I lie face up, engulfed in flames and anguish within a despondent field of open tombs. The only light comes from the crimson glow of burning graves. Cries of indescribable pain sweep through my sepulcher without relent. The scent of roasting flesh is pervasive and constant. I can't stand it. Not far from my torment are the monolithic walls of the City of Dis, fortified with ramparts of iron. The terrible furies are perched atop the walls, tearing at their bare chests with their treacherous claws, screaming for blood. The infamous Medusa is their leader.

This is my eternity. This is my punishment. This is Dante's sixth circle.

Dante is the pinnacle of Western Literature. His Divine Comedy is considered by many as the finest literary production ever to emerge from European culture. Its influence is sweeping and profound: many forms of literature, including fiction, memoir and lyrical poetry find their genesis between Dante's Heaven and Hell.

He was one of the very first to write in the vernacular, breaking the iron shackles that chained literary works to Latin. His works popularized Italian, creating a standard for the language. So when you say, "Ma questo scrittore e' tutto scemo," your words contain remnants of the Tuscan ink that flowed from Dante's pen in the 14th century. This is why he's called the father of Italian language.

It was this language that created the terrifying and infamous scenes of the poet's journey through Hell, followed by sojourns to Purgatory and Heaven. In fact, the language Dante uses reflects each region of the afterlife: the deeper he goes into Hell, the more violent and harsh his language becomes. In Heaven, we find the opposite effect. The language here is what Dante considers to be the language of paradise: immaculate, lyrical, mellifluous, beautiful, perfect. It's so ethereal that many people have trouble understanding the celestial imagery. Purgatory, residing between good and evil, is thought to demonstrate the best example of 14th century Italian.

The three layers of postmortem poetry are based on what people did in life. Heaven is divided by beatific actions. Purgatory is separated by redeemable sins. Hell is structured around circles for each type of sin, malice, or perfidy against god. There are nine circles in all, each spiraling downward, growing smaller with every level, until reaching the frozen chambers of Lucifer in the greatest depths of Hell, the ninth circle.

The first circle is Limbo, reserved for virtuous people living before Christ, including Dante's guide Virgil, Homer, Horace, Ovid, Socrates, and Plato, and for children dying without sin. The second circle, the true beginning of Hell, is for the lustful, who are blown about in tempestuous winds. The third lodges gluttonous souls, who roll around in a slush-filled swamp, pounded by rain and hail, devouring disgusting mud. The fourth circle contains the prodigal and avaricious, who share a Sisyphus-like fate, pushing boulders and crashing into one another for eternity, screaming, "Why do you hoard?" and "Why do you squander?" at each other. The fifth circle houses the wrathful and sullen, who are doomed to perpetual immersion in the Styx, the river of hate, thrashing and biting at each other within the sludge. The seventh is reserved for the violent souls and is divided into three rings for the three types of violence: violence against a neighbor, violence against yourself, and violence against god and nature. The eighth circle is the most extensive, consisting of ten ditches for the ten different types of fraud. The ninth circle is the most horrendous and terrifying, entombed in ice, reserved for treachery -- the most heinous of the sins -- with traitors to kin, traitors to the homeland, traitors to guests, and traitors to benefactors. Lucifer is at the bottom of the ninth circle, guilty of the greatest treachery of all -- treachery against god -- stripped of all intelligence and beauty, roaring incomprehensibly, flapping his giant wings and freezing the entire circle, and chewing a sinner in each of his three mouths in each of his three faces: Judas, who betrayed Christ, and Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed Caesar.

The sixth circle, my fate, is reserved for the heretics. I was condemned to this fiery suffering not by Dante, but by an online quiz of 72 questions based on Dante's categorization of sins. Examples of questions include: Are you good at telling lies? Do you intentionally cause harm to yourself? Do you read scripture? Have you ever taken pleasure in someone else's misery? Do you have any pagan religious beliefs? Simple questions, but be careful about how you answer: your eternity depends on it.

For Dante, heretics were people who followed the beliefs of Epicurus, who believed that the body and soul could not survive without each other:

Within this region is the cemetery
of Epicurus and his followers,
all those who say the soul dies with the body.
(Translated by Allen Mandelbaum, Inferno, 10. 13-15.)

Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who said, "Pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life." He was talking about food: He believed that it was always best to be in a state of moderate fullness. In fact, the word 'epicure' means someone who thoroughly enjoys good food and wine. His religious beliefs derive from his belief in atoms, which leads to thinking that the soul is material. When someone dies their soul is released from the body in the form of atoms, losing all sensation since the body can no longer interpret its messages. He said, "Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us." Now he and his friends burn in fiery tombs.

But why open burning tombs? Every punishment in Dante's Hell is a contrapasso, which is the punishment contrary to the sin. Some of the contrapassi are more straightforward. The gluttonous in the third circle idolized food over god during their lives, therefore they are condemned to eat mud for eternity. The lustful in the second circle are blown about just as they were in life, unable to control themselves, in a hopeless search of fulfilling their insatiable carnal appetites. Count Ugolino in the ninth circle, who betrayed his children by eating them, must eat the skull and brains of the man who betrayed him.

These punishments reflect physical sins, which are relatively simple to punish, whereas heresy is a sin much more complex to mirror. But Dante isn't Dante for nothing, and he produces a frighteningly devious contrapasso for those who shun the power of the Almighty. As we've already covered, the sin of the Epicureans is that they didn't believe the soul could rise from the body after death and enter Heaven. This belief is fundamental to the Christian faith: Christ resurrected and returned home to paradise. Without Christ's resurrection, no one can be resurrected, no one can enter paradise, no one can live immortally with god. This is the foundation of Christianity. And with the Epicureans negating this foundation, their souls are forced to lie in open tombs, supine, looking up towards the heavens they forsook, never able to rise, burning eternally in the fires of Hell. And, apparently, I'm right there with them.

I just hope that for my sake Dante was wrong.

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