The Divine Comedy



""Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" ("Abandon all hope, ye who enter")"

The Divine Comedy (Commedia) is a three-part epic by Florentine poet Durante degli Alighieri (Dante), written some time between 1308 and 1321. It describes one man's journey into the depths of Hell, up the staircase-like mountain of Purgatory, and into the spheres of Heaven. The first part, the Inferno, is the best known and most often retold and alluded to in modern media. Essentially, every portrayal of Hell comes either from Dante, its English Protestant Spiritual Successor Paradise Lost, or a combination of the two.

It isn't a Comedy by modern definition, as it's not very funny. It's called the Comedy because it's written in a vernacular style and has a happy ending, which is the original meaning of the word as opposed to tragedies (which were considered a bit more high-brow). The adjective "Divine" does not refer to the work's religious setting, but was added later by people who thought the poem was awesome.

Inferno was a modern retelling and Deconstruction from 1977 by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Dantes Inferno leads to the page for the Video Game based off this work, with a few liberties taken.

In 1994, it was also adapted into a Manga, of all things.

It should probably be pointed out that the Divine Comedy is not Catholic doctrine; not everything that it says to be true is canon. That's why the Word of Dante trope has that title.

Not to be confused with the band The Divine Comedy, a rather fine Northern Irish band responsible for, among other things, the Father Ted theme tune.


 * Alien Geometries: While Hell and Purgatory have clearly defined geography, that of Paradise is more complicated. The spheres of Heaven correspond to the celestial spheres of a geocentric universe, but can equally well be seen as orbiting around God in the Empyrean, or as all existing in the same space. To enter Paradise or cross between the spheres, one must Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, rather than doing any physical climbing. The structure of Heaven has been interpreted as an early description of the fourth-dimensional hypersphere.
 * All Just a Dream: Well, obviously. Unless it wasn't. Or perhaps it was. Dante scholars still argue about whether we are supposed to consider the whole thing one big, complicated dream; or if Dante wanted us to "believe" that he actually went to Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven and then came back (suspending our disbelief, of course--we're obviously not supposed to believe that he actually did those things, just to approach the text like he physically went rather than went there in a dream); or if he intended us to interpret the whole thing as a prophetic dream (i.e. a dream, but one that is in some way true or a representation of the truth, like a lot of dreams in The Bible--and indeed, there are a number of dreams like this in-story, particularly in the Purgatorio); or any number of variations on this.
 * And I Must Scream: The Inferno is made of these.
 * In particular, suicides are turned into trees. They can scream, but only when someone (or something, as Dante sees later) breaks off a branch.
 * The souls of traitors are frozen in the icy lake of Cocytus, at depths corresponding to the depth of their betrayal. Those at the very bottom are completely encased and in grotesque positions.
 * There's also the penance for the sin of Pride in the Purgatorio: the sinners are made to carry boulders, the weight of which is proportional to the sin's weight. Dante even remarks that the punishment is the simplest, and yet quite terrible.
 * And That's Terrible: Dante really hated corrupt priests.
 * The Annotated Edition: Most good editions of The Divine Comedy are heavily annotated: at the remove of 700 years or so, and given that Dante went on Author Tracts and Author Filibusters in long stretches of the work about now-forgotten Florentine politicians or abstruse theological issues, it's often very difficult to tell who's who or what Dante is on about now without extensive footnotes.
 * Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The last and deepest pit of Hell is guarded by a series of Giants embedded in the cliff. One of them provides a passage to the lake of ice.
 * Author Avatar: Purgatory has seven levels corresponding to the Seven Deadly Sins. Dante experiences the penances for only three: Pride, Anger, and Lust. Translator Dorothy L. Sayers commented that these were precisely the three faults people tend to accuse Dante of, so sharing these penances was probably a deliberate confession on the poet's part.
 * Author Filibuster:
 * At the very entrance of Hell, there is a special place of punishment for people who never took a stand for anything during their lives, and were neither good enough to deserve Heaven (or Purgatory), nor bad enough to end up in the rest of Hell. This also includes the angels who didn't take a side during Satan's rebellion against God. These particular sinners are regarded as the Butt Monkeys of the afterlife. Dante was very passionate about politics, and had a deep contempt for people who just wanted to mind their own business and were ready to change their allegiance whenever it was more convenient.
 * He reserved the deepest layer for his personal betrayers who were convenient about alliances.
 * Badass Bookworm: Dante in Real Life; he was a poet, but he also fought as a knight ("Feditore a cavallo", a particularly dangerous task) for the faction of the Guelphs.
