspirant out of love and mercy and compassion. The Virgin sent Lucia, goddess of light and vision, to Beatrice. In turn, Beatrice, or divine philosophy, descended further through the realms to send Virgil on his guiding mission to Dante the seeker, alone and lost in the gloomy wood, seeking out the way to the holy hill. Thus the divine command made its descent from the heights, step by step, to the pilgrim’s aid. Arturo: “In this context the term philosophy may perhaps be

50 interpreted as both the love of wisdom, and equally, the wisdom of love. For in one sense at least, love is the way, the very path of return upon which we place our feet at the appointed time. Look no further than the return of the prodigal son to the safety and certainty of his loving Father. However, just as we should not seek knowledge to the detriment of Love, neither should we seek love to the detriment of Knowledge. The seed which is the treasure of the heart is formed of the blended essences of ire and light.” In a moving passage rendered here by Kline, Virgil relates how Beatrice explained to him how she was stirred by Lucia to help Dante: “Lucia said: ‘Beatrice, God’s true praise, why do you not help him, who loved you, so intensely, he left behind the common crowd for you? Do you not hear how pitiful his grief is? Do you not see the spiritual death that comes to meet him, on that dark river, over which the sea has no power?’ No one on earth was ever as quick to search for their good, or run from harm, as I to descend, from my blessed place, after these words were spoken, and place my faith in your true speech, that honours you and those who hear it. She turned away, with tears in her bright eyes, after saying this to me, and made me, by that, come here all the quicker: and so I came to you, as she wished, and rescued you in the face of that wild creature, that denied you the shortest path to the lovely mountain.” And so it was that a great beam of divine power unseen, originating from the dizzying heights of the heavenly summit, was focussed on Dante in the valley below. And that power was like a hand stretched out to save a drowning man amid the fast lowing waters which, like

51 Death itself, threatened to overwhelm him. And he, together with his guide Virgil, approaches the gate of Hell, his ardour and courage renewed by the words of his teacher, like the spring lowers which after the cold of night unfold their petals again beneath the dawning sun of morning time. The pair stands at the gate. Now, Jackson Knight has shown how important cities, city walls and city gates were in ancient cultures. The gateway marked and guarded the threshold between the outer and the inner, the lower and the higher, a protected threshold imbued with meaning and magic. In biblical times gates and gateways were often places of judgement. It is said in Deuteronomy: “Judges and oficers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates, which the Lord thy God giveth thee, throughout thy tribes: and they shall judge the people with just judgment.” The architecture of some city entrances combined watchtower and gate. Prophets sometimes proclaimed from the city gate; and in Proverbs it is said of Wisdom: “She standeth in the top of high places, by the way in the places of the paths. She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the coming in at the doors.” And perhaps the most well-known example is that of Christ in the character of the Good Shepherd who was said by John to declare of himself: "I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and ind pasture."

Something of these distinctive qualities still adhered to the idea of the city gate in the middle ages. The famous declaration written above the gates of Dante’s Hell would therefore have been particularly signiicant not only to Dante, but it would have also resonated with his readers. Its message was a daunting one: “THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE INFERNAL CITY: THROUGH ME THE WAY TO ETERNAL SADNESS: THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE LOST PEOPLE. JUSTICE MOVED MY SUPREME MAKER: I WAS SHAPED BY DIVINE POWER, BY HIGHEST WISDOM, AND BY PRIMAL LOVE. BEFORE ME, NOTHING WAS CREATED, THAT IS NOT ETERNAL: AND ETERNAL I ENDURE. FORSAKE ALL HOPE, ALL YOU THAT ENTER HERE.” It is worth noting that Dante believed that Justice held sway here as it did everywhere; and that the infernal regions were, like everything else, an expression of divine power, of light and of love. The regions of eternal sadness were prepared from the beginning for the rebellious spirits who saw their good in evil. Lucifer, the once glorious Angel, was their Lord. In contrast to the joyous liberation and blessedness experienced in the heavenly regions, the poor souls of these worlds were imprisoned there and endured unimaginable hardships. Arturo: “Like the sun of happy day and the shroud of a moonlit night, a man’s destiny and its shadow are both due to the same divine power. And despite the inal words of the declaration above the gate of Dante’s Hell, it should also be remembered that it is often said of hope that it too springs eternal. There are states of mind which are truly hellish in nature. We are

free to condemn ourselves to such states for as long as we want; or we can, if we wish it so, and are deserving, turn away from them to happier worlds.” Cosmos conceived of as one or more closed circles implies eternal circular repetition from which there can be no prospect of escape. However, even though Dante’s Inferno is described as a series of circles, each of them has an entry and exit point which suggests at least the potential for spiralling movement, ascending or descending. However ‘eternal’ the suffering may appear, it seems that it is also possible for a prisoner of one of the circles of Dante’s Hell to gain entry, through repentance, into the appropriate circle of Purgatory where he may be puriied of his fault. Virgil tells Dante that they are approaching the region which contains those “…who have lost the good of the intellect.” Most commentators trace Dante’s understanding of this term back to Aristotle. Although there is much debate and confusion surrounding it, Aristotle distinguishes between different kinds or modes of intellect. It seems that here Dante, through the words of Virgil, is referring to the loss of that form of intellect by which a man may commune with the energies and truths of the heavenly regions. It is the ‘loss’ of this intellectual faculty which denies man access to the light of divine philosophy, to the forms of eternal beauty, and to the purest love of paradise; and it is too the apparent loss of this type of intellect that condemns the high-born rebellious ones to their hellish condition. Dante implies that it is as a consequence of pursuing evil and falsehood as if they were good that man distances himself from that

54 intellect which, as Aristotle asserts, of its own nature sees ‘ in truth its good’. To the Christian mystic, penitential reconciliation with God, together with Divine Grace, restores to man the full power and glory of his intellect. Virgil leads Dante through the region of the selishly indifferent, the lukewarm, those lacking in courage, loved by neither Heaven nor Hell, living shallow, apathetic, mean and shadowed lives, ‘ envious of every other Fate’. They are those men who are not for God; and nor are they for Satan. They are for themselves. Alas, their condition is too well known on Earth to require further deliberation. Let us, like Virgil and Dante, pass them by. Then comes a vision of the souls destined for Hell, crowding the banks of the river Acheron across which it is by some believed that souls must be ferried at death. The crossing of a river is symbolically the same as crossing a threshold. It is noteworthy that the souls on the bank desire to cross into Hell. Virgil, at times overwhelmed with pity, next leads him through Limbo. Traditionally this was the place reserved for unbaptised infants. However, for Dante it was also the place of those who had virtues, but had not been baptised. This may have been because they had lived before the birth of Christ; or because the place and circumstances of their lives did not allow them access to the Christian faith. Consequently, they did not know Christ, the lord of light and love, the divine son of the Father of the highest heaven. And without Christ the way to heaven is closed, for as recorded by John, the Lord says of himself: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

And of baptism in the same place: “Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.” Baptism is one of the most important of the Christian mysteries. In the Christian beliefs it is connected to adoption, son-ship and admittance to the faith. It is by many Christians considered one of the sacraments necessary for salvation; and it is said to bring about regeneration through a cleansing of the soul. It may be noticed in passing that St John the Baptist is the patron saint of Florence, the place of Dante’s birth. However, the true baptism is not a mere rite or ritual. It is not a symbol but is the thing itself. Puriication is achieved through a peaceful communing with spiritual light and life. It involves a coming to one’s self, an awakening of the true self. It is a remembering of intellect in the sense alluded earlier. Only the baptised in this sense can know and love Christ as the way, the truth and the life. Some Christian mystics think of it as the irst of three steps: Baptism, the Eucharist and the Anointing. Dimitri: “Let the baptismal waters purify the worthy mind. Let her be calm and still and full with trust. Let her rest easy. Let peace most pure remove all error. Let her surface relect the image of her Lord amid the scented breath of the Holy Spirit. Let her waters shine saffron, rose and gold, for lo, Aurora wakes to bring forth morning’s ray at the rising of the sun amid the lauds of all creation.” It seems likely, at least from one perspective, that one of the inspirations for the writing of the Commedia was the Passion of Christ; and so it is worth remembering here that according to St. Mark, Christ, following his baptism but before undertaking his divine

56 mission, spent time in the wilderness: “And he was in the desert forty days and forty nights, and was tempted by Satan; and he was with beasts, and the angels ministered to him.” Virgil had not been baptised, and so from a Christian perspective could not know Christ. He was therefore ‘suspended’, as it were, in Limbo, a place in which the very air trembled with the sighs of its grieving inhabitants. Suspended in the same realm were several of the ancient poets, philosophers and various great men and women of the ancient past. Dante is told that it was to this region that Christ came during the harrowing of Hell to redeem some of the most worthy of those that were imprisoned there, such as Adam and some of the Old Testament prophets. Dante’s Limbo is formed of two symmetrical hemispheres. One is of light, and the other shade. “Not very far as yet our way had gone This side the summit, when I saw a ire That overcame a hemisphere of darkness.” Dante is told that those who had earned a reputation for their acts of virtue or wisdom on Earth, despite not knowing Christ, had their habitation in the lighter part of Limbo. He lists the great philosophers, poets and other representatives of the many kinds of men who had earned the right to live amid beauty and light, separated from the hemisphere of shade because of who and what they were. He and Virgil are welcomed by the poets and they speak and walk together to a castle and a beautiful meadow, reminiscent of Virgil’s Elysian Fields.

“Thus we went as far as the light, speaking things of which it is good to be silent now, as it was good to speak them there where I was. We came to the foot of a noble castle, seven times encircled by high walls, defended all around by a lovely little stream. This we passed over like solid ground; through seven gates I entered with these sages; we came into a meadow of fresh green. Here were people with slow, grave eyes and great authority in their countenances: they spoke seldom, and with soft voices. Therefore we drew to one side, to a place open, bright, and high, whence all of them could be seen. There opposite, on the bright green grass, all the great spirits were shown to me, so that I am still exalted within myself at the sight.” The castle with seven encircling walls and seven gates perhaps implies that the men who were qualiied to enter there were not all of the same kind, but entered by the gate most appropriate to their inner qualities and attributes. However, it should also be noted that when considered as an ediice, such a building can symbolise all kinds of things, including man himself. Dante and Virgil pass on to the darker circles of Hell: those that contain men and women whose sins are more damning than those of the lukewarm and those of the un-baptised. They descend to the second circle, imprisoned in which were those who lacked self- control, and so had perverted the divine purpose in their pursuit of carnal pleasures. The circle is guarded by Minos, the mythical king who had Daedalus build the labyrinth in which was housed the Minotaur. As a ‘connoisseur of sin’ he acts as judge in Dante’s Inferno consigning

58 each sinful soul to its appropriate region of Hell. Just as there is a good serpent and a bad one, Minos is a igure of contrasting aspects, often so contradictory that it has led some to wonder if there were not two personages of the same name, but with very different characters. On the one hand he was a great and wise king, a founder and teacher of the Mysteries, receiving the laws directly from God in a sacred cave. On the other, he is depicted as a cruel tyrant and the archetypal imprisoner. Dante does not convey any vindictiveness in Minos’ allocation of individual sinners to their various locations. Minos’ task was not revenge but to administer a just fulilment of cause and effect. The causal forces associated with the sinners’ lives on Earth are relected and ixed by law in the conditions they experience in Hell. This sense of divine justice is at the heart of what Dante refers to as contrapasso, a term by which he means ‘the punishment its the crime’. Here, Dante and Virgil encounter various types or examples of adulterous lovers, or those who Dante thought had while they lived been overcome by lustful desires. They are continually tossed about by a mighty whirlwind. Dante grades the energies associated with love in a hierarchical arrangement. In its highest manifestation it is never far from divine truth. It is too, associated by him with the force that moves the universe. There will be occasion later on to explore higher, spiritual and Divine Love, as the power of love is integral to The Divine Comedy, central to its writer’s vision of the heavenly regions, and to the divine creation itself. However for now we must remain below. Dante’s whirlwind contrapasso reveals that lustful desire reduces or removes our free will. Sometimes a man is driven by his desires to

59 behave in a way which is contrary to his best interests, and just as often, to those of others. He sometimes knows that this is so, but lacks the power to resist the force of the whirlwind. That which Dante calls man’s reason is often unable to restrain his passions and natural appetites. However, it appears that for Dante, human appetites were not sinful in themselves; but a man places himself in a state or realm of pain and sorrow when he is unable to exercise rational control over them. Arturo: “Though in some senses inferior to higher, spiritual love, earthly, romantic love is, like desire itself, not bad or evil in any way. So long as romantic, physical love is noble in intent and practice, it is but evidence of natural afinity. However, a lack of self-control, and the descent into mere lust will lead us away from the light of love to a dark and pitiful place of our own making. There, these two breed restlessness in man, a never satisied hunger which is the very antithesis of holy peace. There is jeopardy too in immoderate or imbalanced desire and earthly love; but through the established point of virtuous balance, the point of potentiality, cascades the power of the ringmaster, spreading from the centre throughout the performance ring to its circumference.” It is thought that by the time he was writing the Divine Comedy Dante had rejected what some consider the excesses of the so-called courtly love beliefs and practices espoused by him as a young man. These ideas come to the fore during the Francesca episode. Love is experienced by her and by some of the other sinners as an all- conquering compulsion against which it is futile to resist. However Dante’s settled view was that the principle of ‘reason’ can and must

be sovereign, and must exercise control over desire, however strong it might be. Failure to do so can eventually lead to tragedy. The main idea associated with courtly love was that the love of the lover for the beloved was a symbolical representation of the quester’s longing for union with a divine principle, often identiied as wisdom. Unfortunately, many of the adherents of courtly love appear to have fallen into the error of confusing the symbol with the thing symbolised. Too often their longings and desires for union with the divine were projected onto the physical level, leading them to all sorts of ideas and practices in which excessiveness is the keynote. However, immoderation works both ways, and human nature is prone to both extremes. At the time that Dante was writing there was already a long tradition of Christian asceticism. It was fed by those who wished to imitate the passions and sufferings of Christ. There was also in places a misguided attitude to the body, which was wrongly identiied as the root of human wickedness and sin. It is still the case today that by inlicting cruelties upon the body some believe that they are aligning themselves with the will of God. Arturo: “Such unreasonable reactions to perfectly natural energies merely demonstrate how far from the light of wisdom they have strayed. Lust and asceticism both operate contrary to the divine will.” Even though in Dante’s scheme the lustful are damned by their sins, unlike many of his holier-than-thou contemporaries he demonstrates remarkable compassion in his treatment of them. "Alas, how many sweet thoughts, how much yearning led them to the grievous pass!" Dante is so moved by pity and so sorrowful at their plight that he

61 faints. The failure to establish a moderate and reasonable control also underlies the associated sins of gluttony, avarice and anger, each of which have their circles in Dante’s Hell. When Dante returns to his senses he and Virgil move on to the circle containing those guilty of gluttony. It was guarded by Cerberus, the three-headed dog that in Greek mythology guarded the gates to Hades. Dante converses with Ciacco, one of the spirits tormented there. They speak about Florence, a profoundly divided city in which had been sown the seeds of discord. In this canto Dante represents Florence as a corrupted city, gluttonous for wealth and power. In answer to a question by Dante, Virgil gives voice to a Christian orthodoxy, telling the pilgrim that Ciacco and the rest of the sinners would endure their torment until the Last Judgement. "Never again will he arise this side of the angelic trumpet, when he will see the enemy governor…” The ‘enemy governor’ is here a reference to the divine Goodness which is in opposition to the rulers of Hell. It was believed, and still is in some quarters, that those condemned by their excessiveness and lack of self-control will endure sufferings in a lower region until the Last Judgement. Arturo: “What this Last Judgement actually represents, both for humanity and for an individual man or woman, each mind guided by conscience will know.” However, whatever it signiies it must surely be the case that so long as a corrupted man pursues evil as if it was his good, then that man

62 must also suffer and endure the just and self-generated consequences. If a sick man eats poisons, as though they were medicine, shall we be surprised when he loses what little health he had? In this sense at least, the state or condition of being in sin, like a self-perpetuated illness, is a punishment we inlict upon ourselves. The names of two Greek gods, Pluto and Plutus, are derived from the Greek word ploutos, meaning wealth. Pluto was the ruler of the underworld, the realm or realms below, and so, as some thought, the source of wealth, igured sometimes in the form of agricultural plenty, and at other times in that of gold and other precious metals mined from within the Earth. Plutus on the other hand, was the god of wealth and riches. He was represented in the Eleusinian mysteries as the divine son of the mother of fruitfulness, and was associated with the cornucopia. However, amid the inversions of Dante’s Inferno, he is the king of the ‘hoarders and wasters’ of material wealth. In Dante’s vision those whose sin was the greedy hoarding of excessive wealth were to one side, and they clashed and jostled with those opposite them whose sin was proligacy. The opposition of the two extremes led the sorry participants to perform a kind of revolving dance. It was likened by Dante to the whirlpool of Charybdis: “As the waves do there above Charybdis, breaking over each other as they collide: so the people here must dance their round.” According to the myths the monster Charybdis lurked under a ig tree and preyed on the ships passing through what is believed to have been the narrow straits of Messina. The shipwrecked Ulysses barely escaped her clutches by clinging to a tree. Charybdis is often associated with Scylla, thought by some to be the personiication of rocks located a mere bowshot away on the opposite shore. From her

63 cave Scylla devoured whatever ventured within reach. In attempting to avoid Charybdis many came to grief on Scylla. Few were able to navigate safely through such treacherous waters. Virgil himself had written of them: “The right side Scylla keeps; the left is given to pitiless Charybdis, who draws down to the wild whirling of her steep abyss the monster waves, and ever and anon lings them at heaven, to lash the tranquil stars. But Scylla, prisoned in her eyeless cave, thrusts forth her face, and pulls upon the rocks ship after ship; the parts that irst be seen are human; a fair-breasted virgin she, down to the womb; but all that lurks below is a huge-membered ish, where strangely join the lukes of dolphins and the paunch of wolves” In this circle of the Inferno the ‘opposing faults’ of the two types of sinners produce permanent unrest: “…for all the gold that is under the moon and that ever was, could not give rest to even one of these weary souls.” The changeability of the moon led to its association with the ickle fortune of the so-called lunar and sub-lunar spheres. Some will also ind relevant the assertion that divine law administered by fortune regulates the distribution of wealth and riches. Material wealth is subject to law, as are the spiritual wealth and the riches of the higher spheres. The rendering is Durling’s: “He whose wisdom transcends all things fashioned the heavens, and he

64 gave them governors who see that every part shines to every other part, distributing the light equally. Similarly, for worldly splendors he ordained a general minister and leader who would transfer from time to time the empty goods from one people to another, from one family to another, beyond any human wisdom’s power to prevent;” Arturo: “It is incumbent on all recipients to be also donors. For in so doing, they discover the inwardness of those unseen laws which enable and regulate the distribution of divine power throughout Creation. And until you fully understood this law Dimitri, and are able to make manifest its various aspects, your future place and purpose in the circus must remain but an aspiration.” There is also something in Dante’s imagery here that brings to mind the wheel of fortune, thought of by some as the ever-turning zodiac, responsible, they say, for the ever-shifting fortunes of those subject to its inluence. By placing ourselves beneath its sway we condemn ourselves to constant unrest and dissatisfaction; and by establishing peace of mind we free ourselves from them. Boethius again: “Thus there is nothing wretched unless you think it to be so: and in like manner he who bears all with a calm mind inds his lot wholly blessed.” Dimitri: “Let us in all sincerity combine unmet need with unemployed resources. Let us share the treasure of our hearts with our kith and kin. And in doing so, let us in all humility place our trust in that power of Providence which transmutes Fortune’s ills to medicine, and proves to the erring mind that only the highest goods are immutable. For they do not melt away like the snows at springtime. They do not disperse like the dell’s dewy mists at dawn. Nor are they snatched away like the leeting moments of illicit pleasure amid the penetrating rays of conscience.”

