#dante's hell

When it comes to the most famous and influential depiction of Hell in the Western world, Dante’s Inferno is the first thing that comes to mind. Who hasn’t heard of the “circles of Hell”? Well, this very concept was invented by Dante. And yet, many things wrong keep circulating about what Dante’s vision of Hell was - or worse, people don’t even know where this whole thing comes from.

So, let’s do a brief dive into Dante’s depiction of Hell, with his poem “Inferno”. 

Already we need to establish some context. We are here talking about Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet from the late Middle-Ages/early Renaissance, and his most famous work, his masterpiece, “The Divine Comedy”, an early 14th century poem considered one of the most important pieces of Italian literature. “The Divine Comedy” is a actually a Christian epic, the full story  of a fictional version of Dante who ends up visiting all three realms of the afterlife: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. 

The poem is divided into three parts, each about one of the afterlife realms, in which fictional-Dante is given a detailed guided tour of these dimensions for the dead, with explanations about everything that happens in them. “Inferno” is the first and more famous part of the poem, Dante’s travel throughout Hell, guided by the soul of the famous Roman poet Virgil. 

According to Dante’s worldbuilding, Hell was created when Lucifer/Satan was thrown out of Heaven for its crime of rebellion against God. Lucifer was actually cast down on Earth - or rather IN Earth, as the devil’s fall created a huge crater in the planet. This crater then became the realm we know as Hell - an underground, conic realm where all the damned souls of the sinners go after their death, and with the Devil at the very bottom of the crater, the lowest point of Hell - which is also supposed to be the furthest point from God. Aka, the very center of the Earth. Hell is organized in nine “rings” - basically nine circular levels (fitting the cone-shaped crater Hell) - each corresponding to a different sin, vice or crime. In a specific ring, will be sent a specific type of sinner or damned soul to be punished. 

Now, one thing to understand is that Dante’s description of Hell is unique. This is part of its enormous success in literature and arts - it was a never-before seen thing, that Dante completely, maybe not invented, but re-created. Like everybody at the time in Italy, Dante was Christian, and so his Hell was a Christian Hell - the very concept of Hell-Purgatory-Heaven comes from Christian religion. And yet, Dante’s Hell wasn’t the Christian Hell... You see, Christianity had very specific doctrines and teachings concerning Hell - and Dante did not follow them when it came to depict the realm. For example, the very concept of a hierarchized Hell with very specific regions for each sinners is Dante’s own invention. It is true that Christian art did depict sinners receiving different punishments depending on their sins... but Christianity never considered that Hell was organized in different levels or sections - in fact Christianity even refused to acknowledge any kind of actual order or specific shape for Hell. The whole “conical hell caused by the fall of Lucifer” is Dante’s own invention - an invention which can cause massive conflict with Christian belief, since Dante took literaly the folk conception of an underground Hell, where for Christianity Hell is more of a supernatural realm separated from our material world. 

One of the key things here is that Dante’s work is not actually supposed to be a religious work. He isn’t trying to give Christian teachings through his work (though his Christian bias is VERY strong). Dante took the Christian concept of Hell, but then re-shaped it to rather fit his own moral compass, and his own poetic rhetoric. Because Dante was a POET before anything else - and a poet with a lot of things to say. By exploring Hell, Dante wanted to explore the vices and crimes of humanity, and thus his “Inferno” poem is a social commentary on the 14th century Italy. In fact, Dante regularly meets sinners and damned souls in Hell, and while he often puts legendary figures or historical characters, he also frequently inserts actual people he knew, or famous Italian figures that lived in his era - more than once Dante puts the people he dislikes or his personal enemies into Hell. This is notably why so many people love to reinvent modern versions of Dante’s Hell - because the whole poet of it is to be a poetic socio-political commentary on a given society’s vices, flaws and sins. 

Beyond all that, as I said there is a strong poetic element to Dante’s Hell. An interesting thing to know is that Dante wrote his “Divine Comedy” in a dialect, the Tuscan dialect, which wasn’t a common or popular literary language in Italy at the time. In fact it was Dante’s work, alongside other authors, that made Tuscan THE poetic and literary language of Italy - and even of all of Europe. This is one of the many elements that show a true... push of the Italian culture of the time into his depiction of Hell. As a result, on top of Dante’s depiction of Hell focusing on famous Italian people and events, he also throws in a LOT of literary references part of the common European cultural ground of the time, with a specific emphasis on Italian culture. In fact, a big part of Dante’s Hell is lifted... from Roman mythology, and Roman literature. Dante, as most Italians of the Renaissance, had a huge fascination for Rome in its Antique state - which was THE big, glorious, world-spanning civilization that “fathered” Italy - and this is why he decided to have lots of Roman mythology and literature references everywhere in his Hell, starting by having Virgil being his guide. 

