Inferno Decoded

by Michael Haag

  Trickled the tear-drops and the bloody drivel.

  At every mouth he with his teeth was crunching

  A sinner, in the manner of a brake,

  So that he three of them tormented thus.

  To him in front the biting was as naught

  Unto the clawing, for sometimes the spine

  Utterly stripped of all the skin remained.

  ‘That soul up there which has the greatest pain,’

  The Master said, ‘is Judas Iscariot;

  With head inside, he plies his legs without.

  Of the two others, who head downward are,

  The one who hangs from the black jowl is Brutus;

  See how he writhes himself, and speaks no word.

  And the other, who so stalwart seems, is Cassius.

  But night is reascending, and ’tis time

  That we depart, for we have seen the whole.’

  From here there is only one way out. The poets must climb up Satan’s back, and after a long climb through the body of the Earth they reach Mount Purgatory. Above them the stars of Heaven shine. It is just before dawn on Easter Sunday.

  ESOTERIC DANTE

  O you possessed of sturdy intellect,

  observe the teaching that is hidden here

  beneath the veil of verses so obscure

  Dante, Inferno, Canto IX [Mandelbaum translation, as quoted by Dan Brown, Inferno, chapter 63]

  As described on p.31, Dante was a member of the group of young Florentine poets called the Fedeli d’Amore, the Faithful Followers of Love. They were dedicated to achieving an erotic spirituality, ascending into Paradise through the adoration of a woman. In some cases they idealised their beloved as Holy Wisdom. The Sufis in their poetry did something of the same, which has led some people to consider a link between the Fedeli d’Amore and the East. Such a link might have been established through the troubadours, through pilgrims returning from the Holy Land, or via the Knights Templar, who had been founded in Jerusalem nearly two hundred years earlier and were also well established throughout Europe, especially in Tuscany and in Florence.

  The poetry of the Fedeli d’Amore is also full of symbolism and double entendres. Some scholars believe it contains codes to disguise the true meaning of their words – possibly heretical meanings, to be kept secret from the Inquisition. Again, they say, that could point to a connection with the Templars.

  THE TEMPLARS IN FLORENCE

  From their inception, the Templars were an international organisation. While their purpose lay in the Holy Land, where their task was to protect pilgrims visiting the holy sites and to defend the Holy Land itself, their support came from all over Europe where they held land, collected tithes and received donations from the pious. They organised markets and fairs, managed their estates and traded in everything from olive oil to timber and wool. In time they built up their own formidable Mediterranean merchant fleet, capable of transporting pilgrims, soldiers and supplies between Spain, France, Italy, Greece and the Holy Land.

  Although it is usual to think of the Templars as knights on horseback charging into battle, the thrust of their lances depended in a very real sense on a vast network of support, not just from sergeants and locally recruited soldiery in the East but also from men who worked their estates in Europe and never went to war. Such people manned the Templars’ houses – their preceptories – as administrators, agricultural workers and artisans of all kinds. By the 1160s, the Templars had already arranged their European holdings, the properties donated to them by the faithful, great and small, into seven large provinces, which extended from England beyond the Channel to Montenegro on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. These landholdings were the foundations of their power.

  The same network of European estates that funded the Templars in the Holy Land developed naturally into an international financial system. During an age of increasing movement owing to the crusades and the growth of trade and pilgrimages, the Templar network of preceptories in the West developed a system of credit notes whereby money deposited in one preceptory could be withdrawn at another upon production of the note. In this way the Templars became Europe’s first international bankers.

  DANTE AND THE FEDE SANTA: A TEMPLAR SUPPORT GROUP

  Such were the activities that the Templars had developed in Tuscany, which was one of the most economically advanced regions in Western Christendom. Since 1138, when the Templars received their first donation in Tuscany, they had built an impressive network of preceptories, with houses at Lucca, Pisa, Arezzo, Florence and many other places. Tuscany was on the trade routes between East and West, and on the pilgrimage routes to Rome and the Adriatic ports for embarkation to the East. Moreover the region was rich in natural resources, including iron and copper, and Florence in particular was famous and wealthy for its wool trade, for which it required finance. The Templar’s Tuscan preceptories, therefore, served to supply the Templars overseas, as hostels for pilgrims heading East, and as financial institutions for one of Europe’s most vibrant economic regions. When Dante and his brother engaged in buying and selling property, raising loans and negotiating interest and repayments, one can well imagine them dealing with the Templars.

