The final levels of Lower Hell
Originally posted Aug 25, 2022 at 10:30 PM
Ferarum Igni Ferroque - Beasts with Fire and Iron
And here we reach the last three circles of Hell. Are you ready? You may soon find yourself wanting to check this book out. Perhaps you may even find yourself asking the same questions as I did upon reading it. Hopefully, this last part of my blog series on Dante Alighieri's Inferno will help.
What will you do? First, you'll get a tasty beverage and take a deep breath. Ok, now you are ready.
CANTO XII, Circle 7. The Violent
The poets Dante and Virgil begin their descent along a fallen rock wall, hurrying past a Minotaur who guards the top of a steep path. Below them marks the edge of the Seventh Circle. They go down a set of rough "stairs" to see The Phlegethon, the River of Boiling Blood. Here, the Violent are punished. As these particular sinners wallowed in blood during their lives, so are they immersed in a boiling bloody river for eternity. Mostly rapists who are now commodity to demons.
Fierce Centaurs patrol the banks ready to shoot their arrows at any person who raises themself out beyond the limits permitted. The shallowest spot within the river's current runs at the opposite side of this Circle which only wades about ankle deep. Jason of Argos is there, along with Cleopatra.
- `Sanders` - Lines 58-60 - When they caught sight of us, they stopped together and three of them came toward us slowly with their bows and arrows at the ready.
- `Ciardi`- Line 101 - Along the bank of the scalding red river, the shrieking wraiths were boiled and purple dyed.
The policing Centaurs, busy with a handful of sinners, lash out at our poets but allow them to pass by with ease.
- `Sanders` - Lines 85 - 87 - Virgil said, "I'm guiding him though this wretched valley. This is not some vacation; he's here to learn a lesson.
Virgil guides Dante through the cleft in the river, blowing past the sinners who are hysterically unaware and oblivious of the river's lack of depth as they grasp at their choking throats.
- `Ciardi` - Line 126 - And here we crossed the ford to deeper Hell.
- `Sanders` - Line 126 - It was there that we finally crossed the other bank.
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(MOST SPECIAL NOTE OF ALL NOTES)
When I mentioned in my previous blog post that the Lower levels of Hell were where "The Inferno" gets good, I didn't intend that this entire series was meant to be a high school book report. As long as you're a fan of horror storytelling and gore with a gratitude for mind bending macabre, you'll appreciate the following Cantos going forward.
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CANTO XIII, Circle 7. The Wood of the Suicides
Past the bloody river grows a forest of shades who now lie encased in thorny and bent trees. Gnarled with rough bark and twisted branches that bleed, their dry, rotting leaves are plucked and eaten by smelly, odious Harpies - defilers of all they touch - and only as long the trees' blood flows are the souls within able to speak. Thus, those who destroyed their own bodies are denied a human form; only through their own blood do they find voice.
- `Sanders` Line 21 - 23 In the woods around us, I could hear moaning and crying, but I couldn't see anyone out there in the trees, and I was getting a little freaked out by it.
- `Ciardi` Lines 22 - 24 They [the Harpies] had the faces of women stuck on top of bird bodies, with huge wings and feathered claws, perched in the trees above us as we passed below.
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Then, just as a harpy hisses and brakes off a branch, a face in the tree's trunk shocks Dante terribly.
- `Sanders` - Line 41 & 42 I was so startled I dropped the twig in my hands and stood gawking.
He evokes the name of Pier delle Vigne II, 1190-1249, once a fantastic minister and trusted friend of Dante's. Sputtering blood and sap escapes from the branches as he listens to how this soul lived his last wounded years.
- `Ciardi` - Lines 58 - 63 I am he who held both keys to Fredrick's * heart, locking, unlocking with so deft a touch that scarce another soul had any part in his most secret thoughts. Through every strife I was so faithful to my glorious office that for it I gave up both sleep and life.
- * Fredrick II, a Roman Emperor.
Now, I understand about loyalty and having an affinity to a job, company or employer or whatever, I get it. That's fine; because I had initially read this Canto from an amorous viewpoint, like Pier and Fredrick were gay lovers perhaps.
People need incentives - it's nothing to be ashamed of.
