Dante's Inferno
Find 10 Criminals and tell me which ring they would belong in and why.
The
Inferno follows the wanderings of the poet Dante as he
strays off the rightful and straight path of moral truth and gets lost
in a dark wood. Just as three wild animals threaten to attack him, Dante
is rescued by the ghost of Virgil, a celebrated Roman poet and also
Dante’s idol. When asked why in hell (pun intended) he came, Virgil
answers that the head honchos of Heaven – the
Virgin Mary
and Santa Lucia – felt sorry for Dante and asked the deceased
love-of-Dante’s-life, Beatrice, to send someone down to help him. And
voila! Virgil to the rescue! He’s an appropriate guide because he’s very
much like Dante, a fellow writer and famous poet.
From Shmoop
Purgatory
You have escaped damnation and made it to
Purgatory, a place where the dew of repentance washes off the stain of
sin and girds the spirit with humility. Through contrition, confession,
and satisfaction by works of righteousness, you must make your way up
the mountain. As the sins are cleansed from your soul, you will be
illuminated by the Sun of Divine Grace, and you will join other souls,
smiling and happy, upon the summit of this mountain. Before long you
will know the joys of Paradise as you ascend to the ethereal realm of
Heaven.
Level 1 - Limbo
Charon ushers you across the river Acheron, and
you find yourself upon the brink of grief's abysmal valley. You are in
Limbo, a place of sorrow without torment. You encounter a seven-walled
castle, and within those walls you find rolling fresh meadows
illuminated by the light of reason, whereabout many shades dwell. These
are the virtuous pagans, the great philosophers and authors, unbaptised
children, and others unfit to enter the kingdom of heaven. You share
company with Caesar, Homer, Virgil, Socrates, and Aristotle. There is
no punishment here, and the atmosphere is peaceful, yet sad.
Level 2
You have come to a place mute of all light, where
the wind bellows as the sea does in a tempest. This is the realm where
the lustful spend eternity. Here, sinners are blown around endlessly
by the unforgiving winds of unquenchable desire as punishment for their
transgressions. The infernal hurricane that never rests hurtles the
spirits onward in its rapine, whirling them round, and smiting, it
molests them. You have betrayed reason at the behest of your appetite
for pleasure, and so here you are doomed to remain. Cleopatra and Helen
of Troy are two that share in your fate.
Level 3
In the third circle, you find yourself amidst
eternal rain, maledict, cold, and heavy. The gluttons are punished
here, lying in the filthy mixture of shadows and of putrid water.
Because you consumed in excess, you meet your fate beneath the cold,
dirty rain, amidst the other souls that there lay unhappily in the
stinking mud. Cerebus, a canine monster cruel and uncouth with his
three heads and red eyes, dwells in this level. He growls and tears at
the damned with his teeth and claws.
Level 4
Just before the river Styx is the Fourth Level of
Hell. Here, the prodigal and the avaricious suffer their punishment,
as they roll weights back and forth against one another. You will share
eternal damnation with others who either wasted and lived greedily and
insatiably, or who stockpiled their fortunes, hoarding everything and
sharing nothing. Plutus, the wolf-like demon of wealth, dwells here.
Level 5
The river Styx runs through this level of Hell,
and in it are punished the wrathful and the gloomy. The former are
forever lashing out at each other in anger, furious and naked, tearing
each other piecemeal with their teeth. The latter are gurgling in the
black mud, slothful and sullen, withdrawn from the world. Their
lamentations bubble to the surface as they try to repeat a doleful hymn,
though with unbroken words they cannot say it. Because you lived a
cruel, vindictive and hateful life, you meet your fate in the Styx.
Level 6 - The City of Dis
You approach Satan's wretched city where you
behold a wide plain surrounded by iron walls. Before you are fields
full of distress and torment terrible. Burning tombs are littered about
the landscape. Inside these flaming sepulchers suffer the heretics,
failing to believe in God and the afterlife, who make themselves audible
by doleful sighs. You will join the wicked that lie here, and will be
offered no respite. The three infernal Furies stained with blood, with
limbs of women and hair of serpents, dwell in this circle of Hell.
Level 7
Guarded by the Minotaur, who snarls in fury, and
encircled within the river Phlegethon, filled with boiling blood, is the
Seventh Level of Hell. The violent, the assasins, the tyrants, and the
war-mongers lament their pitiless mischiefs in the river, while centaurs
armed with bows and arrows shoot those who try to escape their
punishment. The stench here is overpowering. This level is also home
to the wood of the suicides- stunted and gnarled trees with twisting
branches and poisoned fruit. At the time of final judgement, their
bodies will hang from their branches. In those branches the Harpies,
foul birdlike creatures with human faces, make their nests. Beyond the
wood is scorching sand where those who committed violence against God
and nature are showered with flakes of fire that rain down against their
naked bodies. Blasphemers and sodomites writhe in pain, their tongues
more loosed to lamentation, and out of their eyes gushes forth their
woe. Usurers, who followed neither nature nor art, also share company
in the Seventh Level.
Level 8- the Malebolge
Many and varied sinners suffer eternally in the
multi-leveled Malebolge, an ampitheatre-shapped pit of despair Wholly
of stone and of an iron colour: Those guilty of fraudulence and malice;
the seducers and pimps, who are whipped by horned demons; the
hypocrites, who struggle to walk in lead-lined cloaks; the barraters,
who are ducked in boiling pitch by demons known as the Malebranche. The
simonists, wedged into stone holes, and whose feet are licked by
flames, kick and writhe desperately. The magicians, diviners, fortune
tellers, and panderers are all here, as are the thieves. Some wallow in
human excrement. Serpents writhe and wrap around men, sometimes fusing
into each other. Bodies are torn apart. When you arrive, you will want
to put your hands over your ears because of the lamentations of the
sinners here, who are afflicted with scabs like leprosy, and lay sick on
the ground, furiously scratching their skin off with their nails.
Indeed, justice divine doth smite them with its hammer.
Level 9 - Cocytus
This is the deepest level of hell, where the
fallen angel Satan himself resides. His wings flap eternally, producing
chilling cold winds that freeze the thick ice found in Cocytus. The
three faces of Satan, black, red, and yellow, can be seen with mouths
gushing bloody foam and eyes forever weeping, as they chew on the three
traitors, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. This place is furthest removed
from the source of all light and warmth. Sinners here are frozen deep in
the ice, faces out, eyes and mouths frozen shut. Traitors against God,
country, family, and benefactors lament their sins in this frigid pit
of despair.
