Dante’s D.C.: The City of Dis

Corrupt clergy, presidents, politicians, Party hacks, government bureaucrats,  Wall Street gamblers and warmongering generals may or may not be indicted and sent to prison for their crimes but, according to Dante Alighieri, prison should be the least of their worries.

Throughout every dispensation of time, our Heavenly Father has made His will known to his children on earth through various means. This includes the consequences of choosing to act contrary to His guidance.  Those consequences are inescapable and unimaginably horrible.

Dante’s Inferno is the first part his 14^th century epic poem Divine Comedy.  The Inferno describes Dante’s journey through Hell guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine concentric circles of torment located within the earth. It is the “realm…of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen.”

Try to figure out which level of Hell the Biden Crime Family and their co-conspirators will spend Eternity!

• Canto III: Vestibule of Hell: Dante and Virgil pass through the Gates of Hell on which hangs the sign “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!” Dante and his guide hear the anguished cries of the Uncommitted. These are the souls of people who in Life took no sides; the opportunists who were for neither good nor evil, but instead were merely concerned with themselves. Naked and futile, they race around through the mist in eternal pursuit of themselves while relentlessly chased by swarms of wasps and hornets who continually sting them. Loathsome maggots and worms at the sinners’ feet drink the putrid mixture of blood, pus, and tears that flow down their bodies.
• Canto IV: First Circle (Limbo): This circle contains the unbaptized who did not accept Christ. “After those who refused choice come those without opportunity of choice. They lacked the Hope for something greater than rational minds can conceive.
• Canto V: Second Circle (Lust): These souls are condemned for allowing their appetites to sway their reason. They are buffeted back and forth by the terrible winds of a violent storm without rest. This bright, voluptuous sin is now seen as it is – a howling darkness of helpless discomfort.
• Canto VI: Third Circle (Gluttony): The gluttonous wallow in a vile, putrid slush produced by a ceaseless, foul, icy rain. The “Great Worm”, the monstrous, three-headed beast of Hell, ravenously guards the gluttons lying in the freezing mire, mauling and flaying them with his claws as they howl like dogs. The gluttons grovel in the mud sightless.
• Canto VII: Fourth Circle (Greed): Contains those whose attitude toward material goods deviated from the appropriate mean. This includes the avaricious or miserly including many clergymen, cardinals and popes who hoarded possessions and the prodigal who squandered them. They joust with great weights as weapons that they push with their chests.
• Canto VII: Fifth Circle (Wrath): In the swampy, stinking waters of the river Styx the actively wrathful fight each other viciously on the surface of the slime, while the sullen (the passively wrathful) lie beneath the water, withdrawn. The active hatreds rend and snarl at one another, at the bottom, the sullen hatreds lie gurgling, unable even to express themselves for the rage that chokes them. [AntiFa, Communists, Socialists, CNN, MSNBC, etc.]

• Canto VIII: Entrance to Dis: In the distance, Dante perceives high towers that resemble fiery red mosques. Virgil informs him they are approaching the City of Dis. Dis is surrounded by the Stygian marsh and contains Lower Hell within its walls. The walls of Dis are guarded by fallen angels.
•  Canto IX: Dante is threatened by the Furies (think Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark). An angel sent from Heaven secures entry for the poets, opening the gates by touching it with a wand and rebukes those who opposed Dante. 

• Canto X and XI: Sixth Circle (Heresy): Heretics who say “the Soul dies with the body” are trapped in flaming tombs. In response to a question from Dante about the prophecy he has received, Farinata explains that what the souls in Hell know of life on earth comes from seeing the future, not from any observation of the present. Consequently, when “the portal of the future has been shut”, it will no longer be possible for them to know anything. In Lower Hell the sins of violence and fraud are punished. Virgil asserts there are only two legitimate sources of wealth; natural resources and human labor. Usury is therefore an offense against both, it is a kind of blasphemy since it is an act of violence against Nature and Nature derives from God. [The Federal Reserve, Federal Banks, Wall Street, Atheists, Communists, fake clergy, etc.]

• Canto XII: Seventh Circle: (Violence): Swiftly enter the seventh circle descending a jumbled pile of stones resulting from the great earthquake that shook the earth at the moment of Christ’s death. 
  • Ring 1: Against Neighbors [or electors, service members, parishioners]. In the first round of the seventh circle, murderers, war-makers, plunderers, and tyrants are immersed in Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood and fire. Centaurs patrol the ring shooting arrows into any sinner who emerge higher out of the boiling blood than each is allowed.

• • Canto XIII, Ring 2, Against Self: The Wood of the Suicides in which the souls of the people who attempted or died by suicide are transformed into gnarled, thorny trees and then fed upon by Harpes, hideous clawed birds with the faces of women; the trees are only permitted to speak when broken and bleeding. 

• • Canto XIV, Ring 3: Against God, Art an Nature: A great Plain of Burning Sand scorched by great flakes of flame falling slowly down from the sky, an image derived from the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Blasphemers are stretched supine upon the burning sand. The Sodomites run in circles while the Usurers crouch huddled and weeping. The rain descends as fire [a fine use for Napalm!]. 

• Canto XV-XVII: Dante meets several people of high position he knew on earth and was unaware of the vile sins they had committed. 