This shows, once again, how Dante deviates from a Christian canon and concept to fit his own poetical and literary project - a hardcore Christian author would never include in the Christian Hell elements lifted directly from the “pagan” religions of old... and yet, Dante’s Hell has parts taken out of the Greco-Roman Underworld. 

In this same “poetic” base, Dante’s Inferno is an extremely structured poem, depicting a very structured Hell. Already you have a division of Hell and its sinners by vices - one circle for each sin, nine circles in total, and in each circle different punishments for the sinners. Even more! Fitting punishments for the sinners! Taking again a huge inspiration from the literature of Antiquity, Dante lifted his moral system from Aristotle’s writings, especially the “Nicomachean Ethics”. As a result, for example Dante adopts a definition of “sin” which is not based on the laws of God or whatever, but rather on the concept of “reason”, human reason (we’ll explore that later). A very Greek concept - but not a pagan one (basically Greek philosophy was seen in a very positive light by Christians, because Greek philosophers had reached ideas and systems quite similar to those of the Christian morals, so many Christian considered Aristotle and other Greek thinkers as proto-Christians, and were okay with that). Dante also used a lot of other principles to make his Hell a “fair” place.

Dante wanted to create a Hell that reflected a cosmic order where God’s harmony, rule and justice ruled - even in the most dreadful and horrible parts of the world. He wanted to create a Hell of punishment, but of fair and just punishment, reflecting a moral system of afterlife. As a result, for example Dante classifies the sins according to their importance - Hell’s crater being a reverse cone, its upper-levels, the rings closest to the surface level (aka human world) are those of the most benign and less serious sins, larger to host more people. Meanwhile, the further you go down, the closest you come to the Devil, the worst the sins get, and the smaller the circles get too (since in Dante’s mind, usually there’s not many truly vile and terrible people, versus a lot of lesser-evil kind of people). Another VERY important concept used by Dante here, and one that would MASSIVELY influence future depictions of Hell, is the principle of the “contrapasso”. 

The rule of the contrapasso, on which all of Hell is based, says that a sinner must receive a punishment - BUT that this punishment must fit and reflect the crime committed by the sinner, either through a process of analogy, either through a process of contrast. Again, it will all get clearer when we go into details. Basically it is “punishment fits the crime” and “ironic punishment” all in one. While this teaching was somewhat present in Christian teachings (again, Christian art did depict specific punishments reflecting the sins of the damned souls - for example gluttons being forced to eat rats and toads, or lustful sinners being tortured in their genitalia area), it was Dante that truly grew and complexified the concept to massive proportions, and created a catalogue of “fitting punishments” that would influence all future authors writing about Hell. 

A last interesting detail for this generalization: the number nine. Nine circles of Hell. While the expression became common nowadays, back in Dante’s time it was a true invention. In the Middle-Ages, the number seven was the dominating number in everything - religion, science, philosophy... There were seven deadly sins, seven virtues, seven planets, seven metals, seven ages of mankind... The world revolved on the seven. (Three and four were also presents to lesser degree, with the Holy Trinity/three continents, and the four elements/four seasons). So why did Dante decide to go for nine circles of Hell, and nine sins? It is especially baffling since Dante starts his tour of Hell by circles/rings based on the seven deadly sins of Christian teachings... and then throws away the list after covering four of them, to invent his whole new sins - based on Greek philosophical teachings. 

Why nine? Well, it is, once more, explained by Dante’s poetic project. Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is a piece that relies solely and exclusively on the number nine - or rather, on both nine and three. Three because of the Holy Trinity I talked about earlier, which is the core of the Christian religion. In reflecting this “holy tree”, Dante insisted on having three different afterlife realms (reducing the traditional fourth, Limbo, to a mere part of Hell). We also have three main protagonists: Dante, the visitor ; Virgil, Dante’s guide for Hell and Purgatory, and Beatrice, Dante’s lover, and his guide for a part of Purgatory and all of Heaven. To further it all, each part of the poem is actually divided into 33 sections called “canto”, “songs”. And what is the number 9? It is 3X3 - the triple of three, aka a super holy number. And this is why Hell has nine circles, and why Heaven matches it with nine different “spheres” or “skies”. Purgatory seems to be the exception, because it has “seven terraces”, seven levels corresponding to the traditional seven deadly sins... But Purgatory also has two additional levels - a beach before the terraces, and the Earthly Paradise at the top of the terraces - so a total of nine level, matching the two other afterlife realms. 

...and I didn’t even get a welcome basket.

This is in Celsius.  It’s a bit less dramatic in Fahrenheit, but not by that much.

The high for Sunday is forecast, as you see, to be -20C.  That’s FOUR BELOW ZERO for F folks.  And the LOW??!?  -31C,  That’s TWENTY-THREE BELOW ZERO for F folks.