65 Virgil leads Dante further into Hell: “Now let us descend to greater misery: already every star is declining, that was rising when I set out, and we are not allowed to stay too long.” They follow a watercourse, dark and foaming. At the bottom of a slope it forms a muddy swamp. It is the Styx, the principal river of the underworld, around which, according to Homer, it encircles seven times, although others say nine times. It has a long history, one or two aspects of which, in passing, may be worth briely noting. According to Euripides and others, Hercules’ success in mastering Cerberus, the guardian watchdog of Hades, was made possible because of his initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries: “Amphitryon: Did you really go to the house of Hades, my son? Heracles: Yes, and brought to the light that three-headed monster. Amphitryon: Did you conquer him in ight, or receive him from the goddess? Heracles: In ight; for I had been lucky enough to witness the rites of the initiated.” In the Middle Ages Hercules was often interpreted as a kind of forerunner of Christ, as was in some quarters Theseus. In what some have understood as an act parallel to that of Christ’s harrowing of Hell, while he was in Hades Hercules also recued Theseus, and in some versions, Theseus’ faithful companion Pirithous. It was claimed by Apollodorus that he found these two bound fast to the so-called chair of forgetfulness. Some say that the chair had grown into their lesh, while others that they were imprisoned there by serpents coiled fast around their limbs. These were perhaps the same

66 “Lethaean bonds” referred to by Horace. Hercules was aided in his mission by both Hermes and Athena. Homer has Athena claim that without her help Hercules could never have succeeded in escaping from the steeply plunging waters of the Styx. “when the tasks of Eurystheus were too much for his strength. And time and again he would cry out aloud to the heavens, and Zeus would send me down in speed from the sky to help him. If in the wiliness of my heart I had had thoughts like his, when Herakles was sent down to Hades of the Gates, to hale back from the Kingdom of the Dark the hound of the grisly death god, never would he have got clear of the steep-dripping Stygian water.” The snake-like coils of the encircling Styx have been likened by some to the defensive labyrinthine castle defences and impediments common in the Grail legends. Also, the lineage and indeed the appearance of the three-headed dog Cerberus is decidedly reptilian. Dimitri: “How the weight of the body, and all that it entails, weighs down the mind again as the material bonds re-attach themselves to the returning visionary.” “What shock of shocks And sorrow's fruitful tears, As like the lightning lash Which dashing through the atmosphere Finds its prison within the Earth, I fell far down into this waking Dream And felt again the weight of mortal clay, That hangs like a twisting serpent Around some Heavenly Stem. . . Clinging tightly with its suffocating grip.”

67 In Dante’s poem the Styx irst appears in the fourth circle of the Inferno as a stream and then descends into the ifth where it forms a marsh or swamp. They were carried across its waters by Phlegyas, son of Ares. His name means iery, and according to the myths he was consigned to the Underworld for opposing Apollo. In the waters are held those who had been overcome by wrath: “And I who stood there, intent on seeing, saw muddy people in the fen, naked, and all with the look of anger. They were striking each other, not only with hands, but head, chest, and feet, mangling each other with their teeth, bite by bite.” Below the dark waters are those who Virgil explains lacked spirit, and so were sluggish, sullen, sad and depressed. “Wedged in the slime, they say: ‘We had been sullen in the sweet air that’s gladdened by the sun; we bore the mist of sluggishness in us: now we are bitter in the blackened mud.’ This hymn they have to gurgle in their gullets, because they cannot speak it in full words.” Dante sees and converses with someone known to him. His interaction draws from him righteous indignation, a response of which Virgil approves. Here, as he does throughout his poem, Dante continually constructs paradigms of Aristotelian virtue as the mean between excess and deiciency. From the shore the two had already seen a watchtower from which two beacon ires were lit, and another which made reply from a great distance: “so far away the eye could hardly see it”. It seems that the two are far behind enemy lines, trespassers abroad in a hostile territory. Alighting from the little boat they approached the City of Dis. 68 Flaming red with the ires of Hell, the city is surrounded by iron walls forged in the furnaces of the pit. It is the city of Satan, the adversary, and it is protected by ranks of evil powers, rebel servants of a rebel Lord: they, the strange beings who ind in evil their greatest good. It is a prison of suffering, grief and abject sorrow. Like other aspects of the poem Dante’s city of Dis can be approached from a variety of standpoints. In many cases the law of correspondence holds the key. Certainly, it is possible to interpret aspects of Dante’s journey from an individual psychological point of view as well as from an eschatological one. Although not the whole truth of the matter, it is possible to locate the opposer, the great adversary, within man himself. Some see in Satan a metaphor for the base and selish desires rooted in the lowest aspects of human nature. This, such a believer might say, is the real location of the contest between good and bad, light and darkness, love and hatred, between eternal life and the destructions of Dis. In line with their rebellious nature the fallen angels refuse entry to Dante; nor do they acknowledge the one upon whose authority Dante had been permitted to travel there. Dante introduces classical references to witches, necromancy and other black arts. He fears he will be left alone in Hell with little chance of escape if Virgil proceeds without him. Virgil reassures him: “…already on this side of its entrance, one is coming, down the steep, passing the circles unescorted, one for whom the city shall open to us.” While they wait Dante sees the Furies looking down at the pair from the glowering battlements, “Each one was tearing at her breast with her claws”. During Dante’s time the three Furies were often interpreted as the three aspects of evil: evil thought, evil word, and

69 evil deed. Virgil also covers Dante’s eyes to protect the pilgrim from the gaze of Medusa, she who turns the hearts of men to stone. An angel comes, his progress through Hell likened by Dante to a fearful wind fed by conlicting heats, crashing through the forest, breaking braches and sweeping them away in a cloud of dust. The angel’s approach is accompanied by thunder. The spirits imprisoned in the bogs scatter before him like frogs before a snake as he travels through the foul air, crossing the ilthy waters without wetting his feet. Dante recognises the angel as a Messenger from Heaven. Virgil beckons to Dante to remain silent and bow. The messenger rebukes the fallen angels and with a wand opens the door to Dis without resistance. He returns to his work elsewhere without speaking to the two travellers. They enter the city of infernal ire. Dante sees open sepulchres everywhere, and in and between them hot ires burn with tremendous heat, causing great torment to those inside. “Flames were scattered amongst the tombs, by which they were made so red-hot all over, that no smith’s art needs hotter metal. Their lids were all lifted, and such ierce groans came from them, that, indeed, they seemed to be those of the sad and wounded.” Virgil explains that this part of Hell was reserved for arch-heretics and their followers. Before Dante’s time various inquisitions aimed at protecting orthodox religious beliefs had been established by the Church authorities. They became increasingly intolerant, cruel and barbaric; and by the time of Dante’s birth inquisitors had been granted absolution if they felt it necessary to employ instruments of torture in the course of their duties. Arturo: “Be not among the quick to blame, for all men, sooner or

70 later, are prone to error. If we were all free from error then this shadowed world would a Paradise be. However, neither should you look to my words for excuses or justiications. Beware the arch-heretics, and beware the blasphemers, those whose hearts are illed with scorn for all that is true and beautiful and divine; beware the twisters of truth, they who lead the mind astray, far from heavenly light to the darkness and misery of the mausoleums below. But beware also their torturers, the savages and henchmen of hate. Beware too all the other minions of maleicence, for if they could, they would make our world a Hell.” As well as individuals who Dante knew personally, Epicurus and his followers were there. Epicureans were widely thought to have denied the immortality of the soul, a doctrine considered heretical by Christians. Among those known to Dante was Cavalcante, the father of his friend Guido. He asks Dante: "If through this blind prison you are going because of your high genius, where is my son, and why is he not with you?" ‘High genius’ is rendered by some as ‘high intellect’. Some commentators also detect in the description of Hell as ‘this blind prison’ an echo of Anchises’ description of life in the body contained in Virgil’s sixth book of the Aeneid. The translation is Fairclough’s: “Fiery is the vigour and divine the source of those seeds of life, so far as harmful bodies clog them not, or earthly limbs and frames born but to die. Hence their fears and desires, their griefs and joys; nor do they discern the heavenly light, penned as they are in the gloom of their dark dungeon.”

71 Even after death, so Virgil makes Anchises tell, certain puriications may be needed in order to remove from the pure lame of spirit the taint attached to it by its contact with the body and all that this entails. It was believed that these puriications were, for some at least, suficiently eficacious to prepare them for Elysium. Dante would have been aware of these kinds of ideas as he worked up his own notions of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Another of those known to Dante is Farinata. Dante represents him as a materialist for whom the world of the bodily senses is the ‘be-all and end-all’ of man’s existence. There appears to have been a history of conlict between the families of the two men. Farinata prophesies Dante’s exile from Florence. The ‘Lady who reigns here’ is the moon goddess Proserpine, known also as Hecate. The pilgrim and his guide pause to acclimatise themselves to the stench of the region they had entered. While they do so Virgil explains to Dante the various subdivisions of Hell and the reasons for them. The upper parts of Hell, as we have seen, are in Dante’s scheme characterised by sins of incontinence or immoderation. The lower parts held the malicious. However these were also subdivided in various ways, distinguishing between the violent, the deceitful and the treacherous. The places set aside for the violent were in turn subdivided, with sinners placed according to whether they had sought to do harm to their neighbours, to themselves, or to God. Violence may be perpetrated against our neighbours in the form of robbery, murder and similar crimes that run counter to the tolerance, love and compassion of higher spheres. Violence against

72 the self in the form of suicide is a denial of the sovereignty of the true Self. And while God ever remains absolutely invulnerable, a man is free to blaspheme, to rebel against Nature’s laws of light and love, and even to deny in his heart the very existence of his Maker. Such misuse of our free will is in itself a form of self-harm because it distances us, step by step, further and yet further, from the truths, joys and beauties of the higher life. The deceitful seek to destroy the natural bonds of love and harmony fashioned by divine will from the beginning of creation. However, from Dante’s perspective treachery is the most heinous of sins because it is a betrayal of trust. It is in his view the worst kind of malicious deceit. Arturo: “There is a special holiness in trust: trust in God, our Father; trust in the Giver of Life; the innocent child’s trust in the loving mother; the trust of the lover and of the beloved; the mutual trust of friendship; the trust between brother and sister, and between man and wife; the trust of priest and of congregation; trust in the guiding light and in the agents of that light. May the powers that be have pity on the traitors who betray such holy bonds, and who knowing their error, repent in full.” Then follows a discussion of Art and Nature in which Virgil tells Dante that: “To him who attends, Philosophy shows, in more than one place, how Nature takes her path from the Divine Intelligence, and its arts, and if you note your Physics well, you will ind, not many pages in, that art, follows her, as well as it can, as the pupil does the master, so that your art is as it were the grandchild of God. By these two, art and nature, man must earn his bread and lourish, if you recall to mind Genesis, near its beginning.”

73 There has been much debate among commentators about this passage. It is appropriately traced by them back to Aristotle. Contrary to the way in which the argument is often summarised, it is worth noting that neither Dante, nor Aristotle, claims that man’s art merely imitates or copies nature. Rather, his art, as best it can, ‘follows’ or ‘takes its path’ from nature. The distinction is an important one. In making art, man follows laws and patterns of creativity analogous or corresponding to those observable in Nature. Analogously therefore, Nature is God’s child; man’s art is Nature’s child. It is also worth considering that the medieval cosmos was dual in the sense that it involved both the outer, physical, temporal world on the one hand; and on the other, the inner, eternal world visible to higher vision, to the ‘eye of the soul’, but invisible to the ordinary material senses of the body. Thus to some medieval thinkers there emerges a distinction between outer nature and inner Nature. Dante considers Nature in its highest or inmost manifestation to be God’s Art. It was a product of the Divine Mind. It is man’s task – in accordance with his place and purpose – to align, or to model as best he can his art on the truths, beauties and perfections inherent in this higher aspect of Nature. When guided by or aligned with Nature, man’s art becomes the lower link in a chain which stretches up through the heavens to the divine spaces where divine wisdom breathes amid the utter peace, beauty and splendour of God. It was common during Dante’s time to see God’s plan working out in Nature through the angelic agents of divine power, through the inluence of the planetary bodies, and of course through the righteous endeavours of his servants on Earth and in Heaven. In one way or another, the sinful and the vicious use their God-given

74 freewill to pervert this natural order. It should also be noted that art in this context includes creative work of many different kinds. Dante, through the words of Virgil, uses the example of usury, taking advantage of another’s misfortune in order to enrich oneself, to demonstrate how in his view certain behaviours are sinful because they run counter to the natural and intended low. The interest charging moneylenders, so the argument goes, seek to circumvent natural law by earning their bread not by the sweat of their own brow but by that of another’s. Dante and Virgil descend further to the place reserved for those overcome by bestial anger. It is a perilous descent on a path which traverses a recent rock fall. Later, Virgil hints that the rock fall may have been caused by the ramiications of Christ’s harrowing of Hell. The Minotaur bars their way: “… and at the very point where the slope had broken, the infamy of Crete was stretched out, the one conceived in the false cow; and when he saw us, he bit himself like one broken within by anger.” Dante’s reference to the one conceived in the false cow prompts a momentary side glance at the career of Daedalus. He was the master- inventor and artist par excellence. He contrived the wooden cow by which a white bull was tricked into mating with Pasiphae, daughter of the Sun, who subsequently gave birth to the hybrid creature known as the Minotaur: half-human and half-beast. He was also the builder of the labyrinth in which King Minos imprisoned the monster. Minos imprisoned Daedalus too, and barred every route of escape by land and sea. The inventor’s famous light to liberation led to the tragic demise of his son Icarus, who ignored his father’s advice and so drowned in the deeps of the ocean. Daedalus’

75 instructions to his son have been related in several places. The following is taken from Ovid who makes him say: “This is the art that will take us home, by this creation we’ll escape from Minos. Minos bars all other ways but cannot close the skies: as is itting, my invention cleaves the air. But don’t gaze at the Bear, that Arcadian girl, or Bootes’s companion, Orion with his sword: Fly behind me with the wings I give you: I’ll go in front: your job’s to follow: you’ll be safe where I lead. For if we go near the sun through the airy aether, the wax will not endure the heat: if our humble wings glide close to ocean, the breaking salt waves will drench our feathers. Fly between the two: and fear the breeze as well, spread your wings and follow, as the winds allow.” Arturo: “Good advice indeed.” The liberated Daedalus used his art to build a temple to Apollo at Cumae. Cumae was the seat of the Cumaean Sibyl. In some of the myths there was close by at Avernus an entrance to the underworld. This was the route taken by Aeneas in his descent. Dante and Virgil get by the Minotaur while it is momentarily incapacitated by a it of fury. Descending further into a gully they behold a boiling river of blood in which those violent towards others were to varying degrees submerged. Guarding the river were more hybrid creatures: Centaurs, half-man and half-horse. Virgil explains to Dante their task: “They race around the ditch, in thousands, piercing with arrows any spirit that climbs further from the blood than its guilt has condemned it to.” Now, blood has always been associated with the principle of life; and it has often been considered a purifying agent, though such beliefs

76 have also led to the most horrendous practices. At the point of Creation the One Life infused primordial Nature with Spirit and gave it life. In Christian terms thus was the Christ child born of the blood of the Immaculate Virgin. This holy image may be contrasted with the various allusions to poisoned blood in this circle of Dante’s inferno, and to its guardians the Centaurs. Tyrants and murderous robbers, whose hands were stained red with the blood of their many victims, were boiling in Hell in a river of blood. Excessive heat, produced by the ires of low and ignoble passions, tormented the pitiful sinners. According to the myths, Chiron the Centaur is accidentally but fatally poisoned by one of Hercules’ arrows dipped in the blood of the ire- breathing Hydra. One of the same blood-poisoned arrows was used by Hercules to fatally wound another Centaur, Nessus, who had attempted to carry off Deianara, Hercules’ wife. As he lay dying the Centaur convinced her to take his blood-soaked shirt as, he said, it would be a powerful love-charm. Sometime later she sent the shirt to Hercules. The poisoned shirt killed the hero’s human part, although some report that his other part was admitted to the ranks of the gods. Chiron notices that Dante is alive. Virgil explains their mission and asks Chiron for a guide: "He is indeed alive; and thus alone I must show him the dark valley; necessity induces us, and not pleasure. One left off singing hallelujah who entrusted me with this strange task: he is not a robber nor I a thievish soul. But by that Power through which I move my steps along so wild a road, give us one of yours to guide us and show us where the ford is, and carry this one on his rump, for he is not a spirit that can walk upon the air." 77 Chiron appoints Nessus who takes them on his back to a ford across a shallow stretch of the river of boiling blood. Once they are across he leaves them and returns back to the others. They enter an infernal wood in which the trees are warped and knotted. They produce no fruit but poisonous thorns. “Not foliage green, but of a dusky colour, Not branches smooth, but gnarled and intertangled, Not apple-trees were there, but thorns with poison.” The wood appears to be an even lower manifestation of the gloomy wood in which Dante began his pilgrimage. It is the wood of suicides, those who had committed the sin of violence against the self. However they discover that attempts to free oneself of the body by such means are futile. Each sinner has now taken the shape of a deformed tree. Monstrous harpies nest in the wood and feed on the leaves of the man-trees causing them great pain and torment. The episode contains many echoes and allusions. Perhaps most recognisable is the Aeneid’s speaking myrtle bush which Aeneas found growing on the burial mound of Polydorus. However, Ovid’s Metamorphoses also describes the transformation into a laurel tree of Daphne, beloved of Apollo; and of Myrrha who was changed into a tree now called myrrh, out of which her son Adonis was born. The Heliades, children of the sun, were changed to poplars while they grieved the death of their brother Phaeton. Like those in the wood of suicides the grieving poplar trees spoke and bled like humans. Their mother had tried to “…strip the bark from their bodies and break the young branches off with her hands, but all that emerged was a trickle of human blood. Stop hurting me, mother, please! It’s me you’re tearing inside the tree!”

78 Others include Cyparissus who in grief was transformed into a cypress; and also Dryope who became a lotus tree. Perhaps there is in Dante’s plucking of a small branch from one of the trees a tragic undertone of the plucking of the golden bough. There is also in the grotesque Last Judgement image of corpses hanging from thorn trees an echo of Judas and the tree upon which he was said by some to have hung himself. Generally, the wood and the wretched trees form a marked contrast with those which Dante was to behold later in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. Dante and Virgil converse with one of the grieving sinners. He gives a pitiful account of how it was that he came to be there. As the pair listen they see two terriied spirits, guilty of violence against their possessions, pursued through the wood by black bitch hounds. One of them takes refuge in a thorn bush. The other is caught and is torn to pieces. Arturo: “The favours of heaven are many. The rich man receives his wealth from who knows where, and the loving father and mother are blessed by the God-given gift of a child. As the horseman is happy among his horses , so is the gardener at peace among his lowers. The intelligent man – even though his possession may be his for but a season or two – is grateful for his belongings. He does not spurn them; nor does he waste them. He does not complain that they are insuficient. He cares for them; he protects and nurtures them, and brings them to maturity and to fruitfulness. He inds in them the point of virtuous balance; he sets them on the right path, as best he can; and above all, he puts his possession to work in the service of the Lord.” Dante and Virgil move on to the next ring or subdivision of the circle

79 of violence: that of the violent against God. Images and metaphors of excessive heat and ire abound throughout this subdivision of Hell. “I saw many groups of naked spirits, who were all moaning bitterly: and there seemed to be diverse rules applied to them. Some were lying face upward on the ground; some sat all crouched: and others roamed around continuously. Those who moved were more numerous, and those that lay in torment fewer, but uttering louder cries of pain. Dilated lakes of ire, falling slowly, like snow in the windless mountains, rained down over all the vast sands.” It was so hot that the ire-lakes set alight the sand like kindling. The tormented sinners swatted at the falling lakes like lies. They notice one of the sinners who seemed indifferent to the ire, scornful to the end. It was the gigantic Capaneus, one of the chiefs in the war of the seven against Thebes. Thebes was for several old writers a type of the lawless city. It was the centre of man’s rebellions against the gods; and the focus of a struggle between two brothers who ended up killing each other. It may be that for Dante Thebes represented the classical equivalent of his violent and faction-riven Florence. It had fallen to the lower gods and all that this entails. As Capaneus scaled the walls of the city he had exclaimed that Zeus himself could not stop him. It was perhaps inevitable that such blasphemy and hubris would be answered, and predictably, Zeus hurled a thunderbolt at him, killing him instantly. Dante makes the unrepentant Capaneus say: "As I was alive, so am I dead. Though Jove tire out his smith, from whom he wrathful took the sharp thunderbolt that struck me on the

80 last day — and though he weary the others, turn after turn, at the black forge in Mongibello, calling, 'Good Vulcan, help, help!' as he did at the battle of Phlegra — and strike me with all his force, he could not have happy vengeance thereby." Phlegra, a name meaning place of burning , was the mythological site of Zeus's overthrowing of the Giants. Mongibello is the volcanic Etna under which, it was said by the Greeks, Typhon was imprisoned for trying to overthrow Zeus. Also underneath it were the forges of Hephaestus, who was known by the Romans as Vulcan, smith of the gods. In Roman terms, both Vulcan and the Cyclopes were associated with fashioning thunderbolts. Capaneus’ crime and punishment brings to mind those of Ixion who, following his expulsion from heaven, was bound by Hermes to a iery wheel fashioned by Hephaestus. His crime, like that of Capaneus, lay in attempting violence against the gods. Pythagoras called this wheel the Wheel of Life; and others called it the wheel of Fate and generation. Arturo: “Escape from the cycle of rebirth on Earth requires us to turn away and seek our better part, or as Orpheus held, ‘cease from this cycle and gain breathing space from evil’. And as far as Ixion is concerned, perhaps still he revolves upon his wheel of ire, in realms remote from the light and love of heaven.” Following intercourse with a cloud which had been made to resemble Juno, the Queen of Heaven, Ixion was also credited with fathering the generally intemperate race of centaurs, apart, they say, from Chiron. It is worth noting too in passing that clouds were often understood to combine the powers of the bright sun with the waters or the humid vapours of the earth.

