#third circle

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

We are reaching here the first part of Hell – more precisely the Upper Hell, which is the set of Circles all above the city of Dis (more about the city of Dis later). Those that remain in Upper Hell are considered to be “incontinent” sinners. And no it is not incontinence in the modern, medical sense of the term. In Dante’s Aristotle-influenced moral system, the concept of sin relies on human reason, aka the will and the consciousness of one being. As a result, Dante divides the “grave”, serious, truly dark sins, the sins of “Malice”, from the “excusable” and “understandable” sins, the sins of Incontinence. The difference is that a sin of Malice is committed with the full intention of doing a sin, it is an act or a crime with the intent and will to do something evil, a sin committed with the full consciousness of it being a sin. But the “incontinent sinners”? They are people who commit sins mostly because they lack any form of will, or refused to understand what they were doing or the consequences of their actions. The sins of Incontinence are all based on normal, regular, human desires, emotions and actions – sexuality, food, money, anger – but taken to extreme or manifested in a disorderly, chaotic, destructive way through one’s life. These sinners are those that committed sins and did evil not because they wanted to do evil, but rather because they couldn’t control their own passions and desires, and because they let desires control them rather than reason, they led a life dictated by emotion rather than reflection. And this is why these sinners are located in the “Upper Hell”, the one with the less gruesome and painful punishments.

Interestingly, in his Upper Hell, Dante takes back what seems to be the usual list of the seven deadly sins – but he cuts three of them off (Pride, Envy and Sloth), exclusively focus on four of the deadly sins (Lust, Gluttony, Greed and Wrath – well, technically Sloth is maybe included in too, I’ll talk about this topic later, when dealing with the Fifth Circle, it is a complex topic).

 VI) The Second Circle: Lust

Beyond Minos stands the Second Circle of Hell, the one where sinners guilty of acting out of lust are sent. Their punishment, in this place “where no light shines”, is in short – the “eternal storm”. A constant, gigantic storm/tornado/hurricane that never stops, and that constantly sweeps up in the air the shades that are the sinners, whirling them in its stormy blasts, shaking them and throwing them everywhere, up and down, left and right. We see here the principle of the “contrapasso” being applied, as this gigantic hellish storm is actually a visual and material manifestation of the lust the sinners suffered from – just like the winds, their appetites and passions drove them everywhere, leading them into a dissolute, violent, destructive life, without ever letting them rest or settle anywhere.

Now, you might be wondering why Dante would consider “Lust” as the least grave of the deadly sins, especially when you recall that lust is the deadly sin of things such as rape. Well, it is because Dante’s Lust isn’t the Catholic Lust… You see, in the Catholic religion, the seven deadly sins should actually be called “vices” (and it is an appellation that many people have pushed forward). Because unlike actual “sins”, which are specific actions (like murder, theft, rape), the deadly sins (actually vices) are human flaws and mindsets that leads to committing these sins and to one’s soul being corrupted. The idea of people “committing” the seven deadly sins is a HUGE misconception, rather people act “out of” the seven deadly sins. They are the mobile to the crime. But Dante here completely reinvents his own system, and not only takes a more “action-focused” approach, where for him sins such as Lust and Gluttony aren’t so much a human vice than a lifestyle and a set of actions, but also he completely reinvents the meaning of “lust”.

Because, as we see by the description of the various sinners damned in this circle, Dante fuses “lust” and… “love”. “The Divine Comedy” is a romantic poem, all about Dante being guided and protected by the woman he loves, Beatrice, and continuing a travel through horrors just for her, and ultimately heralding God and Heaven as the Supreme Love. There is something deeply romantic in all of the Divine Comedy – and as a result, Dante developed an interpretation of the deadly sins entirely centered around love. For example Greed is an excessive love for money, Gluttony an excessive love for food, etc… And in Dante’s conception, Lust is just an excessive or corrupted form of love. When we see the list of the “crimes” of the sinners of the Second Circle, we have quite “lustful” things (such as a queen that legalized incest, or those that lived in debauchery collecting lovers one after the other), but also lots of tragic love stories – ranging from women who killed themselves out of a broken heart, to adulterers that acted out of a true, forbidden love instead of pure lust… When Dante describes these souls as being “blinded by their appetites”, he doesn’t only mean sexual appetite – Dante also places in this circle the souls that were blinded or lost all reason out of love, excessive or destructive love becoming a sin itself – but a minor one, equal to just not being able to control one’s own sexual desires, or living exclusively by sexual pleasures. (Also note that if rape isn’t in this circle, it is also probably because Dante has a whole other circle dedicated to the sins of “Violence” – and he does mention rape in the circle of Violence if I recall, so in Dante’s mind, rape isn’t so much the “corrupted love and excessive sex” of Lust, but more of a matter of violence inflicted against someone).

