#rivers of hell

XII) The Seventh Circle: Violence

Upon leaving the Sixth Circle, Dante and Virgil descend a landslide similar to the one caused by an earthquake or an erosion, a ruined slide that connects the Sixth and the Seventh Circle. Before, the connections between the Circle was no specified (Dante passing out in one Circle due to intense emotion and then waking up in the next, transported by Virgil), or merely described vaguely as a rocky slope like this one – but here Virgil takes his time to explain the reason why there is such a landslide between the Circles. Virgil notably says that the first time he did the full Hell travel, per the witch Erichtho’s command (I forgot to mention Erichto or Erichtho is actually a character from Lucan’s Pharsalia), the rocks between the Circles weren’t destroyed like that – in fact, this landslide was caused when Christ went into Hell and caused the great Harrowing of Hell. As Jesus took away most of the souls from the First Circle, the entirety of Hell was shaken – and in several places the rock of the “stanching abyss” that is Hell broke into pieces. This slope, as well as others connecting the Circles, were thus caused by the Harrowing.

On the slope connecting the Sixth and Seventh Circle, they are met face to face with the Minotaur from Greek mythology – here still a half-human half-bull monster, but possessed by such a rage he became literally insane, making him constantly twitch, contort and bite his own flesh in rage. Virgil briefly distracts the Minotaur’s mad anger with some references to Theseus, which sends the beast into a self-harming rage, and meanwhile Dante and Virgil run while the creature is blinded by his own anger. For you see, this circle is the Circle of Violence. Remember when I said that in Lower Hell the sins here are those of Malice? Well, there are two ways to make Malice: one is through Fraud, but since Fraud is a form of sin “exclusive to man” it is corresponding to the lower circles ; the first circle of Malice is thus for the other way of committing evil – Violence.

Now, at this point we reach such a level of complexity in human evil that the lower circles are themselves divided into sub-parts. Most notably the Seventh Circle, Violence, is divided into three Rings or Rounds, to represent the three “persons” Violence can be used against.

A) Violence Against the Neighbor

The first Ring is the one where are sent those who were violent “against their neighbor”, aka violent against other people – either violent against the other person’s very self, by wounding, harming, murdering others ; either violent against other people’s goods and belongings, through arsons, theft, devastation, plunder… In short this Ring is for all the homicides, all the pillagers, all the destroyers. Their punishment is to be plunged into a river of boiling blood (here the reinterpretation of the Greek underworld river of the Phlegethon), and guarded by centaurs (THE Centaurs of Greek mythology, as names like Chiron, Nessus and Pholus are talked about). Armed with bows, their role is to shoot down any of the damned that try to escape the river of boiling water – as well as those that try to escape their “level of guilt”. Because you see, depending on the seriousness of your sin, you are assigned a particular level in the river of boiling blood – for example the tyrants who caused massive bloodshed and pillages are plunged in the boiling blood up to their eyelids, while simple murders will rather have the blood to their chest or throat, and the lesser of the violent souls just have the blood up to their ankles (the river basically makes a full circle, with one side shallow to the point there is even a small earth bridge you can cross, and the other very deep). If a soul ever tries to get above their assigned “blood level”, the centaurs will shoot them down with arrows until they get back to their proper level (and a centaur’s arrow can actually SPLIT YOUR HEAD IN TWO, so be careful). We find again the contrapasso here – those that shed blood are now bathing/drowning in it for all of eternity.

The centaurs are actually quite nice and decent denizens of Hell, who agree to carry Dante and Virgil across their Ring to the next: the Second Ring.

B) Violence Against the Self

The Second Ring is a dense, thick, dark forest, all black, where the trees have no colors, no fruits, no leaves, just twisted and entangled branches with poisonous thorns. Dante hears the wails of the damned sinners around him, but cannot see them – Virgil tells him to break a little branch off one of the trees, and as Dante does, the broken branch starts to bleed and the tree starts speaking. As it turns out, the sinners ARE the trees. For you see, the Second Ring is the one of the Violent against the Self. Aka, those that harmed, wounded and destroyed their own body. Aka, suicide. Their punishment is to be sent into this Ring – but without one of those empty shade-humanoid body, those half-material human-imitating bodies. The souls of the suicide rather “grow” in the Second Ring as those black, twisted trees and have to wait there, unable to move or to talk – unless someone or something breaks their branches or claws at their trunk, or causes any sort of damage to them, in which case not only do they feel pain as is they had a human body, but also briefly regain the ability speak in order to cry and wail. This punishment is still part of the contrapasso principle: as the suicide rejected and destroyed their human body while on Earth, in Hell they are denied the right to have one, and are given a new, inhuman body, the one of a tree, that deprives them of all the good things a human body brings (like movement and speech), while leaving them with only the worst part of having a body (pain). The woods are notably home to a specific time of demonic creatures whose job is to inflict damage and pain on the trees: the Harpies from Greco-Roman mythology, who “nest” in the branches of the Wood of Suicides – described as creatures with wide wings, human necks and faces, clawed feet, and fat, feathered bellies.

