LITMIR.BIZ

      TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

      Hell is underground, Heaven high above. Where on Earth is Purgatory? No heretics believed in it. Thomas Aquinas called it a fact human reason could not locate so should leave to God. Dante never feared imagining more than orthodox Catholics, and by combining their theology with Pagan science he placed Purgatory firmly where we place Australia.

      Greeks and Romans had no evidence of land outside Europe, Asia and Africa, so thought a vast ocean covered the rest of the globe. Their geographers deduced that the polar regions furthest from the sun were too cold to support life, and the equator nearest the sun was too hot. Some wondered if the south temperate zone supported life but were sure this could never be known, as the equator would roast or boil explorers trying to cross. This meant Atlantic voyages could discover nothing good, so across the Strait of Gibraltar they imagined a sign: THUS FAR AND NO FURTHER. Dante decided this was a divine prohibition, because shortly before his time Italian merchants sought a faster way than overland to import Indian spices and Chinese silk. They sailed out past Gibraltar meaning to circumnavigate Africa and never returned.

      This enforced Dante’s Catholic cosmography. When God expelled the rebel angels (said theologians) they fell into an underground pit He had prepared for them. Dante described Hell as a conical space, the point at the centre of the world where Satan was stuck like a worm in a bad apple. Matter that formerly filled Hell’s cavity had been expelled as an island-mountain in the south’s ocean, exactly opposite Jerusalem in the north land mass. This was Purgatory, ringed by terraces with steep cliffs between, the lowest cliff surrounded by a coastal plain for new arrivals. Round the low cliff trudged sinful souls saved from Hell by last-minute repentances, but delayed from climbing to Heaven by excommunication. From a cave in that cliff Virgil led Dante after they ascended from

      Hell, as my cover design tries to show.

      LIST OF CANTOS

       TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

       1 Cato, Warden of the Shore

       2 Newcomers

       3 The Foothills

       4 The First Ascent

       5 The Unconfessed

       6 Of Italian States

       7 The Climb Halts

       8 The Vestibule

       9 The Entrance

       10 The First Terrace

       11 The Proud

       12 Going from Pride

       13 The Envious

       14 Of Envious Rulers

       15 Ascent to the Wrathful

       16 The Wrathful

       17 On and Up

       18 Love and Sloth

       19 To the Avaricious

       20 Hoarders and Wasters

       21 Statius

       22 To the Gluttonous

       23 The Gluttons

       24 Toward Temperance

       25 To the Lustful

       26 The Lustful

       27 Chastity

       28 The Earthly Paradise

       29 Revelation

       30 Beatrice

       31 The Cleansing

       32 Of the Kirk

       33 The Final Cleansing