Virgil, indignant that Capaneus refuses to repent, rebukes him, and in doing so reveals that it is he who causes his own Hell: "O Capaneus, since your pride is not extinguished, you are punished more; no punishment, other than your rage, would be suffering of a measure with your fury." They move on in silence and behold a stream, sulphur-red, gushing from the wood. Dante questions Virgil about it and his guide explains the source of the four rivers of Hell. He tells Dante that they have a common source on the island of Crete. There is a monument there on Mount Ida, he says, a statue of a Great Old Man made of gold, silver, brass, iron and clay. Except for the golden head, the statue has a crack or issure that runs throughout all the other parts. Tears drop from this crack and their low eventually forms the rivers of Hell. Most commentators agree that the Old Man of Crete is a metaphor for the descending arc of history. From this point of view it represents the decline through successive stages or cycles from the original Golden Age to the age which is igured by Dante as iron and clay. Hesiod had written of the ive ages of man, while Ovid in his Metamorphoses identiies four phases of history: the eternal spring of the Golden Age where people lived in peace, where there was no evil, no fear, no punishment, no greed or mistrust. The Silver age followed the defeat of Cronus by Zeus and his coninement in Tartarus. Spring was replaced by the four seasons, requiring man to plough, sow and harvest in preparation for the hardships of winter. The Bronze Age saw men taking to arms, one against another; and inally the Iron Age completed the deterioration, producing conditions in which great evils prevailed. All the sins so well known to man at the present time were let loose upon the Earth. No man

82 trusted another and the Earth itself was ravaged in the selish pursuit of material wealth. Dante’s main image is probably derived from a combination of these ideas with those arising from the passage in Daniel in which Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. Daniel’s interpretation points to the deterioration that he prophesied would take place after the king’s reign had ended. It has already been noted how some thinkers have sought to make correspondences between the stages of progress towards human perfection, and the so-called cycles of history as represented by the ancients. The idea is that corrupted and sinful man needed to retrace his steps, as if climbing a ladder or stairway, to regain the original innocence and purity of the Golden Age; but with the added understanding of virtue gained from his experience of its opposite. The climb or ascent follows on from his descent, creating a u-shaped, arcing path. Also, perhaps, the statue represents the current state of man who, apart from his highest principle, appears damaged and, being at or near the bottom of the arc created by the cycles or ages, is very far from his original perfection. It is the distillation of man’s suffering and sin which, in Dante’s terms, produce the rivers of Hell. To follow the meaning further we must relect on why Dante chose to call the gigantic igure the old man of Crete. The bible furnishes the best answer. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans speaks of the death of the old man of sin, renewed to life in righteousness; and in Colossians he refers to the same renewal: “Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds;

And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him…” This renewal or, to use a Christian term, this conversion, is a central theme of the Commedia. And why the old man of Crete ? Crete was a symbol used by various old writers. It has had many meanings attached to it and these have sometimes been contradictory. It has at times represented the Island of the Blessed, because it was said to have been the place in which Zeus was nursed as a divine child. Sometimes it appears to stand for the Earth, an island, as the ancients conceived it, surrounded by Ocean. At other times, for example in the Aeneid, it has been igured as a type of the corrupted wilderness which once was chaste. Some consider that the contrasting images of the island may simply relect Crete’s decline as a political power and its defeat by Rome around the time of Virgil’s birth. Others say that it symbolised the general deterioration of the condition of mankind down through the cycles of history. While there may be truth in both of these perspectives, the very dissimilar treatments may also resound with a distant echo of the contrasting aspects of man’s lineage, with one aspect having its beginnings in paradise, and the other in a veritable wasteland of wickedness. The tension between the idea of Crete as a paradise and as a wilderness; the conlicting forces of Church and State; the contrast between man as he was in the Golden Age of innocence, and that of his present corrupted condition; these, and many other examples, build up in the Commedia a vision of the universal struggle of Goodness with its opposite. The angel and the beast in man, sacred scripture and heresy, virtue

84 and vice, righteousness and sin, sincerity and treason, followers of divine law and those who rebel, and so on, contend for sovereign power in every beating heart. It was a battle of life and death corresponding to that of the heavenly hosts and the battalions of Hell. This same opposition can be seen at times in Dante’s treatment of Florence and Rome. Rome was the sun-city on Earth, the established seat of higher, spiritual authority, an authority derived directly from the divine. In contrast, Florence was the great corrupted and corrupting centre of material wealth and power, a city which, as Ciacco had already revealed, had fallen prey to the infernal powers of pride and greed and envy. One of the characteristics of the Commedia – and perhaps of all such works - is its compression into a single motif, a character, an image or metaphor, several different levels of meaning. Many of the political elements in his work may be interpreted literally; but at the same time it is also possible, and indeed advisable, to explore too their metaphorical value and, where they exist, their various correspondences. As examples this may be true of the poem’s many references to Dante’s exile from Florence, and to his support for the White Geulphs in opposition to the Black Guelphs; and also more generally for his alignment with the Guelphs against the Ghibillines. Interpreted literally, the political inighting and conlict between these and other factions was a bloody and ruthless competition for material power and wealth. However the factions were also at one time or another broadly aligned either with the Pope or Emperor, with Church or with State.

Thus they could also stand for the apparent conlict between spiritual and material interests, as these manifested not only in Italian society, but, by way of correspondence, in man and in the cosmos itself. As such, at the same time as referencing the political and personal struggles of his Florentine life, they are also able to contribute to and strengthen Dante’s main underlying theme, which appears to be essentially allegorical, mystical and initiatory. Arturo: “While there may be some truth in all this, we must try to avoid an exclusively intellectual approach. The art which follows Nature carries seed-like truth from out of the darkness of the unknown into the light of human awareness. However, as it emerges into the realm proper to intellect it expands and multiplies in accordance with its inner qualities. Descending further it combines and clothes itself appropriate to each level of manifestation, generating new forms. There is no end to its expansions and enfoldments, nor to its modiications and distortions as each of its inner qualities are relected, and relected again and again until it becomes whatever it appears to be in the here and now; and, it should be said, without the original actuality losing any of the purity of its divine essence, true identity and unique spiritual qualities. Thus, in contrast to what it actually is, its appearance on the level of lower intellect is distorted, scattered and fragmented. Intellect perceives it not as it is but through the imperfect lens of its own particularity. Intellect or empiricism of the lower sort cannot - whatever it may tell itself - perceive, or even less, comprehend, that which actually is.” To return to our pilgrim and his guide: Dante and Virgil keep to the margins, travelling along a marble dyke between the waters and the

86 ire. They encounter a group of souls and among them Dante recognises Brunetto Latino, his former teacher. As one of the more obvious sources for the Commedia, Brunetto’s work, Tesoretto, or Little Treasure , also involved a wanderer lost in a wood of error, and a journey during which the wanderer was guided by the Goddess of Nature. Dante shows him respect and there is affection between the two. When questioned, Dante explains that he is returning home, guided by Virgil. Brunetto was a student of astrology and he predicts a bright destiny for Dante: "If you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach a glorious port, if I perceived well during sweet life; and if I had not died so early, seeing the heavens so kindly toward you I would have given you strength for the work.” Arturo: “Our guiding star is our own guardian angel, of which we have spoken before. It is the sovereign power and the true master of our destiny.” Dimitri: “The watcher from beyond is like an immense star, the light of which shines, steeply slanting, down through the realms, high and low, from beyond the great abyss of night, that softly breathing night which stretches out like a cloak of velvet across the sky and upon which all the lesser stars twinkle and licker with relected splendour. The ickle light of fortune shines by turns, good and bad, upon all our paths below; but the blazing star of destiny leads the voyager back to the safety of his home… if that mind listens to the whispered wisdom of his soul.” Dante and Brunetto speak of Florence, and Brunetto refers to the

87 bitter fate of the just man surrounded by those who would do him harm: “…and that is reasonable, for among the sour crab apples it is not itting that the sweet ig bear its fruit. Ancient fame in the world calls them blind; they are a people avaricious, envious, and proud: see that you keep yourself clean of their customs.” Almost all of the commentators agree that Dante considered Brunetto’s sin to be that of sodomy. However, the researchers have found no evidence that this was so as a literal or historical fact. It is perhaps more proitable therefore to explore its signiicance within Dante’s overall allegorical or ‘mystical’ scheme. Dante associates Brunetto’s condition in Hell with ire. This particular ire, as it operates in Dante’s scheme, engenders excruciating suffering in Hell; but later on in Purgatory it is identiied as a purifying and reining ire. Also, it is worth noting that Brunetto and the group to which he belongs are condemned to a state of continual unrest. Because they are infertile, the unions achieved by sodomites are considered by Dante to be at variance with the fecundity of Nature. If we consider sodomy as a lack of that which produces fruitfulness, we might also contrast and compare it to usury which generates excessive increase – both of which from Dante’s perspective are distortions of the virtuous middle way. From this point of view it is also possible to interpret Brunetto as the type of the infertile teacher, lacking the living spark of inspiration, unable to infuse his creation with spirit, incapable of imprinting the mind of his pupil with a genuine image of divine wisdom: incapable,

88 as it were, of stamping the coin with the true image of its maker. Dimitri: “How can we repay the true teacher? Where would we be without them? Like the sun of fruitfulness, increase and abundance are in their hands. They fetch clear waters and he who drinks thereof expands and grows and multiplies. As the bull is father to the calf, so the teacher is father to the pupil, and the maestro is the father of the performer. O Son of God we send forth our thanks to thee, the chosen servant of the Lord. Wise husbandman, you sow the golden seed. Behold, there is a silvery sheen upon the dewy blossom, and soon enough the fruits of thy labours shall hang heavy upon the bough.” When compared to the words of the genuine article perhaps Brunetto’s works on treasure did not confer the living gold, the treasure of the heart which brings forth joy. For without the higher light of inspiration all that remains is the counterfeit coin on which is stamped the image of little self. We must endeavour to keep these two – the treasure and the counterfeit coin - separate and in their appropriate place, or as Brunetto says, we must keep the goat from the grass. We must not let the beasts of Florence touch the plant of Rome. “… let them not touch the plant, if any still sprout in their manure, in which may live again the holy seed of the Romans who remained there when that nest of so much malice was built.” The importance of protecting the treasure from that which is corruptible is in one sense at least, reinforced by a reference to the race at Verona. Dante describes Brunetto running to rejoin his tragic companions like: “…one of those who at Verona race for the green cloth across the

89 ields; and of those he seemed the one who wins, not the one who loses.” Boccaccio relates that at Verona there was once a festival which included a race between naked men for a green cloth. Only the fastest runners entered the race. In some quarters the colour green has been associated with Life. The metaphorical relevance of the allusion to the race and its place here is perhaps clariied by Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians: “Know you not that they that run in the race, all run indeed, but one receiveth the prize? So run that you may obtain. And every one that striveth for the mastery, refraineth himself from all things: and they indeed that they may receive a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible one. I therefore so run, not as at an uncertainty: I so ight, not as one beating the air: But I chastise my body, and bring it into subjection: lest perhaps, when I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway.” Arturo: “Remember, Dimitri, victory in the contest here discussed does not at any stage entail the cruelties of asceticism. It is a perfectly natural and humane process.” Dante and Virgil are approached by three sinners who recognise Dante’s Florentine clothes. When they come closer the pair notice how the sinners move in a peculiar way to form a circle: “As is the custom of wrestlers, naked and oiled, spying out their holds and their advantage before they come to blows and wounds: so they wheeled, and each kept his face toward me, so that their necks made a constant motion contrary to their feet”. They were when living Florentine noblemen. One of them likens his

90 fate to being placed on a cross, echoing the death of Christ. Dante expresses sadness at their plight. He explains to them that “… I am leaving the bitter and seek the sweet fruit promised me by my truthful leader; but irst I must plunge as far as the centre." They ask of conditions in Florence and Dante exclaims: “New men, and sudden wealth, have created pride and excess in you, Florence, so that you already weep for it.” They ask Dante to speak of them to the people if he manages to escape Hell and “go back to see the beautiful stars.” Dante’s intention to ‘plunge as far as the centre’ is one of a number of igures of speech and images in this canto that bring to mind either a steep descent or sudden, far-reaching penetration. It is dificult not to feel that they to some degree refer to a going within, or an attempt to reach the centre of himself. Augustine advised that we must ‘descend in order to ascend’ , and while it’s clear that he meant that we must descend from pride to humility before we can make the so- called mystical ascent, it may be that humility sometimes accompanies a new found understanding of ourselves as we are, rather than as we would like to believe we are. When in spate the river Acquacheta – a name meaning quiet waters - plunges in a single deafening cataract over a steep alpine cliff to the valley below. In doing so, Dante notes, it loses its name. Of course, though its outer appearance changes, its conditions alter and it acquires a new name, the essence of the river remains what it always was. Virgil takes a cord from Dante which he had wound around himself like a belt or girdle. Such a cord is to the Christian mystic a sign that

91 the wearer has undergone a conversion. He casts it like a plummet into the darkness of the chasm below in order to lure the monster Geryon up to the surface. Geryon responds. Dante, full with fear, sees the monster rise up from the deeps: “… through that thick dark air, a igure come swimming upward, fearful to the most conident heart, as one returns who at times goes down to release an anchor caught on a rock or other thing hidden in the sea, and reaches upward as he draws in his feet.” As if to remind us that we are here, at least in one sense, following the course of the sun, two others mentioned in this part of Dante’s poem, Icarus and Phaeton, plunged to their deaths as a result of their inability to maintain, at the point of greatest danger, the moderate and balanced course, the true course, the middle way, the way of virtue. One lew too close to the sun; the other veered off course in an unsuccessful attempt to steer the chariot of the sun. Some writers maintain that both fell into water: Icarus into what is now called the Icarian Sea; and Phaeton into the River Eridanus. Dante records that at this point his fear surpassed even theirs. Echoing his own confession that he had ‘ abandoned the true way’ , Dante has Icarus’ father Daedalus issue an urgent warning to his son as disaster approached: “Nor when the wretched Icarus his lanks Felt stripped of feathers by the melting wax, His father crying, ‘An ill way thou takest’!” In contrast, Hercules travelled across the deep in a golden sun-cup in order to slay the three-bodied Geryon and retrieve the red cows which until then had been grazing alongside the cattle of Hades. Descents into the world or the underworld in order to rescue, to

92 retrieve, to overcome, or to remove an impediment of some sort are plentiful in the myths. Ascents in the other direction are also common. The means by which ascent or descent is achieved often differ of course, and in Geryon it is perhaps possible to detect a distorted, infernal undertone of Pegasus. In common with its original mythical character, Dante’s version of Geryon is also tripartite: part man, part beast and part reptile. He has the face of a kind man, outwardly benign; his two paws are hairy to the armpits; and the rest of his body has the form of a serpent, with a long tail at the forked end of which is a poisonous sting like that of a scorpion. He brings to mind the Leviathan of Enoch. "Behold the monster with the pointed tail, Who cleaves the hills, and breaketh walls and weapons, Behold him who infecteth all the world." It is also dificult to ignore the echoing call of Revelation: “And the beast, which I saw, was like to a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion. And the dragon gave him his own strength, and great power… And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them. And power was given him over every tribe, and people, and tongue, and nation.” Dante explicitly identiies the Geryon of the Commedia as the representation of deceit, or as most translate it, fraud: the opposite of truth and sincerity. He describes the torso of the beast as “… painted with knots and little wheels: with more colours, in weave and embroidery, did never Tartars nor Turks make cloths, nor did Arachne string the loom for such tapestries.”

93 Ovid tells how Arachne put herself in competition with Minerva. Both were skilled in embroidery. Minerva used her artistry to make a tapestry depicting the twelve gods in their majesty, with Jupiter in royal aspect in the centre. Her tapestry shows Neptune striking the rock out of which a spring of water lowed. She herself strikes the Earth with her spear causing her own tree to spring up: the olive, thick with fruit, the tree of peace. She also depicted many of the great achievements of the gods, and their victories over various presumptuous or over-ambitious humans. Arachne on the other hand portrayed with equal skill the gods’ deceptions, crimes and acts of treachery. She showed a deceitful Jupiter and Neptune taking on various forms to trick the objects of their desires. She painted Europa deceived and Leda raped. Phoebus was depicted in many forms – a hawk, a lion, or in that of a shepherd when he tricked Isse. She illustrated how Bacchus ensnared Erigone with false grapes, and how Saturn in the form of a horse begot Chiron. The interaction of the elements, their loves, their wars, their combinations, permutations and amalgamations, their mixing and separation: on one level at least, these are often the subject matter of the myths – just as they are in the Commedia. Minerva began to attack Arachne so iercely that she hung herself with a cord. However the goddess brought her back to life, transforming her into a spider. Beware the spinner of deceitful webs and the setter of deadly traps. Dante describes how Geryon beaches itself half on and half off the edge of the abyss as boats are sometimes laid upon the shore, or as a beaver sometimes plants itself for war.

94 Now we ind out why Dante needed to ‘plunge as far as to the centre’ before rising to the heights of the holy hill. Free will was given to us in order that we may make choices between good and bad. These however cannot be truly informed choices without experience and understanding. Virgil sends Dante to speak with a small group of sinners who had gathered nearby: “Then said to me the Master: ‘So that full Experience of this round thou bear away, Now go and see what their condition is’.” Dante was where he was in order to experience and understand the reasons for the varied conditions of the many kinds of men. Arturo: “Although for almost all some culpability is inevitable, this does not mean that in order to advance it is necessary that in each life we must ourselves seek out all the sins and crimes to which men are prone. We must know and understand our selves of course, and appreciate our potentials as best we can; but is it not also inevitable that the intelligent man gathers to himself wide experience of life and of the many kinds of men he encounters on the way?” So Dante, guided by Virgil, was gathering experience and, as best he could, an understanding of the causes and consequences of error and sin. He speaks with a group of moneylenders. Drawing on a range of sources including the Bible, Aristotle, Aquinas and Francis of Assisi, Dante placed usurers far down in Hell. The pursuit of disproportionate wealth and riches was considered by him one of the great vanities of life; and that the charging of extortionate interest in order to enrich oneself was in opposition to the intended pattern of Nature. As we have noted, for Dante usury and sodomy occupy the extremes

95 of excess and deiciency in contrast to the virtuous mean represented by Nature’s fruitfulness. Nature channels and directs the fullness of its possessions. In accordance with divine will it brings them to perfection; but also restrains them and subjects them to justice and to law. Arturo: “Be assured Dimitri, however ardent, however strong our will, however radiant or beautiful the objects of our desire, we shall never ind lasting happiness or true peace until we ind our treasure in God.” There are images of bestiality. The sinners are described as tormented by the falling lakes of ire like dogs are by the biting lies of summer. Each sinner has a bag or pouch around his neck. “And thereupon it seems their eyes are feeding.” On each bag is depicted the sinner’s heraldic coat of arms: a lion, a pregnant sow, a goose. They are expecting another to join them soon whose purse will show three goats. The episode is brought to a close by one of the sinners sticking out his tongue to lick his nose: “Here he twisted his mouth and stuck out his tongue, like an ox licking its snout.” The usurers’ selish enrichment by unfair means, driven by an unhealthy obsession with material wealth, is positioned in Dante’s Inferno on the very edge of the circle of deceit and fraud. Dante returns to his guide to ind Virgil already on Geryon’s back. Full with fear and thankful for Virgil’s protection from its poisonous tail, Dante too climbs on the beast’s back and they make the slow, perilous, spiralling descent. In contrast to the descent, when reaching the bottom Geryon departs from them as swiftly as an arrow.

