Purgatorio · Canto IX ·
Purgatorio IX — The Eagle Dream
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 43 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto IX
Before reading
The pilgrim is, for the first time in the cantica, asleep. The kings of the Valley of Princes have sung their compline, the angels have driven off the serpent, the night has come; the pilgrim has lain down on the grass between Sordello and Nino Visconti, and is dreaming. The canto is built on a single architectural surprise — the pilgrim is going to wake up somewhere else, having been carried bodily across most of the lower slope while he slept. The whole ascent of Ante-Purgatory is being condensed, off-page, into a single overnight passage. The cantica is finally, at canto IX, arriving at the gate of Purgatory proper.
Where the canto sits
You have spent eight cantos in Ante-Purgatory — the long sloping plain below the gate, where the late-repentant must wait before they can begin the climb proper. The gate itself, when you arrive at it, is a small architectural set-piece: three coloured steps leading up to a closed door, and one angel-keeper seated above the door on the threshold, holding two keys. Beyond the door begins the seven-terrace climb that is the cantica's central work — Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust, in that order, each on its own ledge of the mountain. The canto you are about to read is the Commedia's most carefully composed threshold scene since the gate of Hell in Inferno III, and it is built as a deliberate counter-image to that one. Hell's gate spoke; Purgatory's is silent. Hell's gate had a Latin inscription; Purgatory's has none. Hell's gate stood open; Purgatory's is shut, and asks the soul to ask.
What it helps to know
The canto's opening tercets are some of the most allusively dense in the Commedia. They name the dawn through a piece of Roman mythological geography — the concubine of old Tithonus, Aurora, the personified dawn — and then mark astronomically what time it is. The tercets are obscure on a first reading; do not try to decode them in detail. What matters is that they place the canto at the cold animal which with its tail doth smite amain — the constellation Scorpio — and at the third hour of night, the hour at which dreams are traditionally true.
The dream itself draws on a famous classical myth. Ganymede was the beautiful Trojan prince whom Jupiter, in the form of a golden eagle, snatched up from Mount Ida to be cupbearer to the gods. Ovid tells the story; Virgil alludes to it. The dream casts the pilgrim, briefly, as a Christian Ganymede — carried up by an eagle, only in this version the eagle is not Jupiter and the destination is not Olympus.
When the pilgrim wakes, he will be told what actually happened during the dream. The cantica is using the dream-and-reality structure to teach a piece of doctrine the reader will need for the rest of the climb: during sleep, the soul can be operated upon by grace. The body is moved; the soul, dreaming, registers the move only metaphorically. The Christian Ganymede image is the dream's encoding of a real ascent that was happening, in the waking world, while the dream was being dreamt.
The three steps of the gate are an exact emblem of the sacrament of confession in medieval Catholic teaching. The first step — white marble, so polished and so smooth, I mirrored myself therein — is contritio cordis, sorrow of heart, the soul's self-knowledge as required preparation. The second — deeper hue than perse, calcined and uneven stone, cracked all asunder — is confessio oris, oral confession, the broken speech of the penitent. The third — porphyry, flaming red as blood that from a vein is spirting forth — is satisfactio operis, satisfaction by works, paid in the colour of blood. The three steps are not decoration; they are the cantica's sacramental theology rendered as architecture.
The angel-gatekeeper carries two keys — gold and silver — for the doctrine that the absolving priest needs both the authority (the gold) and the discernment (the silver) to open the gate. He will inscribe seven letters P on the pilgrim's forehead with the point of his sword. P stands for peccatum — sin — and the seven letters are the seven deadly sins he must purge on the seven terraces above. They will be erased one by one as he climbs, by the seven angels of the terraces, until at the summit none remain.
What to read for
Read the dream slowly. It is the cantica's first piece of long-form dream-narration; there will be two more before the summit, and all three will turn out to encode, prophetically, what is happening to the pilgrim at the moment of dreaming.
Notice the terror of the awakening. Dante wakes paler than the snow, like a man stripped of all comfort. The cantica is showing that ascent by grace is not painless — even when grace carries the soul up while it sleeps.
Notice the architectural restraint at the gate. There is no inscription. There is no formula of bypass. The angel does not need to be silenced. The whole machinery of Hell's entry is replaced by a quiet courteous exchange.
