Who He Is
Lucifer is the emperor of the sorrowful kingdom, held in the ice of Cocytus up to the middle of his chest, at the center of the earth, where the poem places the point toward which all weight converges. He is presented by Virgil, who calls him Dis and tells Dante that there one must arm oneself with fortitude; the name Lucifer appears in another canto, when the giant Antaeus sets the two down at the bottom that devours Lucifer with Judas, and Beelzebub is the name with which the narrator designates him when he speaks of the place farthest from him. Dis is also the name of the walled city that opens the lower Inferno (Canto VIII of the Inferno and Canto IX of the Inferno). He has three faces, six eyes, six bat wings, and in each mouth he tears a sinner. What defines him is the contrast between what he was and what he is, the lost beauty measured by today's ugliness, and the fact that the evil he represents is not majestic: he weeps, drools blood, and the wind of his wings is what freezes the lake in which he is held.
Trajectory
In Canto XI of the Inferno, Virgil already places him in the design of the abyss: in the smaller circle, at the point of the universe where Dis rests, the traitor is consumed forever. In Canto XXXI of the Inferno, Antaeus sets the two down at the bottom that devours Lucifer with Judas, and only in Canto XXXIV of the Inferno is he seen. The canto opens with Virgil completing a verse of the hymn of the Cross, and Dante, who sees from afar something like a windmill turning in the wind, draws back behind Virgil. When they come close, Virgil steps aside and makes him stop, pointing to the creature that once had the beautiful semblance. Dante's reaction is silence:
Io non mori’ e non rimasi vivo; / pensa oggimai per te, s’hai fior d’ingegno, / qual io divenni, d’uno e d’altro privo, I did not die, and I did not remain alive; now think for yourself, if you have a flower of wit, what I became, deprived of both.
Lucifer rises out of the ice from the middle of his chest upward, and Dante, by comparison, looks more like a giant than the giants look like his arms. The poet draws the conclusion from the state in which he sees him: if he was as beautiful as he is now ugly, and against his creator he raised his brows, all mourning must surely proceed from him. Dante counts the three faces: the one in front red, the one on the right between white and yellow, and the one on the left the color of those who come from where the Nile descends. Under each one come out two great wings, without feathers, shaped like a bat's:
sì che tre venti si movean da ello: / quindi Cocito tutto s’aggelava. / Con sei occhi piangëa, e per tre menti / gocciava ’l pianto e sanguinosa bava, so that three winds moved from him, whence all of Cocytus froze. With six eyes he wept, and through three chins the tears dripped, and bloody drool.
In each mouth he tears a sinner with his teeth, like a flax-breaker. For the one in front, biting was nothing compared with the scratching, which sometimes left the skin of the back completely stripped. Virgil names him:
Quell’ anima là sù c’ha maggior pena», / disse ’l maestro, «è Giuda Scarïotto, / che ’l capo ha dentro e fuor le gambe mena, that soul up there that suffers the greatest pain, said the master, is Judas Iscariot, who has his head inside and waves his legs outside.
The other two, head down and out of the mouth, are Brutus, who hangs from the black mouth and writhes without making a sound, and Cassius, who looks so brawny. When night returns, Virgil clings to Lucifer's shaggy ribs, descends from hair to hair, and, at the point where the thigh turns, turns his head toward where his legs had been and climbs, panting:
Attienti ben, ché per cotali scale», / disse ’l maestro, ansando com’ uom lasso, / «conviensi dipartir da tanto male, hold on tight, for by such stairs, said the master, panting like a weary man, one must depart from so much evil.
On the other side of the center, Virgil explains that there the sun has already passed from evening to morning, that Lucifer remains fixed as before, that on this side he fell from heaven, and that the earth, out of fear of him, made a veil of the sea and passed to the other hemisphere. From there a stream descends through a hole in the rock that he himself gnawed, and it is through this natural corridor of bad ground and little light that the two come out:
salimmo sù, el primo e io secondo, / tanto ch’i’ vidi de le cose belle / che porta ’l ciel, per un pertugio tondo, we climbed up, he first and I second, until I saw some of the beautiful things that heaven carries, through a round opening.
Themes Embodied
Lucifer is Loyalty and Betrayal at its deepest point: the creator he betrayed is the highest bond of all, and the three mouths hold the traitor of Christ and those of Caesar. Sin here is that of rebellion, which the poem deduces from the state in which he is seen, not from a narration. Justice and Law appears in the design of the punishment, in which the emperor of the kingdom held in the ice is also the one who, by beating his wings, freezes the lake that holds him. And Politics is in the trio of mouths, Judas, who betrayed Christ, and Brutus and Cassius, the murderers of Julius Caesar, whom the common reading takes as the two universal authorities that Dante defends, Church and Empire; the text does not say so, it only puts the three together.
No one narrates Lucifer's rebellion: the narrator deduces it from what he sees, in two adjectives, and the one who draws the conclusion is Dante, not Virgil. Nothing in him is majestic. The poem reduces the emperor to a mechanism, or shows that evil consumes itself: both readings fit in the same verse. The exit through the body of the worst of all is the last irony of the canticle.
Divergent Readings
Dante's speech to the reader is the point where the poem renounces description. The narrator who described the blood, the rot, and the serpents says that he is not able to tell what he felt before Dis, and hands the reader the work of imagining, with his flower of wit, what he does not say. The reading here is one of art: the silence measures the fear by what the narrator renounces writing.
The text sustains two readings of what Lucifer is. In one, he is the villain that the poem reserves for the center of everything, for having raised his brows against the creator. In the other, he is a body held in a machine that he himself makes turn, and the ugliness that Dante describes is a consequence of the fall, not an additional punishment. Virgil's and Dante's exit, which depends on that body, leaves the question of why the poem chose to make the passage to the stars a path through the worst.
Relationships
- Dante: the visitor who is left speechless before him and who crosses him holding on to his fur (Canto XXXIV of the Inferno).
- Virgil: the one who presents him by the name of Dis, names the three condemned of the mouths, and uses his body as a ladder.
- Ugolino: the traitor of the same ice, two zones earlier, whose story (Canto XXXIII of the Inferno) precedes the descent to the bottom.