Danteâs Hell: The Midlands of Hell
X) The City of Dis
The City of Dis is one of the biggest landmarks of Danteâs Hell. It is the midpoint of the infernal realm, marking the delimitation between the Upper Hell (with the sins of Incontinence we saw), and the Lower Hell where people are sent for the sins of âMaliceâ. That is to say sins, crimes and actions perpetrated not out of blinding emotions or excessive desires, but out of a cold, calculating, conscious logic, sins committed with the full thought and intent of doing crimes, of harming people, of doing evil things â evil by choice, rather than evil by moral weakness. The City itself is a great and terrifying sight: great walls of iron behind which rises glowing mosques and towers, all buildings burning bright red like hot, recently forged metal â for in this infernal city burns a perpetual and internal fire that never stops, and that is so bright it is actually the only source of light brightening up the lower circles of Hell, which would be plunged in darkness without it. [For the name of this infernal city, Dante used again a Roman mythology reference â Dis was both the name of the underworld where the dead dwelled in ancient Roman culture, and the name of the god ruling over it, also called Dis Pater, the same way the Greeks called âHadesâ both the underworld and its god-ruler).
Upon arriving by boat (through Phlegyas) in front of the great walls of the burning Dis, our duo meets some resistance. The citizens of Dis, who are all âfiendish angelsâ, aka fallen angels and demons, refuse to let Dante pass through their city, because he is a living and does not belong among the dead â they tell him to go back all on his own through the Upper Hell. Alone, because while they allow Virgil to pass through their doors, they make it clear they will keep him locked in Dis for perpetual torment. While Dante is very frightened by these threats, Virgil is not. So far all of the âstaffâ of Hell has been hostile towards them (Charon refusing to let Dante climb in his poet, Minos and Pluto/Plutus trying to scare Dante away, Cerberus attempting to devour the travelersâŚ), and each time Virgil invoking the fact that the journey they are undertaking was ordered by the forces of Heaven themselves worked enough to bend the will of these beings. But this time⌠it doesnât work. After Virgil reminds the demons of Dis that they are sent here by God and that it is the will of the most powerful forces of Paradise, the fallen angels just slam the doors of Dis in Virgilâs face and lock them out, refusing them access to the Lower Hell. As a result, Virgil decides to call forth back-up â Heavenly forces that will come down to teach a lesson to these âinsolent demonsâ.
Virgil reassures the frightened Dante with various stories â for example he explains how the demons also tried blocking the entrance of Hell to Jesus Christ as he died, back at the Gate of Hell, but couldnât keep him out ; and he also reveals the reason why he knows so much about Hell despite being a soul of the First Circle â a witch named Erichtho once used necromancy to submit his spirit and send it fetch the soul of another sinner, into the âpit of Judasâ, lowest and darkest place of Hell, so this is why he knows the way. This story-telling time is brutally interrupted by the arrival of three of the most terrifying denizens of Dis â the Furies or Erynies from Greco-Roman mythology, here depicted as female entities covered in blood, wearing hydras as belts, wth snakes instead of hair, constantly shrieking and self-harming themselves. The Furies, from the top of one of Dis towers, call forth another terrifying monster, Medusa the Gorgon, and order her to turn to stone the living being that dares attempting to enter in their realm. Virgil covers Danteâs eyes to protect him from the petrifying appearance of the Gorgon, but hopefully the back-up from Heaven arrives: in a loud, exploding noise of wild storm, an angel arrives above the Styx, crossing the mists of the marshes, all the damned souls of the sinners of wrath fleeing in terror in front of this holy being, who walks on the Styxâs water without being wet, and with just one move of the hand pushes back all the putrid air far away from him. Armed with a wand, the angel touches the gates of Dis, which open on their own, and then he promptly berates the fallen angels of the city for trying to oppose the will of God. Without a word or even a look for the protagonist, the angel then returns to Heaven, his duty done. [In this passage there are several mentions of Greek heroes that went into the Underworld, and who apparently also existed in this version of Hell â from the Furies who want to destroy Dante because they made the mistake of sparing Theseus when he tried to snatch Persephone away, to the angel reminding them of how Hercules made his own way through the Underworld by dragging Cerberus away, leaving even today the hair/skin of the beastâs chin and throat is âpeeled off cleanâ. ]
[A second interesting parallel here is that⌠Here the three Erynies/Furies appear to block Danteâs path into Hell. But at the beginning of the poem, before Dante entered Hell, we learned that this travel through the afterlife was decided and approved by three celestial women who organized everything in Heaven: Beatrice, Danteâs lover, Saint Lucy, and the Virgin Mary herself. So there is a play here on the two trios of celestial and infernal female entities.]
As a last note: the reason mosques are said to be part of Disâ architecture, is because at the time of Dante, the Muslims were the main enemies of the Christians, and Islam the main threat to Christianity, so of course Dante would place their religious architecture as part of the âcity of Hellâ, the very opposite of the âcity of Godâ imagined by Saint Augustine.
 XI) The Sixth Circle
Interestingly, beyond the walls-towers of Dis, there isnât an actual city⌠But the Sixth Circle itself, which is apparently the same thing as Dis. And what does this sixth circle looks like? A giant cemetery. A landscape of sepulchers and graves modeled after the Ancient Roman cemeteries (such as those of Arles or Pola) â except that here each grave has its lid slightly pushed to the side, to reveal what is within them⌠flames. The same bright, eternal, burning fire that lit up Dis itself â the hottest fire one will ever see. And lying within these graves of fire and stones⌠are the Heretics, the sinners of this Circle.
