Reading Guide to Dante’s Inferno Chap 18-34

Sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge to keep going in the Inferno once you have reached half way into the book, and the fast pace slows down a bit after the first seven circles. So here’s a little guide to point out some highlights from chapter 18, and the second half of the story!

The main points to notice is how Circle 8 is in many ways a psychological description of the Nature of Fraud within you. In the middle there is the Heart of Fraud swarming with Demons, and we see a momentous change in the relationship between the Pilgrim and Virgil as a symbol of using Reason as the sole Guide in these areas of life and in some sense the moral realms.

Towards the end of Circle 8 there is a defining story about Ulysses and his failed Journey towards Knowledge, in many ways contrasting the Journey of the Pilgrim and indirectly paralleling the whole trilogy of the Divine Comedy on a conceptual level. This story makes for one of the deepest arguments in Dante’s life-work, that a quest for understanding can never become complete within the boundaries of the rational intellectual life alone, but must include an openness to larger forms of knowledge only accessible through other sources like the intuitions, allegory, instinct, imagination, Faith and a belief in something much bigger beyond ourselves.

Circle 8 also culminates in a deterioration of illness, disease and insanity – as the logical end point of Fraud as a destructive force and its effects on the inner psyche and symbolically also at the community level and beyond. One might read into Dante’s view a parallel to the city of Florence as well, or the state of the contemporary Church in Rome.

After these 13 chapters with at times lengthy descriptions of circle 8 and references to historical people, which can be skimmed in part – to avoid a full stop which sometimes happens – things speed up a lot again in chapter 31 with the transition to circle 9, and then the last three chapters go very quickly into the center and the climax with meeting Lucifer in the Ice.

The transition with the Well as a portal into circle 9 is important as the Giants and Greek Titans represent what leads to the deepest of evil; the combination of Intelligence, Strength, and the Evil Intent. This is the wrong-doings of the Giants, and also what metaphorically brings us further to the deepest source of the sins, to Pride, and to Lucifer himself (who first was a Cherubim in the Heavens, symbolic of Streams of Knowledge and the spiritual beings that guard the Ark and the Garden of Eden.) Dante is showing us that entering the combination of these three elements psychologically – is the pathway to the darkest center.

The last 3 chapters in circle 9 on the ice of Cocytus is a fast read and packed with symbolic meaning, and a wonderful ending which is largely a sort of an emotional catharsis – implying among other things how once the root of a problem is revealed and “gone through”, it is already behind us in some sense, and the process of healing and renewal can begin, almost instantly.

So in short; the main obstacle in reading the first book of the Comedy is often the repetitiveness of Circle 8 and the ten valleys which could have the feeling of just one more and one more and one more, but keeping in mind that the middle and the ending are the key symbolic passages to understand, it’s ok to read more lightly until chap 26 with Ulysses, and then notice the allegory of diseases in chap 28-30.

And once the final verses of the book are reached, other things become more clear too – about the Journey through the Underworld, and a different feeling of being ready to start the climb further through Knowledge, Mount Purgatory, and then the final Ascent into the spheres of Heaven.

Hope this helps, and happy reading!

😀