Let us now descend to the geography of the interior of the earth. Within the earth is a large cone, whose layers are the frightful abodes of the condemned, and which ends in the centre, where the divine Justice keeps bound up to his chest in ice the prince of the rebellious angels, the emperor of the kingdom of woe. Such are the infernal regions which Dante describes according to ideas generally admitted in the middle ages.
The form of the infernal regions was that of a funnel or reversed cone. All its circles were concentric, and continually diminished; the principal ones were nine in number. Virgil also admitted nine divisions—three times three, a number sacred par excellence. The seventh, eighth, and ninth circles were divided into several regions; and the space between the entrance to the infernal regions and the river Acheron, where the resting-place of the damned really commenced, was divided into two parts. Dante, guided by Virgil, traversed all these circles.
It was in 1300 that the poet, "in the midst of the course of life," at the age of thirty-five, passed in spirit through the three regions of the dead. Lost in a lonely, wild, and dismal forest, he reached the base of a hill, which he attempted to climb. But three animals, a panther, a lion, and a thin and famished wolf, prevented his passage; so, returning again where the sun was powerless, into the shades of the depths of the valley, there met him a shadow of the dead. This human form, whom a long silence had deprived of speech, was Virgil, who was sent to guide and succour him by a celestial dame, Beatrice, the object of his love, who was at the same time a real and a mystically ideal being.
Virgil and Dante arrived at the gate of the infernal regions; they read the terrible inscription placed over the gate; they entered and found first those unhappy souls who had lived without virtue and without vice. They reached the banks of Acheron and saw Charon, who carried over the souls in his bark to the other side; and Dante was surprised by a profound sleep. He woke beyond the river, and he descended into the Limbo which is the first circle of the infernal regions. He found there the souls of those who had died without baptism, or who had been indifferent to religion.
They descended next to the second circle, where Minos, the judge of those below, is enthroned. Here the luxurious are punished. The poet here met with Francesca of Rimini and Paul, her friend. He completely recovered the use of his senses, and passed through the third circle, where the gourmands are punished. In the fourth he found Plutus, who guards it. Here are tormented the prodigal and the avaricious. In the fifth are punished those who yield to anger. Dante and Virgil there saw a bark approaching, conducted by Phlegias; they entered it, crossed a river, and arrived thus at the base of the red-hot iron walls of the infernal town of Dite. The demons that guarded the gates refused them admittance, but an angel opened them, and the two travellers there saw the heretics that were enclosed in tombs surrounded by flames.
Fig. 52.—Dante's Infernal Regions.
The travellers then visited the circles of violence, fraud, and usury, when they came to a river of blood guarded by a troop of centaurs; suddenly they saw coming to them Geryon, who represents fraud, and this beast took them behind him to carry them across the rest of the infernal space.
The eighth circle was divided into ten valleys, comprising: the flatterers; the simoniacal; the astrologers; the sorcerers; the false judges; the hypocrites who walked about clothed with heavy leaden garments; the thieves, eternally stung by venomous serpents; the heresiarchs; the charlatans, and the forgers.