Inferno XXXIV — The First Sight of Lucifer

Before reading

This is the last canto of the Inferno. The architecture of the poem brings the pilgrim to the absolute centre of the universe — and then, in a single deliberately disorienting tercet, turns the universe inside out. Read slowly. The geography of the canto is its argument.

Where the canto sits

The pilgrim has reached the fourth and final ring of Cocytus: Judecca, named for Judas Iscariot. The souls here are the traitors to benefactors and lords — those who betrayed the men to whom they owed everything. The ring's named souls are three: Judas, who betrayed Christ; Brutus and Cassius, who assassinated Julius Caesar. Each of the three is held in the mouth of Lucifer himself, who is fixed at the absolute centre of the earth — and therefore at the absolute centre of the medieval universe — in ice up to his chest.

This is also the canto in which the descent through Hell becomes the climb up to Purgatory. The two are continuous. The poem will not give the reader a break.

What it helps to know

The canto opens with three Latin words: Vexilla Regis prodeunt Inferni. The banners of the King of Hell go forth. The phrase parodies the opening of a famous Latin hymn — Vexilla Regis prodeunt, The banners of the King go forth — written in the sixth century by Venantius Fortunatus and sung in the Latin Church on the Friday before Passion Sunday at the unveiling of the Cross. The hymn's Rex is Christ; the canto's Rex is Lucifer. The opening line is therefore a black liturgical mass set against the most solemn liturgical season of the year, and it announces that the canto's main subject is the parodic inversion of every Christian symbol.

Lucifer in this canto is not the suave tempter of Milton or the urbane Mephistopheles of Goethe. He is huge, mute, and pathetic — a great half-buried beast with three faces and six wings, weeping six streams of tears mixed with bloody slaver from three mouths. The medieval iconography is in part scriptural (Ezekiel's four-faced living creatures; Isaiah's son of the morning fallen) and in part owed to medieval bestiary tradition. The three faces are sometimes read as a parody of the Trinity: red (parodying the Father's love), pale yellow (parodying the Holy Spirit's wisdom), and black (parodying the Son's power). Each mouth crunches one of the three great traitors eternally.

The geographical move at the canto's climax is the most consequential single act of medieval cosmology in literature. The earth, in Dante's universe (and the universe of every educated thirteenth-century European), is a sphere. Jerusalem is the centre of the inhabited (northern) hemisphere. Lucifer fell from Heaven head-first, hit the southern hemisphere, drove all the way through to the centre of the earth, and stopped there — his head buried in the southern face of the ice, his legs sticking up into the northern face. The shock of his impact drove all the land of the southern hemisphere to flee upward; one mountain rose from the antipode of Jerusalem, the mountain of Purgatory. So when Virgil and Dante climb down Lucifer's body and pass the absolute centre, they are now climbing up — into the southern hemisphere, toward Purgatory.

This means that at the centre of Lucifer, down becomes up. Virgil has to grip the hair of Lucifer's body and rotate himself a hundred and eighty degrees in mid-air. The pilgrim, looking back, sees Lucifer's legs sticking up into the air behind him — and is bewildered until Virgil explains that the centre of gravity has been passed and the world is now the right way up.

The canto's last word, the canto's last line, and the Commedia's closing image of the entire Inferno is one of the most famous in literature: e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. And thence we came forth to rebehold the stars. The word stelle — stars — is also the last word of Purgatorio and the last word of Paradiso. The three cantiche end the same way. The Inferno, which had no stars from canto III's air without a star onward, finally lets the sky back in.

What to read for

Listen for what is missing. Lucifer does not speak. The fallen archangel, the great voice of medieval imagination, the figure every reader expected to dominate the canto, is mute. He weeps. He chews. He flaps his great wings (which produce the cold wind that freezes Cocytus). He does not say one word. The silence is the canto's main theological statement.

Notice how the descent works as a body. The pilgrim and Virgil climb down Lucifer's flank, then through the centre, then up the inside of a long stone tunnel along the course of a small stream — and then out, by un round aperture, a round aperture, to see the stars. Pay attention to how each transition is described physically. The poem is teaching the reader, in its last canto, how to read the topography of Purgatorio.

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From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.

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After reading

What the canto did

The canto is the Inferno's exit. It does three things — three things the rest of the poem has been preparing for over a hundred cantica's worth of architecture. It brings the pilgrim to the absolute centre of the universe, which is also the figure of Lucifer. It performs the geographical inversion that turns the descent into the climb, down into up. And it ends, for the first time in the Inferno, by letting the reader see the night sky again. The descent that began in canto III with the air without a star closes in canto XXXIV with the stars. Everything Hell was, the canto announces by exit, was a poem that took place at night.