96 They have arrived at the threshold of Malebolge, the eighth circle. It is a malign place which Dante says is built of stone the colour of iron, the same colour as the great cliffs which on all sides surround it. He describes the structure as consisting of ten circular ditches at the centre of which is a pit or well. “Right in the middle of the ield malign There yawns a well exceeding wide and deep,” He compares the layout to that produced by the circular defensive moats which sometimes radiate concentrically from and around a castle. A series of footbridges enable progress from one ring to the next. They make their way to the left. They encounter two sets of sinners, panders and seducers, being driven in opposite directions by horned devils wielding whips. A pander refers to an intermediary or go-between who enables or encourages, often through deceitful means, an unhealthy or unlawful union. Some modern translations use the term ’pimp’. The pander’s motivation is usually a hoped for reward from the one who employs their services. In a certain kind of literature this is typically a low and corrupt man who desires an innocent maiden. Under normal circumstances such a union might well be avoided. However through the trickery, persuasion and fraudulent representations of the pander – often someone who has her conidence - the maiden is deceived and the seduction is secured. Such an intermediary must know the limitations and weaknesses of their victims, exploiting their human frailties in such a manner as to deliver their prey into the hands of their employer. Thus through the cunning duplicity of a wicked intermediary an inexperienced maiden can be duped into a dangerous and vicious

97 association, a tragic liaison, an entrapment which the victim often inds dificult to escape. Arturo: “An unfortunate triple aspect indeed. And likewise the unwary are seduced by the lower ones at almost every turn. But though the victims suffer, in their dreamlike state they often fail to realise their predicament.” Venedico Caccianemico is among the panders. His greed and political ambitions are said to have led him to deliver his sister Ghisolabella into the hands of an unnamed nobleman, believed by some to have been the marquis of Ferrara, Obizzo II d’Este. Vendico confesses his crime to Dante. The mythical hero Jason is seen among the seducers because it was said that he seduced and abandoned Medea and the pregnant Hypsipyle. Dante likens the way in which the two sets of sinners are kept apart to the crowd control measures imposed on pilgrims in Rome during Jubilee year. Those crossing the Bridge of Angels in one direction were kept separate from those going in the opposite direction. In a variation of the Rome - Florence axis, the pilgrimage from the physical heart of Rome, the centre of imperial power, across the bridge to the Vatican, representative of the heavenly city of the sun, was perhaps a relection of Dante’s own pilgrimage. According to the Book of Leviticus, during the time of the Jubilee Hebrew slaves and prisoners would be freed, debts would be forgiven, and the mercies of God would be made manifest. The Jubilee came after seven circulations or cycles. “And thou shalt sanctify the iftieth year, and shalt proclaim remission to all the inhabitants of thy land: for it is the year of jubilee. Every man

98 shall return to his possession, and every one shall go back to his former family.” Much later the divine mercy associated with the Jubilee was connected to the granting of papal indulgences. The Church’s remission of sins in this way was considered to be no less than an expression of the redemptive power of Christ, made manifest on Earth by his chosen bishop, the Pope. Pope Boniface declared the irst so-called Jubilee year in 1300 A.D., just as Dante was writing the Commedia. Boniface decreed that all those who made the pilgrimage to Rome during that year were promised remission. Not surprisingly, pilgrims from across the Christian world locked to Rome. The inner meaning of the Jubilee, of the pilgrimage to Rome, and of the forgiveness of sins by the grace of God, were as little understood in Dante’s time as they are now. Dimitri: “Lo, the song of joy, heaven’s call, victory proclaimed, the trumpet blast of liberty, when we all shall return to our own possession and place, happy among our own kin; and the redeemer, Christ, Lord of life and light, shall reign for the Ages of the Ages. Let the slave be freed from the illusion of his fetters; let his debts be dissolved; let the penitent’s transgressions be forgiven, as if they never were. The trumpet sounds at last, calling the wanderer home, like the wandering son returning from the sins of a wicked world to the gardens divine of paradise, and to the open arms of his father who throughout the cycles of separation has patiently waited with forgiveness in his heart.” The next bolgia, ditch or ring contained the latterers. Flattery is another of the weapons in the arsenal of the deceitful. In Dante’s Hell

the latterers’ organs of light and life are assailed by mould: The margins were incrusted with a mould By exhalation from below, that sticks there, And with the eyes and nostrils wages war. They are immersed in human excrement. The next of them contained the simonists. Simony involves the exchange for material reimbursement those things which are properly spiritual. As a term it is derived from the legendary magician Simon Magus. The Acts of the Apostles, as well as later writings, contains reference to his powers. Many of the Christian accounts represent him as a sorcerer whose arrogance and ambition led him to oppose the divine will – an act of hubris which, as ever, resulted in a fall. However, because he was said by them to have offered the apostles money in return for the secret of laying on by hands and other powers of the Holy Spirit, he is in the Inferno the type of those who buy and sell sacred things. In Dante’s time corruption was widespread in the Church and the buying and selling of holy orders was common. The popes often sought to enrich themselves in this way and gathered to themselves great wealth and territory. Consequently Dante places a number of them in this ‘pouch’ of Hell. Simony of this sort appears to be for Dante a direct consequence of the tragic descent of the corrupted Church, a descent which leads it to become embroiled in temporal affairs, which leads it to the negation of its higher reason, and which ultimately inverts the purposes of the divine will. As has already been noticed, the Church, and that to which it corresponds, ought not to be motivated by a desire to accrue

100 material wealth and temporal power. On the contrary, its task was to encourage and enable men to live their lives in accordance with divine law, with the received wisdom of its prophets, with the courage of its martyrs, and with the holy example of its saints. In Dante’s view, men with a high-born mission who fall prey to simony in this way – like some of the popes and clergy of his time - prostitute the spiritual powers entrusted to them. They, like the unfaithful and corrupted bride, share an unholy bed with worldly ambition, with greed for material riches, and with low and selish desires of many different kinds. Here, Dante inds the condition of man to be inverted. The sinners are placed head irst in holes in the loor, and the soles of their feet are on ire. Dante compares the holes to those used in the rite of baptism at San Giovanni, a baptistery in Florence. In doing so perhaps he implies that the scene he encounters in this part of Hell is an infernal inversion of the holy sacrament of baptism, a rite, according to Matthew, of water and of ire. I indeed baptise you in the water unto penance, but he that shall come after me, is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear; he shall baptise you in the Holy Ghost and ire. The tongues of lames burning the sinners’ feet: “Even as the lame of unctuous things is wont To move upon the outer surface only” is also reminiscent of the Pentecost’s ‘parted tongues of lames’ , representative of the Holy Spirit. Dante’s allusion to oil or unction in describing the way in which the lames appeared to loat above the surface of the sinners’ feet is

101 another example of the many undertones and reversals scattered throughout the Inferno. The original, before its inverted transposition in the hells of the Inferno, refers to a subject which is not easy to communicate. It relates to the infant who reaches manhood. Dimitri: “O thou son of heaven, beautiful one, in thy infancy you were but a little child in thy mother’s arms. But lo, thou hast become keeper of the snowy locks! Thy forehead glistens with the mystic oil, golden in the light of the rising sun at springtime. Gone is the blood- red sky of the dying day. Gone is winter’s night. The new day cometh! Let the lyre play; let the singers sing; and let the dancers dance the dance of dawn before thee. Thou hast drawn out from the horn of oil the living waters of Euphrates. The grace of God descends swift upon thy heart. A steeply slanting ray ills all thy paths with life and joy. O risen son of light, thou art anointed with the pistic ointment of the Father. The Word of God, even Christ, hath put olive and balsam upon thee. Blest art thou. Rejoice, for thou art man; rejoice, for thou art Man. Raise thyself. Put on thy vestment of ire and splendour and serve the Lord thy God.” Apart from Simon Magus and his followers, Jason is also there. This Jason however was not he of the Argonauts, but was the usurping brother of the high priest Onias. He was said to have bought the high priesthood of Jerusalem for four hundred and forty pieces of silver. Arturo: “Such transactions involve some of the most foolish of men. The true sacred ofices, by their very nature, cannot be bought and sold for money. Of course low men may be successful for a time in fooling the gullible in order to enrich themselves, but eventually they themselves are proven to have been deceived, for such are damned

102 by their own greed in the end. They are among the go-betweens, the intermediaries between unwary men and the lower powers. They have the mark of the lower ones on them; and, when all is said and done, it is the lower ones who shall claim them. Shun them, Dimitri. Shun them.” Dante compares the corrupt and avaricious Church with the harlot of the Apocalypse: “…she who sitteth upon many waters To fornicate with kings…” Virgil helps Dante return to the path and they move on to the next bolgia or ring in the circle of Malebolge. Here are contained the soothsayers, diviners, augers, astrologers, magicians, casters of spells and so on. Or perhaps one should say that this part of Dante’s Hell contains those who in some way or another corrupt such endeavours with deception and fraud. They are the false prophets, the deceivers and the fraudsters. Their false and superstitious claims to have higher knowledge distinguish them from the true prophets whose wisdom is the result of divine revelation. For most of the commentators this section of the Inferno is mainly about the much-rehearsed predestination versus freewill debate, a debate which even today is still far from being settled. The sinners in this bolgia are processing slowly on the curving path below. Their heads are twisted to face backwards, denying them foresight. Their anguished tears low not from their cheeks to their chests, but down their backs to the cleft in their buttocks just below the base of the spine. Their condition appears so horribly distorted that they bring Dante to tears, for which he is rebuked by Virgil.

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Virgil points out various examples of men and women of the ancient past who, it is claimed, had sinned in this way. Included among them is the prophet Tiresias. He was made blind by Hera, but given the gift of prophecy by Jupiter. It was said of him that he was a hermaphrodite; and that on striking a pair of conjoined snakes with his rod he became female. After a cycle of seven years the snakes were struck again and Tiresias was again transformed, manifesting once more as a male. Arturo: “Be assured Dimitri that the original meaning of this had nothing to do with a change of sex.” Already in the Inferno Dante has had cause to reference Hecate, wife and queen of Pluto, and a goddess of the moon; and there are in these cantos further intriguing lunar allusions. For example there is a reference to Aruns the soothsayer “who made his home in the hills of Luni” a place in Northern Italy founded by the Romans. Its original name was Luna – the Roman goddess of the moon. Perhaps the lunar echoes, although still audible, are more distant in the description of Manto, the daughter of Tiresias. Unusually, and signiicantly, she is referred to twice in the Commedia: once here in Malebolge, and again later when Dante is in Purgatory. Virgil provides a detailed account of the founding of his birthplace, Mantua. After the death of Tiresias, Manto is said to have left Thebes and wandered through many lands before settling to “practice her art” in a swampy, malarial wilderness unsuitable for tilling. Here she gave birth to a son, Ocnus, and established a settlement which, “over her dead bones” , was to become Mantua. The long passage is usually considered as a digression, a side-glance

104 or departure, with most interpreters focusing on the discrepancies between Virgil’s account in the Inferno of Mantua’s origins (which is of course Dante’s account), and that provided by Virgil in the Aeneid. Later, in the Purgatorio, Manto, or someone with the same name, is referred to again, but is there said to reside in Limbo, as one of the so-called virtuous pagans: one of those who, while not without virtue, had not been baptised and so did not know Christ. In contrast to the Manto spoken of in the Purgatorio, in the Inferno she is depicted as a wandering prophetess, a harsh virgin who plies her trade in a swampy wilderness. Like the other sinners, she has her head twisted at the neck, so that her loosened hair falls not down her back, but down over her breasts. Her wandering connects her to the moon. Now, all the planets have been at some time or another depicted as wanderers as they make their way across the heavens. However, the wanderer par excellence is the moon, forever fated to circle the Earth. Also, and although it may seem a far stretch to some, Dante’s reference to her long hair, “her loosened tresses”, is also signiicant, connecting her again to the moon, and to its veiled goddess. The lunar allusions are only strengthened when we remember that this bolgia is one which is “bathed with anguished tears”. Taken together these make of her a kind of lower-octave, distorted echo of the biblical sinner who anointed the feet of Christ with her tears and wiped them with her hair. Tracing the biblical episode back to the Ancient Egyptian Ritual, Gerald Massey links this woman to Isis or to Hathor who, the Egyptians said, prepared Osiris for his burial and subsequent rebirth in the place of re-establishing beneath the tresses of her hair.

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“And it is here, beneath the hair of Hathor-Meri, they perfume and anoint Osiris for his burial.” After identifying several more of the soothsayers, ancient and modern, Virgil signals that it is time to push on. There is a hint that their progress is in some way connected to or superintended by the moon which, as Virgil points out to Dante, is setting on the western horizon, between the waters and the land. A well-known medieval tradition depicts the so-called man-in-the- moon as Cain carrying on his back a faggot of thorn sticks. As the bible relates, Cain murdered his righteous brother Abel, and so was exiled, far from the face of God, to wander in the land of Nod. This name Nod means restlessness and wandering ; and as a location it was sometimes represented, so far as the early church fathers were concerned, as a desert land full of wild beasts. Augustine would go on to refer to it as a place beset with carnal desires. Virgil relates to Dante that there was a full moon during the previous night, which now is setting. Some have calculated that this signiies that it is now the morning of Holy Saturday. For now doth Cain with fork of thorns conine On either hemisphere, touching the wave Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight The moon was round. Virgil reminds Dante that the moon helped him during his time in the dark wood, although some translators prefer to moderate this to the recognition that “she did not harm you” . This has also been somewhat puzzling to the commentators, for as they note, no mention is made of the moon in Dante’s account of his wanderings in the wood. But the moon is many different things to the many kinds of men; and

106 though unseen, the moon was indeed present, interceding from afar out of love and mercy, providing holy guidance and assistance to the pilgrim once he was ready and able to make further progress. On another level, there was a Christian tradition going back to Augustine which associates the moon with knowledge, contrasting its light to that of the divine wisdom of the sun. From this point of view, the moon was present in the form of Virgil’s knowledge, which certainly helped Dante in the gloomy wood. Also, perhaps other lunar aspects, albeit of a very different kind, were also present in the form of the wild creatures which did not harm him, but barred his way. Arturo: “And neither should it be forgotten that at the appointed hour the great goddess of dawn, daughter of the heavenly pair, manifests at the point which separates darkness from light, night from day, moon from sun. Though in the underworlds it is the moon and not the sun which holds sway; or as Dante has it in Singleton’s version: “… holds the conines Of both the hemispheres,” Because the moon’s orb continually appears to ‘die’ only to reappear in the night sky after three days, it has since very ancient times, been associated with birth, death and re-birth. However, men have attached countless other meanings to it and to the sun also; and these symbols will need to be revisited many times before the fullness of their true signiicance is clear. This is particularly so if we wish to understand their roles as they relate to the journey undertaken by Dante’s pilgrim and his guide.” Dimitri: “O thou wanderer, lost in the wasted world, exiled seeker of

107 the true way, thy moon-illed dreams of deceit and fraud direct thy ever restless steps away from the all-illuminating sun. See how her watery light falls aslant the noxious glooms of guilt and sin. Lo, how thy tears fall hot and fast upon all her shadowed paths. O Queen of Heaven, Moon of Mercy, intercede on his behalf. O Throne of Light and Life, Belovéd of the Lord, hear my prayer. Bring to thy son the ray of hope, for he is lost in the dark wood. O thou Nurse of Nature, Holy Mother of the Holy Mysteries, come to thy pilgrim’s aid, anoint thou his head, wash clean his feet, for beneath the dusky coverings of thy planetary veils he treads the thorny path to Paradise.” Moving on across the bridge to the ifth bolgia they see boiling pitch below which Dante likens to the pitch sometimes seen in ports or shipyards when ships are being repaired, or readied to set sail. “…heated not by ire but by God's art, a thick pitch boiled there that clung to the banks on every side.” Some early bible commentators considered the pitch that held together Noah’s Ark to be a metaphor for the love that held together the Church. In this part of Dante’s Hell however, it is instrumental in the tortures endured by those whose sinful lives had sought to sever such holy bonds. Throughout this circle Dante uses a lot of military allusions. This was the ring of the Barrators: those corrupt oficials who accepted or, even worse, demanded bribes – worse because by doing so they actively involved others in their fraud and deceit. They were the secular equivalent of the Simonists seen earlier in the third ring. Some modern translators use the American term ‘grafters’ instead of barrators.

108

Virgil sounds the alarm as a devil rushes towards them. He has a sinner slung over his shoulder, hooked by his claws in the manner of a butcher carrying the carcass of a slaughtered animal. Some have seen in this a grotesque parody of the very ancient image of the Good Shepherd carrying a lamb across his shoulders. The devil throws the sinner from the bridge into the boiling pitch. He loats face down with arms outstretched, inviting comparisons with the Cruciixion. He is poked by the devils until he is submerged like meat is prodded in the liquor by cooks. They compare his buttocks, black with pitch, to the Santo Volto or Holy Face , which is an ebony carving of the Christ Cruciied in the city of Lucca. Lucca is a name derived from Luk meaning marsh , denoting the transition from water to land. The devils who superintend this circle are the Malebranche , a name meaning Evil Claws . They patrol the bank and each time a sinner breaks the surface of the pitch in search of relief they are viciously hooked by them and cruelly tormented. Dante provides many of the devils’ names. They threaten the travellers, but their leader Malacoda is crestfallen when informed by Virgil that their journey is willed from Heaven – or at least he appears crestfallen, for we must remember that we are in the circle of deception. Nevertheless, they remain threatening and Dante remains fearful. Malacoda informs them that the next bridge is broken and so they will have to travel further on to another if they wish reach the next bolgia. They are told: “Yesterday, ive hours later than this hour, One thousand and two hundred sixty-six Years were complete, that here the way was broken.”

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As it is now the morning of Holy Saturday Malacoda is implying that the bridge had been destroyed during the harrowing of Hell by Christ following His cruciixion on Good Friday A.D. 34. He suggests that the travellers accompany a squad of devils who will show them to the next bridge, and assures them that they will not be harmed. He directs ten of the devils led by Barbariccia. Dante is suspicious, but is reassured by Virgil. They leave as the devils give their leader an obscene salute, which he answers by loudly breaking wind. Throughout the Malebranche episode the mood is ambiguous. The devils are malevolent and violently cruel, but at the same time the tone is also often comical and there are elements of farce. Much of the action seems to draw on the bawdy, vulgar humour typical of some of the popular plays of the time. Arturo: “It is well known among those of wide experience that there is a certain variety of man who, inluenced by exudations from the lower realms, combines in his character chilling maliciousness and cruelty with absurd, almost comical, buffoonery.” The two travellers accompany the squad of devils along the bank towards the next bridge. Sinners, seeking brief respite from the boiling pitch, are likened to dolphins, otters and frogs. One of them lingers above the surface too long and is hooked by a devil and pulled clear of the pitch. Virgil speaks with the sinner to learn of his sins. He admits that instead of serving his lord and king during his time at court he practised the sin of barratry. He reveals, perhaps to explain his vice, that he was the product of his mother’s unfortunate union with a wastrel of a man: “For she had borne me to a ribald knave, Destroyer of himself and of his things.”