You might notice that there is a lot of half-human half-beasts entities in this Circle: the Minotaur, the Centaurs, the Harpies… And this is done on purpose, to show how violence reduces humanity to a mere beast. We also get a quite depressing info concerning the soul of the suicides: upon Judgement Day, unlike all the others dead, the suicides will not get their human, material body back, because they rejected it definitively by killing themselves. They are cursed to stay as inhuman shades forever, even at the end of times…

Interestingly, there is a second group of souls/sinners in this Ring. The same way the Violent against the Neighbor/the Other could damage other people’s bodies or goods, here Dante makes a distinction between the self-harm and self-violence against the body (suicide) and the one against one’s belongings… This second group is a bit harder to understand: they are the Profligates. Those that wasted their wealth away in an act of material self-destruction. They can sound similar to the Prodigal of Greed, but unlike the Prodigals who squandered and wasted their money out of greed and an obsessive love for material goods, the Profligates are rather the being who dissipated their goods for the simple desire to cause wreckage and disorder, or those who squandered their belongings out of not caring or valuing their possessions as they should have (the same way the suicides disregarded their self and their bodies). It is basically an indirect form of auto-destruction, which unlike the mere “wastefulness” of the Prodigals, has a true violence to it, the idea of a rapid, intense, violent consumption of goods for the sake of losing or destroying said goods, rather than wasting and spending a lot in the hope of any material gain. To give you an idea of what these souls are, we are named two of them. One is Lano of Siena, who was known as a heavy spender, a spendthrift who lost all of his fortune to the point, to avoid the dishonor of poverty, he decided to engage himself as a soldier, in a battle that his home-city lost to a rival army and where he found his death – it is said that, as they understood that the battle was lost, most soldiers fled for their life, but not Lano who stayed and kept fighting until his death because he knew he had nothing to return to but misery, and so preferred to die on battle, even if it was for a lost cause. The other is Giacomo of Saint-Andrea, who was known for foolishly wasting his money away – one notorious anecdote about him is how he invited high-standing guests to his countryside house for an evening party, but upon realizing he didn’t had the means to host a luxurious and lavish party to honor his guest, he rather preferred to burn down his whole countryside house to avoid the shame of being a poor host.

Their punishment is different from the suicides: they rather are constantly running through the thorny woods, naked and gashed, fleeing from two ravenous black she-dogs that, if they ever catch them, rip them to pieces. [The “black bitches” or black she-dogs of the Second Circle have been interpreted in various ways: for some they embody the constant threat of debt, ruin and poverty that hunt the Prodigals ; for others they are the conscience and remorse these self-destructors try to flee from; for others yet they are just manifestation of Violence itself].*

C) Violence Against God

There are three persons against which one can use Violence, and the third one is actually a triple person. God, Nature and the Art. Get ready, we are in for philosophical talks!

The Third Ring of the Seventh Circle is a great sand waste, a desert without plants, a dry and thick sand with as its only liquid source a stream of boiling blood (flowing from the First Ring down into the lower circles). And upon this “sandland” there is what could be taken as a snowstorm… if the snowflakes were actually “fire flakes”. It is basically a slow rain of large flakes made of fire, falling flames that explode into sparks upon touching the sand and burn the flesh they fall onto. Dante and Virgil have to walk on the stone banks of the blood-stream to avoid the burning sands, as they walk by they see the sinners here are divided into three groups.

Some sinners are lying on the ground, on their back, their faces against the fire-fall: those are the Blasphemers. Others are walking, wandering, running aimlessly through the desert without ever stopping: they are the Sodomites. And some are rather crouching on the sand, huddling and weeping – they are the Usurers. Now to understand this trio of sinners, Dante gives us a philosophico-theological explanation. This Ring is about those that were violent against God – and the Blasphemers are the most direct example, being those that cursed or insulted God. But Dante recognizes two other concepts/entities that being violent against means being violent against God: Nature and Art. Nature is, well, nature, which is identified as the “child” of God, because God created the natural world as it is, according to His will and desire, and being violent against Nature is being violent against God’s very project. This is why the Sodomites are here: their sexual relationships were unnatural ones, going against the natural ways of reproducing and having sex. [As a note here, too many people think “sodomy” was an old word for homosexuality. It was not. Yes “sodomy” was the crime of the gay men in the Middle-Ages and the like… But “sodomy” could also be practiced by heterosexual couples, who were shamed and punished just as much as homosexual ones. Because the true meaning of sodomy is literally “having sex by another other means than by the so-called natural ways of sexuality and reproduction”. Aka, not having sex that is a man’s genitalia getting into a woman’s genitalia. Any other form of sexuality was considered “sodomy” and a crime going against the natural ways and God’s designs for humanity.]