 * Body Horror: Several levels of Hell involve grisly torments, including the fortune tellers having their heads turned around backwards and people who committed suicide being turned into trees that are broken by harpies and demon hounds and can only speak when bleeding.
 * In Hell, thieves are turned into snakes and have to regain human form by attacking others.
 * Possibly the nastiest example of body horror in Inferno is what happens to Muhammad. Dante saw him as a schismatic (he viewed Islam as basically an offshoot from Christianity), so the Prophet is depicted split in half down the middle, with all his organs hanging out. And Dante still has a conversation with him.
 * Bury Your Gays: Homosexuals and usurers get the same level in Hell. (Usury is charging excessive, unreasonably high, and often illegal interest rates on loans; it used to mean charging any interest on debt.)
 * By placing both homosexuals and usurers in the circle of the violent, and in a setting that so strongly symbolizes sterility (the burning desert), Dante establishes each sin as the opposite of each other: the homosexuals make sterile that which should be fertile (their sexuality-- according to medieval theology, all sex should have procreation as its final purpose), while usurers make fertile that which should be sterile (wealth should be generated by nature or art, not by interest accumulated by existing wealth.)
 * It should be noted that Dante sees his mentor in the burning desert, as he was gay. Also, that part took place in the middle of Inferno, which has a special place in the other books as well. Thirdly, he depicts homosexuals as constantly running from being burned, which might be symbolic for how gay people had to run from being marked during their lives (more likely it has to do with the rain of fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah).
 * There is an actual critical debate if the group in which Dante places his mentor (Brunetto Latini) is where homosexuals are punished or if it's for pedophiles. Sodomy was in fact a common "contracepting technique" in the middle ages (it is noted by famous Dante scholar Vittorio Sermonti), and it would be unlikely that Dante punishes the act of sodomy in that circle. Moreover, when Dante asks his mentor to name some other fellow sinners, he enumerates only clergymen and literates, indicating a sort of "master-student" relationship issue.
 * Gay people also appear in Purgatory's circle of lust, running in the opposite direction from the rest of the crowd. So either way, if you're gay, you're going to spend a lot of time jogging when you die.
 * Character Filibuster: Paradiso in particular features long discussions of theology, philosophy, and morality.
 * The Chosen One: Dante says that he was chosen for its spiritual journey in order to help to REDEEM MANKIND with the book that he is going to write based on this experience (i.e. the Divine Comedy: intended as a sort of fifth gospel, so to speak).
 * Circles of Hell: The Trope Namers, if not the Trope Makers. Dante traverses all of them in the Inferno.
 * Clown Car Grave: The heretics in Hell lie in flaming tombs, each of which can hold some thousands of sinners.
 * Cool and Unusual Punishment: Trope Exemplar.
 * Corrupt Church:
 * There are many clergy members and a few Popes in Hell, punished for their greed and for perverting the Church by selling indulgences and church offices.
 * In Heaven (Paradiso), St. Peter himself harshly criticizes the church of the time and deems it corrupt, to the extent of calling the papal seat a "sewer of blood and stench".
 * And then there's the Sphere of the Sun, which can be summed up as "St. Francis was a great man, unlike those corrupt Franciscan friars." "St. Dominic was also a great man, unlike those corrupt Dominican friars."
 * Crapsack World: One could draw from the Comedy that Dante sees the world as this.
 * Cultural Translation:
 * In Dorothy L. Sayers's translation, Arnaut Daniel, who, in the Purgatorio, spoke Provençal rather than the narrative's Italian, now speaks in the Scots language. (However, most, if not all translations choose to explain Dante's historical and cultural references in footnotes or endnotes.)
 * This is taken to its logical extreme by Sandow Birk's translation, which translates Dante's vernacular Italian verse into slangy (and profanity-ridden) vernacular American English prose. Many of Dante's allusions to medieval life, history, and culture are replaced or augmented with references to modern life and pop culture, and the lists of sinners in Hell now include such figures as Bill Clinton, "Reagan, and Bush (both of them)."
 * Dead Unicorn Trope: A typical description of the Inferno would probably mention "demons with pointy sticks torturing sinners chained to the wall,". This is actually a fairly uncommon punishment in Dante's Hell, and is shown directly only a couple of times; sinners are tormented by fire, ice, storms, hounds, snakes, etc.
 * The Devil Is a Loser: Some readers and critics have noted that Satan is one of the least colourful villains of the whole Inferno, but this was actually deliberate.
 * Did Not Do the Research: A lot of people will tell you that Dante's Inferno revolves around the Seven Deadly Sins. It doesn't. The Seven Deadly Sins are covered in Purgatorio, but sins are classified differently in Inferno.
