Dante went on to marry, and he and Signora Alighieri raised three children.
Then, suddenly, at the midpoint of his life, he fell into a deep depression.
His epic poem, Divine Comedy, begins by saying that he was walking along in the afternoon of his life and fell into a deep hole.
No one has described the midlife crisis any better — You’re going along, things pretty well in hand, and suddenly you fall into A Hole.
Dante finds himself in the Underworld, and above the portal into what turns out to be Hell is a sign, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
Dante proceeds, and encounters Virgil, the poet from ancient Greece, Heaven-sent to guide him through the nine levels of Hell, which is a spiral downward, each level worse than the pre- vious one. In his writing, Dante peoples Hell with his own acquaintances— even a cardinal or two — which got him into trouble.
Our present idea of Hell comes in part from Dante’s description. Virgil represents The Intellect. The guide for the first part of your inward journey is Your Intellect, the masculine traits of intelligence, proportion, and good sense.
The lowest level of Hell is The Worst. It is FROZEN.
To reach the coldness of life — Loneliness and Meaninglessness — is the worst experience a human being goes through, worse than the fiery aspects of Hell. Under the guidance of Virgil, Dante gets to the bottom of Hell and just keeps going.
You don’t come out of Hell through The door you entered. You go through it and out the other side. On the other side of Hell lies Heaven.
Dante and Virgil are in the middle of the world, which is where the Devil lives. And Dante gets through that nodal point, the point of zero gravity at The Center of The World, by shimmying down the hairy leg of The Devil, and finds himself in Purgatory.
Hell lays out what’s wrong — the hellish dimensions of life — and Purgatory begins The Repair, what you need in order to be restored. You need to be treated. The verb to treat comes from the Latin tmctus, front tractre, “ to pull or drag.”
The earliest therapists had a series of stones with increasingly smaller holes in them, and you were literally pulled through — the biggest one first, a smaller one next, until you couldn’t be pulled through any more. You came out of this experience minus a bit of skin, but you were treated.
Dante is pulled through a hole from the center of the world and begins his ascent through Purgatory, its many levels and teachings.