The Latin opening

The canto's first three words are in Latin, not Italian:

Vexilla Regis prodeunt Inferni Towards us; therefore look in front of thee, My Master said, if thou discernest him. (Inf. XXXIV.1–3)

The phrase Vexilla Regis prodeunt — the banners of the King go forth — opens the famous sixth-century Latin hymn of Venantius Fortunatus, sung in the medieval Latin Church on Good Friday at the unveiling of the Cross. The Rex of the hymn is Christ; the addition of Inferni — of Hell — makes the Rex Lucifer. The first line of the canto is therefore a black liturgical inversion of the most solemn Christian hymn of the Passion season, sung in the wrong direction, in the wrong key, in praise of the wrong King. The whole canto operates by this principle of parodic inversion: the Trinity inverted in Lucifer's three faces, the Crucifixion inverted in the mouth of Judas inside Lucifer's chief mouth, the Resurrection ascent inverted in the climb down Lucifer's flank.

The silence of Lucifer

The most striking thing about Lucifer in this canto is what he does not do. He does not speak. He weeps. He chews. He flaps his great wings (the cold wind from his wings is what freezes Cocytus). He cannot speak. The fallen Lightbringer, the most musical voice in medieval Christian imagination, the figure that John Milton would three centuries later make eloquent above all his other characters, is in Dante simply mute. The single most consequential theological statement of the Inferno is non-verbal: evil at its absolute centre is not a counter-voice to God but an absence of voice. Sin in the Commedia is privative — a falling-away rather than a positive presence — and the canto's most precise image of that doctrine is a mouth that contains a soul but does not contain a word.

The single attribute the canto allows Lucifer is fairness once:

Were he as fair once, as he now is foul, And lifted up his brow against his Maker, Well may proceed from him all tribulation. (Inf. XXXIV.34–36)

The two-line concession to former beauty is the Commedia's only acknowledgment that the fallen archangel had been, before the fall, the brightest being God made. The rest of the canto's description is unrelieved ugliness: huge, half-buried, three-faced, six-winged, mouths working at three names.

The three traitors

The choice of the three souls in Lucifer's three mouths is the Commedia's most explicit statement of political theology. Judas in the front mouth — head inside, legs kicking out, the worst-treated of the three — is the obvious choice; he betrayed Christ, the primus inter pares of all benefactors. Brutus and Cassius in the side mouths — head-out, hanging — are less obvious to a modern reader and more revealing to a medieval one. Brutus and Cassius were the principal conspirators in the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. To put them at the bottom of Hell — flanking Judas, ranked second only to him among traitors — is to make a specific theological-political claim: that the Roman Empire was as divinely ordained as the Roman Church, and that to betray its founder was a sin of the same order as betraying Christ. Dante's politics required this. The Commedia assumes the necessary providential coupling of the universal monarchy (the empire) and the universal priesthood (the papacy), and the canto enforces the coupling at the deepest point of the bottom: Caesar and Christ are the two foundational benefactors whose betrayers occupy the three lowest mouths of the world.

The descent and the inversion

The canto's most arresting twenty lines are the descent of Lucifer's body and the geographical inversion at his hip. Virgil takes the pilgrim onto his neck, waits for the moment when the wings are spread wide, and grips the matted hair on Lucifer's flank. The two descend hand over hand. They reach the point where Lucifer's hip is — the exact midpoint of his body — and Virgil turns himself a hundred and eighty degrees in mid-air, grappling the same hair upward instead of downward, as one who mounts. The pilgrim, watching this without understanding it, thought we were returning to Hell. They are not. They have passed the centre of the earth, which is also the centre of gravity, and up and down have reversed:

Thou art beyond the centre, where I grasped The hair of the fell worm, who mines the world. That side thou wast, so long as I descended; When round I turned me, thou didst pass the point To which things heavy draw from every side. (Inf. XXXIV.107–111)

The image is the Commedia's most consequential single piece of cosmography. The bottom of Hell is not a place. It is a point — the precise centre of the spherical earth, which is also the geometric centre of the medieval universe — and the descent through it requires the pilgrim to turn upside down without noticing that he has done so. Beyond the point, the geography inverts: Lucifer is now seen feet-up, hanging from the ceiling of the southern hemisphere; the climb is up; the shore the pilgrim is about to reach is the shore of an island in the antipodal ocean, the only land in the southern hemisphere, the mountain of Purgatory.

The cosmography is precise to within a few details of medieval Aristotelian physics. The earth is a sphere; gravity pulls toward its centre from every direction; Jerusalem is the apex of the northern (inhabited) hemisphere; the mountain of Purgatory is the antipode of Jerusalem in the southern (water-covered) hemisphere; Lucifer fell from heaven head-first, struck the southern hemisphere, drove all the way to the centre and stopped there, his body now stretched precisely along the axis of the earth from the southern surface to the centre. The land that fled before him rose in fear and formed Mount Purgatory. The whole imaginative architecture of the next cantica is implicit in the geographical move at line 110 of this canto.

The climb out

The two poets enter a long natural tunnel that follows the course of a small stream descending from the antipodal hemisphere through the rock of the earth toward Lucifer at the centre. They climb up against the current, without care of having any rest. The detail of the stream matters: the medieval reading held it as Lethe, the river of forgetting, which carries away from Purgatory the memory of the sins washed off there. The pilgrim, climbing against its flow, is moving toward the world of consequence and away from the world of forgetting — the opposite of the direction in which the souls above will travel as they are cleansed.

