The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [461]
As they travel downwards through an ever darker and more nightmarish landscape, with its fogs, marshes, beetling cliffs and stinking pools, each new circle represents states of separation from `wholeness' more extreme than those which came before. The three animals Dante had encountered characterised the general nature of these sins. The topmost three circles, symbolised by the untamable leopard, contain those who have committed sins associated with `incontinence, lack of selfcontrol. The first, dedicated to those who have given way to lust, contains pairs of illicit lovers, such as Paolo and Francesca of Rimini. Trapped in marriage to a monster, she had sought refuge in a love affair with her brother-in-law until her husband murdered them both. But at least the sin of these couples had been based on a shared love. The second circle contains those who allowed their physical appetites to run to excess in greed or gluttony. But again this can at least imply a measure of sociability. The third contains those who had lived enslaved to material wealth, as hoarders or spendthrifts, and below them, in a fourth, transitional circle, are those whose lives had become consumed by anger. Here the states of egocentricity are becoming more obviously and aggressively turned against other people. Dante and Virgil then come to the gates of the infernal city, `lower Hell', where three more circles, symbolised by the raging lion, contain those who had been guilty of crimes of violence: first those murderers and torturers who had been violent against others; then the suicides who had committed violence against themselves; finally those who had violated nature, as `sodomites' or by living parasitically on the efforts of others through usury.
The last two circles, symbolised by the ravening wolf, contain those who lived by deceiving others. One includes a bewildering variety of sinners, from those whose deceit had lain in seduction or flattery to those whose offence had been hypocrisy or fraud. The lowest circle includes those guilty of betraying a fundamental loyalty or trust: those who had betrayed their kin or their country; those who had violated the trust of hospitality by betraying their guests; lastly those who had betrayed their lord. At this deepest part of Hell, Dante and Virgil are finally confronted by the terrifying figure of the Devil himself, a huge monster with three faces, each munching the shade of a particularly notorious traitor, Brutus and Cassius, the treacherous assassins of Caesar, and Judas, the betrayer of Christ. And at this point, when they begin to clamber down the Devil's immense body, comes that dazzling stroke whereby, as they continue to descend ever deeper, they suddenly sense they are no longer moving downwards. Having reached the very centre of the earth, they are now climbing upwards: until, in the book's closing lines, they glimpse, shining far above them, the light of the stars. Their hellish slog through the claustrophobic underworld of the ego is over. They are at the start of the next stage of their journey, at the foot of the towering mountain of Purgatory.
The next book, Purgatorio, is devoted to those who, although they had lived selfishly on earth, still had enough good in them or sense of remorse to hope for eventual salvation. The first two `terraces' of the precipitous mountain contain the shades of those excommunicated by the Church, or who for some reason, such as sudden death, had not repented of their sins