In Canto I of the Inferno, which is generally considered an introduction to the Divine Comedy as a whole rather than as part of the Inferno itself, Dante encounters three beasts: the leopard, Lust, the lion, Pride, and the wolf, Covetousness. (See I John 2:16: "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.") Dante conceives these as the main forces of evil not merely in himself but in the world around him. And the inscription upon the Gate of Hell: THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE WOEFUL CITY, THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN, THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST PEOPLE. JUSTICE MOVED MY MAKER ON HIGH, DIVINE POWER MADE ME AND SUPREME WISDOM AND PRIMAL LOVE; BEFORE ME NOTHING WAS CREATED BUT ETERNAL THINGS, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY. ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YE THAT ENTER. The key phrase that Virgil uses to pass through Hell: "It is so willed where will and power are one, and ask no more." Consider this in the light of the solipsism conversation for a few minutes. Sins of Incontinence Canto V of the Inferno shows the carnal sinners - Lust - not because of sex itself, but specifically that they "subject reason to desire," they let their passion overcome their sense, they lost the power of restraint and therefore cannot restrain themselves from being tossed about by the winds of this circle. Canto VI of the Inferno shows the gluttons; this circle's punishment is rain, "cold and heavy, never changing its measure or its kind; huge hail, foul water and snow pour down through the gloomy air, and the ground that receives it stinks." Plus, hey, in case that wasn't enough, there's a giant three-headed dog clawing at them forever. Lots and lots of dog references. Gluttony is lower in Hell than lasciviousness because lasciviousness at least has love to excuse it; gluttony only has excuses of the flesh, not the spirit. It's the intentional reduction of oneself to an animal state. Canto VII involves Plutus, the classical god of wealth, whom Dante calls "the great enemy." The Fourth Circle includes both the avaricious and the prodigal, fighting one another by pointlessly jousting with huge weights. The sin here is excessive concern with earthly possessions. The Styx has its spring in the circle of avarice, and divides it from and provides the water-source for the Fifth Circle, a swamp where the people whose sin was wrath, violent and ungoverned temper, fight each other for the rest of eternity. The City of Dis - Heresy Cantos VIII through X pass the city of Dis, iron-walled and with fallen angels manning the gates; the Furies, Megaera and Alecto and Tisiphone, stand in one of the towers - the enforcers of remorse. So does the Medusa - despair. Dis marks the division between the sins of weakness and wilful sin. Within the city of Dis are punished the heretics - the sin of wilful refusal of God, linked simultaneously with weakness and will. The city's position and inhabitants suggest that all deliberate sins are actually forms of heresy, of the rejection of grace. Canto XI goes into more detail on the plan of Dante's Hell: "Every kind of wickedness that gains the hatred of Heaven has injustice for its end, and every such end afflicts someone either by force or fraud; but because fraud is a sin peculiar to man it is more offensive to God, and for that reason the fraudulent have their place lower and more pain assails them. All the first circle is of the violent; but since violence is done to three persons, it is formed of three separate rounds. Force may be used against God, aginst oneself, or a neighbor... Fraud, which always stings the conscience, a man may practice on one who confides in him or on one who does not so place his confidence; it is evident that this latter way destroys simply the bond of love which nature makes.... By the other way both that love which nature makes is forgotten and that also which is added to it and which creates a special trust; therefore in the smallest circle, at the central point of the universe and seat of Dis, every traitor is consumed eternally." "Remember not the words with which thy Ethics expounds the the three dispositions which are against the will of Heaven, incontinence, malice, and mad brutishness, and how incontinence offends God less and incurs less blame? If thou consider well this teaching and call to mind who are those that bear their penalty above outside thou shalt see clearly why they are separated from these wicked spirits and why divine vengeance smites them with less wrath." Sins of Violence Canto XII shows the first round of the Seventh Circle - the river of boiling blood, in which centaurs with bows and arrows keep those who injure others by violence. Canto XIII, the Wood of the Suicides, the violent against themselves - dusky leaves, warped boughs, poisonous thorns, harsh and dense, filled with the nests of the Harpies and the whispered moans of the soul/trees and the bleeding where the Harpies have torn off leaves to feed on and where hunting-hounds shatter branches in their chase after damned souls. Cantos XIV through XVII give the Third Round, the violent against God (blasphemy), nature (sodomy), and art (usury). This is a desert of burning sand and a rain of fire, and the damned are confined on it. Blasphemers, as the worst of the three, are stretched full-length on the sand; the sodomites walk or run about on it, and the usurers crouch over the purses bound around their necks to weigh them down. Sins of Fraud "There is a place in Hell called Malebolge, all stone of iron colour like the wall that goes round it. Right in the middle of the baleful space yawns a pit of great breadth and depth... so that the belt left between the pit and the high rocky bank is round, and its bottom is divided into ten valleys." This is the Eighth Circle. We'll be here for a while. Malebolge is above all a prison, far more explicitly than the other circles - the self-imprisoning effect of fraud. Fraud is the abuse of reason rather than the abuse of the body. Thus the Malebolge, painfully geometric and painfully divided, and painfully futile. Canto XVIII deals with the First and Second Bolgias. The first valley has the panders and seducers, who run naked around the bottom, helped along by the attentions of "horned demons with great whips." The second is a sewer, where flatterers wallow in human filth. Canto XIX spotlights a sin we don't have to worry much about these days. The Third Bolgia holds the simonists, "who, rapacious, prostitute for gold and silver the things of God which should be brides of righteousness." Actually, I wonder if the Scientologists would wind up here. They're planted upside-down in holes about the size of baptismal fonts, with their feet on fire; eventually their places are taken by even worse simonists, and they're shoved down to be flattened into the fissures of the rock. (It should be noted that in Dante's time, hired assassins were buried alive head-downward.) Canto XX and the Fourth Bolgia: the diviners, who walk backwards through their valley, silent and weeping - they have to walk backward; their faces are twisted around so they can't see forward. "Here pity lives when it is quite dead. Who is more guilty than he that makes the divine counsel subject to his will? ... Look how he has made a breast of his shoulders; because he would see too far ahead he looks behind and makes his way backwards." ...(more to come when Pryde stops bleeding from the eyes.)