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By Root 5321 0

wounded but at the same time wins the victory, overcoming his antagonist. At least in Beowulf's case we know he is physically dead, as we see his ashes consumed on a funeral pyre. But Arthur simply passes from sight, merging into some new state of wholeness and light, accompanied by that shining threefold presence of the `feminine'. Whatever the nature of this blessed world he has passed into, it is not the orthodox Christian heaven. There is no sign of God, or angels, or judgement. And in this sense he might simply be taken to have merged mystically with the One. Yet it then appears this is not the end of Arthur's story. He has seemingly survived in his full individual identity, to such effect that he may one day `awaken; to return as redeemer of his nation: although not as a spiritual saviour but as the warlike hero he had been in life. As a compromise between ego and Self, it was a brilliantly fudged formula. The one thing it was not was a Christian answer to that perennial riddle.21

The story which did provide a Christian answer, more profoundly than any other, was the long poem written in the early years of the fourteenth century by a Florentine scholar, soldier, diplomat, politician and philosopher, Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy was one of the towering imaginative achievements of the Middle Ages. In three books, describing Dante's journey down through Hell and up through Purgatory to Paradise, it is constructed as completely around the Rule of Three as any story in the world. Each book is divided into thirty-three cantos, plus one more as a prologue to the whole poem, making a hundred in all. His narrative famously begins with those words `Midway through the journey of this life I found myself in a dark wood where the way was lost'. Outwardly this referred back to the time in his own life when, in his mid-thirties, as one of the civic leaders of his city-state, he had become caught up in a violent political conflict which resulted in his expulsion from the city. Cast penniless into exile, his world seemed in ruins. But inwardly Dante was describing that `central crisis, where a hero suddenly finds himself forced to set out from the `City of Destruction' on a Quest for the innermost meaning of human existence.

At the start of the first book, the Inferno, Dante sees before him a great mountain, rising out of darkness into sunlight far above. He sets off to climb it, but finds his way barred in turn by three fierce animals, a leopard, a lion and a wolf. As he runs away, stumbling in his desperation to escape, he is confronted by an imposing figure who turns out to be Virgil, revered in the Middle Ages above all other pre-Christian writers. This `wise old man, who is to be Dante's guide through the first part of his journey, tells him that, if he wishes to escape from this savage place, he will have to take another road:

`This beast [the ego] which makes you weep does not allow anyone to pass by her, but so entangles them that she kills them; and she has a nature so perverse and vicious that her craving appetite can never be satisfied, so that after feeding she is hungrier than before.'

Dante cannot hope to climb the mountain without first going down through all the nine circles of Hell which contain those shades condemned to eternal punishment for their sins on earth. Virgil leads him to a grim gateway, bearing the legend 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here'. As they go through, his guide tells him:

"`We are come to the place where, as I said, you would see the wretched people who have lost the good of their understanding" ... here sighs, cries and deep wailings resounded through the starless air, at first bringing tears to my eyes. Strange tongues, horrible outcries, words of pain, tones of anger, voices deep and hoarse ... made a tumult which echoes forever through that tainted air, like the whirlwind eddies of desert sand.'

They see queues of newly-arrived souls miserably waiting to be ferried across a black river into the underworld, and Virgil arranges for them to cross over. Before reaching the pit of