109 Arturo: “How swiftly the many kinds of men forget the dark and dangerous unions of their long and chequered past. How short the dimly shining ray of the lesser eye; and how far-reaching the illuminating beam of the higher self. But such memories come only to those who can bear their burdens. For the rest, thanks be for the mercies of God.” True to his character the sinner deceives the devils by offering to trick seven more of his fellow sinners to the surface in return for his freedom. The devils are suspicious but agree. However, as soon as he is released the sinner escapes and plunges beneath the surface like a duck avoiding the talons of a hawk. This prompts fury among the devils and two of them - Alichino and Calcabrina - come to blows, ighting above the pitch like two hawks. They tumble into the boiling liquid. Dante and Virgil, fearing for their own safety, depart hastily as the devils attempt to rescue their two stricken companions. The episode brings to Dante’s mind the fable of the mouse and frog. While there are various versions, it tells of a mouse who wishes to cross the river. A frog pretends to offer assistance, and so the mouse is duly tied to the amphibian. However, during the crossing the frog attempts to drown its helpless victim. The mouse is saved when a hawk swoops down and snatches them. It frees the mouse and eats the frog. There has been much discussion about the relevance of the fable. However, as well as illustrating how evil intent contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, perhaps the fable also suggests an adventure not so dissimilar in outline to that of Dante’s own. Dante then expresses to Virgil his fear that the enraged Malebranche

110 will pursue them as swiftly and mercilessly as a dog pursues a leveret. His concerns are transmitted to Virgil’s mind quicker than a mirror relects an image. They are in an instant of one mind. Just as the pair feared, the devils appear close by and are intent on doing them harm. Virgil picks up Dante as hastily as a mother scoops up her child to escape a burning house. They slide down the ditch to the next bolgia with more speed than that with which water lows through the mill’s sluice. Above them the devils arrive, but the travellers are safe: “…for the high Providence that placed them as ministers of the ifth ditch takes from them all power to leave it.” Next are the hypocrites. When they were living, those guilty of hypocrisy hid the ulterior motives of their true, base nature beneath their pretended righteousness and sincerity. Consequently they are in Hell compelled to suffer the weight of their sin by wearing a thinly gilded, leaden, hooded cloak. “A painted people there below we found, Who went about with footsteps very slow, Weeping and in their semblance tired and vanquished. They had on mantles with the hoods low down Before their eyes, and fashioned of the cut That in Cologne they for the monks are made. Without, they gilded are so that it dazzles; But inwardly all leaden and so heavy That Frederick used to put them on of straw. O everlastingly fatiguing mantle!” This image involves a clear alchemical reference, and there will be reason to notice more of that subject further on. It is enough here to

111 mention that Dante appears to restrict his condemnation of the art to the charlatans who sought to deceive the gullible into parting with their money. Although there is little or no evidence in the Commedia that Dante believed in genuine alchemy, there is so among the writings of some of his intellectual mentors. The reference to the monks of Cologne is explained by their adopted fashion of wearing sumptuous hooded cloaks. And according to some of his enemies Frederick II used to encase his victims in lead before roasting them. During his passage through this part of Hell Dante makes various allusions to the Cruciixion. So heavy are the leaden cloaks that they cause the sinners’ “balances to creak”. Dante speaks with two sinners, Catalano and Loderingo. They admit that when living their ofice was tasked with keeping the peace and reconciling the opposing factions of Florentine political life; but their even-handedness was but a show. Secretly they were all the while in the employ of a corrupted Pope intent on sowing the seeds of discord between the various spiritual and temporal seats of Florentine power. The hypocrites Caiaphas and Annas, along with others who condemned Christ to his death appear naked and cruciied, bound to the ground by three stakes. As the members of what Dante calls “the college of miserable hypocrites” slowly process, they walk over the cruciied Pharisees, who are thus compelled to bear the crushing weight of their companions. Dante’s use of the term college here is meant to emphasise the brotherhood of sin that binds together the miserable inhabitants of Hell. The hypocrites’ true condition is in contrast to the bonds of love and harmony they pretended to foster during their time among the living.

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Virgil questions the sinners on the subject of the bridge to the next bolgia and Catalano informs him that Malacoda had lied, for all the bridges had been destroyed. He refers to the leader of the devils as “…a liar and the father of lies.” Most commentators consider this to be one of many hints by Dante that however much affection Dante has for him, Virgil, or perhaps what Virgil represents, has his limitations. There follows a beautiful passage which contains echoes of something very high, and which cannot easily be put into words. It is on the surface an extended simile which compares the changeability of the natural world with the changing mood of Dante’s guide as he realises he has been duped. It points to the illusions, the false appearances and uncertainties amid which men spend their days of hope and despair; and also to the illusions and deceptions conjured up by the artists of many different kinds. However Dante masterfully weaves the threads to create something which from the perspective of intellect has the appearance of a supplementary tonal ‘atmosphere’; but in fact embodies an essence which disdains to put its feet upon unholy ground. Dimitri: “Behold! The iery lion embraces the bearer of heavenly waters; and the child with dew upon his hair and a lame within his heart is born amid the wastes of the wide, wide world. Let us then, you and I, here in the wilderness of the world, come together in celebration. Let us drink this holy wine, and eat this holy bread in the presence of the Lord. Manhu! The hidden bread, like the whispered word that hovers above the illuminated pen, bringeth the mind to fullness. It is sweet and mighty in equal measure, like unto honeycomb and lour and the

113 seeds of the coriander. Manhu! The lifeblood and juice of the tree of life lows from the winepress of the world, and it taketh the mind to paradise. Lo, how the cares and pleasures of a dreaming world melt away like hoar frosts beneath the warming rays of selless love. But the blessings of the higher regions melteth not, for they are the everlasting treasures of God, He who is the fount of light and life eternal. Worry not. Fear not. Trust not in the father of lies; but put thy trust instead in God, and keep it forever in the safety of thy purse. For beyond the rainbow of hope we shall ind pasture in the green meadow fed by the splashing stream. And there we shall be safeguarded beneath the watchful eye of him who is our shepherd. And when we have said and done what must be said and done he shall lead us to the fold and to the shelter of our home.” Dante, pushed and guided from behind by Virgil, makes the exhausting climb up the steep slope of the ditch. They grapple their way “from jag to jag” and from one to another of the great stones that once formed the now ruined bridge. On reaching the top Dante is fatigued and completely out of breath. Virgil warns Dante against sloth, and tells him that there are yet steeper climbs ahead. “And therefore raise thee up, o'ercome the anguish With spirit that o'ercometh every battle, If with its heavy body it sink not.” Arturo: “Sometimes there comes a time in a man or woman’s life when they feel compelled to make a choice between a path which might take them to virtue’s light, and another which ends in wickedness and sin. The former is a steep climb and not without its

114 dificulties. It requires effort, and cannot be accomplished by the lazy; for there is nothing good which is not earned. The latter is easy and requires no effort at all. Indeed the path followed by the lazy is one of minimum resistance, and already inclines downwards to less and still less favourable conditions. Each of us is completely free to choose between these two. Such things are often dismissed as commonplace by the unready. However, do not be misled Dimitri, for if interpreted right, things of considerable importance to us lie concealed beneath this and other such ‘commonplace’ ideas.” The next bolgia of Malebolge contains the thieves. Dante’s representation of theft is in part – for it is much more also - an allusion to the original theft recorded in the Christian version of the Garden of Eden. It involves a vision of serpents and sinners: “And I beheld therein a terrible throng Of serpents… Among this cruel and most dismal throng People were running naked and affrighted. Without the hope of hole or heliotrope.” While its main theme is that of transformation of various types, this section is another that contains plenty of references to ire and blood. The mere memory of the serpents is said by Dante to spoil’ or curdle his blood. According to Christian tradition, relecting as it so often did much older beliefs and superstitions, the desert was a place in which were found monsters of many kinds. It was particularly associated with serpents. It was irst formed, the old Greek storytellers say, when

115 Perseus was lying over the Sahara with the Gorgon’s head, and drops of blood fell from it to poison the ground below. In contrast, the heliotrope, a stone also known in olden times as the bloodstone, was said by Christians to have been formed when drops of Christ’s blood fell from his side during the Cruciixion. Presumably its connection with blood arose because the predominantly green stone has specks of red in it. It is consequently said to staunch the low of blood from a wound. Dr Fernie has also recorded its associations with long life. Signiicantly, the ancient Greeks and Romans wore it as a charm against the bite of venomous snakes; and their athletes believed that it would bring them victory in the games. It was believed to derive its various magical powers from the sun, as indicated by helio in the makeup of its name. In the 13th century Albertus Magnus, a writer well known to Dante, recollected some of the old beliefs about it, and asserted that, in combination with its herbal counterpart the sunlower, it dazzles the eyes of men and so renders the wearer invisible: To many a gift divine this Stone lays claim; Surpassing which the power that makes its fame Is,—when conjoined with Herb of title quaint, Same as its own; whilst, spoken by a saint Are incantations, holy, and a spell Invoked,--with words the pious tongue can tell; Of Gem, and Plant combined, the wearer then Becomes invisible to eyes of men.” It was its property of making the wearer invisible which above all made the stone much sought after by thieves and robbers.

116

As a symbol, the snake, serpent or dragon can stand for wisdom and life eternal; but also for that which will steal from man all that makes of him a man. The serpent periodically sheds its skin, emerging renewed from its ‘dead’ form, and so has for many centuries been, like the moon, considered a type of birth, death and renewal. In this part of Dante’s Hell are found evil snakes which attach themselves to the sinners and attack them in various ways. In some cases there are violent unions between men and serpents resulting in a blending of the natures of both. For the types of serpents and their desert habitats Dante draws on Lucan’s Pharsalia. The conlict between man and the evil serpent or dragon, thought of later on by Christians as the devil, is a very old belief. Very old also is the serpent’s associations with the human constitution, particularly the human spine. In Dante’s Hell some sinners are bound fast by coiled serpents; some have their loins penetrated by serpents which at the same time bite at the top of the spinal column. One sinner is repeatedly reduced to ash by a iery bite and then is swiftly reconstituted before being once again dissembled by ire. Each time he is reformed he appears utterly bewildered. The biblical ‘dust to dust’ is enacted over and over again, inviting contrast with the resurrection of Christ, with the periodical rebirth of the sloughing snake, and with the wondrous reconstitution of the phoenix, the mythical bird of the sun. After each 500 year cycle the phoenix was said to burst into lame only to emerge from the ashes renewed. “On herb or grain it feeds not in its life, But only on tears of incense and amomum, And nard and myrrh are its last winding-sheet.”

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Amomum is a reference to the spice called cardamom, while nard is spikenard, which is an oil valued for its fragrance. Myrrh was used by some ancient cultures during their anointing rites. It is a gum formed from the resin of certain thorn trees. Herodotus claims the phoenix was known in Egypt. "There is another sacred bird, too, whose name is Phoinix. I myself have never seen it, only pictures of it; for the bird seldom comes into Aigyptos: once in ive hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say. It is said that the Phoinix comes when his father dies. If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden and partly red. He is most like an eagle in shape and size. What they say this bird manages to do is incredible to me. Flying from Arabia to the temple of the Sun, they say, he conveys his father encased in myrrh and buries him at the temple of Helios. This is how he conveys him: he irst moulds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, then tries lifting it, and when he has tried it, he then hollows out the egg and puts his father into it, and plasters over with more myrrh the hollow of the egg into which he has put his father, which is the same in weight with his father lying in it, and he conveys him encased to the temple of the Sun in Aigyptos. This is what they say this bird does." In some versions a worm emerges from the ashes irst and in three days transforms into the bird. Dimitri: “The phoenix is reduced to ashes; and the sun puts on the death mask of deepest night. But lo, the bird shall rise again in ire and lame; and the sun shall dawn once more and rise in majesty to claim his throne on high. Christ shall be born a man, shall die upon a cross, shall descend unto the night of Hell; and in three ever- brightening days shall rise again to life and shall rule for evermore.”

118

Dante and Virgil encounter a sinner known to Dante. He identiies himself: “A bestial life, and not a human, pleased me, Even as the mule I was; I’m Vanni Fucci, Beast, and Pistoia was my worthy den.” He admits to have stolen sacred objects from the sacristy and allowing another to take the blame. He prophecies the defeat of the Whites by the Blacks, and compares the battle between the two factions to a storm produced by the clash of a hot, dry wind with a moist cloud. “And this I’ve said that it may give thee pain.” He makes an obscene gesture directed at God, prompting Dante to judge that his rebelliousness exceeded even that of Capaneus. The sinner’s words are cut short by a strangling serpent. He led away, and spake no further word; And I beheld a Centaur full of rage Come crying out: “Where is, where is the scoffer?” Some render the scoffer as the bitter one and others as the unripe one . It has snakes along it spine and a dragon on its shoulders. “I do not think Maremma has so many Serpents as he had all along his back, As far as where our countenance begins. Upon the shoulders, just behind the nape, With wings wide open was a dragon lying, And he sets ire to all that he encounters.” Meremma was a swampy region of Italy known for its water snakes.

119 It’s also worth noting here that traditionally the venom of serpents was thought to contain ire. Virgil identiies him as Cacus. Dante’s representation of him as a centaur is the result of a tangled and confused history. The original was said by the Greeks to have been a ire-breathing son of Vulcan. Despite the complications, it nevertheless brings into focus the mythical slaying of Cacus by Hercules as punishment for stealing some of his cattle, said in some versions of the story to have been four cows and four bulls. The two protagonists have sometimes been associated by Christian commentators with Satan and Christ. Cacus hid the cattle in his cave. Some versions of the myth relate that they were discovered when Hercules’ remaining cattle called to their erstwhile companions. The stolen cattle answered, and thereby revealed where they had been concealed. Cacus’ appearance as a centaur here, rather than in the earlier bolgia with the other centaurs, suggests that his thievery was accompanied more by the slyness of fraud and deception than it was by violence. Dante and Virgil witness a scene in which sinners are assaulted by serpents, monsters which, it transpires, were once men. One serpent invades the very shape and form of the sinner, blending or merging itself with that of the man. Their two forms become one. The detailed description of the process is horriic. More than one commentator has speculated that Dante intended to portray a perverted version of the Incarnation of Christ. Dante boasts that his visions of these metamorphoses put into shade those of his predecessors Lucan and Ovid. References to the transmutation of lead into gold may be commonplace, but these cantos remind us that, through the agency

120 of vice and sin, changing the higher into something base and infernal is also possible, though tragic and pitiful to behold. Interestingly, several of the personalities encountered in this part of Hell were members of the Florentine political party known as the Whites who at some point chose to convert to the faction of the Blacks. Dimitri: “The evil one sees his greatest good in wickedness; and his heart is the dominion of the darkest arts. Linger not among thieves lest those they serve rob thy mind of sanity. See how they strip from the unwary anything of any worth. They deprive from the mother the love of a loving heart, the child of its innocence, and the man of that which makes him man. They steal from the body its loveliness; they bereave the very soul of life and breath. They rob the radiant eye of inner sight; and of memory its remembrance of our home. The thieves of hell will thieve from a happy man his happiness, and leave sorrow in their wake. They rob us of our joy; they rob us of our rapture; they remove the cheerful spring from every lightsome step. They steal from the pauper all hope for better days; and from the prince those royal things which right declares are his. From saints they plunder virtue and its protection from all sin. They ransack the warrior of his courage; they purloin the husband’s honour; and from his love her faithfulness. They steal the fervour of the seeker’s lame; rob the pilgrim of his way; and the workman of his work. They snatch the lamb from behind the shepherd’s back; and from the guarding dog its watchfulness. They remove from the gold its lustre; and lop the branch from the unripe bough. They take away the keenness of the cutting edge; deprive the dewy dell of all delight; and of the jewel its splendour. They ruin bread and take from wine the savour of its taste. They steal from Earth the light of sun and stars;

121 and, worst of all: they dispossess the peaceful mind of its sanctifying peace.” Dante continues to use the language of quest, by land and by sea; and even at times by lying through the air. He implies that Florence’s imperial ambitions are a kind of perverted quest. “Rejoice, 0 Florence, since thou art so great, That over sea and land thou beatest thy wings, And throughout Hell thy name is spread abroad!” As far as the individual quester is concerned, his courage may result in glory and freedom in the end; but as in the cases of Ulysses, Icarus and Phaeton, they can also bring the reckless one to tragedy. It has already been noted that Ulysses in particular was for Dante – though it was not universally so - the type of the wandering hero whose desire for knowledge and wisdom overstepped the bounds, and whose quest was deeply lawed and doomed to failure in the end. Arturo: “A strong desire to know is essential but insuficient.” Dante beholds lames at the bottom of the bolgia They seem to him at irst like glittering irelies. “With lames as manifold resplendent all Was the eighth Bolgia, as I grew aware As soon as I was where the depth appeared. And such as he who with the bears avenged him Beheld Elijah’s chariot at departing, What time the steeds to heaven erect uprose For with his eye he could not follow it So as to see aught else than lame alone,” Each of the lames contained a sinner. Dante’s reference to Elijah’s passage to heaven contrasts with the plight of the sinners he was to

122 encounter in this ring of Malebolge – particularly that of Ulysses. Passing on the sacred task to his successor Elisha, Elijah was carried to heaven on a horse-driven chariot of ire. As he soared upwards it seemed to Elisha that his master was enveloped in a heavenly lame. As far as Dante is concerned, the selish and reckless Ulyssean mission produced very different results. Each appears as a lame, but lames of very different kinds. Horses too are at times associated with both, but again, of very different breeds. Dante is intrigued that the higher part of one of the lames appears to be horned or cleft in two. Virgil explains that it contains Ulysses and Diomedes who while alive shared a companionship of transgression, and now share a lame in Hell. Dante reveals the character of Ulysses by having Virgil refer to three of his crimes. Jackson Knight has shown how each of these offences played their part in negating the protective forces associated with the city of Troy. Not least was the theft of the image of wisdom from within the Trojan citadel. The thieves stealthily gained entry by way of a secret underground passage in the dead of night. Further, he had inspired the hero Achilles to join the battle on the side of the Greeks. Achilles was to be instrumental in overcoming in combat the protection of Troy represented symbolically in the person of Hector. We must add to these Ulysses’ great deception: the infamous wooden horse. By welcoming the horse into the city the Trojans were persuaded to remove even more of the divine protections afforded to them, in this case by breaching their own city walls. In some accounts of the sacking of Troy the dual symbolic nature of the gods is implied by the switching of their allegiance, leading them to assist the Greeks, when previously they had protected the Trojans. However, it is dificult to ignore the charge that the Trojans, deceived

123 by Ulysses, were in the end the authors of their own downfall. Similarly, many symbols, including horses, have both divine and infernal connotations. On the one hand horses pull the iery chariot of the illuminated seer to the heights of heaven; and on the other, they spell disaster, are taboo, and must remain outside the precincts of the holy city. In addition to the wooden horse, Ulysses and Diomedes were responsible for the theft of the famous horses of Troy’s ally: the Thracian king, Rhesus. This is thought by some to have been an important component of the success of the Greeks’ assault on Troy. Dimitri: “Let all good men bow low their heads. Let the child cover up his eyes. Is there any greater tragedy? Behold the fallen city: the veil is rent; the knot is unloosed; the seal is broken; the walls are breached. The wicked pour forth from out the belly of the Earth and run through the hallowed streets from house to house, from shrine to shrine, from altar to holy altar. Blind with blood-lust they surge towards the palace. Fire is in their eyes and evil burns within the blackness of their hearts. It is renewal; but alas, a renewal conceived in Hell. It is a conversion, but one inverted. The deceiving serpent sloughs its skin and lifts its gleaming body to curse with triple tongue the jewel of the sun. The ire infernal belches forth its lames that rise above the golden rooftops, as high as the pitying stars, which alas must turn their backs, lacking sanction to intervene. Devastation rushes forth as swift as a ire fanned by ierce winds speeds unhindered across the stubble. It slithers and darts along every path. It plants a blood-red laming banner in every courtyard. It despoils the altar of every god. It glides its hissing way through the secret passageways and corridors beneath the city streets, familiar to the ancient steps of

124 king and priest. From the sanctuary of the citadel to the palace of light the laming serpent rises, deiling the scented air with the blasphemous chanting of the lower ones. Flee! Take to thy little boat and lee! Be gone! Save from this calamity the seeds of a better time. Cast them and thee upon the open sea. Wipe the scalding tears from thy belovèd’s eye; and pray with a sincere heart to thy Lord above. Turn! For yet awhile, thy golden star shall rise again; and thy destiny bright shall yet be won. The iery mist shall clear from before the placid face of victory; virtuous hearts shall yet in peace prevail; and when all is said and all is done, Rome yet shall rise from the ashes of a fallen Troy.” Returning to the Inferno: Dante places Ulysses among those whose sin was fraudulent counsel. This has been the subject of much debate among the commentators. However it is possible to speculate that by doing so Dante draws attention to Ulysses’ role as a leader of others. From Dante’s perspective, no matter how strong the hero’s desire, no matter how ambitious his quest, he recklessly led his followers to their doom. He did not merely transgress the limits himself, but took with him others inspired by his words ‘beyond the pillars of Hercules’ . Ulysses, speaking from within the lame, admits to the pair that nothing “Could overcome within me the desire I had to be experienced of the world, And of the vice and virtue of mankind; But I put forth on the high open sea With one sole ship, and that small company By which I never had deserted been.”

