So @thecottageinthedark asked me to elaborate on the animal symbolism in Inferno that I used to speculate about Limbus Company...
I want to reiterate: I am not a Dante scholar. This is not the one true interpretation of Dante, this is not even a super informed interpretation of Dante, I know exactly enough to get me in trouble. Also, the translation/notes I'm going off of are mostly Ciardi.
So, okay, the gist of what I talked about was the Lion, the Leopard, and the She-Wolf. In the original poem, these three Fucked Up Animals drive Dante off the path of virtue and into a dark wood that he can only escape through divine intervention. To recap:
... And lo!
almost at the beginning of the rise
I faced a spotted Leopard, all tremor and flow
and gaudy pelt. And it would not pass,
but stood so blocking my every turn that time and again
I was on the verge of turning back to the wood.
This fell at the first widening of the dawn
as the sun was climbing Aries with those stars
that rode with him to light the new creation.
Thus the holy hour and the sweet season
of commemoration did much to arm my fear
of that bright murderous beast with their good omen.
Yet not so much but what I shook with dread
at sight of a great Lion that broke upon me
raging with hunger, its enormous head
held high as if to strike a mortal terror
into the very air. And down his track,
a She-Wolf drove upon me, a starved horror
ravening and wasted beyond all belief.
She seemed a rack for avarice, gaunt and craving.
Oh many the souls she has brought to endless grief!
So first off, I mentioned there's Fourteenth Century Italian Political Symbolism here. Most of it comes a few paragraphs later- Virgil prophesies that the She-Wolf in particular is going to wreck Italy's shit until "a Greyhound" from "between Feltro and Feltro" shows up to hunt her down. I'm going to admit: I barely know anything about this. again, I'm a dude with a special interest, not a Dante scholar.
... So I did a little research. According to Marc LePain, there's a handful of political readings of the Greyhound and thus the Fucked Up Animals. The most popular is that the Greyhound is Dante's patron and admirer, Congrande della Scala, who was born between Feltre and Montefeltro, and the Fucked Up Animals symbolize the sins plaguing Italy. He's a Good Man who pays Very Handsome Poets a Lot Of Money, and so he gets talked up in the very first canto.
There's other readings (including that the She-Wolf is also a symbol of the Papacy, and the other two Fucked Up Animals are symbols of the Papacy's allies) but they seem like a reach to me.
So, going past that. The Fucked Up Animals have a more important, direct symbolic meaning. They symbolize the three categories of sin, as explained by Aristotle. These categories have very unfortunate names and I don't want to get put in Tumblr jail, so I'll take a screenshot; apologies for anyone on screen reader.
....Yeah. Exactly one of those words has kept its meaning to this day.
"Incontinence", in this context, means something more like "impulsiveness"- it's sins committed because you lost your self-control and did something greedy or horny or angery. I'm just gonna call the third one "violence", but the connotation is wild and animalistic violence- crimes of passion. And then malice is sins committed with full intent to screw someone over, in cold blood.
Dante uses these three categories to group the different layers of hell. The first five circles are for various sins of incontinence; circles six and seven are for sins of violence, and circles eight and nine are for sins of malice.
So, everyone agrees that the three Fucked Up Animals symbolize these different kinds of sin. The split is over which Fucked Up Animal stands for which sin.
The camp Ciardi belongs to thinks that the Leopard is sins of Malice, the Lion is sins of Violence, and the She-Wolf is sins of Incontinence. I personally think it's the other way round- the She-Wolf is Malice, the Lion is Violence, and the Leopard is Incontinence.
The reason I think that is the relative severity of the sins and the difficulty Dante has escaping them. The thing you need to remember about Inferno is that Dante wrote it after going into exile, and it's at least like 50% his way of #coping with said exile. So, when he writes about political stuff as a prophecy, all of this stuff has already happened.
So, Dante can avoid getting thrown off track by sins of incontinence by just remembering, "hey, it's dawn and it's coming up on Easter, I love Bible", and sticking to his guns. The leopard's just kind of in his way; it's not actively trying to hurt him. But he can't avoid getting thrown off track in life by malice and violence... specifically, other people's, aimed at him. He's going to have to go through Hell to get to Heaven, because he's been exiled and nothing is okay anymore.
It is also weird to me to have the sin described as the least displeasing to God be portrayed as a ravening, terrifying wolf that will drive you off the path whether you like it or not, and the most terrifying one be a leopard that's just kinda chillin'? It just makes sense to have it be the other way round.
(The main argument for the She-Wolf being Incontinence is that the poem says she'll mate with just about anything. I think this is political commentary, specifically about how much various Italian governments and nobles enjoyed maliciously defrauding/betraying each other. I will own I'm not the expert, but Ciardi himself says there's a good argument to be made either way.)
....I wrote about as much about this as I did for my final essay for English class, lmao. Hope you enjoy. Please subscribe to my Patreon so I can go back in time and teach Dante Alighieri about the concept of a fursona.