Listen for the angel's small severity. The keys turn; the gate opens; but the warning is sharp. Take heed that thou wash these wounds when thou shalt be within. The seven P's are the soul's homework.
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.
After reading
What the canto did
The canto delivered the cantica's most elaborately composed threshold scene, and built it as a deliberate counter-image to the gate of Hell in Inferno III. Where Hell's gate spoke an inscription nine lines long and stood open, Purgatory's gate is silent and shut. Where Hell's gatekeepers needed to be overridden by Virgil's six-word formula, Purgatory's gatekeeper opens with two keys. Where Inferno's threshold ended with the pilgrim crossing the river unconscious — the first true entry given as a withholding — Purgatory's gate ends with the pilgrim consciously kneeling, having seven letters cut into his forehead with a sword's point, and walking through. The Christian sacrament of penance is being staged here in its full architectural and ceremonial precision: three steps for contrition, confession, and satisfaction; two keys for authority and discernment; seven letters for the seven sins to be purged. The cantica has, by canto IX, arrived at its central image.
The dream, and what was actually happening
The dream of the golden eagle is the first of three long-form dreams the cantica will give the pilgrim. The pattern of all three is the same: a vivid mythological image dreamed at dawn, encoding prophetically what is happening to the pilgrim's body or soul at that moment. In this dream, the eagle of Jupiter — the bird that snatched Ganymede up from Mount Ida to be cupbearer to the gods — descends terrible as the lightning and carries the pilgrim up to the fire (the sphere of fire below the moon in medieval Ptolemaic cosmology). The dream's pagan envelope (Jupiter, Ganymede, Olympus) is the cantica's deliberate use of classical machinery to encode Christian action. When the pilgrim wakes, Virgil tells him what really happened: while he slept, Lucia — the same St Lucy from the chain of three women in Inferno II — came and carried him bodily, with Virgil following, from the Valley of Princes up to this rocky platform at the foot of the gate. The eagle of the dream was Lucia; Ganymede on Mount Ida was the pilgrim on the slope. The pagan myth is the dream's translation of the Christian act.
This is the cantica's most explicit statement of its dream-theology: during sleep, the soul can be operated upon by grace, and the soul's dream-image is grace's local language. The doctrine is doctrinally orthodox (Aquinas treats it in the Summa) and structurally important. The cantica is teaching the reader to read dreams in the Commedia not as escape from reality but as oblique reportage of what is most really happening.
The three steps as sacrament
The three coloured steps before the gate are the cantica's most overt sacramental allegory. They are also one of the most carefully described pieces of physical detail in the Commedia.
The first step is marble white, so polished and so smooth, I mirrored myself therein as I appear. The mirror-detail is decisive: this is the step of contritio cordis, sorrow of heart, the first part of penance in which the sinner sees himself as he is. The polished marble is the soul's self-knowledge as required preparation; the reflection is the recognition.
The second is of deeper hue than perse, calcined and uneven stone, cracked all asunder lengthwise and across. This is confessio oris, oral confession — the broken speech of the penitent, the soul speaking out of itself the catalogue of its faults. The stone is cracked in both directions, length and breadth, because confession must be complete: vertically (the highest sins and the most secret) and horizontally (across the full range of acts).
The third is porphyry, as flaming red as blood that from a vein is spirting forth. This is satisfactio operis, satisfaction by works, paid in the colour of blood — the penance the sinner performs in restitution. The blood-red is double-coded: the blood of the penitent's exertion, and the blood of Christ's atonement that makes the exertion redemptive.
The three steps are the three parts of the sacrament of penance as the medieval Church taught it. Dante's rendering is precise; it is also one of the rare moments where the Commedia gives institutional Catholic doctrine an unironic full-throated emblem. The cantica's politics in canto VI were searingly critical of the Pope; its theology in canto IX is fully faithful to the sacrament the Pope administered. The two attitudes coexist without contradiction. The exile is a Catholic; the diatribe is a family quarrel.
The angel-keeper, the two keys, the seven P's
The angel sits on the highest step. He is ashes, or earth that dry is excavated in colour — the colour of penance itself, the colour worn on Ash Wednesday. He carries two keys, gold and silver, the same keys carved over countless medieval portals as the keys of St Peter. The gold is authority (the institutional power to absolve); the silver is discernment (the personal wisdom to distinguish true contrition from false). Both, the angel tells the pilgrim, must turn for the gate to open. The doctrine here is precise: institutional authority alone (gold without silver) cannot absolve, and personal wisdom alone (silver without gold) cannot either. The sacrament needs both.
