Coyote Conscious: Face It: There's only one circle left!

I often told friends and family that I'm absolutely, positively sticking to a four-part blog aesthetic when I'd initiated this series. I'd argue the length of blog posts and the time it takes to publish them. Holding onto this Inferno series towards a fifth commitment is going to bring a welcome sense of closure as to how Dante wanted to scare the sinners of his time about the atrocities of Hell. Of course, once you collapse from fears relating to work life, lack thereof or realizing your personality hasn't developed since the club days of '00, millennials like me thus wonder if Hell is all its chalked up to be. However, remain in uncertainty no longer, readers!

I'm almost certain Part 5 will have you chilled to the bone.

CANTOS XXIV - XXV THE THIEVES

Virgil and Dante laboriously climb through the broken rock bridge at the Eighth Circle's opposite edge. They've escaped the uncomfortable environment of pacing and fretting souls to arrive at a space between Circle Eight and Nine. Dante's journey moves him closer to the absolute bottom of Hell, where he finds a stressful place full of wandering snakes and reptilian humanoids who wrap themselves around naked sinners; biting viciously with flaming fangs causing immediate combustion, reforming to become snake-people.

Endless and final in Hell, these sinners' very bodies are constantly being stolen from them. Here their humanity is eternally stolen from them, painfully wavering between human and snake. Everything that exists in this space seems to shake and reverberate, causing Virgil and Dante to become dizzy, unbalanced and nauseous.

`Ciardi` Lines 103 - 105 and when he was dissolved into a heap upon the ground, the dust rose of itself and immediately resumed its scaly shape. *CANTO 24*
`Sanders` Lines 91 - 93 And throughout that evil ditch, the sinners ran around completely naked and, in a panic, knowing there was no hiding place to protect them. *CANTO 24*

Like questionable special effects from cheesy horror flicks, humans morphing into animals is something I've never outgrown.

I've even gone as far as to gush about the following "weresnake" chapter when a cute girl started asking me about what I was working on recently (literally shuddering as I type this).

`Ciardi` ~CANTO 25~ Lines 43 - 47 Reader, should you doubt what next, I tell, it will be no wonder, for though I saw it happen, I can scarce believe it possible, even in Hell. For suddenly, as I watched, I saw a lizard come darting forward on six great taloned feet
Lines 53 & 54 its tail thrust through a sinner's thighs and closed its coil over his legs. I saw it with my own eyes!
Lines 56 - 60 as tightly as that monster wove itself limb by limb about the wretch's body; it fused like hot wax, as skin and scale ran together until neither man nor reptile appeared what he had been when he began:
Lines 73 & 74 Their former likenesses mottled and sank to something that was both of them and neither;
Lines 103 - 105 The sinner's legs and thighs began to join; they grew together so, that soon no trace of juncture could be seen from toe to loin.
Lines 109 - 111 The armpits swallowed the arms, and the short shank of the reptile's forefeet simultaneously lengthened by as much as the man's arms shrank.
Lines 133 & 134 The soul that had become a beast went flitting and hissing over the stones,

Although, despite my nerdy passion in explaining this blog, it was kind of cool that I could reference two books in one project, conveniently.

`Sanders` ~CANTO 25~ Lines 91 - 101 It gets worse. As we stood there watching, the snake and this guy, too, started to morph and transform. Each one slowly became the other, with the snake's tail diving down the middle into two parts and the guy's legs mushing into one big thing like a mermaid's tail. The serpent's body began to grow more human, and its scales flattened out smooth; they guy's skin started to splinter and crack into scales. His arms shriveled up into his shoulders just as the snake's body stretched out longer.

Why am I rambling about my true and earnest appreciation to those who have taken the time to keep up on this review's conclusion? Is it important that the series of radiation Virgil and Dante have been exposed to this whole time has worn on their sense of balance, time and space? Does the fact that I have a soft spot for Greek mythology influence a Dantean bias towards seeing the hero Ulysess not tortured by flames in Hell as the author poet would have otherwise?

Sure, maybe. But I'm all about these final Cantos right now at this beginning of the 2023 year because of what they've meant relating to where we've been and where we're going and the fluid parallels of both.

A great deal of CANTOS 26 & 27 are rooted in dialogue between Dante and Virgil - "Look, poet, in the great flames which are their own guilty consciousness," "Such myriads of flame I see shine though the gloom of the Eighth abyss, each sinner swathes himself in his own torment" - and appropriately so. `Ciardi` Lines 13 - 16

Because Dante considered Ulysses' strategies evil during the time of the Trojan War suggests to me that he felt the Greek's eternal suffering was a rather exceptional accommodation.

