This Week in Hell

So this week we traveled through Cantos 19-32 of Dante's Inferno. Though it is called the Divine Comedy, I fail to see the comedy in people being tortured for human mistakes. Maybe people in the thirteen hundreds just had really perverse senses of humour, "Hahaha, look at that poor guy being rained fire upon because he stood up against the all-mighty Church!" Yep, sounds like a barrel of laughs. But thanks to the all-mighty inter-web I have discovered that Divine Comedy was a lost in translation thing because comedy in Dante's time meant that the poem was of a serious topic. So basically the exact opposite of what comedy means to us in 2014. Anyway, as I was saying, we saw presentations from cantos 19-32 which is the rest of Malebolge to the beginning of the 9th circle.  All the presentations have been very good and I'm really jealous of all of the visuals because I can't paint, draw, sketch, trace, etc. Also everyone has really awesome reaction pictures most likely because that is one of the only slides that you don't have to put a serious picture on. I personally used Beaker from the Muppets because it was adorable and he always looks distraught and surprised which is a hilariously true combination for Dante's Inferno.

The interesting thing about the Inferno is that Dante had to think up all of the punishments for the sinners. Though he might have been extremely self-centered, Dante was a maliciously evil genius. Like with canto 23, where the sinners who were hypocrites had to wear cowls lined with lead but the outside was gold. So like hypocrites the cowls were perfect on the outside but horrible within. But Dante had think of punishments that were insanely horrible but befitting to the crime and it wasn't like there was a magical guidebook, "Horrible Punishments for Every Level of Hell!". Canto 24 was interesting because it was thieves being attack constantly by snakes. It's like Battle Royale except that one side is a powerless to do anything but suffer a horrible, painful death every time they regenerate. Canto 27 was fun because it included a bunch of Greek people that I actually knew instead of having a bunch of random Italian guys that Dante hates. Canto 28 was a tad bit gory and quite sad because a lot of revengeful girls are going to that section of hell. Rumors are started daily to split "couples" apart because it's "too much effort" to wait for a high school relationship to implode on it's own. Moving on to the cheery 29th canto where alchemists are punished for figuring out how chemicals and other science works to make everyone's life better in the longer run. Also if God didn't want them to falsify metals then he should of made them harder to falsify. So that is a brief summary/commentary on cantos 19-32.