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October 5, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XX
Canto XX
The next pocket of the Malebolge contains those who predicted the future. Their punishment fits their crime very visibly - as Vergil says about one of them:
See how he's made a breast out of his back.
because he wished to see too far ahead,
now he looks back and walks a backward path.
(20.37-39)
That is, their heads are screwed around to face their backs, and they back through hell at a slow walk, weeping down their backs.
Vergil seems a little more hostile to these than even to the average damned souls. Esolen suggests that his extremely hostile narration of the founding of his own city of Mantua by Manto, the daughter of Tiresias, may be an implicit self-defense against charges of magic (458). In the Middle Ages the Aeneid, like the Bible, was used for fortune telling - in the sortes Virgilianae one picked up a copy of Vergil's poem, flipped to a random page, stabbed a line with your finger, and found your fortune. The sortes Biblicae was the same thing, but with a Bible.
The only memorable medieval person in this circle is Michael Scot, court alchemist and astrologer to Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Astrology is one of those pagan practices the Church was never able to stamp out. Yes, pagan - though there may be Christian's who have a very high mark for predestination, we have to leave room for the free will. If stars control things, there's no free will. And there astrology columns still are in newspapers.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at October 5, 2009 8:46 AM