Lines 55 - 60 Forever around this path Ulysses moves in such pain as once he was in wrath; there he laments the ambush of the Horse which was the door through the noble seed of Romans issued from its holy source;
Line 81 having disappeared from the known world, went to die.

To Dante, the Greeks were the raiders of Carthage and the pirates of Gaul.

`Sanders` Canto 27 Line 85 Virgil, "Unless my moral recollection strays, how good an ape I was of Nature's ways."

Dante's poetic force is obvious within these two Cantos.

CANTOS XXV111 - XX1X THE SOWERS OF DISCORD

Two of my favorite Cantos in either book of Inferno are the following. Our poet duo has climbed over boulders rubbled and sinners cooked to reach yet another rocky ledge of blackness. It's like looking down into the depths of a black hallway. This warped part of non-reality is often cited as what mainstream society considers the epitome of Hell. A great example of these visually disturbing notions are horror movies like Event Horizon and the Hellraiser franchise.

As a kid I was raised on the barbaric genre from hacking up body pieces on family movie nights to sneaking a peek at what my parents were watching after my siblings and I had gone to bed.

The blood and guts that Dante finds in the darkened hallway of the eighth ditch were frustratingly nostalgic for me. A parade of hideously mutilated souls are hacked to pieces by a demon here.

After each mutilation, the formless bodies would drag their entrails across the floor of the circular ditch and return to the beginning of the circuit with their wounds knitted together in time to be inflicted anew. Most grotesque. Regenerating only to get hacked again.

`Ciardi` Lines 13 & 21 whose bodies felt the wet; the mutilations of the ninth pit's crew.

"Those who should be one where my evil turns to pain, an eye for an eye to all eternity; thus is the law of Hell observed in me." - Bertrand de Born (1140-1215) Great Knight of the troubadours of Provence, England, forever damned in the bottom of Hell.

Its barbarically disturbing down there.

`Sanders` Lines 19 - 22 if you put all the dismembered and hacked up limbs of all the wars into the same place, it still wouldn't be nearly as horrible as what I saw in that disgusting and wretched Ninth Ditch of the Eighth Circle.

The plagued, scabbed and fleshless. Coherent speech is indiscernible in the putrid stink around them.

You see, this realm is pretty much a meatgrinder.

`Sanders` Lines 119 - 124 I'm sure I saw it, and it still haunts me: It was a headless corpse that walked just the same as the others, except he was holding onto his own head by his hair, swinging it next to him as he went - like a security guard with a flashlight.

Our poet duo of Virgil and Dante walk further down the rubble, blood and gore to a Tenth Ditch within the Eighth Circle, and they can hear the screams of even more sinners below. Covered in open sores and continually scratching at themselves, some wraiths are forever pissing themselves, others roll in shapeless ruts of shit, without eyes in their sockets and gnawing at the air in mad seizures. Virgil explains through hissing teeth that the suffering of these poor souls is the most wretched in all of Hell.

I could understand how remarkably urgent leaving this miserable pit of Hell would be for Dante.

CANTO XXX - THE REMAINING CLASS

I have a few words left to blog about on the last leg of Dante's journey; he describes the bottom of the Treacherous Universe as a broken well. From beyond the dark notch of a pit they'd just left, Virgil clarifies that the burning ground will cool after eleven painstaking miles toward the center of which lies a well.

`Ciardi` Lines 135 - 138 I grow pale yet at the memory. As one trapped in a nightmare that has caught his sleeping mind, wishes within the dream that it were all a dream, as if it were not -

`Sanders` Lines 48 - 54 I looked around at the rest of the sinners. There was one guy who looked like a broken hourglass, as though his legs were cut off right below the stomach and lying in the mud. He was completely bloated, with all his internal organs bulging out from his swollen chest and stomach. It made his head look tiny.

“I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.”

― Neil Gaiman , The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists

Maybe it was what Virgil had said to Dante at the very start of their journey, that Heaven wanted Dante there to record the many forms Hell represents which coaxes him onward.

CANTO XXXI - GIANTS AND THE WELL

Through the darkness Dante thinks he sees what appears to be two great towers in the fog ahead, but as he and Virgil draw near the obelisks turn out to be giants buried up to their waist in the ground.

