More Metamorphoses and Miserable Mutations
Canto XXV of Inferno
Friends,
I hope that April is off to a good start for you. We have just one month left of our sojourn through Hell. Then we will breathe the free air once again! I must warn you, however, that things are going to get worse before they get better; so let’s carry on together.
Today’s canto opens with a farewell to one of the nastiest sinners that we have yet encountered. You’ll recall that Vanni Fucci—a thief, liar, and murderer—had reluctantly confessed his crimes, before immediately pivoting to wound Dante in the only way he could: foretelling the imminent defeat of his political faction in Florence. Now Vanni Fucci shifts his angry attention to God with a lewd gesture and a blasphemous curse: “At the end of his words, the thief raised high his fists with both the figs, crying: ‘Take that, God, I aim them at you!’” (lines 1-3). Reflecting on this shocking blasphemy, Dante offers a wry aside (4-9):
From that time on, serpents have been my friends,
because one of them coiled around his neck,
as if to say, “I don’t want him to speak anymore”;
and another wound about his arms, and bound them,
and wrapped itself so firmly in front,
that he could not make them budge an inch.
So much for Vanni Fucci, an even worse blasphemer than Capaneus on the burning sands (13-15).
Another figure comes into view immediately: a centaur who carries a multitude of snakes on his horse haunches, as well as a fire-breathing dragon on his human shoulders! Virgil identifies him as Cacus, who made the grave mistake of stealing some cattle that belonged to Hercules (and then met his end beneath that hero’s club). That theft, in addition to bringing about his own death, also separated him from his fellow centaurs, who serve as guardians in the circle of the violent. Dante watches as he, too, yells in anger and then runs past.
Overall, this pouch is giving us a sense of unnerving cacophony and frenzied chaos. Together, the writhing undulations of the snakes and the wrenching ululations of the shades call to mind a few antecedents: the punishment for grumbling against God in the wilderness, as reported in the biblical book of Numbers; the myth of Cadmus, who founded the city of Thebes with the teeth of the dragon who had killed his companions, as reported in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and the tragedy of Laocoön, who with his sons was strangled by sea serpents after (correctly!) warning the Trojans against accepting the Greeks’ wooden horse, as reported in Virgil’s Aeneid. But if the forms that the thieves’ metamorphoses take have some precedent, their underlying meaning is an innovation of Dante’s own, as a hapless trio will soon demonstrate.
At first, both Dante and Virgil are so absorbed in their discussion about the centaur Cacus that they do not notice as three new souls arrive just beneath the ledge on which they are standing. These cause an interruption by crying out, “Who are you?” (37), thus redirecting both the pilgrim and his guide to focus only on them. Dante gives Virgil the same signal requesting silence that we still use today, seven centuries later: “I raised my finger up from chin to nose” (45). At this point, the poet interrupts himself once again to address us directly: “If you, reader, are now slow to believe what I will say, that will be no wonder, for I who saw it can hardly accept it” (46-48). That is, what follows is so bizarre that it starts to pull the three Dantes apart—Dante the poet-narrator struggles to mediate between Dante the person-writer (who actually invented the shocking scene) and Dante the pilgrim-protagonist (who must watch as it unfolds). But this apostrophe, in its acknowledgement of how incredible the forthcoming images will seem, also makes a subtle bid for our trust in the reliability of the account.
The majority of the canto (lines 50-141) is devoted to two metamorphoses that befall this trio. Both are more complex than what, in the previous canto, Vanni Fucci had undergone. Having been bitten by a snake, he burst into flames, fell apart into ashes, and then was immediately reassembled; this both reenacted God’s primordial judgment (“You are dust, and to dust you shall return”) and displayed a distorted parody of the resurrection. Here, in simultaneously excruciating and erotic detail, Dante describes not just destruction and reconstitution, but full-blown transmogrification. The first time, a snake bites one of the shades, and they tortuously meld and merge into one another. But the result is less a hybrid snake-man than it is a motley amalgamation of various parts from both, such that “every former shape was shattered there: two and none the perverse image seemed, and so it moved with slow step” (76-78). This haphazard mixture exhibits a warped caricature of the incarnation of Christ, whose divine and human natures were joined “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” The second transmutation involves an outright exchange of natures. This time—in a convoluted and grotesque mimicry of copulation and gestation—when a serpent embraces and bites a human, they both experience a rapid multitude of changes until the snake has become human, and the human has turned into a snake!