 * And let's not forget all the Protestants who think the circles of hell are canon. To which we can also add deals with Satan and Satan's fall for not worshipping man.
 * Empathic Environment: When the Corrupt Church is discussed in Heaven, the sky turns dark and reddish, as if the whole cosmos is ashamed of how the true religion has been perverted.
 * The Everyman: "Midway through the journey of our life..."
 * Even Evil Has Standards:
 * The Uncommitted souls and fallen uncommitted angels aren't even considered worthy of entering hell, although they're still punished.
 * In the fiery desert of the seventh circle, blasphemers and sodomites keep themselves away from the usurers.
 * Evil Chancellor
 * Evil Is Burning Hot: A large portion of hell is torturously hot, like the fiery sands and the river of blood, and fire is used as aspects of punishments in other areas. It notably averts associating Satan with fire, as he's trapped in the coldest part of hell.
 * Evil Is Deathly Cold: The deepest circle of Hell, reserved for traitors and lorded over by a monstrous but helpless Satan, is a frozen lake.
 * Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It's a story with a happy ending-- seeing God.
 * Comedies traditionally ended with lovers being reunited (think A Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night) and sure enough, Dante is reunited with his childhood sweetheart, Beatrice, who meets him on the threshold of Paradise and guides him to the throne of God.
 * Eye Scream: Traitors to their guests are encased in the frozen lake Cocytus, with only their faces coming out. The intense cold freezes their tears, encrusting their eyes in ice. Any further tears cannot get out and increase pressure on the eyes.
 * Fainting: Dante faints twice near the beginning of Inferno, as the first tortures terrify him before he braces himself for the rest of the journey. He faints again towards the end of Paradiso as he approaches God.
 * Fartillery: One of the devils in the later part of Hell lets out a huge fart in as a sort of military trumpet. Even Dante himself points out the similarity.
 * Fate Worse Than Death: One might think that The Inferno is chock full of these, but the ones who really have it bad are the ones trapped in Hell's Vestibule -- The Opportunists. As they never took sides between good and evil in life, so is their fate in death. They're not actually a part of Hell, and they have no chance at redemption. They just have one small place to be tormented for eternity alone by themselves.
 * Fantasy World Map: Diagrams of Hell and Purgatory are featured in many translations; some fine ones can be found here.
 * Flipping the Bird: ...or the equivalent of that time: One damned soul curses God and gives Him "the figs" with both hands.
 * Fluffy Cloud Heaven: Often depicted as such in illustrations; the actual "landscape" of Paradise is a bit vaguely described.
 * From a Certain Point of View: One sinner asks Dante if he will clear the ice from his eyes after he tells his story. Dante responds that if he doesn't, may he "go to the bottom of the ice". As it turns out, the entrance to Purgatory is reached by traveling below the ice...
 * Giant Flyer: Geryon, demon of fraud and keeper of the "Malebolge". He's described as a devil with the face of a honest man, body of a multicolored serpent, hairy wings and a scorpion's stinger.
 * Gorn: Frequent.
 * Hand Wave:
 * Two pagans are in Heaven, despite Christians being the only ones able to get in. The narrator ascribes this to the mysteries of God, which are unknowable to all.
 * Dante often passes out if he doesn't want to explain something.
 * Hell Gate: Possibly the Trope Maker.
 * Hell Hound:
 * Cerberus, who has the traits of a human like beard and hands.
 * The black bitches (as in female dogs) chasing and maiming the damned in the Forest of Suicides.
 * Hero's Muse: Dante is sent on his quest for redemption through the afterlife by Beatrice, who enlists the help of the poet Virgil to guide him through Hell and Purgatory, and guides Dante through Heaven herself.
 * Hijacked by Jesus: Despite the generally Christian nature of this work, Dante borrows aspects of Hell (including the four rivers and various creatures) from the Greek underworld.
 * In the Past Everyone Will Be Famous: Everyone in the afterlife is either a well-known historical figure or someone who would be familiar to Dante's readers. It gets a justification as Dante's guides point out these exemplary figures. They also usually have more important places in Heaven or more picturesque punishments in Hell. There are some exceptions, though-- the hoarders and spenders, for instance, are so featureless that they can barely be distinguished from each other, and Dante does pause to talk with a nameless Florentine suicide.
 * Ironic Hell: A quite famous one at that.
 * Kick the Son of a Bitch: At one point while in the Cocito, Dante pulls a traitor's hair in order to force him to tell his story, going so far as to actually tear out handfuls of hair when the shade stubbornly refuses to say anything.