`Sanders` Lines 6 - 10 Finally, we turned away from that pit of tortures and walked together along the cliff around the edge. It was like a permanent twilight there, that dim gray light before dawn, and I couldn't see very far ahead of my Guide. [Virgil]
`Ciardi` Lines 19 - 20 And as I stared though that obscurity, I saw what seemed two great steeples,
`Sanders` Lines 16 - 21 through the gloom and the grey, I thought I could make out two tall [spires further forward]. "What city are we coming to?" I asked. "You're trying too hard to see through the dark, perhaps it looks like buildings in the distance, but they're not," Virgil answered. "As we get closer, you'll see what they really are."

Like most of Dante's input throughout the Inferno record, it is a poetical rather than a literal measurement in ascertaining the height of giants. Little by little Dante pieces together the giants as symbols of every devout man's embodiment of unchecked animality. These are the sons of the earth who stand a ceaseless guard beside the well pit with the upper halves of their bodies rising above the rim; they are like elemental forces unbalanced by love and without realization of moral or theoretical law. Raised from the earth, they are now rebounded to the darkness of their agent source, guardians of earth's last depth.

`Sanders` Lines 28-32 As we got nearer to the shapes, they became clear [through the dimness] as if a fog was lifting and the air was [given way]. The closer we got, the more distinctly I could see them, and the more afraid I became.

Actually, these particular two giants are Nimrod and Ephialtes from Greek mythology.

`Sanders` Lines 79-82 Nimrod's right arm seemed tied taut against his back, bound to the well, while his left arm was locked to a chain that ran from his neck and wrapped around his chest five times then down to his waist to the well.

Roughly, from the waist to the collarbone of one of these guys, their faces must be a bit over thirteen feet long. I mean, honestly, though; how tall is a man whose face is that damn long?! If the face represents 1/6th of a person's height, these giant dudes at minimum could figure to be at around seventy-five to eighty feet tall.

`Ciardi` Lines 86-90 Nimrod had one arm pinned behind his back, and the other across his breast by an enormous chain that wound about him from the neck down, completing five great turns before it spiraled down below the well's rim.
`Sanders` Lines 83-87 Virgil said as we stood looking at him, "He and his brother here led all of the giants of their time in an uprising against the Olympian gods in a fit of jealousy. Now he'll never raise his arms again as punishment for raising his fists in sin.

If Nimrod was the symbolic crass big brother of the two, then Ephialtes was the uglier, more remorseful and guilt-ridden younger brother per se; he too, is chained to the well but by only one of his arms. Son of Neptune, he warned Apollo about Nimrod's intentions yet took part in the battle regrettably. Ephialtes' actions were viewed as a message of revolt rather than distorted sin, thus earning him only one arm similarly bound while his other is free to hold his face in eternal woeful guilt. Instead of handing Nimrod a reminder of his chained, rejected afterlife, Virgil lumps a backhanded compliment to Ephialtes as a means to butter him up a bit. Sweet talker, that Poet Guide!

Thinking to add Dante's ability to make the giant famous for a long time to come, Virgil asks if he could be so kind to lift and lower them down to the icy level below.

`Sanders` Lines 130-135 But Ephialtes lowered us down softly over the well's cliff of a rim into the very deepest pit of Hell, where Lucifer himself was sent to sit. Even the great "hero" giant must have dreaded the evil cold of that place, because as soon as he had set us down gently, he drew his free arm back from the cursed depths as if it were snapped by a bungee cord.

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CANTO XXXII - THE FROZEN LAKE COCYTUS

As Greyon led the poet pair down the waterfall many circles above, so does Ephialtes land Virgil and Dante to Hell's final level at long last. Here, rather than burning, punished souls freeze for their sins. Completely encased in ice, these fixed sinners are guilty of treachery against kin and family. They've murdered their families in some way - their parents, siblings or own children. In a symbolic equivalent these murderers are denied human warmth or contact yet remain eternally conscious of their damnation.

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This Hell dimension is considered the bottom of the Universe, the center of all weight, if you will.

While I suggest that Dante means that the bottom of Hell is the center of the earth, most may agree that the center of the Universe is the center of gravity also. That means symbolically, gravity is the focal point of all guilt. So, my tendency is to understand evil is what draws man down directly to this lowest point possible via the soul's realization of the hideousness of their sin.

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`Sanders` Lines 38 & 39 their lips purple with the cold and a haunted, empty, defeated hopeless look of sadness in their eyes.