However, to my surprise it was a sub-story of a guy who did everything for his boss only to become distrusted unfairly and locked away in a cell to die. Pier ended up committing suicide rather than starve to death but his means of doing so aren't elaborated on.
The poets, Dante and his guide Virgil, are suddenly and abruptly alarmed.
- `Sanders` Lines 109 - 112 Suddenly, two naked guys burst out of the trees on our left and ran past us, bleeding and scratched as they charged through the dry branches and brush.
- 'Ciardi' Line 117 two torn and naked wraiths went plunging by me.
The two ghosts who swerve dramatically around our poets are chased and ultimately devoured by a pack of gurgling and stinking dogs.
Dante observes the ghosts' reward for their lives of sin: their limbs re-form at their torsos only to flee and be hunted again, as the process must be repeated for all eternity.
In Ciardi's notes he mentions that one of the ghosts is a famous murderer whose favorite prank was arson of the day, Jacomo da Sant Andrea who perished in 1239 probably by the hands of assassins, who alongside him is an anonymous Florentine Christian suicide.
The poets manage to gather their composure and steel themselves for the remaining task at hand and head off into the Third Ring of the Seventh Circle.
"Immortality is proof that we exist. We want gore, preferably in 1080p." - Frank Rose. Editor at Wired
CANTO XIV, Circle 7. The Violent Against Nature
Leaving the woods, Dante and Virgil cross a desert of burning marsh and sand. The two witness flames raining down continuously from the sky onto the sinners who are moved to greater cries of pain. Dante is immensely fascinated by the punishments he finds and records about here.
- `Sanders` Lines 28 - 30 Big flakes of fire rained down in slow motion, like some kind of evil Christmas Eve snowfall of flame.
Virgil then recognizes a war captain named Capaneus, who once scaled the great walls of Thebes. He ridicules the man as he and Dante pass by unaffected by the raining flame.
- `Ciardi` Lines 62 - 63 and Line 69 Only your own rage could be fit torment for your sullen pride." His slobber is a fit badge for his breast.
The poets' slow passage through the sands is difficult process. Yet they are able to find a margin of lane. It permits them unburnt beyond the desert sands. Their next round of torture and lament lies ahead.
CANTO XV, the Great Cliff at whose foot lies the EIGHTH CIRCLE
Over the next few cantos, I've noticed many homosexual implicated resonances, which made me positively intrigued going forward. I have so many references that I can't wait to share as we continue this journey with our poets.
Dante and Virgil pass a round of stones lining the steaming river, Lethe. Hell offers endless surprises and spawns fresh atrocity for a roving band of sinners called, the Sodomites. They trudge in a ditch alongside the river and stare almost greedily up at the poets as they walk by in observation. The souls who reside here are Greek artists, musicians or Roman military elite. One ghost in particular recognizes Dante and grabs his attention.
- `Ciardi` Lines 25 - 27 And I, when he stretched his arm out to me, searched his baked features closely, till at last I traced his image from my memory
The ghost prophesizes that once Dante leaves Hell everyone he knows will die from bad luck in some form or another.
Eventually our poets pass safely alongside the river and arrive at the edge of a great waterfall cliff face. Here, at Virgil's command, Dante removes his belt from around his waist and drops it over the edge of the abyss. In the following Canto - Canto XVI, there's mention of three heckling wraiths asking our poets what the latest happenings in Florence are and seems like a bit of a "filler" Canto for me. In this regard I've skipped over the gossip shared between spirits and men to continue onward with what Dante witnesses next.
CANTO XVII - GREYON, the Monster of Fraud
A shape - so it rose. Through the rust-colored mist. A dragon half reptile half man. Virgil reassures Dante a ride on this horrid beast is better than the alternative, eyeing the roaring chasm below.
The poets mount the great shoulders of Greyon with haste. Into blackness they float their descent further within the bowels of Hell.
Of ragged rock sets the eighth shelf of horrors.
CANTO XVIII, Circle 8, The Evil Ditches
The two now stand at the edge of the Eighth Circle; it is a great stone circuit whose slope is much like that of an amphitheater. These slopes are divided by ten ditches and within them are those sinners punished eternally by different barbed-faced monsters with their own foul purposes and agendas.
A series of rock spokes run from the cliff face down towards the center of the circle to serve as bridges between the ditches.
A crude screenshot of Ciardi's visual description of Circle Eight.