The angel's most decisive act is the inscription. He writes seven P's — peccatum, sin — on the pilgrim's forehead with the sword's point. The seven are the seven deadly sins of the seven terraces above: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust. They will be erased one by one, by the angels of the terraces, as the pilgrim climbs. The cantica's whole structure has been waiting to be inscribed; the moment of inscription is the moment the climb proper begins. Take heed that thou wash these wounds when thou shalt be within — the imperative is for the pilgrim's whole homework on the mountain.
The silence at the threshold
The most authored choice in the whole canto is what the gate does not do. It does not speak. There is no inscription, no formula, no warning addressed to the entrant. The contrast with the gate of Hell in Inferno III is total: that gate spoke nine lines naming itself, its builders, its eternity, and its prohibition on hope. Purgatory's gate carries no text at all. The argument is implicit: Hell announces itself because Hell is fixed; Purgatory is silent because Purgatory is transit. The architecture of the redeemed has nothing to say to the soul approaching it because the architecture's whole purpose is to be passed through.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening on Aurora.
The concubine of old Tithonus now Gleamed white upon the eastern balcony, Forth from the arms of her sweet paramour; With gems her forehead all relucent was, Set in the shape of that cold animal Which with its tail doth smite amain the nations, And of the steps, with which she mounts, the Night Had taken two in that place where we were, And now the third was bending down its wings. (Purg. IX.1–9)
The dawn rendered through Roman mythology and contemporary astronomy at once. That cold animal which with its tail doth smite — the constellation Scorpio. The two opening tercets are obscure on a first reading; they are also the cantica's most virtuosic single piece of late-Latin pagan-Christian compression.
The eagle dream.
In dreams it seemed to me I saw suspended An eagle in the sky, with plumes of gold, With wings wide open, and intent to stoop, And this, it seemed to me, was where had been By Ganymede his kith and kin abandoned, When to the high consistory he was rapt. Then wheeling somewhat more, it seemed to me, Terrible as the lightning he descended, And snatched me upward even to the fire. (Purg. IX.19–30, approx.)
The pagan myth carrying Christian grace. Snatched me upward even to the fire — the Ptolemaic sphere of fire below the moon, the upper boundary of the sublunary world. The dream's destination is the cantica's allegorical as high as a pagan image can carry a Christian soul.
The three steps.
Thither did we approach; and the first stair Was marble white, so polished and so smooth, I mirrored myself therein as I appear. The second, tinct of deeper hue than perse, Was of a calcined and uneven stone, Cracked all asunder lengthwise and across. The third, that uppermost rests massively, Porphyry seemed to me, as flaming red As blood that from a vein is spirting forth. (Purg. IX.94–102, approx.)
The sacrament of penance as architecture. Mirror, crack, blood — self-knowledge, confession, satisfaction. Three tercets, three steps.
The seven P's.
Seven P's upon my forehead he described With the sword's point, and, Take heed that thou wash These wounds, when thou shalt be within, he said. Ashes, or earth that dry is excavated, Of the same colour were with his attire, And from beneath it he drew forth two keys. (Purg. IX.112–117, approx.)
The whole structure of the next twelve cantos written in seven letters. Wash these wounds when thou shalt be within — the climb is the washing.
What to watch for
Watch the P's. As the pilgrim climbs through each of the seven terraces, the angel at the exit of each terrace will erase one of the seven letters with a small wing-stroke across the forehead. The pilgrim will get lighter and the climb easier as the count goes down. By the summit, his forehead will be clean.
Watch the dream pattern. There will be two more dreams in the cantica — the dream of the Siren in canto XIX, and the dream of Leah at canto XXVII. Both will follow this canto's pattern: a vivid mythological image dreamed at dawn, encoding what is happening at the moment of dreaming.
Watch the silence of the threshold. As the pilgrim climbs, he will pass through six more thresholds (the entries to the six remaining terraces) and the silence will hold: no inscriptions, no formulae, only the angel's quiet erasure of one P. The cantica's architecture refuses to make itself loud.
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.