Dante’s Hell: Ten little frauds...
XIV) The Eighth Circle: Fraud
The Eighth Circle of Hell is a very particular and unique one, as it is all made of sub-divisions. In this circle are punished those who committed Malice not by Violence, but by Fraud, aka trickery and deceit. The Circle itself is divided into ten sub-divisions. They are called “Malebolge” (Evil Pockets) because these sub-divisions are large holes of iron-colored stones or ravines within the Circle, large ditches or small valleys that Dante and Virgil walk over through over-arching bridges, looking at the sinners below. Each Malebolge is dedicated to a very specific type of Fraud (again, ten in total) and each Malebolge has its own form of punishment.
1) Panderers and Seducers
The First Malebolge is host to two lines of naked sinners, each walking into a different direction, and each line pushed forward by horned demons who uses enormous whips on their backs, laughing with cruel delight at the souls suffering. The first line is the one of the “pimps”, those who gained power, influence and favors by using girls and women as prostitutes and sexual tools ; the second line is the one of those who deceived people through seduction – the most famous sinner here being the Greek hero Jason, who seduced several women with big promises so that they would help him in his quest, before ditching them away. Both are basically deceivers and frauds who used sexual desire and love to reach their goal.
The Second Malebolge is for those that used flattery as a way to commit fraud, or gain influence and power: they are condemned to forever be plunged in a vast pool of human excrements, representing the true nature of the “flattery” these sinners used and surrounded themselves with to please those in powers, or those they wanted to obtain things from.
In this Malebolge are sent those that committed religious frauds: members of the Church accused of the sin of “simony”, that is to say selling religious favors, goods or powers. When people gain positions in the Church by buying them, and not by faith and hard work ; when people sell relics and holy items as if they were just random goods ; when people say “I will absolve your sins in exchange for money” or “I only agree to baptize you if you pay”, this is the act of simony – it is basically making the religion a business. And more generally, it is religious corruption as a whole: popes that give high-ranking positions in the Church to their friend and family rather than those deserving it ; high-ranking church members who use their religious powers to gain material and political favors, popes who were only elected to papacy through intrigue and manipulation, etc, etc… Again, all forms of religious corruptions.
Their punishment is to be thrown into stone holes (shaped like baptisteries, places in churches designed for the priest to stand in while they baptize people), but head at the bottom of the hole, with only their legs sticking out of it – and their feet are constantly burning, forming a grotesque parody of a candle. As the simonists (or simoniacs) corrupted the Church’s practices, they are forced into a painful twisted version of religious symbols. What is even worse is that the feet sticking out and burning (the flame hotter or weaker depending on the sinner’s level of crime) are only those of the latest arrivals in the Circle – below these upside-down sinners, others are below, down into the stone tube that open up at the surface, all piled up in there. When there is a new one arriving, the sinner with the burning feet is pushed down the stone tube, so that the new one can take their place.
In this Malebolge are sent the soothsayers, auguries, diviners, fortune tellers, astrologers and other “false prophets” – those that, from esoteric science, scam-tricks or real (but then demonic) magic tried to see/guess/reveal the secrets of the future to humanity… which is something only God can know, and a knowledge forbidden from humanity unless God himself choses to reveal it. So, for their punishments, these sorcerers are condemned to have their heads twisted so that they can only walk backward, never knowing what is in front of him, and only constantly seeing what is behind them. You tried to see ahead in time, boy? Well now you’ll only look behind!
This Malebolge is for the “grafters and barrators” – not a religious corruption, as with the simonists, but a political corruption. Selling public offices for good money, abusing one’s political powers and position, making dirty political moves to gain more power, accepting bribe to let criminals escape or send innocent people to death… This Malebolge is similar to the one of the Flatterers, as it is a pool filled with a liquid substance – but instead of feces, here the corrupted politicians are bathing in thick, black, boiling pitch; a sticky, viscous, burning tar. And while the flatterers could be seen splashing, swimming, and drowning in their fetid pool, here the grafters are plunged below the surface of the tar, with only air bubbles indicating their presence. Here, the Malebolge is overseen and guarded by a group of devils known as the Malebranche (Evil Claws) – described as terrifying, cruel even in their movements, black in color, with outstretched wings, claws, and “high-hunched, pointed shoulders”. Their job is to throw the sinners into the pitch, and then with forks and grappling hooks make sure the damned stays under the surface, poking them back below if they ever appear. If the sinner persists in trying to get out, the Malebranche will simply tear them apart. And unlike other demons, the Malebranche are actually very talkative – they keep cracking jokes at the expense of sinners and mocking their suffering in various ways.