 * List of Transgressions: Hell is divided into subsections by crime made life.
 * A Load of Bull: The Minotaur is the guardian of the three Violent circles, and is depicted as very wrathful and savage.
 * The Muse: Not only does Beatrice inspire Dante, but he invokes all 9 of them (plus Apollo!) to help write the epic the way it deserves.
 * No Fourth Wall: Dante addresses the reader repeatedly.
 * Medium Awareness: Dante, at least.
 * Nightmarish Factory: One part of hell is compared to the Venetian naval yard.
 * No Party Like a Donner Party: Ugolino, according to some interpretations, is implied to have eaten his children when imprisoned in the "Hunger Tower". In Hell, he continually eats the head of the man who imprisoned him there.
 * Not Drawn to Scale: Dante provides some scattered measurements for places and things in Hell (such as the distance around one circle and the height of a giant); from these, one can attempt to infer the overall dimensions of Hell, but the results are wildly inconsistent. But considering that it's Hell, see Alien Geometries.
 * The Nothing After Death: Limbo, the first and outermost circle of Hell, is inhabited by virtuous heathens (it's not an oxymoron) and unbaptized children who died without knowledge of Christ. They do not suffer torments but live forever without hope or the light of God. And while, depending on your faith, this might be a horrible fate, for people who exist there, like Socrates and other eminent pre-Christians, it's not a bad place. They essentially do there what they did in life: wax philosophic about everything without the distractions of sleep or sustenance.
 * Numerological Motif: The number 3 appears a lot, naturally. So does 9, which is 3*3.
 * And 10, which is 3x3+1 (for the One True God, of course)
 * The Divine Comedy as a whole is structured around the number 100. Each section has 33 cantos, with the exception of The Inferno, which has 34; the extra one serves as an general prologue for the entire poem.
 * The Obi-Wan: Virgil, who's stuck in the First Circle of Hell because he was born before Christ and can't be saved.
 * The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: Beatrice and her companions in Heaven, watching over Dante.
 * Patchwork Map: Hell juxtaposes regions with wildly different climates; justified in that it's a supernatural world shaped by divine will.
 * Pass the Popcorn: Dante gets so caught up listening to two sinners insulting each other Virgil has to snap him out of it.
 * Pet the Dog:
 * Dante feels quite sad about Paolo and Francesca (a couple in the circle of the Lustful) as well.
 * Count Ugolino, a traitor in the depth of Hell, actually becomes pitiable when he tells his tale about his sons.
 * Popcultural Osmosis:
 * The concept of circles of Hell and the quote "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" (or a close variant) are well-known and alluded to/copied in innumerable places, but their origin isn't as widely known. (However, in pop culture, they are usually seen with a Fire and Brimstone Hell, instead of the more varied and complex Ironic Hell of the Inferno.)
 * In Italy, many quotes from Hell have actually become proverbial. It's also worth nothing that about 15% of the most-used words in the modern Italian language were first used in literature by Dante in the Comedy.
 * This is because the Divine Comedy is one of the first works to be written in Italian, rather than Latin.
 * Recycled in Space:
 * Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel Inferno, in which the protagonist is a Dead to Begin With, Genre Savvy sci-fi author who tries (unsuccessfully) to explain Hell as Lost Technology or an "Infernoland" created by aliens. His guide is . Additions to the original include a Hellish version of a Celestial Bureaucracy in which damned souls as well as demons work, new torments for both extreme environmentalists and wanton environment-destroyers, and the theologically questionable revelation that.
 * There's also an independent movie adaptation with an Urban Fantasy look and plenty of cameos by modern politicians. Apparently, Washington DC itself is in Hell. Enacted with paper puppets in the manner of a Victorian toy theater.
 * And new sinners such as Ronald Reagan and Adolf Hitler (for consulting fortune tellers), Dick Cheney (so evil he was sent straight to hell and his body is possessed by a demon), L. Ron Hubbard (heresy), and, in Cocytus, Lizzie Borden and Vidkun Quisling.
 * The book and movie What Dreams May Come is also more than a little indebted to Dante's vision.
 * Sacred Hospitality: Ptolomaea, the second to last round of the ninth circle of Hell, is reserved for those who betrayed their guests. Souls there are buried in ice with just their faces exposed, but their eyes frozen so they cannot weep. And they are sent to Hell before they're dead, their bodies becoming vessels for Demonic Possession.
 * Satan: Although he's a rather weak and pitiful (albeit gigantic) being, stuck in ice at the very bottom of Hell and chewing on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius; he doesn't even put up a fight when Dante and Virgil climb down his body to access the path to Purgatory.