Again, we have here a very strong and clear divide from the Catholic teachings, as in the Christian religion the whole thing of “lust” is that it is “sex without love”, living for the pleasures of the flesh without caring about anything that can come beyond it, be it safety, responsibility or, more importantly, love. In Christian teachings, love is not a sin and cannot be a sin because love is a virtue, and a divine thing, and one of the most beautiful things in the world – on the contrary, it is sex that is a sin, to the point it was demonized and rejected for centuries, you couldn’t even enjoy having sex without being deemed a sinner. “Lust” as a vice is thus, not a corrupted form of love in the Christian mindset, but a pure sexuality without any form of love (hence why rape is the supreme form of the vice of lust, as it just sex with no love). Fun fact/digression: it is because of this duality of love and sex that in the Middle-Ages, homoromantic relationships could be accepted or tolerated (not as romantic mind you, but the Christian culture recognized there could be between two person of the same sex a form of love stronger than friendship and just as strong and unbreakable as a brotherhood/sisterhood), while homosexual relationships were punished by the law (medieval Christians didn’t mind two guys loving each other a lot – but they condemned heavily two guys having sex with each other, or more precisely fucking each other, aka the famous sin of “sodomy”, which isn’t about gay love but about gay sex).

This is all quite important to understand how Dante’s work is non-Christian in MANY way, and also how Dante’s very personal poetic-philosophical moral system somehow influenced popular culture enough that many people started to believe it was actual Christian teaching.

 VII) The Third Circle: Gluttony

The third circle of Hell is the one where the sinners of gluttony are sent – unlike the Second Circle, we don’t have a big development on the sin of gluttony, which seems to be resumed to an excessive love of food and to people leading lives led by their stomach rather than by their brain. Only one sinner is named, and it is just someone who was nicknamed “Pig”, and we don’t know more, so… Yeah. (Note: in actual Catholic teaching the vice of gluttony is just as complex as the other deadly sins, with many more forms and variations beyond just “eating a lot and loving to it”, ranging from the selfishness of not sharing your food with those that need it to alcoholism, passing by the obsession for food leading one to lose huge sums on money on just one dish instead of just using this money for something that could be more useful… Of course we’re not here to talk about Christian religion, but I just want to point out that Dante oversimplified the vice/deadly sin here.

And what is the punishment of the sinners, here? Rain. Not just any rain. A constant, eternal, unchanging, rain of heavy, dirty, cold water, mixed with thick hail and snow. A rain that makes the very ground a vast expanse of stinking mud, in which the gluttons lie forever, not standing up, “howling like dogs”. This is the contrapasso principle applied. The gluttons sought comfort in the material world through excesses of food of various kind, and now they are surrounded by another form of materiality – the materiality of snow and mud. The gluttons drowned in alcohol, and now they are beaten up by constant torrents of water. The gluttons spent their time eating and living by the basest functions of the body, and now are surrounded by things reminding them of the “nasty” side of the eating process – slimy, dirty, stinking things… And as the gluttons allowed their very life to be led by appetite and hunger, like animals, they are now howling like dogs, reduced to beasts unable to stand up…