Upon seeing the Malebranche demons, Virgil demands to Dante that he hides, because if they ever see him, he’ll be in BIG troubles – while Virgil knows already the mechanics and ways of these cruel and insulting demons. Virgil has a talk with the leader of the Malebranche, called Malacoda (Evil Tail), who upon learning he is on a Heaven-sent mission drops his pitchfork and lets them pass, agreeing to not have any of his demons hurt them – when one of them, called Scarmiglione (Disheveled Hair) tries to stick his prong in Dante’s “rump”, Malacoda quickly puts him in his place. Malacoda also informs Virgil that the bridge over the sixth Malebolge is actually broken (destroyed by the Harrowing of Hell). Hopefully there is a second bridge they can cross – but they will need to first walk along the ridge of the Fifth Malebolge, and to escort them safely Malacoda gives them a squad of his own demons (who will also have a secondary job on checking on the sinners as they make their way). Dante is not at all reassured at the idea of being surrounding by awful, sadistic, terrifying demons, but Virgil tells him it is all fine… Spoiler: it won’t be fine.
Here we get a list of more demon names. Some of the Malebranche are called by animalistic or monstrous traits : Draghighnazzo (“nasty/sneering dragon”), Ciriatto (“swine” or “wild hog”), Graffiacane (“dog scratcher” or maybe “scratching dog”), Farfarello (might be an Italian word for “goblin”), Cagnazzo (“nasty dog”)… These names are later confirmed to seemingly be related to the demon’s physical attributes (Ciriatto has “two tusks on each side of his mouth”, while Cagnazzo has a “muzzle or “snout”). Others have much more comical names similar to Scarmiglione: Barbariccia (“curly beard”), Libicocco (could mean “Libyan hothead”), Alichino (a variation of “Harlequin/Arlecchino”), Rubicante (“red-faced”)… And you have bizarre name the exact meaning of is unclear, such as Calcabrina (“Grace-stomper”? “Frost-trampler”? “Brine-walker”? the expression seems to hint at someone nimble and light on his feet). But overall, one has to understand these names as not serious at all – as commentators pointed out, the whole passage is actually very farcical, with a sort of comedy-horror to it, and if the jokes cracked by the demons themselves at the expense of the sinners or their nonsensical names weren’t enough, the first “canto” they appear in ends with the demons saluting their superior… with farts.
But below this comical aspect, there is a true danger, because as Dante understands (and as Virgil takes some time to understand, too trusting that he is in his Heavenly power), there is no “second bridge” and the demons are just luring them away in hope of inflicting on them some nasty torture… Hopefully for our duo, another farcical adventure distracts the demons enough for them to escape: one of the sinners, who was trying to get out, gets ripped apart by the demons. Being a corrupt man, he tries to make a deal with the demons: if they agree to stop tearing him to pieces, and hide a bit far away, he will convince other sinners in the lake of pitch to get out, so that the demons can have more victims to “play” with. The demons, thinking he is a sell-out, agree – but as soon as they hide, the sinner just plunges back into the boiling tar, where the demons can’t catch or torture him. And indeed, one angry Malebranche (Alichino, the one who agreed to the sinner’s bargain despite Cagnazzo skepticism) tries to dive after him to get him back, only to end up stuck in the tar. Another demon, Calcabrina, who wanted to punish Alichino for making the deal in the first place, tried to beat him up mid-air, only to also get stuck in the tar with him. And as the other demons rescue their fallen companions, our duo escapes the demons and whatever doom they had planned for them.
The Sixth Bolgia is here for those who were hypocrites in life, and their punishment, per the contrapasso, is a reflection of their very sin. They walk across the Malebolge in a single line, constantly forward, and they are dressed (which is unusual since all damned souls are naked). They are dressed with a golden hooded cloak, shaped like a monk’s robe… but the lining of the cloak is actually lead. I can let you imagine that a cloak of gold lined with lead is VERY heavy, and this is what they are forced to wear and walk with for all of eternity, as a metaphor for their hypocrisy: shining and holy on the outside, unpleasant and painful on the inside.
One specific sinner suffers a different fate: a man, lying naked on the ground, crucified by three stakes, his body stretched on the road so that all the hypocrites walk over him and crush him – he is literally “bearing the weight” of the others’ hypocrisy. As we learn, his special place is because he is Caiaphas, a Biblical character. He was the High Priest of the Jews during the time of Pontius Pilate, and he was the one who orchestrated, alongside other high religious figures among the Jewish community at the time, the downfall, fake trial and death sentence of Jesus due to how much influence and power the latter got. It is for this supreme “religious hypocrisy” that he now suffers a special punishment in the Sixth Bolgia.
