Categories: Dante

The Forest of the Suicides

 

Forest of Suicides

After crossing the river of boiling blood, Dante and Virgil enter a dense forest where they hear moans coming from within. Dante can’t tell where the sounds are coming from. Responding, his guide Virgil points him to the actual bushes and trees of the forest. These plants are the souls of the damned who committed suicide. They are only able to speak when one of their branches are broken off (which also causes them pain and weeping of blood).

Since these souls have rejected the earthly bodies given to them by God, they suffer the punishment of losing all control over their “bodies” in Hell. The are also constantly tormented by Harpies (beasts with the body of a large bird and the head of a woman) who rend and tear their branches, causing them constant pain. At the second coming of Christ, when other souls will be united with their earthly bodies, these souls will retain their plant bodies and must hang their earthly bodies from the branches.

Harpy

Dante and Virgil then see the souls of the profligate (those who extravagantly wasted their riches) running through the forest, only to be tracked down and torn apart by wild dogs. They then leave the forest and encounter a stretch of desert with burning sand and flames falling from the sky.

Next – The Blasphemers

Table of Contents

Dave

Creator of Dante Explorer

View Comments

  • Sounds bloody awful. I prefer to think of God as a loving God who would not cause pain in heaven but teach the individual about their actions.

Recent Posts

Summary of the Terraces of Purgatory

Just as the landscape of Dante’s Purgatory is different from that of Hell, the second…

4 years ago

Botticelli’s Inferno Painting

Sandro Botticelli was a renaissance painter in Florence best known today for his works "The…

4 years ago

The Circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno

The nine Circles of Hell, punishing progressively more serious sins,  gives the sinners what they…

4 years ago

The Gate of Hell

Although the first part of the Divine Comedy, Inferno, begins at canto one, the journey…

4 years ago

The Grafters Inferno

A devil carrying a soul of the damned in his claws runs toward Dante and…

4 years ago

Maps of the Afterlife

Dante's Paradise consists of different ascending spheres by holiness, ultimately ending in a vision of…

4 years ago