If this wasn’t enough, there’s another torment and punishment here – a being inhabiting the Third Circle. Cerberus. Yes, the Cerberus of Greek mythology – but here reimagined as a demon of gluttony and spirit of hunger. Dante’s Cerberus is described as a clawed and fanged beast, a three-headed mass of twitching muscles with a swollen belly, red eyes, and a greasy black beard. Cerberus spends its time ripping the sinners apart, “flaying and mangling them”, and to appease the creature which growls upon seeing the two protagonists, Virgil takes fistfuls of the mud on the ground and throws them in each of the creature’s mouth, which makes Cerberus busy as his hungry mind focuses now on devouring the slimy material. This passage is actually a reference to one of the greatest texts of Ancient Roman literature, the Aeneid, in which the holy seer/priestess/oracle known as the Sybil travels to the Roman Underworld and to avoid Cerberus killing them (since no mortal is allowed in the realm of the dead), she offers the beast three special honey cakes prepared in a sacred rite to appease the beast. Dante took back this image, but replaced the cakes with stinking slime, to better highly the irrational appetite and constant hunger of this frightening Cerberus, who is ready to eat anything, even filth. As a note, one famous thing with Dante’s description of Cerberus is that, at one point, he calls it “the great worm”. This expression has become very popular among imaginative interpretation and reinterpretations of Dante’s Inferno, where Cerberus is given worm-like attributes. But originally it is not supposed to be a physical description, rather it is a common Biblical expression used to designate vile and repulsive evil beings – for example later Dante uses “the great worm” as a way to call Lucifer/the Devil, who clearly isn’t worm-like in Dante’s invented Hell.

The interaction Dante has with the only sinner of Gluttony (Ciacco, aka “pig-guy”), leads to one very important fact that keeps returning throughout the poem: the dead actually have some sort of “prophetic ability” which allows them to see into and know what will happen in the immediate future. This is an heritage of the Greco-Roman Underworld, since in both the Odyssey and the Aeneid the protagonists enter the Underworld and seek the dead because, being dead, they now exist outside of the constraint of the material world (including time) which gives them a lot of extra-knowledge and minor prophetic abilities. Dante likes to use this concept in order to sneak into his poem commentaries and opinions about events that happened right as he was writing his poem.

Before leaving for the next circle: remember my long talk about Judgement Day in the previous part? Well, this comes back here as Dante asks Virgil about the whole Judgement Day business, and Virgil delivers this universe’s version of the Judgement Day! Now, according to “Inferno” (and Dante’s Virgil), there is indeed a Judgement Day that will come at the end of all things. It is when the sinners of Hell will be delivered from their torment, and regain the world of the living by being given back a body – all so they could be judged against, in front of God Himself, who will deliver a last sentence. An eternal sentence that this time will never stop. Dante (well, to be precise the fictional, unnamed Dante of the poem, that some like to call the Wanderer or the Pilgrim) then asks Virgil an interesting question: if people are still deemed bad and sentenced to torment upon Judgement Day… Will they end up just back in the same torments Hell already has? Or will they have a lesser pain? Or will they have even harsher punishments? What will be the difference of this second judgement? And Virgil’s answer… will probably seem very strange, very weird and very eldritch to those that are unfamiliar with Dante’s personal philosophy (itself based on things such as the teachings of Aristotle and saint Thomas), but basically it goes: upon Judgement Day, humanity will reach perfection. They will be into a perfect state, having underwent a full mortal, living, material existence, then having a full spiritual afterlife, and now the spirit and the body reunited, “refined” by their various experiences while living and after-living. And the principle is that the closer a being gets to perfect, the more intensely they will feel things, be it pleasure… or pain. So the torments and punishment delivered on the souls judged bad even at Judgement Day will be much, much greater ad much more painful than those they currently experiment in Hell… but it will be a proof that they have reached a “perfect” state.

Sigh.

He's the one true asshole, one true villain, force of nature of this whole song and dance.

He has a permanent black eye from the time he pissed off a fellow demigod and was punched with the full force of A DEMIGOD'S RAGE

Noteable achievements:

Winner of asshole of the year 1,000 years in a row

Destroyed the mind of an innocent man

Reacted with hostility when a mute character was trying to find help for an injured person

Ripped off a guy's wing

"Everyone is beneath me."

"Too many good guys in here."

"I'm BORED. I wanna KILL."

Language Enthusiast Creator reacts to a video where Nanainani was speaking.

Toliki reacts to chaos

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. 

behold the ridiculousness of a human version of a dude who canonically has functioning rabbit ears

the human ears look so weird omg

but he needs the pink long things aesthetic so partway between his bangs and the back of his head he has apparently grabbed a fistful of hair above the ears to make braids with??? and dyed them pink???

also an eyepatch because of his damaged eye

what is this

what am i

-hello page 4-

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Guys guess what, I scanned 19 pages of this comic today, so I am back and ready to be posting a new page daily !!!!!!

~~~~it seems~~~~~~~