Dante’s Inferno
It is fast approaching Halloween around here, and also Dia De Los Muertos celebrations. That makes it great time to consider the existential fear of death. Both holidays, after all, have at their core something to say about the end of life.
The Inferno lays out the afterlife as somewhere you can walk through. Not quickly or without a guide, but a walkable geographical location, nonetheless. Most people are aware that the poem starts at the base of a mountain in the middle of a dark forest. The speaker tries to walk up the mountain, but a lion, a she-wolf, and a panther shoo him back down again. Then Virgil the poet shows up and leads him to a city. I’m not sure where the city is supposed to be situated in regard to the mountain, but it’s past a river and behind a wall.
Now, the poem is so heavy on symbology that it needs some high medieval scholar to parse. It was written in 1300 and is reflective of an era that loved them some symbols. The geography is no exception.
Dante starts his poem quite explicitly saying he had gotten lost, and the forest, as in Hansel and Gretl and Snow White, is the place to represent his lost bearings. The forest is where civilization disappears and is where you are stuck with your own voice.
From there, everywhere he moves through represents something: entering Death’s domain means crossing a river because he is copying Greek depictions of death, and the notion of a city with consecutive rings borrows heavily from Plato and other works. Each ring, of course, has torments representing the type of sin committed by the people there. (Those people all being people he didn’t like. He even takes a swipe a pope he disapproved of. He was big in the fight between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and the pope was by definition on the other side of it. That’s a different topic for a different post though.)
But why is a 35-year-old with 20 more years to live symbolically walking among the dead? I mean, yes, it’s a revenge fic where he gets to imagine people he disagrees with politically getting punished in the most heavy-handed symbolic way possible, but why walk to see them? Why not make them come to him?
And the idea of walking between realms of the dead isn’t necessarily a given in medieval Italy. People tend to be whisked straight up in the Bible- they don’t have to traverse any terrain.
But he has to get un-lost spiritually from his place in the forest. He ultimately leaves the city of Diss and its rings of torments and gets found again in another poem, but that rather suggests that you are lost when you die. That you can wind up far away from your goal at death and have to make your way somewhere else.
I suppose that is a natural way of thinking of it. If someone dies, they are lost to their survivors.
And perhaps that is why so many festivals, from the Tibetan New Year to All Hallows Eve, have an element of trying to find the dead again. Whether you want their company, as in the case of Dia De Los Muertos, fear them as in Halloween, or just hope they make it to their next life ok as in Losar, you want to be sure of where those spirits lie.
Anyway, something to ponder on these chilly October nights.