Lucky you, you've been good enough to escape hell. You must climb Mount Pergatory in your quest toward heaven. Good luck to ye!
Charon ushers you across the river Acheron, and you find yourself upon the brink of grief's abysmal valley.. You are in Limbo, a place of sorrow without torment. You encounter a seven-walled castle, and within those walls you find rolling fresh meadows whereabout many shades dwell. These are the virtuous pagans, the great philosophers and authors, unbaptised children, and others unfit to enter heaven. You share company with Caesar, Homer, Virgil, Socrates, and Aristotle. There is no punishment here. Encompassed by a hemisphere of light- light of reason. peaceful, yet sad.
You have come to a place mute of all light, where the wind bellows as the sea does in a tempest. This is the realm where the lustful spend eternity. Here, sinners are blown around endlessly by the unforgiving winds of unquenchable desire as punishment for their transgressions. The infernal hurricane that never rests hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine, whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them. You have betrayed reason at the behest of your appetite for pleasure, and so here you are doomed to remain. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy are two that share in your fate.
In the third circle, you find yourself amidst eternal rain, maledict, cold, and heavy. Cerebus, a canine monster cruel and uncouth, with his three heads and red eyes, dwells in this level. He growls and tears at the damned with his teeth and claws. The gluttons are punished here, within the filthy mixture of shadows and of rain. Because you consumed in excess, here is where you meet your fate. filled with cold, heavy, dirty rain and the souls there lay unhappily in the stinking mud.
Just before the river Styx is the Fourth Level of Hell. Here, the prodigal and the avaricious meet their punishment, as they roll weights back and forth against one another. You will share eternity with others who either wasted, lived greedily and insatiably, or who hoarded their fortunes, . The demon Plutus dwells here.
The river Styx runs through this level of Hell, and in it are punished the wrathful and the gloomy. The former are forever lashing out at each other in anger, furious and naked, tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth. The latter are gurgling in the black mud, slothful and sullen, withdrawn from the world. Their lamentations bubble to the surface as they try to repeat a doleful hymn, though with unbroken words they cannot say it. Because you lived a cruel, vindictive and hateful life, you meet your fate in the Styx.
You approach Satan's wretched city where you behold a wide plain dotted with burning tombs, surrounded by iron walls. Standing guard??? are the three infernal Furies stained with blood, with limbs of women and hair of serpents. Before you are fields full of distress and torment terrible. Inside the tombs (sepulchers) suffer the heretics, failing to believe in God and the afterlife. Make themselves audible by doleful sighs. respite wicked
Guarded by the Minotaur, who snarls and bites himself in fury, but was unable to reach them, and across the river Phlegethon, filled with boiling blood, is the Seventh Level of Hell. lament their pitiless mischiefs centaurs armed with bows and arrows, shot those who came too far out of the river. The violent, the assasins, the tyrants, and the war-mongers suffer here. The stench is overpowering. There is also the wood of the suicides- stunted and gnarled trees with twisting branches and poisoned fruit. At the time of final judgement, their bodies will hang from their branches. Harpies (foul birdlike creatures with human faces) nested there. Beyond the wood is scorching sand where those who committed violence against God and nature are showered with eternal fire against their naked bodies. Blasphemers. Sodomites. Usurers, who followed neither nature nor art.
Many and varied sinners suffer eternally in the multi-leveled (amphitheatre-shaped) Malebolge: Those guilty of fraudulence and malice. The seducers and pimps, who are whipped by horned demons. The hypocrites, who struggle to walk in lead-lined cloaks. The simonists, wedged into stone holes, whose feet are licked by flames, kicked and writhed desperately. The barraters, who are ducked in boiling pitch by demons known as the Malebranche. The magicians, diviners, fortune tellers, and panderers are all here. Thieves. Some wallow in human excrement. Serpents writhed and wrapped around men, sometimes fusing into each other. Bodies torn apart. Dante wanted to put his hands over his ears because of the lamentations of the sinners there, who were afflicted with scabs like leprosy, and lay sick on the ground, furiously scratching their skin of with their nails: it was worse than the great hospitals. Justice divine doth smite them with its hammer.
This is the deepest level of hell, where Satan himself resides. His wings flap eternally, producing a chilling cold winds that freeze the thick ice found here. The three faces of Satan (black, red, yellow) can be seen with mouths gushing bloody foam and eyes forever weeping, as they chew on the three traitors, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. This place is furthest from the source of all light and warmth. Sinners frozen deep in the ice, faces out, eyes and mouths frozen shut.