"Thought you burned not froze for your sins." - Pearl Jam, Let Me Sleep

Unfortunately, in the seemingly lost furtherance of light removed, these sinners are denied all human ties to be bound by unyielding ice. Like bad heads of lettuce kept crisp, these fuckers are fixed here eternally. I believe that many murderers within the last couple decades have wound up here, and they need more recognition over the more commonly known mass shootings gun manufactures have produced. Because if people are killing their own families and are allowed to go and thrive while their own kids are chained, tortured and starved to death, they'd certainly be considered sinners on this planet and worthy of this chilling punishment once they die and are sent to Hell.

CANTO XXXIII - COMPOUND TREACHERY

Let me explain a little bit about this the second to the last Canto of my Dante Series and why the punished here have compounded their treacheries on Earth. Acknowledging this Canto to be the most poetic and dramatic passage in the Inferno, Dante details how the sinners here lie with half their faces above the ice and their tears freeze their eyelids nearly shut.

To me, that feels like it'd be the worst-fitting outfit ever put together then never being able to take it off. Or maybe it would be like a pebble in your shoe, or a belt that digs into the side of your gut? It would be as though even the comfort of tears, this far from light or human emotion would be denied. Either way, it sounds like a scary place for anybody to be for all of continued damnation. At that point, I'd personally prefer a Circle or two above with the screaming and puking up of the guts and all.

This Canto is a very slippery thing. As I read what Virgil goes on to explain to Dante, I assumed that the souls of the guilty, who intrinsically cry icicles, fall to their torments before they die. Virgil clarifies this by saying the bodies of those punished here in this way are inhabited by Demons back up on Earth.

`Ciardi` Lines 128 - 130 [Virgil] I will tell you this: when a soul betrays as these did, it falls from flesh, and a demon takes its place, ruling the body till its time is spent.
`Sanders` Lines 129 - 132 when the soul of somebody who has committed the sins of Compound Treachery is sent down here, then a demon takes over his body up there and can do whatever he wants with it until it dies.

I recommend this trailer to get a glimpse of what such a possession would look like courtesy of the great Sam Raimi. Evil Dead Rise

As previously mentioned, it is particularly cold in this Hell dimension. According to the last lines in Sanders's copy of The Inferno Canto 33 our poet duo strolls into the final and last Canto - #34

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`Sanders` Lines 105 - 112 It was so damned cold down there that my face was numb, but even so, I thought I felt a breeze on my cheeks and asked Virgil, "If it's always dark down here and the sun can't warm the air, where is this breeze coming from?' "Just wait a little longer," he answered, "and you will see for yourself what it is that makes the winds you're feeling in this land of ice. You'll see."

CANTO XXXIV - THE CENTER - MASTER SATAN HIMSELF

Once upon a time, the Devil had three faces. It involved the distortion and perversion of an infernal parody of God - basically, it was the spirit of evil itself manifest in three entire dimensions. As far as I can tell, Satan hasn't slowed on any of his various aliases, disguises or personas. I wanted to create this last Canto of my Inferno blog series as a space where you could face the last depth with an enhanced understanding of Hell's true nature of frigid bitterness and how the only way to get back up is to travel further downward.

In the exact middle of the frozen lake Cocytus our Poet duo Virgil and Dante see Lucifer in the distance. His great black wings beat like a windmill.

`Sanders` Lines 7 - 9 As we got closer, the force of the wind was so strong that I had to hide behind Virgil to get out of its cold blast.

Obviously, it is his thrashing wings that are the source of Hell's icy wind.

`Sanders` Lines 17 & 18 Virgil figured he should prepare me to meet Lucifer, who had once been the most beautiful of all the angels in Heaven.

Upon confronting the glorification of all dread and evil, Dante observes that Satan is fixed within the ice from the waist up, apparently trying his best to escape. Yet the thrashing of his leathery wings only freezes him more surely into the polluted ice of the lake.

`Sanders` Lines 23 - 36 I don't even know what to write - words aren't strong enough to explain what emotions I felt right then. I didn't exactly die or anything, but at the same time I wasn't really alive either. I mean, just think about it for a second: I was down at the very bottom of Hell, neither alive nor dead, but sort of in between life and death. It was heavy. And there before me was Lucifer, the absolute ruler of that whole world of grief and suffering, halfway buried in the ice himself. He was huge. If you compared the giants above to one of his arms, that gives you some proportional idea of how large the guy was. He is hideous to look at. Seeing how ugly he is and thinking how he dared to rebel against God Himself, it's no wonder that he is the source of all sorrow.
`Ciardi` Lines 46 - 54 two wings rose terribly, their span so to proportioned: I never saw such sails upon the sea. They were not feathers - their texture and their form like a bat's wings - and he beat them so that three winds blew from him in one great storm: it is these winds that freeze all Cocytus. He wept from his six eyes, and down three chins, the tears ran mixed with bloody froth and pus.
`Sanders` Line 49 - 52 They looked like bats' wings more than anything else; their strokes caused enough windchill factor to keep this lowest circle of Hell covered in ice, despite the flames on the levels above. All six of Lucifer's eyes were crying at once, and his tears mixed with his bloody drool and wet his three faces.