The exit is given as a small round aperture in the rock at the top of the tunnel — a round aperture, un pertugio tondo. The pilgrim looks up through it and sees the night sky:

We mounted up, he first and I the second, Till I beheld through a round aperture Some of those beauteous things which Heaven doth bear; Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars. (Inf. XXXIV.136–139)

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. The last word — stelle — is the Inferno's first star. The closing image is the entire Commedia's first promise made good. The pilgrim has been in absolute darkness since canto III; he is now, for the first time in over a hundred cantos, out under the sky. The verb riveder — to see again — is the canto's small precise grammar: not to see for the first time, but to see again. The pilgrim has been remembering the stars all this time. Now he sees them.

The same word will close Purgatorio and Paradiso. Every cantica of the Commedia ends on the word stelle. The three rhymes are the three notes of a chord — the same word, the same vowel, the same image of the heavens — held across a hundred cantos. Whoever planned the poem this way planned it from the very beginning. The first canto's paura — fear — and the last canto's stelle — stars — are the two endpoints of the Inferno's emotional arc, and the conversion of one into the other is the work of the whole.

Famous and meaningful passages

The Latin opening.

Vexilla Regis prodeunt Inferni Towards us; therefore look in front of thee, My Master said, if thou discernest him. (Inf. XXXIV.1–3)

The Commedia's only Latin opening to a canto. The parodic citation of the Good Friday hymn. The most concise statement of the canto's principle that everything in Hell is the inversion of something in worship.

Lucifer's first description.

The Emperor of the kingdom dolorous From his mid-breast forth issued from the ice; And better with a giant I compare Than do the giants with those arms of his; Consider now how great must be that whole, Which unto such a part conforms itself. Were he as fair once, as he now is foul, And lifted up his brow against his Maker, Well may proceed from him all tribulation. (Inf. XXXIV.28–36)

The scale-comparison is the canto's introduction by mathematics: Lucifer is to the giants of canto XXXI as the giants were to the pilgrim. The proportion is recursive and terrifying. The fair once is the two-line concession to the lost beauty of the morning-star.

Judas in the first mouth.

That soul up there which has the greatest pain, The Master said, is Judas Iscariot; With head inside, he plies his legs without. Of the two others, who head downward are, The one who hangs from the black jowl is Brutus; See how he writhes himself, and speaks no word. And the other, who so stalwart seems, is Cassius. (Inf. XXXIV.61–67)

The three names placed in the bottom three mouths. He writhes himself, and speaks no word — vedi come si storce, e non fa motto. The silence of Brutus matches the silence of Lucifer above.

The descent.

As seemed him good, I clasped him round the neck, And he the vantage seized of time and place, And when the wings were opened wide apart, He laid fast hold upon the shaggy sides; From fell to fell descended downward then Between the thick hair and the frozen crust. When we were come to where the thigh revolves Exactly on the thickness of the haunch, The Guide, with labor and with hard-drawn breath, Turned round his head where he had had his legs, And grappled to the hair, as one who mounts, So that to Hell I thought we were returning. Keep fast thy hold, for by such stairs as these, The Master said, panting as one fatigued, Must we perforce depart from so much evil. (Inf. XXXIV.70–84)

The most physically precise climb in the Inferno. By such stairs as these — per cotali scale — the canto's gentle joke about what counts, in Hell, as a staircase. The climb out of Hell is the climb down the body of Hell's lord.

The cosmography.

Thou art beyond the centre, where I grasped The hair of the fell worm, who mines the world. That side thou wast, so long as I descended; When round I turned me, thou didst pass the point To which things heavy draw from every side. (Inf. XXXIV.107–111)

The closest the Commedia comes to a textbook of medieval physics. The point to which things heavy draw from every side is the centre of gravity, which is also the centre of the earth, which is also the place where Lucifer is fixed. Three centres in one point.

The last tercet.

We mounted up, he first and I the second, Till I beheld through a round aperture Some of those beauteous things which Heaven doth bear; Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars. (Inf. XXXIV.136–139)

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. Memorise this. The Inferno's last word. The last word also of Purgatorio and Paradiso. The chord on which the whole poem closes.

What to watch for

Watch for Purgatorio I. The pilgrim has emerged onto the shore of the antipodal island in the southern hemisphere. The first soul he will meet there is Cato of Utica, the great Roman republican suicide — a pagan who killed himself rather than accept Caesar's victory, and who in any rigorous Christian theology should be in Hell twice over (suicide and opposition to the empire). Cato instead guards the shore of Purgatory. The first cantica ended on a paradox — Brutus and Cassius in Hell for opposing Caesar; the second cantica opens on a paradox — Cato in Heaven's foothills for the same reason. The Commedia is not finished doing its political theology.

Watch the silence the canto leaves between the two cantiche. Virgil and Dante exit by a small round aperture; the Inferno ends; the Purgatorio will open at dawn on the shore. The transition is unremarked. The reader who reads the two cantiche in sequence will pass between them as the pilgrim does — without ceremony, without summary, simply out, into the stars.

The descent is finished.

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This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.