- `Ciardi` Lines 34 - 36 And everywhere along that hideous track I saw horned demons with enormous lashes move through those souls, scouring them on the back.
- `Ciardi` Lines 103 - 117 Here we heard people whine in the next chasm, knocking and thumping themselves with open palms, and blubber through their snouts as if in a spasm. Steaming from that pit, a vapor rose over the banks, crusting them with a slime that sickened my eyes and hammered at my nose. That chasm sinks so deep we could not sight its bottom anywhere until we climbed along the rock arch to its greatest height. Once there, I peered down; and I saw long lines of people in a river of excrement that seemed the overflow of the world's latrines. I saw among the felons of that pit one wraith who might or might not have been tortured - one could not tell; he was so smeared with shit.
...fresh tormentors...- `Sanders` Lines 104 - 108 At the same time, we could hear them being beaten by demons. A scalding heat rose with a stench from below, and the walls of the pit were covered in moist, slimy mold that stuck to the sufferers like flypaper and smelled like shit.
...with fresh torments.Both poets literally cannot get away fast enough to pass onto the next ditch.
- `Sanders` Line 136 "Let's get out of here," Virgil said. "We've seen enough of this."
CANTO XIX, Pit of Woe
Dante and Virgil come across the following chasm, where they find sinners placed upside down, headfirst into tube-like furnaces with their legs sticking out, flailing wildly in their deserved and eternal punishment.
- `Ciardi` Lines 22 - 24 From every stone mouth a miscreant's legs stuck out as far as the calf. The torsos were all ablaze and the joints of the legs quivered and writhed about.
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CANTO XX: The Fortune Tellers and Diviners
Our poets descend further down an arched ledge towards a succeeding trench of damned souls. Here, astronomers and soothsayers turned wretched wraiths parade slowly and tearfully in their enormous void. Since their lives on Earth were spent attempting to glimpse the future by arts forbidden by God, these sufferers' heads are turned a full 180 degrees. Dante reiterates how the sins committed in life are reversed upon the sinner once they've entered Hell. Again.
- `Sanders` Lines 6 - 15 In the bottom of the ditch below us, I saw condemned souls walking slowly, as if dazed, and crying quietly like some tragic, bizarre holiday parade. When I got a better look at their bodies, I realized they were completely deformed: Their chins weren't over their chests and their necks were all twisted around, so that their noses faced backwards.
- `Sanders` Line 15 They had to walk backward to get anywhere, because they couldn't see what was ahead.
- `Ciardi` Lines 10 - 14 And when I looked down from their faces, I saw that each of them was hideously distorted between the top of the chest and the lines of the jaw; for the face was reversed on the neck, and they came on backwards, staring backwards at their loins,
I tend to agree it's probably not healthy to expose oneself to boiling black tar. Then again, the outside of this ditch is ringed with the gunk to represent these sinners' sticky deeds in life. I mean, boiling tar is probably never safe.
- `Sanders` Line 130 And over there, he [Virgil] led me through the pits of Hell.
CANTOS XXI & XXII: Conveniently recalled as the GARGOYLE CANTOS
In his notes, Ciardi mentions Dante being called "The Master of the Disgusting". It is here that Dante certainly attaches his grotesqueries.
The poets move on and arrive at the next ditch which is essentially a broken bridge guarded by hideous demons, who tear sinners apart with claws and grappling hooks. This band of terror are so infamous in Hell that they have their own squad name - The Blacktalons. Each with their own name and distinct personality, I was reminded of a card game from the mid-90s called Werewolf: The Apocalypse. There were a certain corrupt tribe of evil werewolves that kept presenting me with twisted images as I read these Cantos, initially.
The stress on the coarse details marks the beginning of the gargoyle dance that swells and rolls through this Canto and the next.
I remember how excited I was when I first read these Cantos of grotesqueries. Ciardi's version of "The Inferno" had everything appealing to me in the brashest of styles for the day - awesomely dark Demons under desolate bridges! naked sinners being popped and bubbled in gunky oil pits! the poet Dante pressing the whole of his body against is guide Virgil in a suspiciously gay way despite the terrors witnessed around him!? - and my fondness for Demons asking amongst themselves if they ought to touch Dante in the rump was only matched by the delight I found when, years later, I was given the revolutionized version of "The Inferno" by Marcus Sanders complete with illustrated text adaptions. Luckily, I've included plenty of images of what I imagined the aforementioned Blacktalons would look like, each as visually exciting and bloodthirsty as what their names would suggest. Some of them - gasp! - aren't even devil demons at all. So, in that spirit, I present to you the monsters who escort our poet duo over the last ditch's broken bridge towards a cliff's edge.