 * Dante's description of Satan may be the first time he appears with bat wings.
 * Science Marches On:
 * In Purgatorio, we learn that the island of Purgatory is the only piece of land in antipodes, surrounded by a huge ocean that covers one full hemisphere.
 * To his credit, Dante always remembers that the sun would be to the north in the antipodes. (And remarkably enough, he describes a constellation of four bright stars that sounds suspiciously like the Southern Cross; he couldn't possibly have seen it, or even spoken to anyone who had. Critics generally think it's a metaphor for the Four Cardinal Virtues (fortitude, temperance, justice and prudence) illuminating the life of the penitent sinner.)
 * Paradiso features a geocentric universe.
 * Sort of.
 * Self-Deprecation: Several times in Purgatorio, Dante meets someone and tries to show off some of his poetry, but Virgil rushes them along, saying his poetry doesn't matter.
 * Self-Inflicted Hell: The damned are implied to have chosen their own fate, as they clamber madly to cross the river Acheron.
 * Self-Insert Fic: The main character is Alighieri himself. It's still a good story, though.
 * Seven Deadly Sins:
 * Purgatory is patterned after these.
 * Hell includes punishments for lust, gluttony, greed, and wrath.
 * Seven Heavenly Virtues: They appear as beautiful maidens dancing around Beatrice's chariot in her triumphal procession at the end of Purgatory.
 * Single Tear: A soldier Dante meets in Purgatory was put there instead of Hell because he shed a single tear before dying.
 * Snicket Warning Label: Some early verses in the Paradiso warn readers not to continue further if they are not ready to deal with the complex theology discussed therein. Most people who end up reading it regret not taking the warning more seriously and end up with a headache, and left very confused.
 * Sympathy for the Devil: Although Dante has nothing but contempt for Satan and his minions, he often shows feelings of empathy, pity, and even respect for several sinners he meets in Hell. Virgil sometimes tells Dante off for this. After all, if an omniscient and all-loving God has decided they're not worth pity, why should anyone go against divine will and feel sorry for them?
 * Take Our Word for It: At the end of Paradiso, this is how Dante describes God. Anything else would have been underwhelming.
 * Take That:
 * Dante's personal and political enemies, as well as historical villains-- even some of his friends-- often end up in Hell. One of the most notable examples is none other than the then-current Pope, Bonifacius VIII, of whom Dante was not a big fan. According to Cracked.com, this was a big "screw you" to "Pope" Boniface and the town of Florence for double-crossing and exiling him (in an order that wasn't repealed until 2008). The pope's not in Hell yet, but it's stated that he will be.
 * Dante himself gets one when he meets Beatrice at the top of Purgatorio. While he expects a tender and loving reunion, she angrily lambasts him and tears him apart, calling all of heaven to bear witness to the fact that Dante doesn't love her like he thinks he does.
 * Taken for Granite: The Furies on the walls of Dis threaten to call forth Medusa to turn Dante to stone, but Virgil shields him with his cloak.
 * Tears of Remorse
 * Tender Tears
 * Thicker Than Water
 * This Loser Is You:
 * Dante faints, weeps, kicks the heads of incapacitated shades, and lambastes in the narration things his character self almost immediately does.
 * Also, well, there's a reason that Dante has to go through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. See Author Avatar.
 * One theory of the Commedia is that Dante is contemplating suicide at the beginning of the poem. He describes himself as "lost in a dark forest," and what's the only other dark forest we see in the Commedia? The circle of Hell in which suicides are transformed into barren trees.
 * To Hell and Back: Literally.
 * Toilet Humour:
 * One of the Malebranche "makes a trumpet of his ass" as a salute to his fellow demons.
 * The flatterers in the second Bolgia are immersed in shit.
 * Wish Fulfillment: Seeing as he gets to beat up people he doesn't like in Hell, confronts Satan, meets the woman he fell in love with during her life and be saved by her, sees God Himself, and transcends the mortal realm forever. The real kicker is that it's actually pulled off fairly well as far as self-inserts go. See Author Avatar above.
 * Wounded Gazelle Warcry: Helen of Troy in hell can be interpreted as having been this trope in life, rather than the passive object of desire she was in The Iliad: Dante gives her the full blame for the Trojan War, as if she got herself kidnapped by the Trojan prince on purpose in order to give her own nation an excuse to invade Troy.
 * It boils down to whether you think she was abducted by Paris or gave in to lust and ran off with him willingly.
 * Write Who You Know: Dante populates the spirit world with his friends and enemies, alongside mythical and historical characters.