• Canto XVII: Eighth Circle: The Upper Half of the Hell of the Fraudulent and Malicious called Malebolge. It is a large funnel of stone shaped like an amphitheater around which run a series of ten deep, narrow, concentric ditches or trenches called bolge. Within these ditches are punished those guilty of Simple Fraud. The image of the City in corruption; the progressive disintegration of every social relationship, personal and public. Sexuality, ecclesiastical and civil office, language, ownership, counsel, authority, psychic influence, and material interdependence – all the media of the community’s interchange are perverted and falsified. 

• • Bolge 1: Panderers and seducers make two files, one along either bank of the ditch and march quickly in opposite directions while being whipped by horned demons for eternity.
  • Bolge 2: Flatterers are steeped in excrement as they howl and fight among themselves. [lobbyists, aides-de-camp, etc.]

• • Canto XIX: Bolgia 3: Simoniacs are those who committed simony, or the sale of ecclesiastic favors and offices and therefore made money for themselves out of what belongs to God. They are placed head down in round, tube-like holes within the rock with flames burning the soles of their feet. 

• • Canto XX: Bolgia 4: Sorcerers, those who attempted to usurp God’s prerogative by prying into the future. They have their heads turned around on their bodies and compelled to walk backwards for eternity blinded by their own tears. 

• • Canto XXI-XXII: Bolgia 5: Barrators, Corrupt politicians who made money by trafficking in public offices are immersed in a lake of boiling pitch, which represents the sticky fingers and dark secrets of their corrupt deals. They are guarded by demons called the Malebranche (Evil Claws) who tear them to pieces with claws and grappling hooks if they catch them above the surface of the pitch.

• • Canto XXIII: Bolgia 6: Hypocrites listlessly walk around a narrow track for eternity, weighted down by leaden robes. The robes are brilliantly gilded on the outside and shaped like a monk’s habit. The hypocrites outward appearance shines brightly and passes for holiness but underneath lies the terrible weight of his deceit – a falsity that makes spiritual progress impossible.

• • Canto XXIV – XXV: Bolgia 7: Thieves live in a pit filled with monstrous snakes and lizards who curl themselves around the sinners and bind their hands behind their backs. Just as they stole other peoples’ substance in Life, their very identity becomes subject to theft. They are bitten in the jugular vein by a serpent and burst into flames.

• • Canto XXVI: Bolgia 8: Counsellors of Fraud are not people who gave false advice but people who used their position to advise others to engage in Fraud. They move about hidden from view inside their individual flame. This includes those who use Rhetoric without proper Wisdom [most Academicians, Phds., etc.]

• • Canto XXVII-XXVIII: Bolgia 9: Sowers of Discord are hacked and mutilated for all eternity by a large demon wielding a bloody sword; their bodies are divided as, in Life, their sin was to tear apart what God had intended to be united. These are the sinners who are “ready to rip up the whole fabric of society to gratify a sectional egoism.” Their souls must drag their ruined bodies around the ditch, their wounds healing in the course of the circuit, only to have the demon tear them apart anew. They are divided into three categories: (i) religious schism and discord, (ii) civil strife and political discord, and (iii) family disunion, or discord between kinsmen. [Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.; Obama, Biden, Lyndon Johnson, etc. etc. ad nauseum]

• • Canto XXIX: Bolgia 10: Falsifiers as a “disease” on society suffer different horrible diseases, stench, thirst, filth, darkness, and screaming. Some lie prostrate while others run hungering through the pit, tearing others to pieces:
    • Imposters (Falsifiers of Persons) run rabid through the pit.
    • Counterfeiters (Falsifiers of Money) are condemned to a dropsy- like disease giving them a bloated stomach, preventing them from moving and an eternal thirst.
    • Perjurers (Falsifiers of Words) suffer eternally from a burning fever. 

• Canto XXXI: The Central Well is guarded by Giants symbolizing pride and other spiritual flaws lying behind acts of treachery.

Ninth Circle (Treachery)

• Canto XXXII: Sinners trapped in a lake of ice:
  • Traitors to family ties or kindred have their necks and heads out of the ice so they can bow their heads.
  • Traitors to their country have their heads above the ice but cannot bend their necks to keep others from gnawing the nape of their necks.
  • Traitors to guests lie supine in the ice while their tears freeze in their eye sockets.
  • Traitors to those legally appointed over them are completely encapsulated in ice, distorted and twisted in every conceivable position.

Center of Hell: In the very center of Hell, condemned for committing the ultimate sin (personal treachery against God) is the Devil, referred to by Virgil as Dis. Lucifer is trapped waist-deep in the ice, fixed and suffering. He has three faces each a different color – red, yellow and black. Satan is impotent, ignorant, and full of hate. Lucifer retains his six wings as having belonged to the Seraphic order but they are now dark, bat-like and futile; the icy wind that emanates from the beating of Lucifer’s wings only further ensures his own imprisonment in the frozen lake. He weeps from his six eyes and his tears mix with bloody froth and pus as they pour down his three chins.” (Wikipedia)

Who can argue that Washington, D.C. is not really Satan’s City of Dis? Who can disagree the eternal punishments fit the crimes?

Editor’s note: Rodin’s statue “The Thinker” is actually named by the sculptor “The Poet” after Dante. “The Poet” Dante is seated on the tympanum leaning forward to observe the circles of Hell. Money for the project ran out before the Gates of Hell could be constructed.