- `Ciardi` Lines 73 & 74 so rushed those Fiends from below, and all the pack pointed their gleaming pitchforks at my Guide.
- `Sanders` Lines 76 - 84 [Virgil] "Do you pitiful souls believe I've made it this far down in Hell with nary a crisis without some kind of protection from someone more important than you watching out for me? Get out of the way: You can't stop us! Great God above has decided that I'm to guide this guy through this hellhole without any trouble! The leader of the devils looked pissed, but he backed down, "Let him go for now!" he called to the other, lowering his fork.
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- `Ciardi` Lines 118 - 126 [Snatcher] "Front and center here, Grizzly and Hellken," he began to order them.
[Snatcher] "Take Pigtusk and Dragontooth along with you.
[Snatcher] "Catclaw, Cramper and Crazyred, keep a sharp lookout on the boiling glue as you move along.
[Snatcher] "Badtail, see that these gentlemen are not molested until they reach the crag where they can find a way across the den."
- `Ciardi` Lines 139 & 140 and to their Captain, he [Badtail] made a trumpet of his ass.
CIRCLE EIGHT: THE GRAFTERS
For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.
The poets set off with their escort of demons. As they hopscotch over the broken bridge, Dante notices ripples upon the surface of the black tar pitch beneath them. Here, bobbing and drowning, are the Grafters - sinners who wallow in eternity with only half their faces gasping for air, no matter how putrid the "oxygen". One certain wretch manages to aggravate and antagonize the demons who break out into a battle amongst themselves. In the confusion, Virgil initiates an advantage to slip away from the Blacktalons towards the next cliff face.
As I've mentioned before, I'm completely smitten with gory horror movies. Seeing black tar monsters is scary enough but being an outspoken fan of body gore is a fiercely ballsy statement. For some with the perspective that I've had growing up raised on this type of genre, I was enthralled and horrified at how Curlybeard and Catclaw would rake their pitchforks through the muck to hook these sufferers in this Canto back into such terrifying bogs.
- `Sanders` Lines 13-15 We finally headed out with those ten demons, and they were a pretty wild and noisy group, like a bunch of horny alcoholics leaving the neighborhood bar.
- Lines 40-42 "Hey, Catclaw," the demon Cramper shouted, "peel that guy's skin off like a banana! Use your claws on him!" They all laughed and egged him on as he tortured the guy.
There are currently massive searches in northern Spain and in Turkey about actual gates to Hell that resemble the ditches and broken landscapes Dante describes as this Eighth Circle.
CANTO XXII, CIRCLE EIGHT:
The cold day in Hell is within reach; the Poets make their escape by sliding down a sloping bank into the next pit.
When I read the next few Cantos, I took small breaks to really appreciate the resonance of particular lines. Going back after a couple months to lament kept me recharged again without feeling completely drained from this last stretch.
After all, the final Cantos are key to Dante's Inferno.
- `Ciardi` Lines 22 - 24 "Were I a plane of glass, I could not summon your outward look more instantly into myself, than I do your inner thought.
Now in the Sixth ditch of the Eighth Circle, they see a group of wraiths plodding along in robes of heavy lead.
- `Sanders` Lines 59-62 As we watched, they shuffled off slowly to the left and we followed beside them, listening to their wailing moans and crying. Their shawls were so heavy that they moved slower than a tai chi class,
- `Ciardi` Lines 55 - 58 About us now in the depth of the pit we found a painted people, weary and defeated. Slowly, in pain, they paced it round and round. All wore great cloaks cut to as ample a size.
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While I must thank my readers here and now for sticking with this book review, we must begin Part 5 of this blog series. It's taken me nearly a year's worth of time and I'm more than excited to see the end of "The Inferno" completion. Part 5 will encompass Cantos XXIV- XXXIV.
This isn't a hobby, and revolutions don't make themselves.
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