A psychedelic trip
Since ancient times, the human being has had the desire to know what is beyond life, beyond the palpable, since writers, religions and ideologies have tried to give their part in this search for revelation. It cannot be said that it is something that has to fit within the perfect, methodical or ineffable. A great reference to that is "The Divine Comedy", by Dante Alighieri, a magnificent work ahead of its time that leaves the paradigms of the medieval era to delve into the anthropocentric but without losing its spiritual touch. This beauty of a work of a hundred songs, opens the way for us on the great hidden, mysterious, forbidden path and shows it to us with the greatest naturalness typical of a master mind. At first we see a Dante lost in an inhospitable forest surrounded by 3 wild beasts, in a fine line between life and death. And when his hopes are over, like a kind of "light at the end of the tunnel", Virgilio appears on his way to get him out of his terrible misfortune and take him with him to the other plane, because Dante had already left. He has already finished his earthly pass. Virgilio, his guide, tells him his why and his reasons, in such a convincing way that Dante is encouraged to go to that underworld. The first impression of hell ate at his senses, as expected, but he did not lose his composure. He saw how a group of insects tormented some miserable souls who suffered the misfortune of his ambivalence and his uncertainty. Then they go through the river of the dead to reach the first circle of hell, Limbo, there surprisingly they meet renowned Greek philosophers such as Homer, Ovid and Lucan, as well as great heroes. The second circle is more depressing than the first, love and sin here are not romanticized and are coldly punished with a strong gale controlled by inertia, one of the poor souls sadly tells of his love for Dante, it was like if that soul in the shadows still remembered his memory, with conscience. Then further on, in the third circle, a huge three-headed canine, named Cerberus, barks with an eerie magnitude, the sound of wild surf in the midst of a heavily falling hail drizzle. Here lie the souls dominated by their unbridled appetite and their indecent gluttony. The fourth circle is reserved for the greedy and wasteful in an abyss of stones. The fifth circle goes through a very smelly swamp, here there are uncontrolled souls, without control of themselves, and in the deepest they sing their songs of hate and fury. In the sixth, 3 goddesses fervently torment the heretics, who denied the existence of the soul. In the seventh circle it is divided into 3 turns; First are the dangerous and cruel murderers, murderers, criminals, thieves and bandits tormented by centaurs armed with arrows and bows. In the second turn, those who permanently attempted against his life are transformed into trees, since they attempted with the divine mandate. And the spendthrifts, who are tormented by rabid labrels. Unlike the fourth circle, these types of spendthrifts had malice added to their actions. And finally the third turn, where blasphemers, sodomites and usurers burn in burning sand and rain. In the eighth circle are all the sinners of fraud and deception, divided into 10 pits. And finally and the most heartbreaking and gloomy of all, the ninth circle. Here are the traitors. Lucifer himself is in charge of carrying out most of the punishments of this last circle. But every evil has its contrast, and Dante, enchanted by Beatriz, discovers the counterpart of hell, Heaven. Here are 9 spheres that represent the purity and peace of the soul in its maximum splendor; The Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, and the First Mobile.
In a retrospective analysis we can deduce that Dante has actually died, and that consequently his soul has traveled to hell, but that due to his ambivalent nature, he passed through both strata. Hell is a representation of the evils that afflict humanity, the chaos that they produce and the damage to the soul that they cause, falling into hell from their misfortune as a consequence, while heaven is the renewal, sanctification and purification of the human soul. Although Dante Alighieri's work has a rather terrifying and devastating nuance, at times you can connect with the characters in the work and feel their deepest emotions, as in the case of Dante, who feels like in the first person. , or also their most joyful and vivacious emotions. It can be concluded that this great work has been one of the most important of this spiritual and Renaissance genre and has managed to captivate with its ways of seeing the Christian religion at that time. Each chapter feels like levels of a video game, where Dante has to endure those unfortunate existences of those souls and manage to reach his soul purification, reach God, together with Beatriz, his platonic love, his pure love. All this is an allegory of how the human being in ignorance and sin, is directed towards knowledge. It is known that it is a long and elaborate poem, perhaps a bit indigestible, but grammatically very good if read from the correct point of view. But Dante did not write it for the love of art, it was all with a purpose to humanity to reveal the truth of hell and ignorance and the subsequent awakening to knowledge to reach paradise. Dante played with literary figures, including hyperbole; “My guide quickly took me in his arms and dropped me from the top of the hill, carrying me on his chest, like a mother in danger, she watches over the safety of her child more than her own” and the personification; "and I thought I heard the murmur of a river." All these literary figures give a touch of life to the work and a more emotional air to the things that happen in the songs. In my opinion bathed in inexperience and youth, I dare to say that Dante's Divine Comedy has captured my attention and has made me reflect on the realities of life and how others see it.
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