The more âhereticâ they are, the stronger the fire of the flame will burn ; the lesser âhereticâ they were, the lesser the fire is. But what is an âhereticâ? I want to briefly define that, because there is a widespread misconception that âheresyâ means ânot being part of the Christian religionâ. That is false, there is a clear divide between âheresyâ and âpaganismâ. âPaganismâ is all the religions that are not Christian, and thus considered âwrongâ religions. âHeresyâ is rather doctrines and beliefs held or created by Christians themselves, but which oppose themselves to the official dogma of the Church and canons of the religion. This is basically the ânon-canonâ content of the Christian religion, which was fiercely and furiously hunted down throughout the Churchâs history. An ancient Babylonian worshipping their god wasnât considered an heretic, but a pagan. However if a Christian priest started a cult centered around how Jesus was a dog disguised as a human, he would be an âhereticâ. There is a lot of âheresiesâ that the Church denounced, opposed and fought, ranging from belief debates to little political details â some of the most famous including the Arians (who considered that Jesus was not divine in nature, the son of God yes, but a mere man) ; the Marcionites (who believed that the God of the Ancient Testament wasnât the same as the one of the New Testament), the Cathars (who thought the physical and material world was created by evil itself, and that God and good could only be found in the spiritual and immaterial world), or the Nestorians, that considered that Jesus the Christ wasnât the Son of God, and that the Son of God was a separate characterâŚ
Dante here, however, only focuses on one particular kind of âheresyâ â the Epicureans and affiliated heresies. This will probably confuse you, because the Epicurean were Greek philosophers of the Antiquity, and thus should be considered âpagansâ, right? But thatâs forgetting that the Christian Church saw the Greek philosophers (such as Aristotle) as proto-Christians, who had managed to find the basic truths and principles of Christianity before the Christ was even born (which is why Dante uses a moral system based on Aristotle and Cicero for his Christian Hell). One of those was the belief in the existence of an afterlife, and the immortality of the souls. But the Epicureans rather believed that there was no afterlife, no immortality of the soul, that the death was a final thing destroying both body and mind, and as a result they said that one should focus on happiness and pleasures in the living and material life, without any regard for a possible âafter-lifeâ. This led to the Christian Church deeming them as âhereticsâ even though they were pagans â and indeed, several other Christian heresies also held the idea that âheaven was on earthâ and there was no afterlife to look for past the death of the body.
This is why the punishment of the Heretics is to be forever stuck into graves: those that denied the existence of a life after death or the immortality of the soul are now entombed forever as âliving corpsesâ. In a more general way, the whole point of the Christian religion is that the Christ promised that the deceased would be free of the grave, by accessing a new existence in an afterlife or heaven â and here, the Heretics are simply stuck forever in a cemetery, never âdelivered from the graveâ. There is only one other type pf heresy mentioned explicitly by Dante â the heresy of Acacius, that denied that Jesusâ birth was divine in any way, and claimed that he was born like a mortal man, solely and exclusively out of mortal parents.
In this Circle, Dante has more chats and talks with the damned, again mostly about the conflict of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, but we do learn a few interesting things. For example we have here a clarification of the knowledge of the damned: once in Hell, the shades have a full knowledge of the past and of the future, which allows them to understand a lot of things and deliver prophecies. BUT they actually do not have access to the present or the immediate times around their death. In their own words, they perceive it as if they had âfaulty visionsâ, which explains why several of the sinners Dante meets ask him for information about certain person and certain events, while also delivering him prophecies about what will happen. But this immense knowledge, a form of âgiftâ of those damned souls, will disappear upon Judgement Day â those sent back to Hell upon their last, eternal punishment, still blind to the present, will have no more future to look into since time itself will end, and slowly their knowledge of the past will fade away into oblivion, leaving them in absolute emptinessâŚ
[Interestingly, throughout the travel of the Sixth Circle, there are references to a mysterious queen of Hell that never actually happens. The Erynies already were presented as the âhandmaids of the queen of timeless woeâ, here clearly referring to Proserpine, the queen of the underworld and wife of Pluto ; but one of the sinners of Heresy refers to fifty cycles of the moon in the living world as âfifty times the face of the queen who reigns down here will glowâ, rather depicting the queen of Hell as Hecate, known as the Greek goddess of both the moon and the dead. So it seems there is a sort of Proserpina/Hecate amalgam somewhere in Danteâs Hell.]
As they approach the next abyss leading to Lower Hell, Dante and Virgil have to stop due to an extremely powerful stench making them sick. As they rest, Virgil explains to Dante the whole moral and ethical logic behind the system of Hell, that I already talked about. Virgil explains how those âoutside of the fiery citiesâ, the sinners of the Upper Hell, are those of incontinence â who through their moral incontinence earned Godâs wrath, but offended him the least and âmerits the least blameâ compared to the other sinners â those of the Lower Hell, the sinners of malice, who acted with âinjusticeâ as their sole endgoal, and who committed their malice either through violence or fraud. Now, while Virgil doesnât explicitly says it, he purposefully leaves out Heresy and the circle they are in from both the Upper Hell of Incontinence and the Lower Hell of Malice â because heresy is actually a strange in-between, there is not done with the purpose of doing evil like Malice, but isnât either related to natural human emotions and desires like Incontinence, and thus stands in a strange in-between, in the very midway of Hell.
[It is actually quite unclear where the City of Dis ends⌠the flaming tombs of the Sixth Circle are clearly said to be directly beyond and within the Walls of Dis, and that the burning city lights up the darkness of the Circles below, so for some Dis is just the Sixth Circle and its protecting walls â but other times, the characters speak and imply that basically Dis is the ENTIRETY of Lower Hell.]