125 He recounts the now famous speech he made to his men, inspiring them to follow him to regions beyond which living men should not venture. “‘Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang; Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.’ So eager did I render my companions, With this brief exhortation, for the voyage, That then I hardly could have held them back.” The lame goes quiet and departs. Another lame draws their attention. Its attempts to speak are at irst unintelligible, for its words are unable to escape the nature of the ire. Dante likens it to the sound made by the Sicilian bull. This was the bull used in the wicked torture and executions said to have been enacted by the tyrant Phalaris. Victims were roasted inside its bronze body. It was constructed in such a manner as to transform their cries into something like the bellowing of a bull. In both examples human utterance is degraded into something less than human: in the irst into the sound of ire and in the second, the bellowing of a beast. In the Sicilian Bull there is perhaps also an echo of Daedalus’ false cow and Ulysses’ Trojan horse. Eventually as the sound of the sinner’s voice reaches the tip of the lame a human voice is heard. Mandelbaum translates the passage thus: “…so were the helpless words that, from the irst, had found no path or exit from the lame, transformed into the language of the ire. But after they had found their way up toward

126 the tip, and given it that movement which the tongue had given them along their passage, we heard: “O you to whom I turn my voice,…” It’s likely that one of the ideas Dante had in mind here was a passage from the Bible referred to as ‘the taming of the tongue’ in which the tongue is described as a ire. James 3.3: “…If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man. He is able also with a bridle to lead about the whole body. For if we put bits into the mouths of horses, that they may obey us, and we turn about their whole body. Behold also ships, whereas they are great, and are driven by strong winds, yet are they turned about with a small helm, whithersoever the force of the governor willeth… And the tongue is a ire, a world of iniquity. The tongue is placed among our members, which deileth the whole body, and inlameth the wheel of our nativity, being set on ire by hell. For every nature of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of the rest, is tamed, and hath been tamed, by the nature of man: But the tongue no man can tame, an unquiet evil, full of deadly poison… Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be. Doth a fountain send forth, out of the same hole, sweet and bitter water? Can the ig tree, my brethren, bear grapes; or the vine, igs? So neither can the salt water yield sweet.” Arturo: “From one point of view at least, the tongue is the agent of creation; and so also involves the potential for its opposite.” The sinner was Guido da Montefeltro, one of the city-tyrants whose families governed the main cities of Romagna. In his conversation with Guido Dante informs him of the present conditions there. He describes the situation of seven cities, referring to their coats of arms, each of which includes a ierce beast of prey. It is said by some

127 that Guido was known as ‘the fox’ because of his slyness and his preference for deploying hidden strategies to outwit his enemies. Judging that Dante would be unable to return from Hell to the land of the living, Guido calculates that it is safe to admit his crimes. He reveals that near the end of his life he withdrew from public life and took holy orders. “I was a man of arms, then Cordelier, Believing thus begirt to make amends; “ The reference to Cordeliers, or those who wear the cord , means that he became a member of the Franciscan community, known by the knotted cord which formed part of their habit. The knots are said to symbolise the Franciscan vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. That which is usually referred to as knot magic has a very long history stretching back to Ancient Egypt and perhaps beyond. Nowadays a version of it forms part of the symbology associated with freemasonry and other similar belief systems. In Dante’s time Christian believers would have recognised the knotted cord as an outward sign that the wearer had undergone an inner conversion. However in Guido’s case it may be that the conversion was not a genuine inner transformation. At that time Pope Boniface VIII was engaged in a bitter struggle with the powerful Roman Colonna family who questioned the Pope’s legitimacy. As he laid siege to their hilltop fortress Boniface asked Guido to advise how he might overcome their defences. Following the promise of the Pope’s absolution, Guido counselled that Boniface should make them lots of promises, and keep but few. Boniface offered them safe passage, but as they left the city he razed it to the ground, burnt its libraries and some say spoiled its ields with salt.

128 In spite of the Pope’s promised absolution, Guido was for his false counsel claimed at death by a devil and taken to Malebolge to inhabit a body of lame. The devil used logic to demonstrate that absolution cannot precede the commission of a sin, but must follow it; and that one cannot will an action and at the same time repent it. Guido departs and Dante and Virgil move on to the next ring. “Onward we passed, both I and my Conductor, Up o’er the crag above another arch, Which the moat covers, where is paid the fee By those who, sowing discord, win their burden.” Dante expresses the dificulty in describing - even if he were doing so in prose - the horrors he encounters in this bolgia. It exceeds those of the wars in Apulia, the medieval kingdom of Naples; and of the wars between Troy’s descendants, the Romans, against the Latin tribes. So bloody were these that it was said by some that Hannibal's soldiers accumulated a bushel of rings from the Roman dead. Others report that it was three. He describes in gruesome detail sinners with horriic wounds, sustained by victims of the most dreadful savagery. Among them are Muhammed and his son-in-law Ali. Dante seems to accept the Christian polemic that Muhammed was a Christian before he founded Islam. Ali of course was said by some to have been responsible for the schism which led to the creation of Sunnites and Shiites. From the medieval Christian perspective both are sowers of discord whose sin had the effect of wounding the body of believers. In Dante’s Hell they are among those who suffer from being continually cleft asunder, their wounds healing only for their bodies to be hideously split apart again.

129

“And all the others whom thou here beholdest, Disseminators of scandal and of schism While living were, and therefore are cleft thus.” Disseminate is from the Latin disseminare and means scattering seeds. Seeds contain as yet unfolded potentials. Scandal comes from the Greek skandalon meaning stumbling block . It is a word used in the bible to refer to anything which leads the righteous to stumble and fall into error. In contrast, the Psalmist asserts that freedom from error and a life lived in accord with divine law brings the certainty and balance of inner peace: “Abundant peace have those loving Thy law, And they have no stumbling-block.” Arturo: “This is true; but it is also the case that those who ind a measure of inner peace live their lives, from that moment on, in accordance with divine law.” As far as the term schism is concerned, St Thomas Aquinas denotes it one of the sins against peace. Following the etymology of Isidore he considers it to have taken its name "…from being a scission of minds, and scission is opposed to unity. Wherefore the sin of schism is one that is directly and essentially opposed to unity.” In his later writings Dante suggests that the deinition of sin in general may be summarised as that which leads us from the unity of peace to the divergence of the many. Dimitri: “The one-ness of Peace is the overseeing cause of the love, harmony and fellowship of the Church of Christ. The bonds that tie us thus, are in full accord with those that bind the angels, saints and

130 servants of God to the loving Father of us all. Unseen by the many kinds of dreaming men, they connect us to those who know and love us well. Like the mother who nurses with milk her blue-eyed child, they sustain us, feed us and nourish us. Woe betides the breaker of loving bonds made in Heaven. Woe betides the sower of the seeds of discord made in Hell. Woe betides him who alienates father from son and son from father, performer from maestro and maestro from performer. Woe betides him who strives to loosen the ties of trust and sincerity, the delight of kindred minds. Circus folk, more so than most, know the sacred power of such holy bonds.” Also encountered are various sinners thought by Dante to be responsible for much of the division, contention and factional discord that characterised the Tuscany of his day. They are of those who see their good in undermining peace. This can be interpreted politically, sociologically, theologically, psychologically and on other levels too. Dante reveals that he would be loath to tell of what he saw next if it were not for the purity of his conscience, the reassurer, the good companion which gives him heart. If it were not that conscience reassures me, That good companion which emboldens man Beneath the hauberk of its feeling pure. A hauberk is a chain mail vest or shirt. Some translators render it as a breastplate. Dante encounters a sinner, Bertrand de Born, who holds his own severed head by the hair aloft like a lantern. Holding a severed head

131 in this way is often interpreted as a gesture of victory – in this case, an infernal one. Also noteworthy is the fact that Dante likens the head to a lantern or lamp. Most commentators explain the comparison with reference to light’s association with sight and the eyes. However, it also sometimes stands for mind and reason. “And by the hair it held the head dissevered, Hung from the hand in fashion of a lantern, And that upon us gazed and said: ‘O me!’ ” Dante has made references before of the apparent fusion of two forms into one: of snake and man, for example. But here he relects upon the severance of a man’s head from his torso, making two from one: “And they were two in one, and one in two; How that can be, He knows who so ordains it.” Arturo: “The phrase ‘two in one, and one in two’ conceals several mystical meanings of interest to both ringmaster and performer. It is worthy of meditation.” In his earlier writings Dante had expressed admiration for Bertrand’s poetry. However in the Commedia he is placed in the ninth bolgia of Malebolge as punishment for causing Prince Henry to rebel against his father, King Henry II of England. Because he had parted those who were joined he now suffers from his head being parted from his torso. His sin is compared to that of Achitophel whose evil counsel, the bible tells, caused Absalom to rebel against his father, King David, with tragic consequences. All this brings to mind the contrasting love and unity of Father and Son proclaimed by John, wherein Christ, in the character of Good

132 Shepherd, declares: “But you do not believe, because you are not of my sheep. My sheep hear my voice: and I know them, and they follow me. And I give them life everlasting; and they shall not perish for ever, and no man shall pluck them out of my hand. That which my Father hath given me, is greater than all: and no one can snatch them out of the hand of my Father. I and the Father are one.” Dante feels almost drunk at the bloody spectacle, hardly able to avert his eyes. Virgil urges him on, hinting once more that the cycles of the moon regulate their progress below. There is also reference to the size of the circle of Hell. Dante recognises one of his relatives whose murder had gone unavenged. He implies that the culture of vendetta and the so-called honour crimes common in the Tuscany of his day were but the working out, the coming to fruition as it were, of evil seeds planted long ago. Using language which brings to mind a shipwreck on the rocks, Virgil urges him to think no more of the sinner. They climb to the top of the ridge separating this bolgia from the next, looking down into the darkness below. The unbearable cries and laments of the sinners reach him like arrows tipped with pity. His description is one which is in accord with the attestations of many a clairvoyant. Divers lamentings pierced me through and through, Which with compassion had their arrows barbed, Whereat mine ears I covered with my hands. He compares the sights and sounds to the sum total of suffering in all the hospitals of the wet regions south of Rome, where malaria and other diseases were particularly virulent during his time. Keeping to

133 the left, the pilgrim and his guide walk on, and the sinners come more clearly into view. They languish amid the stench of rotting lesh at the bottom of the gully “…where the minister of the Lord, infallible justice, punishes the falsiiers that it registers here.” The sight of such an amount of suffering in one place is likened to that of Ovid’s description of a great plague which, he says, was once sent to Aegina by the unhappy gods. All the animals and people died, although the people were eventually restored, it was claimed, from the seed of ants. The sinners are lying about in heaps, the Italian word for which is the same as that generally used for the heaped sheaves of grain scattered across the ields at harvest time. I saw two sitting propped against each other— as pan is propped on pan to heat them up— and each, from head to foot, spotted with scabs; The two sinners are furiously scratching their laking skin with their nails. Dante compares the sight to a stable boy hastily combing a horse; and further, to the use of a knife to scrape large ish scales from the body of a ish. The early commentators identify the disease from which the two are suffering as probably a form of leprosy. One quotes an early encyclopaedia on the subject of a condition referred to there as serpentine leprosy: "It is scaly: the patient suffering from this type of leprosy easily loses the surface of his skin, which is resolved in a kind of scaliness." He also makes reference to the stench associated with it.

134

Dante speaks with one of the sinners who reveals that while living he had claimed in jest to know the secret of lying through the air. When he could not or would not pass on the secret, he was burned at the stake. However, he also conides that it was not for this that he was consigned to his place in Hell, but for practicing alchemy. Near the end of the canto the other sinner identiies himself as Capocchio, a person Dante knew. And thou shalt see I am Capocchio’s shade, Who metals falsiied by alchemy; The sinful act of falsifying metals can be interpreted in a number of ways. The various meanings of to falsify includes to fashion or alter fraudulently . This sense of the term illustrates that it is possible to make something appear to be something it is not, in order to dupe and deceive the gullible, a charge often made against the alchemists, and often enough with good reason. A further meaning of the verb is to make something false . In other words it is possible to bring about a degradation of something, taking it further away from its original or true condition. Thus we falsify and degrade it by making it less perfect, less true relative to its original state. Instead of treading the path of improvement, a path which eventually leads to the pristine blessedness of the higher spheres, it is the lot of the sorry inhabitants of Hell to experience conditions and forces contrary to their advancement. They are on a downward spiralling path. In this sense they might be said to undergo an infernal transmutation of noble metals into something less noble. Both of these senses may be relevant to an understanding of why Dante placed the alchemists so far down in Hell. It is also one of the

135 reasons, perhaps, that the alchemist sinners are suffering in the particular way that they are; for among some alchemists the metal lead is sometimes referred to as ‘leprosy of gold.’ A digression of sorts: corrosion, oxidation and degradation commonly spoil metals, weaken metallic structures, and, in the worst cases, destroy the metals themselves. Often this is directly due to the aggressive environment that a metal is exposed to over its life. While there are many types of corrosion, galvanic corrosion, also known as bimetallic corrosion, is an electrochemical process that more often than not degrades certain metals. It occurs when one metal is in electrical contact with another by way of an electrolyte, often involving water or moisture. It is worth noting in passing that the true noble metals, including gold, have very little afinity to water. So, galvanic corrosion occurs when the two dissimilar metals, having differing potentials, are electrically connected by being immersed in a conductive solution. One of the two metals (the cathode) is protected, while the other (the anode) is corroded. When such a circuit is established the rate of attack on the anode is accelerated, compared to the rate when it is electrically uncoupled from the other. When connected, the less noble of the two metals will be the one to suffer corrosion. There are various kinds of protection available. One is to place a non- conducting material between metals of different potentials. When so protected, no electrical current can low between the two. Another option is to apply a counteracting electrical power supply in such a way as to oppose and neutralise the corrosive galvanic current. Lamellar corrosion in ferrous alloys is associated with the excessive

136 internal growth of metal oxide. It results in pancake-like corrosion which lakes away from the body of the material. It is sometimes referred to as layer corrosion or exfoliation corrosion. It mostly affects alloys with a directional grain structure. The lakes form parallel to the surface. Foliation is the process of putting forth leaves . In a literal sense therefore, exfoliation means to denude a tree of its leaves . Returning to the commedia. One of the alchemists refers to his skills as art , and the other describes himself as a skilful ape of nature . This brings back into focus the earlier discussion about the relationship between art and nature. It is well known that alchemists consider that the success of their work depends on appropriate combinations of these two. While Dante was writing the Divine Comedy there was a furious debate about alchemy which brought into sharp relief the differences between Franciscan and Dominican thinking. One side of the argument, inluenced by the 13th century Franciscan Roger Bacon, considered theoretical alchemy to be a valuable ield of spiritual knowledge, while the practical application of that knowledge – the making of gold – was widely considered morally defective and reprehensible. The Dominicans on the other hand, denounced both branches of the art. The debate culminated in 1317 with the Pope’s condemnation of alchemy in both its speculative and operative forms. In the Commedia Dante does not condemn or commend alchemy in either of its manifestations, and there is no obvious evidence that he believed that its tenets were true. If he had so, however, it would have been in accord with the beliefs of some of the philosophers he admired, like for example Thomas Aquinas. What seems to have

137 condemned Dante’s sinners to Hell was not alchemy per se, but the art and science of spurious alchemy and the practice of falsifying metals. Arturo: “The famous distinction between speculative and practical alchemy is from one point of view somewhat misleading. The truest and best sort of alchemy is practical. However, true alchemy is not limited to the chemical transformations of physical matter on the material level. Alongside the physical it is also a spiritual and mental science. It is above all else a practical endeavour because its goal is achieved not in the library or in the classroom, but in the crucible of the performance ring. No matter how much theoretical knowledge we gather to ourselves, unless we do that which needs to be done, the whole subject remains an often bewildering set of abstract, esoteric symbols and little else. And while the work requires solid preparation, there is a good deal of difference between rehearsal and performance. Generally speaking, and from the ring-master’s point of view, it is a process by which we realise how best to create the conditions needed for our performers to discover and demonstrate their full potential. Our work and art is to help them to be the best that they can be. See how the sun sheds its light on every planet. He knows their song and beholds each dance of destiny. The rider must know his horse; and the father must know his son. The ringmaster must know the good and not so good of each performing artist. It’s up to him to motivate them, to inspire them, to stir them into life, up into Nature’s higher low, up towards the perfect performance. And as we do so we should keep in mind that our thoughts and

138 words and deeds are as seeds which must inevitably come to fruition in one way or another. And this is so for good and for bad; however these two appear to us upon our path. But when all comes to all, as Zosimus is supposed to have said: “…he who sows gold reaps gold.” And who knows, with the grace of God, with the assistance of our Lord, with light and with life, the best that our performers can be shall lead them to their own true place and their own true purpose, qualifying them and us for the next phase of our wonderful circus adventure.” One of the sinners makes reference to various members of the so- called Brigata Spendereccia, which means the Spendthrift Club . One such club was formed by twelve rich young socialites who were reputed to have pooled their entire fortunes and spent it all on lavish banquets and parties over a mere two years or so. The sinners in this part of Dante’s Hell were examples of those who, in their proligate excesses, were guilty of wasting the fruitful generosity of Nature, of transforming the benevolence of Heaven and Earth into the meaningless pursuits of little self. A now obsolete meaning of thrift is thought to be derived from to thrive and relates to the condition of prosperity . To be a spend-thrift therefore used to mean to spend one’s prosperity . The reference to cloves also reminds us that many of the imported spices of Dante’s day were worth their weight in gold; and that they were sometimes used in trade as a substitute for the noble metal. The lucrative spice trade at that time was in large part controlled by Arabic traders and the merchants of Venice. Dimitri: “What is the wealth of this world when compared to the

139 treasures of heaven? Pity the heaven-born who transmutes his inheritance into the empty pleasures, the lies and worthless unrealities of material life. Pity him who puts his higher gifts to the service of his selish desires, for on his return he shall be as a pauper in the eyes of the Lord. Pity the fraudster who in order to enrich himself sows the seeds of mendacity, adulterating the simple, wholesome food of heaven; or he who disguises his lies with the piquant lavours so often and so fatally preferred by the inexperienced, by the unwary, and by the vain; pity them indeed, for such falsiiers and deceivers shall languish long in the belly of Hell.” Dante begins canto 30 with two accounts of madness drawn primarily from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Some of the early commentators on Ovid consider madness to have represented a metamorphism of ‘intellect’. The irst involves Arthamas who Juno had one of the Furies make mad. The episode results in the hideous death of his wife Ino and their two sons. The Furies have already been noted among the guardians of Dante’s Infernal City. Ovid describes them combing the black snakes in their hair as they guard the adamantine doors of the “Dungeon of the Damned .” They were said by some to be daughters of Night, and by others to be the offspring of Persephone and Hades. They were usually three in number, but were also sometimes referred to in the singular. They were Alecto, punisher of moral crimes (anger, etc.); Megaera, punisher of inidelity, oath breakers, and theft; and Tisiphone, punisher of murderers. It was Tisiphone who made Arthamus “reft of reason” , as Longfellow renders it. The other account of madness is that of Hercuba, queen of Troy who was taken by the Greeks at the fall of Troy and the death of its king,

140 her husband Priam, who had risked all. She was turned mad at the death two of her children, Polyxena and Polydorus. The latter, her youngest son, was sent in secret to be raised, safe from the wars, in the palace of the Thracian King Polymnestor. Following the fall of Troy the boy was slain by his foster father. Polyxena was Hercuba’s virgin daughter whose blood was spilled by the Greeks on the altar of the dead Achilles. Their cruel deaths caused Hercuba to go mad, her speech transformed into the barking of a dog when she tried to speak. Dante conides that none of these horrendous crimes can compare to the cruelty before him now. Two sinners run berserk attacking the others. “But not of Thebes the furies nor the Trojan Were ever seen in any one so cruel In goading beasts, and much more human members, As I beheld two shadows pale and naked, Who, biting, in the manner ran along That a boar does, when from the sty turned loose. One to Capocchio came, and by the nape Seized with its teeth his neck, so that in dragging It made his belly grate the solid bottom.” One of them is the impersonator Schicchi who was paid to impersonate a recently dead man in order to fraudulently dictate a will. His payment was said to have been the dead man’s prize mare, queen of the herd. Reference is also made to another impersonator, Myrrha, who famously impersonated another in order to lie with her father, King Cinyras. Dante next speaks to the rabid Master Adam, a man of noble birth

141 who was reputed to have become a counterfeiter when alive in Florence. He is suffering from dropsy, caused by a malfunction of the liver, and Dante compares his bloated shape to that of a lute. He is raging with thirst, his suffering made worse by his memory of his previous life. “The rivulets that fall into the Arno down from the green hills of the Casentino with channels cool and moist, are constantly before me; I am racked by memory - the image of their low parches me more than the disease that robs my face of lesh.” As is the case with so many, Adam blames others for his crimes. “The currency imprinted with the Baptist” refers to the Florentine lorin. It was a coin made of gold, and on one side was depicted the city’s patron saint, John the Baptist. On the other side was the leur de lis, an emblematic depiction of the lily, the city’s insignia. Generally, it is associated on the one hand with the purity and chastity of the Virgin; and on the other with the Holy Trinity. In Dante’s time money was often compared with the low of the blood in the body. Counterfeiting the currency was akin to degrading and poisoning the blood and was considered to be the cause of many of the ills associated with life in corrupted Florence. It was also, metaphorically, the root cause of the many ailments suffered by the sinners. Poisoned blood, restrictions to its low, diseases of the liver and other organs, the consumption of spoiled or contaminated food, and the consequent bodily diseases and sickness are common images in this part of Dante’s Hell.