DETAILS:

Virgil and Dante push on without rest.

`Ciardi` Lines 68 & 69 [Virgil] But the night is coming on and we must go, for we have seen the whole.

Virgil carpe diems their asses outta there by urging Dante to rush at the center crust between Satan's hip area and a bit of broken ice. Together both poets grapple their way between wing flaps through the natty exit door at Virgil's insistence of their only way out.

`Ciardi` Lines 73- 84 My Guide seized the shaggy coat of the king demon; then grappling matted hair and frozen crusts from one tuft to another, clambered down. When we had reached the joint where the great thigh merges into the swelling of the haunch, Virgil straining terribly, turned his head to where his feet had been and began to grip the hair as if he were climbing; so that I thought we moved toward Hell again. "Hold fast!" he said, and his breath came shrill with labor and exhaustion. "There is no way but by such stairs to rise above such evil."
`Sanders` Lines 85 - 91 Virgil pulled himself through a crevice in the rock, setting me down on the lip of it. He then scrambled up right next to me. Dazed, I looked up, fully expecting to see Satan's head in all his disgusting glory, but instead, I saw two long legs reaching up from the bottom of the crater. I was dizzy and disorientated.

Muddy, tired and confused, Dante and Virgil find themselves in a giant cave with a rocky floor and barely enough light to see. As they stand up, Virgil explains what happened back there after climbing down the matted hair of Satan himself. At the very center of Earth, the king demon is trapped, and the poets had been moving downward into Hell the whole time. But during the reversal, they passed through the center of gravity. For such a God and Satan based tale, Virgil's explanation to the poet Dante has suddenly turned quite scientific.

This insight is held onto unflinchingly, borderline stubbornly. It is somewhat credible news for those who might believe in the Flat Earth Theory who are direly searching for support, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Dante writes that where they eventually came to stand was at almost exactly the direct center below the spot where Jesus was crucified up above. The Gross Fiend and Image of all Evil remains trapped, pinched and prisoned in the ice-pack still below them right where he fell when he was banished and thrown from Heaven. The force of his fall from the heights of Paradise pushed him violently through the Earth, forcing and disrupting all the land into craters and rings to form the Circles of Hell.

Virgil knows yet another secret way to emerge out from Hell - a babbling brook that trickles through the cave. Here are the last Lines that I've found to be of importance from each book included in this blog series:

`Ciardi` Canto XXXIV Lines 131 - 134 there is a space not known by sight, but only by the sound of a little stream descending through the hollow, it has eroded from the massive stone
`Sanders` Canto 34 Lines 132 - 139 I followed Virgil along a path through the rocks to be free from the darkness, scrambling right behind him, until we finally came to a small, round opening in the rocks where I could see the beautiful sky above. We clambered out and stood looking again at the stars.

INFERNO'S EFFECTS

The foul creature that is Satan and the interpretations of his three faces are perversions of Sin. Note how closely each sinner's punishment is patterned on their deeds in life on Earth. Dante goes on to writes about the Mount of Purgatory after the Inferno. Naturally, the little stream which helps the poets emerge from the Earth is Lithe, the river of forgetfulness. Their conclusion upwards symbolizes God's ideal, shining virtue.

The moral lesson is that evil will always be punished by equal amounts to the egression of the Sinner.

"Hell is more bearable than nothingness" - P. J. Bailey

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Glorification, magnification, both immediate and enduring. Many massively influential and industry-revolutionizing movies about escaping horrifying prosecution by the Devil continue throughout pop culture today. Movies like Legend, Demon Knight, and even the comedy, Bedazzled.

I've never regretted my early enthusiasm towards a multi-part book review of Dante's Inferno. This has been an enormous undertaking for me with a dedication to long hours towards this project. I was well into Circle Seven by the time I knew my hard work would see that this particular subject got done and done well. There remains a long list of books I have yet to read and places I have not yet been. Hell, and Dante are no longer on my lists.