THIS IS THE TEMPERATURE ALONE.  THERE IS ALSO A WIND CHILL.  WE HAVE A FROSTBITE WARNING FOR EXPOSED SKIN.

-31C/-23F.

I have lived here for a long time and it’s been plenty cold, but never anything like THIS.

After the purple of Lust, the red of Gluttony: the third circle of Hell.

Gluttony, in Dante’s original poem, was just mud and rain. Lots of rain. Lots and lots of rain. But you can expect that something coming from the mind of Barlowe will go one step further. So, the third circle of Hell in the video game “Dante’s Inferno” is all about digestion. Literaly.

What best to depict the realm of Gluttony than making the landscape a literal digestive system? There are rains and puddles here, yes - rains and puddles of stomach acid. The ground you walk on, and the walls you climb on? They’re muscles and stomach lining. The mud? It’s feces. And regularly you will have lovely organs ornating the place, and trying to kill you - from mouths that try to bite you, to anuses that blow fire in attempt of burning you... It is a level of intestines and fat and stomachs, it is a visceral hell, quite literaly, “the bowels of the Beast” as the design team put it. 

This process of depicting food and the act of eating in its more organic, grotesque and repulsive side reaches its culminations with the main “ennemies” of this circle, the Gluttons, damned souls that indulged in their vice even in the afterlife, becoming disfigured monsters of corruptions. These Gluttons are obese and bloated creatures who spend their time constantly eating, and rejecting what they eat. They eat everything and everyone they can find - they eat so much their eyes and ears were shrunken in size to allow their maw to take more place on their face, and instead of hands they have jaws that bites and tongues that lick. And what I mean by “rejecting” is: vomiting and defecating. This is something the Gluttons regularly do, as a reflection of their constant and excessive eating, and they even use it as an attack, burying their victims under toxic feces and acidic vomit. You cannot do something more revolting than that. The other antagonists of the circle are giant worms that suddenly burst out of the muddy ground to devour the player if they’re not careful. 

There is one exception to this entire circle - a break from the “body” world to enter the “mind”. It is actually a trap that Satan designed and placed specifically to capture Dante - a pocket dimension inside the Circle, called the “Hall of the Gluttons” (because at its centers the Gluttons feast on damned souls). This level is one of grey stone and grey mist, clashing with the red viscerality of the Gluttony circle - it is actually a geometrical puzzle, a cubic structure of doorways and staircases, each with its own gravity, a clear homage to an Escher painting - here applied so that only a maddening logic could help you escape. The designers did call it a “mind trip”, and it is actually quite nice that they decided to break the “unity” of the Circle’s theme by brinking this one little tidbit of purely mental and geometrical puzzle-game, so as not to be overrun with gore. 

The final boss of this circle is, of course, Cerberus himself, the “great worm”... literaly. Cerberus design is another proof of Barlowe’s genius. He took the three-headed dog idea, he took the denomination “great worm” from the original poem, and he sparkled it all/fused it with the aesthetic of Hell as painted by Bosch and the absurd hellish pictures of Bruegel. The result? A grotesque, pale, humanoid head walking on two arms - with nothing else for a body. And when it open its mouth, a monstrous, giant, three-headed tapeworm spills forward, each head covered in jaws but without any eyes, snapping blindly at everything around it... You can’t make more Bosch-nightmare than that. 

The first Circle of Hell is of course Limbo - while it is not the first level of the game (the game actually starts in the “human world”, at the “surface”, before Dante breaks open the Rodin-styled Gates of Hell and throws himself down into the Inferno below).

The introduction to Limbo is glorious, as it is Dante falling down into a gigantic void of darkness, as other people around him also fall while screaming - only he lands perfectly though, protected by the magic around him and his own life. The other souls crash around him, some on fire due to how long and fast they fall. But here is the fascinating concept: they fall. You don’t arrive gracefully in Hell, you arrive just like Lucifer himself arrived, falling down from Heaven, crashing onto Hell itself. All throughout Limbo (at least the higher part of it) you see various giant faces carved into the walls, literaly vomitting the damned souls out of their open mouth - not just a play on how the damned souls are literaly “vomitted” out of the world, rejected by the universe itself, but also a clever twist on how in traditional medieval depictions the Gate of Hell is represented by the mouth of a dragon/monster/the maw of Leviathan itself.  (Again, I can’t give enough credit to Wayne Barlowe for all he invented and created - the bonus videos for the game do say that Barlowe had an entire sketchbook on which the game visuals were designed, a sketchbook called “Barlow’s Inferno”).