As for Art, it is not just “art” as we understand it, but also crafts and techniques in general – and Dante, reusing the old Greek concept that true Art imitates Nature as best as it can, claims that Art is the last member of the “divine family”, being the “grandchild” of God and “child of Nature” – and one can be Violent Against Art. Which is the position of the Usurers here, who are extremely reviled because they are actually doubly violent, against both Art and Nature. Art and Nature were considered to be the two legitimate sources of wealth – natural resources, and human labor/work/activity. But usury, for those of you that don’t know, is basically lending money to people, but with extremely high interest rates – meaning the loan resulted always in the person receiving the money having to pay much more back than what they were given. Usury was considered a big crime in medieval and Renaissance society, as it was basically extortion and parasitism, a way to steal money from people in a semi-legal way using the loan system ; a way to get rich on the other people’s poverty, and thus is was condemned as much by the religion as by law – and Dante here condemns it as a Violence Against Nature (because it is getting money not by exploiting the natural resources, but by exploiting other people) and it is a Violence Against Art (because it is not working to get money, not producing anything to get money, but becoming rich on the work of others and multiplying money by money).  In fact, the very sand of the desert here represents the sterility of their actions in life – as the Blasphemers cursed and insulted a God who is infinitively more good, just and powerful than them ; the Sodomites used sexual acts that could not produce a natural reproduction (that was the big thing of the Christian Church, sex was only here for reproduction, not for pleasure, PLEASURE IS EVIL but babies are goods, which is why the Church was so strongly opposed to contraception for a very long time) ; and the Usurers got rich by not creating or making anything, and by basically not doing anything.

[Random trivia: the sins of sodomy and usury here are placed in parallels by Dante as both being sins associated with a city. The sin of sodomy is the “sin of Sodom”, a reference to the dual cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Ancient Testament, who were said to have depraved sexual practices. The very word “sodomy” comes from the legend of Sodom, destroyed by God for its malicious and vile practices, but in the Ancient Testament the sin of Sodom is not actually spelled out as homosexuality – the actual sin of Sodom is that the citizens of the city had the habit of gang-raping every newcomer to the city… As for usury, Dante calls it the “sin of Cahors”, which was a city of Southern France famous for being filled with usurers, to the point that in medieval Italy an usurer was called a “caorsino”.]

[Another note: All throughout Dante’s Inferno, there is a constant theme of the loss of identity and individuality. This shows notably here with the Usurers, who can only be recognized by the crests on the moneybags they wear around their necks, but it popped up in other passages throughout the poem – damned souls regularly being said to be unrecognizable due to the state they are in (naked, wounded, covered in mud…) or due to their intense emotions disfiguring them (pain, anger, sorrow…). For example, when Dante met Ciacco, a contemporary of his, in the Circle of the Gluttony, Dante had to ask him who he was while Ciacco recognized Dante immediately – because the pain and suffering of Ciacco had made him unrecognizable.]

Virgil explains at this point the source and origin of all the rivers of the afterlife, which are said to all come from a gigantic statue of an old man somewhere on the island of Crete. From this statue bleed different flows of liquids, that form the rivers of the afterlife: the Lethe (which is only found in Purgatory), and the three rivers of Hell (Acheron between the Vestibule and First Circle, Styx of the Fifth Circle surrounding the Walls of Dis), and Phlegethon (the blood river of the Seventh Circle). In the Lower Circles, all three rivers then fuse together into one last body of infernal water – the Cocytus Lake, at the bottom of Hell. In fact, at the end of the Seventh Circle, at the edge above the dark abyss leading to the lower Circles, our duo saws a huge, rushing waterfall, so loud they can’t even speak to each other – a waterfall falling down to the end of Hell…

XIII) Geryon

Between the Seventh and Eighth Circle, there is no actual passage by which the protagonists can go on their own. No slope, no river – just a steep abyss. They can’t just jump into the bottomless darkness of course – Virgil has to throw a rope into the shadowy void below them to warn the creature in charge of transporting them to the next Circle… Geryon.