  But, according to claims that were first heard in the seventeenth century, Dante’s involvement with the Templars amounted to more than that. The matter was investigated in the nineteenth century by none other than Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter and founder of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England. Rossetti came to the conclusion that Dante had been initiated into La Fede Santa, The Sacred Faith, a tertiary order of the Templars open to lay people. Certainly the Divine Comedy contains considerable symbolism connected with the Templars and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem which had been their headquarters, and not only the reference in the Purgatorio, Canto XX, to Philip IV, king of France, being a second Pontius Pilate who ‘ruthless’ and ‘without law … bears into the Temple his greedy sails’. Is it simply a coincidence, for example, that in Canto XXXI of the Paradiso, Beatrice hands over Dante to St Bernard who will bring him face to face with God? St Bernard of Clairvaux, famous as a mystical contemplative, was also in his day the chief promoter of the Templars, whom he described as ‘the instrument of God for the punishment of malefactors and for the defence of the just’.

  The Templars were arrested in October 1307 and put on trial for blasphemy, sodomy, heresy and various other heinous crimes. Many were burned alive at the stake, a fate to which Dante himself had been condemned. By the time the Templars met their final end, in 1312, Dante had completed the Inferno, which evidence suggests he then revised. He also launched an attack on the French king in his next book, the Purgatorio, and made further veiled references elsewhere in the Divine Comedy. Outspoken as Dante was usually willing to be, he had to take care. Secrecy and obscurity were necessary, as any defence of the Templars or their ideas could be interpreted as heresy. According to one scholar, William Anderson, author of Dante the Maker, ‘Many of the most obscure allegorical passages [of the Comedy] receive their most coherent explanation when related to the crisis of the Templar order’.

  EROTIC PARADISE

  Whether or not it was the Templars who brought back from the East ideas of attaining Paradise by a mystical transformation of sexual gratification, Dante did not forget his old allegiance to the Fedeli d’Amore, and its desire to rise towards a spiritual world pervaded by eroticism.

  In the Paradiso, for example, Canto I, 1–3, he writes ‘The glory to Him who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines in one part more and in another less’. The English ‘penetrates’ is an exact translation of the Italian ‘penetra’, which introduces the Paradiso’s subtle but pervasive erotic language.

  A few lines later (Canto I, 21), when he refers to Apollo skinning Marsyas alive, he writes of how he drew Marsyas ‘from the scabbard of his limbs’, in which Dante’s chosen word for scabbard in Italian is ‘vagina’. Marsyas, for his crime of challenging Apollo the god of music, is brutally deco
upled from a woman.

  This eroticism becomes progressively more apparent through the Paradiso, and is reminiscent of Ovid’s amorous poetry and the Song of Songs in the Old Testament, for which, as it happens, St Bernard, Dante’s guide at the end of the Paradiso, composed an allegorical commentary. For all his references to the Virgin Mary, Dante did not seem to have virgins entirely on his mind, nor, for that matter, Christian orthodoxy.

  DANTE’S ADVENTURES INSIDE HIS MOTHER

  Much more can be made of this, and has been by Walter Arensberg in his book The Cryptography of Dante. Arensberg argues that Beatrice is not, in fact, the girl around the corner but is actually Dante’s mother Bella. Given all the motherly references Dante makes to his Beatrice, that’s not an unreasonable supposition. Following on from this, the principal argument of Arensberg’s book is that Dante’s entire journey recorded in Inferno is a journey through the body of a woman, a woman who may or may not be his mother.

  Apollo skinning Marsyas alive – Titian’s last work. the Divine Comedy is full of sexual symbolism.