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There are also here echoes of ancient theories of generation, particularly those usually attributed to Aristotle. Early beliefs on a subject now referred to as embryology held that the generation of a thing depended on a number of factors, termed ‘causes’ by Aristotle. First was the ultimate purpose of a thing. Next was its essence, containing the unique properties proper to its purpose and its place in the universal order of the many kinds of things. Third was the material it was made from. In the case of a human, this was the blood of the mother. Last was the cause of its life and motion contained in the father’s seed. In Aristotle’s theory the father’s seed also guides the thing’s embryonic development. The contamination of human blood therefore, or metaphorically the debasement or falsiication of a gold coin, would in this sense inevitably result in the generation of unnatural, mal-formations. Adam confesses to have been persuaded by three powerful Florentines to debase the gold in the lorins with three carats of dross. “For them am I in such a family; They did induce me into coining lorins, Which had three carats of impurity.” One of the meanings of the word carat relates to the proportion of pure gold used with an alloy. It is said by some to come from the Greek keration which means small horn . Keration is also a word which is thought to be connected to the carob seed of the Bible, where it is harvested from the carob tree, a tree which prefers the dry wilderness. It produces fruits, contained in a small horn-shaped pod, which are high in sugars and so traditionally were fed to swine. Some Bible translators render it as husk or pod .

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The Italian word mondiglia , rendered by Longfellow as impurity, is often translated as dross . It comes from the verb to cleanse and it relates to the leftovers or residues left behind after washing or cleansing. So, Dante’s Master Adam was persuaded by three deceivers to introduce three carats of dross, the meat of swine, into a golden coin, the lifeblood of the city, bearing the image of the cleanser or baptiser along with the seal of the threefold godhead. It is tempting to speculate that this evil act is also not unconnected to the three creatures – and all that they entail – which were said to bar Dante’s passage at the beginning of his poem. Master Adam identiies to Dante two further sinners. “One the false woman is who accused Joseph, The other the false Sinon, Greek of Troy;” The Bible tells how when Joseph went down to Egypt the mistress of the house desired him. When he refused to lie with her she accused him of attempted rape. Her lies resulted in Joseph’s incarceration. Sinon’s lies persuaded the Trojans to take the wooden horse within their city walls. This led to the fall of Troy. Sinon, like many of the protagonists in this bolgia was of noble birth. Dimitri: “The moon rises to her throne of night, her dark locks loose upon her breast, breathing thickly in her desire. The sun, sick with the sorrows of the world sinks into the deeps to shed his light elsewhere. The light has fallen. Jerusalem is slain. The bright day cedes the ield to shadows. The dewy mists of the dell disperse and the poisoned vapours of the swamp hang like a shroud over the dying earth. Behold, as the rebellious ones take up their place, the subtle arts of

144 those who see their good in wickedness. In their hatred they come to their purpose: to deceive, to impersonate, to lie and falsify, to corrode and degrade all that is good and true and beautiful. Behold the infernal alchemy that transmutes all things high into all things low. Behold the gold encased in lead. Give them coin, they say, if coin is their desire. Give them the little treasure if they wish it so; but keep from them the three most precious stones, for these we’ve won, and ours they shall remain! Give them fodder, not as the lord provides for the queen of his herd, but feed them as the swineherd feeds his swine. Keep from them the fruits of the garden; deny them the clear waters of the mountain stream. Nourish them with lies, and satisfy their thirst with sin and low desire. Wash them in the waters of the wicked world. Baptise them in the ires of Hell. Devour them, they say. Devour them all; digest them in bile and gall. Yea, they say, let them be lodged in the swollen belly of perdition! The queen of fallen Troy is enslaved. The king is blinded. The mother is ensnared and barks her anguished words to the heavens… which hear her not. The infant is drowned in its mother’s arms; another’s broken upon the rocks by the wide-eyed one whose madness and malice have overthrown the light and love of reason. The living one, impersonating the dead, lies in a deathbed of lies, and tries in vain to overturn the law. The deceived father falls into the deceiving arms of his daughter. At last, they cry, at last the two are one; let the victor rejoice and let the juice of the bitter fruit low, like a river of tears down unto a boiling sea.” Two of the sinners, Master Adam and Sinon, quarrel. Their insults,

145 taunts and blows form a to-and-fro exchange in which each of them emphasises the fallaciousness of the other. Dante ends the episode with a reference to “the mirror of Narcissus.” Man’s experience of life on the material level is derived from a distorted relection, an illusion projected by him onto the surface of things, just as Narcissus was with dire consequences ixated on his own image relected by the surface of a woodland pool. He knows his conditions, but only through the prisms of the falsifying senses, which relect back to him his own particularity. Our world is just that: ours. If we had radically different organs of sensation, then our perceptions of reality would be radically different also. However, what actually is would not have changed. If, as it does with every passing mood, the way in which we look at things alters, so then so does our reality, proving the illusion of material life, dependant as it is on the limited sensory information underpinning our perceptions. In this sense, the world of Dante’s sinners, like Dante’s, like our own, like that of Narcissus, like the insubstantial shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, is a falsiication. Our physical senses produce a stream of ever-shifting versions or accounts – some might call them lies - about what actually is. It is ideas akin to these that have led some to conclude with Prospero that: “We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.” Dante is intent on following the argument between the two sinners, for which Virgil rebukes him. Dante’s word here for look is mira from

146 mirare, itself derived from miraglio, meaning mirror. It is possible that Dante wishes to convey that the argument between the two is in some way a relection of an argument within himself. Following Virgil’s rebuke Dante feels shame, but his guide has already forgiven him. Dante likens the situation to dreaming of what actually is. In an unpleasant dream we, believing that we are awake, wish that we were merely dreaming, wishing therefore for what already is. However, because we are dreaming we do not realise that what we wish for is already actually so. Arturo: “The divine height of that which actually is cannot be reached by the lower senses nor by the logic of little man; and nor can it be grasped by the dreaming mind, whatever the dreaming mind might tell itself. Although we can if we wish it so and deserve it rise by our efforts to a truer realm than the one we currently occupy.” Canto 31 begins with another reference to the tongue’s ability to wound and heal. It is likened to Achilles’s lance, which had the same facility. It is twilight and the two climb into the next bolgia. In the dim light Dante hears the sound of a bugle which ills him with dread. He likens it to the sound of Orlando’s horn at the defeat of the holy army. The chevalier Orlando, known also as Roland, led a company of men which formed the rear guard of Charlemagne’s army. They were ambushed by Saracens in the pass of Roncesvalles. Despite his friend and comrade Olivier’s urging him to do so, Roland was too proud to sound the alarm until it was too late. Because he failed to call for assistance the band of peers and companions were all slaughtered. Dante sees what he believes are towers in the distance and wonders what city it might be. The combination of city and tower is in one

147 sense the equivalent of mound and pillar. Earth mounds are often associated with the burial of the dead, but in many cases they have also been shown to have religious and initiatory signiicance. Interestingly, Dante uses the word terra for city which also means earth. Virgil informs him that they are not towers but giants. Each giant is standing in the pit and so is only visible from the waist up. The image brings to mind King Lear’s “But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the iends'; There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding, stench, consumption;” Some commentators see in the central well or pit an inverted tower, at the bottom of which dwells Satan. There is a reference to Jove which points to the mythological war between the Titans and Olympians. Jove defeated the Giants with his thunderbolts at the battle of Phlegra. “With one half of their bodies turreted The horrible giants, whom Jove menaces E’en now from out the heavens when he thunders. And I of one already saw the face, Shoulders, and breast, and great part of the belly, And down along his sides both of the arms.” Whatever their original meaning, giants usually signiied to the Christians of Dante’s time man’s pride, his arrogant lawlessness and his rebellious will to dominate. In the Bible their destruction led to the scattering of the seeds of a new generation. The Book of Wisdom records:

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“And from the beginning also when the proud giants perished, the hope of the world leeing to a vessel, which was governed by thy hand, left to the world seed of generation.” The aftermath of the deluge also provides the Nimrod or Nembrot motif. The sound of the horn, as loud as a thunderclap, and alarming to Dante, was blown by the giant Nimrod. To pursue an understanding here of Nimrod’s original signiicance and the various meanings that have been attached to his name would take us too far from our subject. However, it may be noted that some render the biblical description of him as ‘a mighty Hunter before the Lord’, while other interpreters, following Augustine, emphasise his rebelliousness by representing him as ‘a mighty Hunter against the Lord’. In his ‘City of God’ Augustine asserted that following the great lood Nimrod, irst King of Babylon, instigated the building of the Tower of Babel. His construction of the tower epitomized for Augustine and his followers on the one hand the corruption of human nature; and at the same time the pride and hubris of those who see their good in evil. The bricks that formed the tower were made of clay baked or burned in ire. The mortar was a subterranean bitumen, pitch or tar which had boiled up from below the earth. Some say that each brick had a name inscribed on it. Each brick was bonded to the others and so were analogous to the cells that combine to make a body; or to the individual members of an empire, nation, tribe or family. According to this sort of interpretation, so popular among the biblical commentators, Nimrod’s creation represents an attempt to build, or perhaps rebuild, a nation of the kinds of men whose kinship

149 is rooted in their wickedness. Left to his own devices his tower of pride would have risen from the mounded Earth to reach the very heavens. Now, a uniied will inds its expression in a common language. Also, a perfect language is one in which the word for a thing truly corresponds to the thing as it is in itself. In the beginning, it is said in Genesis: “…the earth was of one tongue, and of the same speech.” The literal translation of this reads: “the earth was of one lip, and of words one”, signifying that not only were words universally common, but also their pronunciation. Because this was so, the Lord declared that there would be no restraining the builders’ rebellious purpose, a purpose which to Augustine could not be clearer: “By this means human beings hoped to climb up to heaven, intending in their foolishness not to equal but to excel their creator.” It was an attempt by the lower ones to build or open up a channel reaching upwards from the pit, and enabling thereby an assault on heaven and all that this entails. Consequently, according to Augustine, God decreed that the language of men should henceforth be confused; and that men would from that time onwards speak many different languages. Thus, according to tradition, the confusion of lip and tongue inhibited the rebuilding of the evil city with its tower of pride. Once tribes of the post-lood world were no longer able to communicate with other tribes, the rebel builders drifted apart until they became scattered

150 across the world; and so Nimrod’s designs were thwarted. Arturo: “Ultimately, the unity of language must be sought for in the Word of God. And when we return to where we truly belong the need for earthly speech will cease to be, for there we shall bask in the mutual understanding of our kin.” For Christian believers the Psalms, in contrast to the tower of Babel, represented the concord of the good city and the good tower. “For, lo, thine enemies, O LORD, for, lo, thine enemies shall perish; all the workers of iniquity shall be scattered.” It has long been believed by some Christians that the so-called fallen angels united with the daughters of men and brought forth giants. Elsewhere they are considered to be the offspring of the Earth. It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that some have equated them with the generative power of the lower gods. Dante is thankful that Nature no longer produces such giants. “For where the argument of intellect Is added unto evil will and power, No rampart can the people make against it.” He compares the size of Nimrod’s face to that of the pine-cone of St. Peter’s. It refers to the large brass cone which in Dante’s time was housed near St. Peter’s in Rome, and which can still be seen at the Vatican Museums. It is an allusion which brings into partial view a set of symbols often associated with sex and sexuality. When surmounted on the mound it represented the mother’s breast. The gateway into the mound beneath led to the fertile womb of the earth goddess, thought of by some as a tomb, but believed by others

151 to have housed the rites of rebirth and initiation. Typically, after three days and nights the successful candidate re-emerges through the gate of the mound or cave amid the irst rays of dawn. The symbolic gate or door remains closed – though some might say concealed - until order is established, until inner and outer, higher and lower, are perfect in their balance and in the harmony of their proportions. In the body of beliefs associated with freemasonry a connection is sometimes made between this door and the so-called vesica piscis . At times however a cone was surmounted on a stone pillar or phallus. In this form it is believed by some to represent among other things the pineal gland. Stone pillars and obelisks were common features of ancient gateways. In Egypt there were two pillars, one in the North, the other in the South, which are thought to have represented the poles. In some quarters St. Peter is believed to represent the Christian version of the pillar. He was the rock or stone; he was the father; and he was the holder of the keys and keeper of the gates. Throughout the Christian era there have been lots of trustworthy references to the existence of a bronze bust housed in the Vatican, though presumably for reasons of proprietary, no longer accessible to the public. It is thought to be of Greek origin, and is of a man’s torso, but with a cock’s head, and in place of its beak an erect phallus. The inscription is said to read: Saviour of the World . As an ancient precedent, Eros was originally the primal god of procreation at the dawn of cosmic creation. He was the uniting power of love, which brought order and harmony among the conlicting elements of Chaos. Plato described Eros as a universal

152 force that moves all things towards peace, perfection and divinity. In short, in its higher aspect it represents the Desire for the Truly Beautiful. Eros was later associated with the ithyphallic Priapus. Some associate such ideas with the much older Egyptian solar god Ra, sometimes referred to as Lord of the Phallus. However, it should be noted that the Egyptians also used the symbol to denote the divine procreative power inherited and made manifest by several masculine gods, including Seb, Osiris and Horus, who all in one way or another fertilise seed. Given the dependence of early Greek thought on the Egyptian system, it is not surprising that Eros also played an important part in the rites of the Greek Mysteries. Pausanias records that: “Later than Olen, both Pamphos and Orpheus wrote hexameter verse, and composed poems on Eros, in order that they might be among those sung by the Lykomidai to accompany the ritual. I read them after conversation with a Torchbearer. Of these things I will make no further mention.” As far as one can tell, the Greek Mysteries involved the union or blending of Eros and Psyche. Eros was said to be a tamer of wild beasts, and one of the creatures sacred to him is the cock, a bird often associated with the sun. Dante faces three impediments that bar his way to the mount of dawn. Peter denies Jesus three times before the cock crows to proclaim the dawn. The candidate is in the mound for three days before re-emerging to behold the ray of dawn. Christ was resurrected from the tomb after three days. In some old rites associated with a form of the mystery teachings the candidate is

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ritualistically denied entry three times before being accepted as a full member of the brotherhood. Arturo: “A purely intellectual approach to such matters will not sufice. In one sense it is true that the steps to the light are three; and so their impediments have at times also been considered to be threefold. However as man experiences them, these three, high and low, are countless in their manifestations in his world. They cannot all be enumerated, deined or otherwise comprehended by lower intellect alone. Sometimes it is best to concentrate simply on the One Light, give thanks for its many blessings, and leave darkness to look after itself.” Nimrod bellows: “Raphael mai amech izabi almi,” Virgil rebukes him and explains to Dante that the giant knows no other language but his own, and uses a language that no other understands. Many attempts have been made to translate his utterance, although most commentators interpret it as empty, meaningless babble, an apt punishment, they say, verging on the loss of language altogether. On the other hand one or two have speculated that it may represent some sort of magical formula. It is possible to speculate further that Nimrod’s ‘lip and tongue’, while remaining pregnant with meaning is, since the destruction of Babel, no longer understood by the commentators or anyone else. Arturo: “If this is the case, then long may it remain so!” Virgil and Dante move on: “Here let us leave him and not speak in vain; For even such to him is every language

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As his to others, which to none is known.” They carry on to the left. There follows various encounters with or references to giants of the mythological past. Dante places emphasis on their great power and physical prowess when they were among the living, often represented by the strength of their arms and hands. In the Bible the words arm and might are often interchangeable. In this sense arms and hands signify an extended power of action . The irst was the enchained Ephialtes, his chains wrapped around him ive times. “Ephialtes is his name; he showed great prowess. What time the giants terriied the gods; The arms he wielded never more he moves.” Arturo: “He who is unwilling to exercise a measure of control over his senses will eventually, sooner or later, become their slave. Such are enchained to the worlds of a purely material life, and all that these worlds involve.” Reference is also made to Briaeus who was said to have had a hundred hands and ifty heads. Virgil tells Dante that they will travel on to Antaeus, as among the giants he is the only one who is unfettered and able to speak. They will need his assistance to descend further. But before they do so Ephialtes shakes himself, causing Dante to be fearful: “No earthquake ever was so violent when called to shake a tower so robust, as Ephialtes quick to shake himself.” They move on to Antaeus who Dante says rises ive ells above the pit. “And we continued on until we reached

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Antaeus, who, not reckoning his head, stood out above the rock wall full ive ells.” An ell is a unit of measurement derived from the length of the forearm; that is, from the el-bow to the tip of the outstretched hand. Although in reality its length often varied from country to country, attempts were made to standardise it and in some places a rod or ellwand was made to a standard length. It is connected to the cubit, a measurement still in use in Dante’s time. There was a common cubit and a royal cubit; the latter divided into 28 units: 7 palms multiplied by 4 ingers. Hercules’ heroic victory over Antaeus is compared by Dante to the Roman Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal. When wrestling Antaeus, Hercules won the contest by irst lifting the giant above the ground, denying his opponent contact with the earth, the maternal source of his great strength. Once drained of her power Antaeus’ grip was no match for that of Hercules. Virgil speaks with Antaeus and asks him to take them further below. Reference is made to two other giants: Tityus and Typhoeus. The latter is also known as Typhon, an ever-watchful, hundred-headed, ire-breathing dragon. He and his wife Echidna were called the father and mother of all monsters. The other, Tityus or Tityos, had assaulted Latona. There are old illustrations which show the giant dragging the goddess by her veil. Ovid tells that Tityus was punished for his crime and that he is now “stretched across nine acres and provides his vitals for the vultures.” Some versions replace the word vitals with liver, which brings to mind the punishment of Prometheus. Latona, whose Greek name was Leto, was the mother of Apollo and

156 Artemis. As Homer relates: “Rejoice, blessed Leto, for you bare glorious children, the lord Apollon and Artemis who delights in arrows; her in Ortygia, and him in rocky Delos, as you rested against the great mass of the Cynthian hill hard by a palm-tree by the streams of Inopus.” Dimitri: “O thou night of mystery, robed in black, bringer forth of the light and life that maketh day. Thou, the divine silence whose heavenly locks conceal that which is not yet, but shall come to be. Thou, the joy of Delos, the aroma of thy breath ambrosial ills the air; the waters of life low around thee; the tree of life is as a canopy above thy head; the nymphai encircle thee in dance; all thy choirs unseen doth sing creation’s song; the Earth doth shine with pleasure; and a steeply slanting ray brings light to the dark and watery deeps.” Antaeus bends to lift the two travellers and gently places them below. Dante compares the bending giant to the leaning tower of Garisenda. When the giant has deposited them on the loor below, he rises again like the mast of a ship. Canto 32 begins with Dante doubting that he has the words to describe the bottom of Hell. “Down upon which thrust all the other rocks.” There is a symbolical representation of the universe, accepted widely as literal during Dante’s time, which places the Earth as the central planet in a series of nine planets. Building on this geocentric model Dante places the centre of Hell at the centre of the Earth, itself the centre of the cosmos, and so subject to the immense natural forces or ‘weight’ of the entire system surrounding it. Thus are some types of poetry and other creative endeavours akin to the expression of an inner essence squeezed or pressed out like juice