Speaking of the damned souls - the game designers kept the idea that the damned regain a second body in the afterlife, though a lesser one than the body people have on Earth. In this case, they made sure the damned all looked completely stripped of their identity. All the damned have a colorless, hairless, naked body, all of the same size and condition - if it wasn’t for their gender or voice, they would all look like each other. In fact, the damned souls are so much stripped of their individual identities that they are literaly becoming the building blocks of Hell. It is something the design team highlighted in the bonus content - the walls you can climb on are actually made of cages stacked onto each other, all filled to the brim with damned souls, crushed into a surface you can climb. This is the metaphor “Hell is made of people’s souls” or “Hell is made of the souls’ torment” made LITERAL as Hell is built with and on the damned souls themselves, their torment is being literaly turned into a living brick. 

The other idea brought forward by the developers is that “the sins twist the people into monsters”. It is something we will see regularly throughout this version of Hell, but already I can point out here that one of the various “ennemies” of this circle are the Tormented Shades, also know as the Hell Minions - unlike the other damned souls, who just wail and weep and stay huddled and hidden in their little corners, they actually serve the forces of Hell, and become more grotesque, corpse-like, hunched figures fighting Dante. Alongside these damned souls that decide to serve Hell, there are also demons - pure demons, as in inhuman beings, that Dante has to fight. The demons here are based on your “stereotypical” of demons, as they are towering, horned humanoids all in black with massive goat-like feet and clawed hands. The final type of ennemies Dante has to fight are unique to the Limbo level and... they are one of the most notorious parts of the game. They are... the Unbaptized Babies. They are not in Alighieri’s original poem, BUT one of the reasons Limbo existed for a time in the teachings of the Church, and appeared into Christian belief, was to solve the tricky problem of the “unbaptized babies” - these babies that died before they could be baptized and thus, according to Christian teachings, could not actually reach Heaven, despite them being “innocent” and not having had a chance at life. The Christian teaching claimed that for them, Limbo awaited, a unique realm that is neither Heaven nor Hell, a neutral in-between. It was one of the two Limbos of Christian belief, the Limbo of Infants - the other, the one Dante was ACTUALLY referring to in his poem, was the Limbo of the Patriarch, supposed to be the dwelling place of the righteous souls before the arrival of Christ. But the developers of the game played very morbidly on the ambiguity of these two Limbos, by mixing them into the first Circle of Hell, and thus making “real” the most extreme and fanatic teachings that claim all unbaptized babies go to Hell. And in this case, the souls of the unbaptized babies become grotesque, demonic beings Dante has to fight throughout his exploration of Limbo...

Limbo is mostly made of two distinctive parts, sharing an eternal “stormy night” ambiance. The first one is the “arrival” part, where all the damned sinners are vomited into Hell, and then have to gather by the side of the foggy Acheron river, to cross into Hell on Charon’s boat. Charon is in fact the first boss of the Limbo level, and he got a massive upgrade. His boat is not just a little boat you see in so may paintings - it is an ENORMOUS, MASSIVE, cruise-sized ship, fit to host the enormous amount of damned souls that flow into Hell. And Charon isn’t a separate entity - he IS the ship, a giant head at the end of the massive ship, reciting forever the same lines engraved on the gates of Hell in the original poem, the “Abandon all hope” poem. 

The second section of Limbo is the “Citadel”, loosely inspired by the fortress in which the virtuous pagans dwell in the original poem. This Citadel is a grim and huge fortress in the middle of the stormy night, where the Unbaptized Babies appear out of burning chimneys. And at the end of the Citadel... you find the final, “true” boss and master of this realm. Minos, the King and Judge. As with a lot of other characters in this game, Minos is here a genius disturbing reinterpretation of the character from the poem - Barlowe as you will see did a great job for all of the game bosses. Here, Minos is still a serpentine giant - though he now has two, tentacle-like tails instead of legs. The theme of “the sinners become literaly part of Hell” is also at work strongly for Minos, as his skin is the same color as the rock of the citadel, and his high crown (fused in his head/made of his skull and flesh) is actually imitating the architecture of his very judgement room. But the real twist is that this version of Minos is completely blind. Eyeless - or rather with his eyes covered by a thick layer of flesh - in a grotesque parody of the blindfolded Lady Justice, Minos actually SMELLS the sins of the damned. By sniffng them he can identify the crimes they commited in life and the types of vices that sent them to Hell, and this is how he decides where each soul has to go. 

Dante's Hell consists of nine main circles. Each circle of hell, or level, is subdivided into smaller regions devoted to eqquisite punishments for the sinners assigned eternally to that location. Although Dante was influenced by Christian doctrine in his conception of Hell as a place of eternal damnation, he also applied his crfeative vision to invent a hell which was entirely unique and reflected his own concepts and prejudices. The different levels of Hell do correspond somewhat to Christian concepts of sin.