  The dark wood is her pubic hair, the mountain beyond is her mons veneris, the gate of Hell is her vulva, the noble castle is her clitoris, the descent to the Second Circle is her vagina, and the city of Dis is her uterus. What has happened, says Arensberg (who studied English literature at Harvard and perhaps should take over from Langdon in Dan Brown’s novels) is that Dante was born but immediately wanted to return to his mother’s womb, both as a child and as a copulating man, and has been disturbed along the way by fears of incest. It certainly provides a new angle on the idea of the Sacred Feminine, and makes good reading alongside Dante’s own Inferno.

  PYTHAGORAS AND SACRED NUMEROLOGY

  Dante’s fascination, even obsession, with the world of numbers has long been recognised by literary critics as well as by mathematicians. In fact the Divine Comedy is the primary example of literary numerology in the Middle Ages, and for that matter throughout the whole of Western literature.

  Dante mentions Pythagoras eight times in his writings, and a further mention of his followers, the Pythagoreans, brings the total to nine – not in the Divine Comedy, but in two prose works, the Convivio and De Monarchia. Dante refers, for example, to the Pythagorean doctrine that numbers are the origin of all things. He does not mean this drily; for Pythagoras, the mathematical principles that underlay the universe gave it a harmony, literally a music of the spheres, to which Dante turned his ear, listening for the divine song.

  Pythagoras was a sixth-century BC Greek philosopher and mathematician whose thought combined the spiritual and the rational, and who placed geometry and music at the heart of the workings of the universe. He came from the Mysteries tradition, specifically the Orphic Mysteries, which had a reputation for drunkenness and orgies as well as the crankiness associated with attempts at abstemiousness and purification. They were looked at askance by the authorities, but attracted writers, poets, playwrights and philosophers and proved to have a lasting influence on Greek thought. ‘I am a child of earth and the starry heaven but my race is of heaven alone’, the Orphic initiates proclaimed.

  Pythagoras sought to explain the world, both spiritual and material, by numbers. He made important observations on the arithmetical proportions that govern musical harmony, and his belief that movements of the heavenly bodies produced concordant notes was later expressed in English as ‘the music of the spheres’.

  The influence of Pythagoras was felt on succeeding generations of philosophers, among them Plato and Aristotle, who flourished in the fourth century BC. Aristotle quoted him in his Metaphysics: ‘There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacings of the spheres.’ But the influence of Pythagoras was most imprinted on the thoughts of Plato, who shared with him a mystical approach to the soul and its place in the material world, and who accepted from Pythagoras the idea that mathematics and abstract thinking provided a secure basis for philosophical thought and for addressing both science and morals. Dante, in his liberal education, imbibed the thinking of Pythagoras.

  Viewing everything through a Pythagorean lens allowed for a universe based on a harmony of numbers and geometrical shapes. The medieval world view of a universe based on hierarchy was replaced by a universe of unity, an interconnected cosmic kingdom consisting of heaven above and Earth below.

  Dante notes that Pythagoras saw Unity as Good and Plurality as Evil. Therefore it is important to pay attention when Dante writes in the Divine Comedy, ‘five and six, if understood, ray forth from unity’ [Paradiso XV, 56–57]. The union of five and six is eleven, which turns out to be a fundamental number in Dante’s Inferno. Eleven and multiples of eleven are common in Dante; the Inferno has thirty-four cantos, but the first canto serves as a general introduction to the whole, so essentially the Inferno has thirty-three cantos; Purgatorio and Paradiso likewise have thirty-three cantos each. The entire Divine Comedy is written in terza rima, the pattern of its rhyme scheme being aba, bcb, cdc, ded, and so on, so that the middle line of the first tercet rhymes with the first and third lines of the following tercet – but the lines are always hendasyllabic, that is eleven syllables long. Therefore each terzine has thirty-three syllables, just as each book of the Comedy has thirty-three cantos.

