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Two unusual examples of the Gemini type in the field of letters are Dante and Bernard Shaw. Dante wrote his Inferno so that he could show in luminous verbiage all his enemies roasting in the pits of perdition. The Shavian humor has about it the bite of shallowness. It is not the deep laughter of the gods who understand all, but the shallow titillating laughter of mortals who understand not even themselves.”

― Manly P. Hall

PILGRIMAGE

To follow Dante in his pilgrimage is to follow the path of the human psyche, the human condition, and the experience of our existence. Dante offers a view of the hero’s journey from darkness to awakening, later known as the Jungian notion of individuation. Dante’s path is lyrical, literal, esoteric, anagogical, allegorical, deep, and sometimes moralistic. 

Witnessing it, one discovers stage by stage the process of living according to one’s design, illustrated as a political critique of the role of the individual in society. Dante tells the story of a protagonist (himself) who meets his hero (Virgil, the Roman poet), who becomes the voice of reason; the pilgrimage is a metaphor for self-inquiry. Virgil operates as a guide and creates in Dante an inner dia-logos, such as a relationship one can have with a journal, or with a therapist that listens and observes as one walks near the abyss. Virgil, as the other, creates a space where insights emerge for Dante (and for the viewer, who is the witness). 

The Divine Comedy accounts that individuals must take responsibility for their deeds and aim for ethical and moral virtues to live purposeful lives. I resonate with this part, and the way Dante uses allegory as a device, the poem contains a compelling socio-economic and political examination addressing corruption and justice in familiar ways that seem extremely relatable to the roles we have constructed and what is expected for the individual in society. In my view, Dante Alighieri, if alive today, would have been a Bitcoiner.

God spoke to him in a dream: “You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem.”

[...] Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life. Tradition relates that, upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world, is much too complex for the simplicity of men.

Translated by J. E. I. Inferno, I, 32:: J. L. Borges

Virtuosity, Dante becomes Virgil for later writers

Fideli D’Amore Dante through Borges’eyes 

To observe Jorge Luis Borges follow Dante is to witness a path of admiration and pure enchantment; while Borges did not speak Italian (I do), he read the poem many, many times in the original text. As he mentions in his Seven-night lecture, the translation could serve as a stimulus for the reader to approach the original; he continues to say that Dante’s poetry is much more than what it says. Is Borges [or am I through him], stating that the pure comprehension of the beauty of this magnum opus is attained abstractly, rather than logically? 

The four mathematical arts are arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy; these anciently were termed the quadrivium, or fourfold way of knowledge.

Sir John Hawkins, "A General History of