157 from fruit by the winepress of the world. Dante declares that his present task , which is to ind the words that accurately relect the very base of the cosmos, is not a task for children. He calls on the Muses for help. He relates that they had helped the poet Amphion to build with nought but the powers of lip and tongue the city walls of Thebes. The sinners here are encased in a lake of ice, caused by the freezing of the waters of Cocytus. Dante likens its appearance to glass. A digression: one of the characteristics of ice is that because its molecules are more closely packed together, they are more ixed and have less freedom of movement than they do in water. Ice crystals in the form of individual snowlakes can be compressed into blocks of solid ice. Temperature and pressure are key determinates in the process. There are various ways in which atoms and molecules can be arranged to form crystals. Many early scientists believed that further compression over a long period would slowly transform ice into rock crystal, a member of the quartz family sometimes referred to as ice-crystal. The word crystal comes from the Greek krustallos meaning ice, or frozen water . Quartz continues to be of interest to scientists today because of its ability to transform heat into electrical energy. It is important too in our modern materials technologies because of its remarkable electrical and optical properties, as well as its great physical strength and chemical resistance. The formation of crystals is interesting for all sorts of reasons. For example, if a certain substance (the solute) is dissolved in another substance (the solvent) the solute molecules are separated from each other due to the intervening solvent molecules. However if there are

158 enough of them, or if the solvent molecules are reduced in number, it’s possible for the solute molecules to bond together to create a nucleus, around which a crystal may grow. The forces associated with the solvent molecules will tend to pull the nucleus-forming solute molecules apart, but in some cases the nucleus remains intact and is stable enough to allow the crystal to reach a critical size. Dr Fernie in commenting on the formation of rock crystal summarises the theory of one of the early founders of crystallography, Nicolaus Steno. “He saw that evidently these Crystals grew; and not from within themselves, but from without, by the addition of new layers of minute particles carried to the Crystals by a luid, and laid down specially at the ends, as shown by the ﬁne strive which are never wanting on the middle planes. Furthermore, his rejecting the notion of extreme cold as the causa eficiens (in producing the Crystal), for the adopted thought of something similar to magnetic power, was a suggestive idea; and not less so his conclusion that therefore the Crystals were not formed only at the ﬁrst beginning of things, but that they continue to grow, even to the present day.” Back to the Inferno. The sinners in this circle are traitors. They are the breakers of the bonds of love, of friendship and of mutual trust. They are the frozen-hearted ones who pervert the purpose of man’s better self. They are the beasts who enslave reason, putting it to the service of low and destructive passions. Like many others encountered in the Inferno, the sin of treachery is a species of fraud or deception, a manifestation of that which is in opposition to truth and sincerity. However Dante considers one of the worst types of fraud to be that perpetrated against those with whom we have a special bond of love and trust: our kith and kin,

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those with whom we share the city of our birth, our compatriots, our friends, companions and fellow workers, and those to whom Nature has bonded us, some that we may guide, and others by whom we may be guided. Dimitri: “O my Lord, crystal-seed of the light serene… sadness… sadness… sadness. Take from thy pilgrim this bitter cup. Take him… take him from out of the midst of those who would do him harm. Lift him up into thy arms, for he is tired. The cunning spread their net of lies and the gullible believe them. They steal, they pry, they delve and they dig. Their shadow, low and thick, is cast upon him. He prays that they know not what they do. Save those he loves. Save them from the harms of this wicked world. Grant them peace. Grant thy blessing to all his kindred spirits, to those now gone from sight, to those still yet to go, to those who know and love him well; for where would he be… where would he be without them? Thy will, O Lord… thy will be done.” The rivers of Dante’s Hell, as we have already noted, originate in the suffering of sinful man. When the waters reach their lowest point in the abyss or pit at the centre of Hell they are almost devoid of life, devoid of those things that reasonable men take for granted, and perhaps most tragically, devoid of love. This ninth circle is itself divided into four zones: Caina, Antenora, Ptolomea, and Judecca. He encounters or refers to various sinners encased in ice, all of whom were in some way or another considered traitors. There are the Bisenzio twins frozen together so closely that their hair intermingles. They are unable to speak because their combined tears have run down their faces only to freeze, sealing their lips in ice. Both

160 had died by the hand of the other. They are in Caina, named after the biblical Cain. There is a reference to Mordred who betrayed his father, Arthur; and among various others there is Foccaccia who betrayed and murdered his cousin, and believed by some to have been the originator of the division between Whites and Blacks. He was notorious for striking off the hand of the Guelf standard-bearer at the decisive moment of the battle of Montaperti, causing the Guelf defeat. As Dante proceeds through Antenora he stumbles on the protruding head of a frozen spirit. There ensues an argument which ends with Dante pulling the belligerent spirit’s hair in an attempt to ind out his name. Another spirit reveals that it is Bocca; and Bocca lists the names of other sinners there. Antenora is named after Anternor who some traditions allege was a traitor who helped the Greeks to take the city of Troy. Ganelon was there too. It was said that he had been bribed to betray his stepson Roland, leading to the massacre of Roland’s holy army of companions at Roncesvalles. After the battle, Ganelon was tried, found guilty, and torn apart by four horses. Tebaldello had betrayed his city by opening the gates to the enemy army during the night. Next there is the hideous sight of two spirits bound closely together, one of which is eating the other’s head. The language Dante uses suggests an intended contrast between this act and the Eucharist of the New Testament. The reference to Tydeus, one of the seven against Thebes, relates to another instance of cannibalism which, according to Euripedes, led Athena to withhold from Tydeus his ‘immortal glory’. The spirit eating its victim’s head is identiied as Ugolino. He is one of the most famous characters of the Inferno. He was said to have died in a tower, imprisoned along with his sons and

161 grandsons for his treachery. Although there is some ambiguity, some commentators suggest that after the children had starved to death, he was overcome by hunger and ate of their lesh. He is represented by Dante as bereft of love, consumed by hatred and an unceasing desire for revenge against his betrayer and imprisoner, who was said to have been Archbishop Ruggieri. Ugolino makes manifest these passions while encased in ice at the bottom of Hell. As the pilgrim and his guide proceed, they enter the third zone or ring, Ptolomea, reserved for those whose treachery leads them to murder guests. Dante feels a freezing wind and is confused because, in line with the science of the day, a wind is caused by the heating of moist air by the sun, both of which are absent here. Virgil tells him that he will discover soon enough what is causing the wind. Dante encounters a novel type of sinner in this ring: souls consigned to Hell while their bodies, inhabited by a demon, remain on Earth. The reference to Atropos relates to one of the three Fates. It was believed that she was responsible for severing the soul’s bond with the body at the end of a person’s life. The sinners are blinded by the ice formed of their frozen tears. “Because the earliest tears a cluster form, And, in the manner of a crystal visor, Fill all the cup beneath the eyebrow full.” One of the sinners asks Dante to remove the ice from his eyes so that the pressure of his grief within can be temporarily relieved by weeping. He identiies himself: “I am Friar Alberigo; He am I of the fruit of the bad garden, Who here a date am getting for my ig.”

162 He assassinated members of his family during a banquet at his home. The signal to the assassins was reported to have been a call to “bring in the fruit.” In the Bible good igs are considered to be very good, and are associated with the fruitfulness of Nature, while igs that had gone bad were very bad. There is also the advice offered in Matthew: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. By their fruits you shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or igs of thistles?” Dates, on the other hand, were not so highly valued, and were in some cultures seen as a poor substitute for igs. The biblical Bethany, the so-called house of afliction, is sometimes, though perhaps erroneously, referred to as the house of dates . Signiicantly, in the Egyptian teachings, Osiris, the dweller in the West, inds rest, relief and sustenance at dawn, or in other words, under the ig tree of Hathor. The inal canto of Dante’s inferno begins with an adaptation of a hymn traditionally sung at vespers during Lent, and also at the feasts of the Cross. Instead of the irst line of the hymn: “The standards of the king go forth:” Dante begins the canto with: “The standards of the king of Hell go forth towards us.” The huge ediice that is Satan can be seen in the distance, but in the darkness Dante can’t make out any detail and compares the apparent structure to an enormous windmill viewed in foggy weather. During Dante’s time windmills would have carried strong associations with the gristmills that processed grain gathered during harvest. Grist is

163 grain that has been separated from its chaff in preparation for grinding. There are also similar connotations in his comparison of the ice-encased sinners of this zone with wisps of straw, the leavings of the harvest. They approach nearer, Dante sheltering from the icy wind behind his guide. When they are close enough, Virgil stands aside and Dante beholds Satan. The sight leads Dante to experience something which he says cannot be put into words. “I did not die, and I alive remained not; Think for thyself now, hast thou aught of wit, What I became, being of both deprived.” Dante is neither dead nor alive. He is for a moment suspended in the liminal space between life and death, neither descending nor ascending. This brings to mind again the u-shaped arc of the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ. It brings to mind too, the death of the old man and the birth of the new. In one sense he is following in the footsteps of Christ. Dante’s vision of life’s renewal, epitomised by Christ, is at the very heart of his poem. Romans: “Know you not that all we, who are baptised in Christ Jesus, are baptised in his death? For we are buried together with him by baptism into death; that as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life.” Satan’s appearance is hideous in the extreme. He is bereft of the splendour and living power he embodied before his fall. Dante makes clear his espousal of the Augustinian reiteration that evil is not in itself substantial; but rather, is the lack of good. Satan has been stripped of all beauty and wisdom and love. It is due to this privation

164 that he has become the worm at the core of the apple of the world, the infernal source from which all ignorance, degradation and hatred proceeds. Arturo: “It is true that Evil is but the lack of Good, just as dark ignorance exists only where the light of understanding is missing. Similarly, we encounter one or more of the ininite gradations of suffering, fear and hate wherever there is an absence of love. Death itself is but the illusion caused in the minds of the many kinds of men when the immortal breath and motion-imparting spirit is withdrawn from here, for good or ill, to sing and dance elsewhere. But even though these things may be so, do not be deceived by those who claim to comprehend the ultimate purposes of God. Nor by those who wildly theorise and speculate about things that lowly man can never truly know. As I have said so often before: concentrate on the Light and let darkness look after itself. And be thou assured: the efforts to destroy goodness and its light by those who see their good in wickedness will fail in the end. When all has been said and all has been done, the good will rise again to the country of the Good.” Dante’s Satan has three heads, an inversion of the triple godhead. His six eyes pour forth tears which mixes with the blood of the three victims he chews, one in each of his mouths, another apparent parody of the Eucharist. The famous Florence Baptistery, a building well known by Dante – in fact he was baptised there – shows a giant devil devouring sinners as part of a Last Judgement scene. It too has more than one head, and some of them take the form of snake heads. This image, if it inluenced Dante at all, draws a line, however subconscious, from his

165 depiction of Satan, via the imagery of medieval Christianity, to its ancient sources in the Egyptian beliefs, where the all-devouring snake of darkness and death was the eternal opponent of the God of Light and Life. Each of the three sinners, Brutus, Cassius and Judas, were traitors who had betrayed those whose generosity had bestowed on them great material or spiritual beneits. Their treachery had broken the holy ties of trust and loyalty between them and their benefactors, a pledge and mutual bond freely made, and for as long as they were so bound, an unfailing surety of protection and assistance. Satan’s three heads are coloured blood-red, pale yellow and black. Underneath each of them is a pair of enormous bat wings. Their lapping produces the cold winds that freeze the waters of Coctyus. On one level, this wind is perhaps intended as a lower-octave correspondence to the spirit of God which in Genesis is said to move over the waters during the creation of the cosmos. Dante describes the horrendous suffering of the three sinners. “At every mouth he with his teeth was crunching A sinner, in the manner of a brake, So that he three of them tormented thus.” Longfellow’s choice of the word brake is interesting. One of the word’s meanings refers to a toothed machine used to break up clods of earth: or in other words, a harrow. This would make of Satan’s chewing of the sinners a parody of the harrowing of Hell by Christ. However, another meaning of the term relates to a toothed device used in the working of lax and the manufacture of linen. It has a crushing and beating action which separates the useful material from the useless, which can then be discarded. There are perhaps obvious

166 parallels in the separation of the chaff from the wheat; and also, among others, in the processes of separation associated with alchemy and other forms of metal-working. In this context it is perhaps worth noting the parable of the weeds as it is related in Matthew: “Another parable he proposed to them, saying: The kingdom of heaven is likened to a man that sowed good seeds in his ield. But while men were asleep, his enemy came and oversowed cockle among the wheat and went his way. And when the blade was sprung up, and had brought forth fruit, then appeared also the cockle. And the servants of the goodman of the house coming said to him: Sir, didst thou not sow good seed in thy ield? whence then hath it cockle? And he said to them: An enemy hath done this. And the servants said to him: Wilt thou that we go and gather it up? And he said: No, lest perhaps gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it. Suffer both to grow until the harvest, and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers: Gather up irst the cockle, and bind it into bundles to burn, but the wheat gather ye into my barn.” A cockle is a typical weed often found among grain crops, like the corn cockle for example. Virgil advises that night is returning, that they have seen all they need to see, and so they should move on. With Dante on his back Virgil climbs down the monster’s body holding on to its shaggy body hair. When they reach the lower torso Virgil, making a great physical effort, “Turned round his head where he had had his legs, And grappled to the hair, as one who mounts, So that to Hell I thought we were returning.”

167 Dante is confused when they arrive at a hole in the rock and Virgil places him on a ledge. Looking back he is nonplussed to see that Satan’s position has somehow reversed with his legs now turned upwards. Virgil answers Dante’s questions, explaining how the apparent reversal occurred, an explanation which makes more sense when considered in the context of how, to a medieval thinker, the cosmos was arranged. A detailed exposition of Dante’s cosmology, in all its scientiic and symbolical aspects, would require a volume of its own. It is enough here to remember that Dante’s Earth was at the centre of the universe. The sphere of the Earth was formed of two hemispheres: one of land and the other of ocean. Incidentally, Dante has Virgil allude to the belief that at some point in the distant past, after the fall of Satan and the rebellious angels, the hemispheres reversed, with the land and ocean changing places. Jerusalem, and more speciically its Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was built at the centre of the hemisphere of land. In Dante’s time it was widely thought to have marked the place of Christ’s death and of his descent to harrow Hell. It was also believed that Christ’s Cross had been buried and subsequently excavated from beneath the Church’s foundations. Dante’s Hell was located at the very centre of the Earth directly below Jerusalem. Satan is suspended at the base of Hell by the tremendous forces of the universe focussed on him from all sides, holding him in his place. Once the pilgrim passes the point at the very centre of the Earth, at the very bottom of Hell, he is no longer descending, but is climbing away from the centre towards a point on the Earth’s circumference directly opposite the Holy City: in other words, towards the antipodes of Jerusalem. In Dante’s scheme this is where, as it rises up

168 from an island at the centre of the hemisphere of ocean, the Mountain of Purgatory is located. The pilgrim and his guide ind themselves in a kind of tunnel roughly hewn by Nature which leads the pair from the bottom of the pit back to the world. Mandelbaum’s translation renders the last verses of the Inferno thus: “My guide and I came on that hidden road to make our way back into the bright world; and with no care for any rest, we climbed - he irst, I following - until I saw, through a round opening, some of those things of beauty Heaven bears. It was from there that we emerged, to see - once more - the stars.” Dimitri: “The many kinds of high-born men tread their many different paths like the spiralling stars that whirl their way through the crystal air to God; or like the planets that dance their dance of destiny to the tune of their solar lord; or like the lowers of the woods that turn their faces in childlike trust to the gentle light, many rayed, iltering through the many kinds of trees; or the shining clouds of ripened spirit-seed drifting upon the scented breeze of the sunny meadow; or the jewels and gems that spangle forth their magic and multi-coloured splendour; or the metals of many different qualities and elemental attributes; or the doe and roebuck, soft of eye, wandering the secret hours of rosy dusk and dawn, browsing the multitudes of fruits and healing herbs brought forth by mother Earth; or the dewy gardens of the morning fresh; or the ish, lashing silver and gold as they shoal in the treasured deeps or in solitude rest in pools of hallowed peace; or the locks of golden throated songsters that mount the golden branch to sing their halleluiahs,

169 diverse in lip and tongue; or the many kinds of saints who know and love us well, and who guard and guide us from afar; or the Lords of the heights, of light and mighty love, who cascade their living powers of goodness and beauty to all the realms below. But the degraded hordes of moonlit night are like unto winter hailstorms that freeze men to the bone; or like the iendish winds that shriek and wail among the rocky precipice or cause the unripe ig to fall from the shaken branch; or like the heavy hammer of the thunderclap or the lightning strike that fells the agèd tree or kindles wildires on the plain; or the many kinds of evil-hearted predators that hunt the wastes of sorrow and grief; or the spider who ensnares the unsuspecting ly in a web of subtle lies; or like the polluted stream of low desire which poisons slow the dell; or the many kinds of plagues that prey on the many kinds of hapless men; or the pestilence that spoils the crop; or the oppressive heat that turns the soil to dust; or the birds of blood and those that feed on carrion; or like the crushing or the iery-biting serpents that slither amid the swamp; or the scorpions that sting the straying man to death in the burning deserts of the world; or like the demons of despair; or the robbers that hide themselves in shadows; or the devils that bind the foolish man to dreams of lust and selishness; or like the princes of pride who boast their way to earthly power to rule with an iron ist over those who wish to take their place; or the hoarders and the wasters who deny the hungry child; or the stony-hearted landlord who turns out the unprotected mother into the city street; or like the hogs who wallow happy in their ilth; or the tyrants and warlords whose lip and tongue spread hate and wickedness wherever they are heard. Who or what shall save the high-born from his fate? Who or what

170 shall save him from the all-devouring shadow of his destiny? O Holy Mother, save thou his soul. Virgin of virgins pure, lead this wanderer from the shadow of death to the place of lowering where the rose and lily grow. Restore him to his home and to the fruits of the tree which grows amid the lowing waters. Thou, who causeth the dry twig to lourish, grant him sustenance. Establish him, alive, immovable, forever in the freedom of his place. Extend the hand of gentle power to thy son who walks the ways of the wicked world. Thou, who are the glory of the House of God, send aid to the one who suffers. Thou, the bestower of eternal life, remove from him the cause of death. Thou, the veilèd cause of all that is or seems to be, grant unto him thy peace divine. Lucia, whose eyes give forth the light, come to his assistance and illuminate the path that leads to thee. Thou, who are clad in the splendour of precious stones, grant vision to this blind beggar of a man. Thou, lady of the treasury, allow him his inheritance. Thou, who are the brightness of the sun, show unto him the secrets of God that man is permitted to know. Thou, the lady of light, overthrow the hungry darkness which threatens thy child. Thou, the handmaid of God and crystal-mirror of wisdom, lift him up to safety. Thou, heaven protected one, protect him. Thou, who are beyond the reach of the lowly man and the vain of heart, lift the veil to him who deserves. Thou who are illed with the purpose of God, reveal to him his purpose. Thou, whose lamp is held in the hand of Christ, open the door to thy holy hill. Thou, morning’s dawn, awaken from his dreams the one who sleeps. Thou, who sealeth the just in light, put the signature of the Lord upon him. Thou, queen of the octave, teach him who is dumb to sing thy holy song. Beatrice, his belovèd, pour out on him mercy’s waters. Thou, the

171 heavenly ray, steeply slanting, Thou, the lady of the high road, smile thou on him. Thou, love’s truth and his heart’s desire, do not deny him. Thou, the self who maketh straight the wanderer’s way, loosen thou his bonds. Thou, the mildness of the Lord, hear his call. Thou, who driest every tear, shelter him in thy arms. Thou, the virtuous, save him from his foes. Thou, who serves the highest God, answer his prayer. Thou, who kindles righteousness, let him not perish with the wicked. Thou, the keeper of love’s sacred mysteries, instruct him in thy law. Thou, who singeth halleluiah with the angels, bring relief unto an aflicted heart. Thou, the font of beauty and grace and blessings, bless him in this, his hour of need.”

End of The Inferno

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