[I do want to point out something here – I keep using “Malebolge” for the sake of simplicity, but “Malebolge” is actually the plural of the word. In singular, it is a “Malebolgia”, or simply a “bolgia”. I’ll try to switch a bit the terms going forward, but just know there is a grammatical difference.]
As a note, Malacoda did not lie when he said the bridge over the Sixth Malebolge is broken – the duo has to get down into the bolgia and then climb back up on their own. But what he lied about was the existence of another bridge – which you would except from the demons working in the circle of “Fraud” out of all things.
The seventh bolgia is a great mass of writhing snakes, of all kinds and species (including fabulous ones talked about in Lucan’s books, such as the chelydrid who leave smoking trails in their path, or the amphisbenes, two-headed snakes) – lots and lots of snakes from which the naked damned souls try running away or hiding from, even though they can’t – in fact, lots of sinners have snakes (or lizard-like snakes, aka snakes with “legs”) binding their arms like handcuffs, or twisting their bodies around them in coils.
This passage is, in Dante’s own word, true confusion and chaos as he assists to a series of mysterious, bizarre and gruesome transformations. One man gets bitten by a snake, and upon being bitten bursts into flames and crumbles into ashes… only for the ashes to reform themselves in the shape of a man. In a second case, a snake with “six feet” attaches itself to a man, each of its clawed feet on different part of its body, and bites through his cheek – and then the man and the snake start “melting” into each-other like hot wax, until they become one tangled, deformed mass of flesh, limbs and facial features. The last and final transformation occurs when another snake bites a man at the navel – smokes comes out from the man’s wound, smoke also comes out from the snake’s mouth, and as all this smoke whirls and twirls around them, they “exchange” their shape through transformation – the snake becomes a man and the man becomes a snake, in perfect synchronicity. For example when the snake’s tail forks in two, the man’s legs fuse in one; and when the man’s skin grows scaly, the snake’s skin grows soft…
This circle is where the souls of thieves are sent, and this nightmarish mess of chaotic transformations is a poetic metaphor for theft itself. In the contrapasso logic, here the thieves get their very identity and shapes stolen away like they stole the goods and belongings of other, the monstrous snakes and lizards forcing all sorts of transformations onto them, ranging from deforming the sinners to stealing their appearance and reducing them to snakes, until nobody can recognize nobody and no one knows anymore who everyone is.
We also get a special treatment as one particular soul starts cursing God and insulting Him with obscene gestures – immediately all the snakes of the pit wraps their body and coils around his limbs until he cannot move, and a centaur with hundreds of snake on his horse-back and a “crouching, winged, fire-breathing dragon” on his human shoulders arrives looking to punish him. This centaur is actually Cacus (a fire-breathing monster of Roman mythology, here reinvented as a centaur with a dragon-pet apparently), and Virgil explains that unlike the other centaurs, who after their death became overseers of the first Ring of Violence, Cacus got in charge of this Malebolge because his death was brought by him stealing cattle and being killed by Heracles in the process. So he is the only centaur of Hell outside of the Seventh Circle. [Yes, it is confirmed that the centaurs were definitively alive, and then were sent in Hell after their death, but became there part of the “staff” rather than damned souls – after all, the heroes of Greco-Roman mythology are also said to have lived in humanity’s past in this universe…]
8) The Fraudulent Counsellors
Within this Malebolgia, there are hundreds, thousands of moving flames – and inside of each flames is actually a sinner, that is constantly burning up, surrounded by the flame, which moves when they move. (In fact the flames are so bright you can’t see the sinners in them, you just hear their voices). And precisely, now only their voice remain, for in life they were “Fraudulent Counsellors”, evil advisers and counsellors of fraud who encouraged others to commit sins of fraud and deceit. As such, we see several figures of cunning people or trickster figure, who used their intellect to advice other on various traps and deceiving plans, or encouraged others to do evil. Most famous of them being Ulysses. For you who know your Greek world, you’d know him as Odysseus, the cunning hero of the Greeks whose tricks and intelligence allowed him to overcome all problems and troubles… But for Dante, a fan of Roman culture, literature and mythology, Ulysses was the one responsible for the fall of Troy, Rome’s ancestor-city, and thus an enemy of the Roman culture and a villain rather than a hero. This is why Ulysses is condemned here, stuck within a twin flame alongside his “partner” in crime Diomedes, both guilty of their triple plans of deceit: the Trojan Horse ; the “grief of Deidamia” (when