This stunning revelation, that the snakes themselves are former (and future) humans, also helps to illuminate the contrapasso. For the archetypal thief is none other than the devil, who craftily tempted primeval humanity to take the forbidden fruit for themselves, thus stealing them from God in the Garden of Eden. In their eternal metamorphoses between human and beastly forms, the thieves are recurrently doomed to take on the image of the Serpent, whom they so fatefully imitated during their lives.
It’s a horrific sight and an even more heartbreaking story. And I think we’ve been here long enough. We’ll move on to the next pouch this Saturday when we explore Inferno Canto 26.
Yours on the journey,
Joshua
From Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8)
There was an ancient grove, whose branching trees
had never known the desecrating ax,
where hidden in the undergrowth a cave,
with oziers bending round its low-formed arch,
was hollowed in the jutting rocks—deep-found
in the dark center of that hallowed grove—
beneath its arched roof a beauteous stream
of water welled serene. Its gloom concealed
a dragon, sacred to the war-like Mars;
crested and gorgeous with radescent scales,
and eyes that sparkled as the glow of coals.
A deadly venom had puffed up his bulk,
and from his jaws he darted forth three tongues,
and in a triple row his sharp teeth stood.
Now those who ventured of the Tyrian race,
misfortuned followers of Cadmus, took
the path that led them to this grove; and when
they cast down-splashing in the springs an urn,
the hidden dragon stretched his azure head
out from the cavern’s gloom, and vented forth
terrific hissings. Horrified they dropped
their urns. A sudden trembling shook their knees;
and their life-blood was ice within their veins.
The dragon wreathed his scales in rolling knots,
and with a spring, entwisted in great folds,
reared up his bulk beyond the middle rings,
high in the air from whence was given his gaze
the extreme confines of the grove below.
A size prodigious, his enormous bulk,
if seen extended where was naught to hide,
would rival in its length the Serpent’s folds,
involved betwixt the planes of the Twin Bears.
The terrified Phoenicians, whether armed
for conflict, or in flight precipitate,
or whether held incapable from fear,
he seized with sudden rage; stung them to death,
or crushed them in the grasp of crushing folds,
or blasted with the poison of his breath.
High in the Heavens the sun small shadow made
when Cadmus, wondering what detained his men,
prepared to follow them. Clothed in a skin
torn from a lion, he was armed, complete,
with lance of glittering steel; and with a dart:
but passing these he had a dauntless soul.
When he explored the grove and there beheld
the lifeless bodies, and above them stretched
the vast victorious dragon licking up
the blood that issued from their ghastly wounds;
his red tongues dripping gore; then Cadmus filled
with rage and grief; “Behold, my faithful ones!
I will avenge your deaths or I will share it!”
He spoke; and lifted up a mill-stone huge,
in his right hand, and having poised it, hurled
with a tremendous effort dealing such
a blow would crush the strongest builded walls;
yet neither did the dragon flinch the shock
nor was he wounded, for his armour-scales,
fixed in his hard and swarthy hide, repelled
the dreadful impact. Not the javelin thus,
so surely by his armoured skin was foiled,
for through the middle segment of his spine
the steel point pierced, and sank beneath the flesh,
deep in his entrails. Writhing in great pain
he turned his head upon his bleeding back,
twisting the shaft, with force prodigious shook
it back and forth, and wrenched it from the wound;
with difficulty wrenched it. But the steel
remained securely fastened in his bones.
Such agony but made increase of rage:
his throat was swollen with great knotted veins;
a white froth gathered on his poisonous jaws;
the earth resounded with his rasping scales;
he breathed upon the grass a pestilence,
steaming mephitic from his Stygian mouth.
His body writhes up in tremendous gyres;
his folds, now straighter than a beam, untwist;
he rushes forward on his vengeful foe,
his great breast crushing the deep-rooted trees.
Small space gave Cadmus to the dragon’s rage,
for by the lion’s spoil he stood the shock,
and thrusting in his adversary’s jaws
the trusted lance gave check his mad career.
Wild in his rage the dragon bit the steel
and fixed his teeth on the keen-biting point:
out from his poisoned palate streams of gore
spouted and stained the green with sanguine spray.
Yet slight the wound for he recoiled in time,
and drew his wounded body from the spear;
by shrinking from the sharp steel saved his throat
a mortal wound. But Cadmus as he pressed
the spear-point deeper in the serpent’s throat,
pursued him till an oak-tree barred the way;
to this he fixed the dragon through the neck:
the stout trunk bending with the monster’s weight,
groaned at the lashing of his serpent tail.
An ancient sculpture of Laocoön, his sons, and the sea serpents