  Twice in the Inferno Dante provides dimensions for Hell. Once he states that the circumference of the ninth bolgia (ditch) in the Eighth Circle is twenty-two miles, and once that the tenth bolgia in the Eighth Circle is eleven miles. There is nothing accidental about this mention of eleven and its multiple twenty-two; twenty-two forms part of the well-known fraction 22/7 which expresses the Pythagorean value of pi.

  The entire shape of Dante’s Inferno, and also the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, are circular. Dante was well versed in mathematics and mentions in the last canto of the Divine Comedy the problem of ‘squaring the circle’, a mathematical impossibility that Dante uses to illustrate the ineffable experience of the divine:

  Like a geometer who sets himself

  To square the circle, and is unable to think

  Of the formula he needs to solve the problem,

  So was I faced with this new vision.

  The numbers three and nine occur throughout Dante’s writings, and have special meaning. The Divine Comedy has three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. Beatrice is associated with nine, the square and multiple of three. Three is the Christian Trinity, and Beatrice, in Dante’s mind, becomes associated with the Mother of God.

  Some argue that Dante’s obsessive use of numbers harbours a deep mystery, but quite possibly he is simply aligning his own work with the mathematics all around him, as in the motions of the stars, and trying to make his great epic at one with God’s universe.

  THE DREAM OF THE MISSING CANTOS

  Boccaccio tells the strange story of how the Divine Comedy was seemingly left incomplete at Dante’s death. When his friends and family searched Dante’s papers they found nothing beyond Canto XX of the Paradiso which ends with ‘blessed lights like winking eyes keeping time together’. Boccaccio writes how Dante’s admirers were ‘outraged that God had not at least lent him to the world long enough that he might have had opportunity to finish what little remained of his work’. Dante’s sons Jacopo and Piero, both poets in their own right, even proposed to complete the Paradiso themselves.

  But they were checked in this ‘foolish presumption’ when eight months after his death Dante appeared to Jacopo in a dream, all dressed in white, his face shining with a strange light, and taking him by the hand led him to a hidden recess in the wall above the bed in which during life he had slept, saying, ‘Here is what you have looked for for so long’.

  When Jacopo awoke, he went to the spot, reached in and found the missing thirteen cantos, mouldy and on the point of decay; he quickly copied them and so the Divine Comedy was finally complete and saw the light of day and the night of stars.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Florence and the Black Death

  The
Black Plague thinned the herd and paved the way for the Renaissance… and Bertrand created Inferno as a kind of modern-day catalyst for global renewal – a Transhumanist Black Death.

  Sienna Brooks, Inferno, chapter 99

  The Black Death arrived in Florence in the spring of 1348. At first the victims felt a swelling under their armpits and in their groin. Then they began spitting blood. Three days later they were dead. By the time the last victim was tossed into a mass grave, a hundred thousand Florentines had died. ‘La bellissima e famosissima figlia di Roma’, was how Dante had described Florence, ‘the beautiful and famous daughter of Rome’. But Florence was both heaven and hell.

  FLORENTINE PRIDE AND DESTINY

  Tuscany was the heartland of the ancient Etruscans, the mysterious people from whom it takes its name. They were settled at Fiesole, a hill town above present-day Florence, from where they traded along the River Arno and farmed its rich valley. If they also had a settlement beside the river, however, nothing of it is known. The Etruscans had a rich and extensive literature, but except for one book, which remains largely undeciphered, it has been entirely lost. Nor have any physical traces of the Etruscans been found at Florence.

  The Black Death in Florence.

  The Florentines themselves were happy to claim descent from the ancient Romans. They liked to believe that the octagonal Baptistery of San Giovanni had originally been a temple to Mars; it’s certainly very old, but dates no earlier than the fourth or fifth century AD. Immediately to its east, the original cathedral of the city, Santa Reparata, was built in the sixth or seventh century and named for a third-century Palestinian martyr executed for refusing to sacrifice to the gods. This was the cathedral that Dante knew as a child. In about 1296, however, when Dante was in his early thirties, he would have watched as it was reduced to its foundations to build the vast domed church we see today – Santa Maria del Fiore, Saint Mary of the Flowers, though usually simply called the Duomo, the cathedral.