Ulysses convinced Achilles to abandon Deidamia, his then girlfriend, and their baby, to go to war) and the theft of the Palladium, the sacred statue protecting Troy, all things that Ulysses and Diomed planned and ordered. We also have a third soul mentioned, Guido da Montefeltro, who was a cunning fox of a man, called by pope Boniface VIII, who wanted to get rid of a family of political opponents, and Guido invented for him a perfect plan to, with false promises, attract the family into the pope’s clutch so he could take everything from them. This last part is quite interesting because Guido is freshly arrived in the Malebolgia, and recalls to Dante how when he died, Saint Francis was about to take his soul (due to him having repented from his youth’s cunning and trickster ways, confessed his sins and pronounced monk vows) when a “Black Cherubim” or “Black Cherub” (the demonic corruption of the Cherubim angels) appeared and debated with the saint, ultimately claiming Guido’s soul for Hell, over the proof that his repentance was false – Guido had repented from his sins of using tricks and dubious ways to gain fame and power as a young man/warrior, before entering the orders and confessing/repenting… but as the Black Cherubim points out, he then redid the very same sin of plotting, conspiring and inventing deceitful tricks, per the demand of the Pope. And, as the Black Cherub continues, one cannot claim to be repentant from his sins… and then commit the exact same sins after having been confessed of them, it was clearly a false repentance adding to his deceiving nature.
In the ninth Malebolgia, the sinners condemned are those who created scandals and schism, the “sowers of discord” who removed peace and unity from the world, be it in religious, politic, social or familial domains – and as per the contrapasso law, the same way they tore the world, institutions and communities into pieces, they themselves are condemned to be cut up into morsels and mutilated to no end. The sinners line up in front of a devil holding a huge sword, and upon presenting themselves to him, the devil slices them in various ways, before they are healed and must be cut up again. A certain “Pier da Medicina”, who spent his life feeding the fires between the principalities of the Italian city-states, has his throat slit and his nose cut off. Mahomet has his body torn from chin to crotch, and his first disciple Ali his head cut off from the top to the chin (In Dante’s view, and for many Christians at the time, the Muslims weren’t a different religion so much than a sort of schism among Christianity, and their departure from the Christian canon wasn’t seen so much as a question of faith than a question of trying to wage war against Christian – notably, a very common belief in the Christian world at the time of Dante was that Mahomet was originally Christian and wanted to become pope, but since he couldn’t created his own religion just to be at the head of his own church… If it wasn’t clear already, Dante and the Christians of his time had a very WEIRD viewpoint of history.)
Curio, who helped Caesar turn into Rome and had him march onto the city in an act of civil war, now has his lower jaw cut off ; Mosca, the one who caused the feud between the Guelf and the Ghibelline, has his hands cut off ; Bertran de Born, who encouraged prince Henry to rebel against his father, Henry II of England, now carries around his cut-off head, etc etc…
The tenth and final bolgia is home to falsifier of all sorts and kinds – and like the sowers of discord, they suffer from a general punishment with specific tortures. Just like the sowers of discord were all cut off, but each in a different way, all the falsifiers are suffering from horrible diseases, but each one a different affliction. (For, in the contrapasso logic, the falsifiers themselves were a “disease” onto society). There is a pair of alchemists (alchemy being seen as an art of falsifying things, metals and products, and a true scam by Dante) suffering from a form of leprosy, their body covered in scabs, itching so much they constantly scratch themselves and scrap their skin to no avail as the scabs and itch keep returning, again and again… Another duo, a couple of impostors who falsified their identities and imitated other people to falsify their will or trick others into sleeping with them, are now suffering from a rabid rage, running naked like beasts, snapping at everything they see, biting into other sinners body by the teeth and dragging them away, like insane. There is a counterfeiter, a maker of false money, that now suffers from an extreme form of hydropsy – his body so bloated with fluids he is the “shape of a luth, if a luth had legs”, unable to move due to his swelled up legs and heavy weight, his skin tight like a drum over his enormous abdomen, and yet suffering from an intense, unquenchable thirst that even “curls up” his lips in dryness. Finally, there is a couple of perjurers, “falsifiers of words”, givers of false accusations and false testimonies, who are cursed with an intense, burning fever, a fever so intense they are constantly soaked in a stinking sweat, and they actually are even STEAMING due to how high their temperature is!
