The lyrics in Kreator’s song “World Beyond” describe a trip through the gates of Hell similar to Dante and Virgil’s, according to Loudwire’s Katy Irizary.
The song discusses the river Styx and selling souls.
Read the full Loudwire article here.
Dark Dante by Maggie Rose
Dark Dante, a novel by Maggie Rose, takes place in Florence 700 years after Dante’s Inferno.
“In this engaging and evocative mystery thriller, a string of horrendous murders is committed in quick succession. Seeing that the Italian police are making little headway finding the culprit, Maria Farrell, the niece of the first victim, Peter Farrell, decides to investigate. Because of a family feud, she never met Peter, a specialist in art history, who lived in Florence most of his life. A theatre director from Manchester, Maria shrewdly exploits her professional skills and knowledge of Shakespeare’s theatre in her attempt to solve the murders.” –Troubador, 2021
To learn more about the novel, visit troubador.co.uk.
Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human (1948)
“…The front door of another person’s house terrified me more than the gate of Inferno in the Divine Comedy, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I really felt I could detect within the door the presence of a horrible dragon-like monster writhing there with a dank, raw, smell…” –Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, 1948
Contributed by Camila Aguilar (University of Texas at Austin, ’25)
“Revisiting Dante’s Florence: Experiencing Dante’s ‘circles of hell'” Essay, Sarah Odishoo (2021)
“Dante’s Florence was a circle of intrigue between the Holy Roman Catholic Church and Firenze’s powerful political parties. Dante, as a young Italian, became part of the struggle to keep the city for the people. He lost. He was exiled. He wrote The Divine Comedy, starting with The Inferno. Mirroring through reflection.
“I begin to understand the infernal map Dante had drawn. Florence itself is the paradigm for the nine circles of the inferno. The city is ringed around by streets that all move toward its center. In the time of Dante, the city had been a series of expanding fortresses, enlarging as the population and wealth increased. But the structure — the ringed city — with its quarters defined and stationary, is still in place. And the Arno River is one of its boundaries. Dante used Florence to define the parameters and structure of Hell — a spiraling atlas of infernal distances.
“Dante’s cosmos is just that: What one does is immediately mirrored in life and in death. As are Beatrice’s thoughts and actions; her awareness brought her closer to that state of unconditional awareness, one that sees more of the whole, the holy. The creatures in the inferno fell in love with the lesser good — money, food, fame, a lover —and staying loyal to that lesser love brings the limitations, the fragmentation of the whole. The lesser holds the whole, but the lesser is unable in its separateness from the whole to maintain the weight of all that is.” [. . .] –Sarah Odishoo, The Smart Set, August 22, 2021 (retrieved April 12, 2022)
Read Odishoo’s full essay about her journey to and within Florence here.
“The Fractal Consciousness of Dante’s Divine Comedy”, Essay by Mark Vernon (2021)
“Dante Alighieri was early in recognizing that our age has a problem. He was the first writer to use the word moderno, in Italian, and the difficulty he spotted with the modern mind is its limited capacity to relate to the whole of reality, particularly the spiritual aspects. This might sound surprising, given that his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, is often described as one of the most brilliant creations of the medieval imagination. It is taken to be a genius expression of a discarded worldview, not the modern one, from an era in which everything was taken to be connected to the supreme reality called God. But Dante was born in a time of troubling transition. He realized that this cosmic vision was being challenged, and he didn’t seek to reject it or restore it, but to remake it.
“This brings us to the heart of why Dante still matters today. He stresses ways of knowing about life based on experiencing and undergoing, as opposed to studying or inspecting. They bring an understanding that isn’t about accumulating information and sorting data but trusting feeling and following insights.
“The vision is tremendous and simple and is a gloriously articulated reflection on everyday human consciousness. We are aware and can be aware of being aware. And this is Dante’s message for now: in a way, all we have to do to rediscover the essence of our intelligence, and the capacity to relate to the whole of reality – particularly in its spiritual aspects – is turn towards our felt experience, and examine what we find. There is presence and freedom, intention and imagination, truth in stories and transformations of time. To grow in this sense is to get better at being alive.”[. . .] –Mark Vernon, Aeon, July 20, 2021 (retrieved April 11, 2022)
Read the full text of psychotherapist and writer Mark Vernon’s essay here.
See our other post relating to Mark Vernon and his work here.
