Dante’s Inferno

from the dark woods to Purgatory

Limbo
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Anger
Heresy
- the City of Dis
Violence
- Phlegethon
- the Wood of Suicides
- the Desert of Burning Sands
Fraud
- the ten bolgias of the Malebolge
Treachery
- Cocytus

That is your way down the circles of Hell. And there goes down the levels of Christian sins. The vision has been enliven by modern anime, with all its gruesome visual, horrifying acoustic, and dark imaginations. But wait... this is no original Inferno from the Divine Comedy.

The video game-style depiction of Dante’s Inferno was not the most attractive feature to me. It was the medieval, yet unrestrained, imaginations of Dante that was the most facinating of all. Intertwined with mythology, theology and science, the illumination through the path undergone by Dante the warrior was so vivid that the mind could hardly stop wandering in the darkness of Hell even after the animated epic ended in front of the mountain of Purgatory.

Dante’s true love for Beatrice was in itself the epic. Yet the most oppressing of all was the constant laughters of Lucifer through the burning lava, the boiling blood and the freezing icy lake of the underworld, which ‘guided’ Virgil and Dante ever deeper into the darkness. As part of the ‘comedy,’ of course, Dante managed to overcome all the odds, leave behind his mortal sins and embark on his pilgrimage through Purgatory to Paradise. What a terrifying image Dante left behind in this horrible afterlife of the Christian world!

I did not die, and I did not live.