In which we meet people with various kinds of bodily integrity issues.

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Week 20: Where we call bologna on Dante’s talent curbing and clearly see the simple summer simile. Where with Ulysses we pass the columns, and the poles, and founder on the shores of Mount Purgatory having found the earth round. Where we hear that one cannot logically be absolved before, or during, the commission of an evil deed or counsel. Sorry, not sorry, or something like that, Minos judges. And Dante litters his own path with cautionary examples; there but for the ‘rock’ goes he.

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\Week 19: A Place Among the Classics

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Guess what sin is punished by snakes. And cyclical incineration.

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Week 17: Now into the second half of the Malebolge, we look back at the closing line of Canto 21 and The Comedy's lack of humor. Then on to Canto 23, where Aesop’s frog and mouse story is called upon to warn Dante against trusting too closely the partnership of Demons. And Virgil luges Dante down the rocky slope, making a quick escape from pocket 5 to 6, where they try to hide among the lead-lined, golden-robed hypocrites.

For more information about the Mythgard Academy series on Dante's Inferno, visit https://mythgard.org/academy/inferno/

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Tonight we encounter some really ... unexpected demons. What under the earth is going on here?

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Week 15: We revisit the Baptistery of San Giovanni and notice the inversions in Dante’s destroying holy furniture to save a life while the popes destroy lives to save holy money for themselves. But what is with all the feet? And do you think Boniface saw the funny side of his little cameo, or would he be depressed in determinism like his predecessor having perverted the mechanism of forgiveness and having then no path to repentance? And here Virgil the ghost grabs Dante the flesh-man and poltergeists him back to the bridge, to the fifth ditch, the rampart of the Fortune Tellers. Where Dante cranes his own head to see the parade of backward-headed shades and sheds a tear for those who weep as their fate. And Virgil rebukes Dante, and Dante corrects Virgil, and one is ready to trust the poets again.

For more information about the Mythgard Academy series on Dante's Inferno, visit https://mythgard.org/academy/inferno/

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Week 14: True to the nature of Fraud, the 8th circle is an artificial construct of inverted imagery split into 10 concentric pockets, with bridges that look down upon each trench. The first pocket is a gender discriminated container for pimps and seducers, a sex traffic kept moving by demons with whips. The second pocket is an egalitarian circle of very rude words (What? Would you like to sugar coat with flowery language the circle of flattery?). The third pocket is for spiritual pimps, the fraud of simony, punished in inversions of baptismal fonts with sprinklings of fire on feet. The core of these three - the pimps, the seducers, and the flatterers - is treating people as beasts for their own gain. O see what Dante did there. Then, with one mention of Dante’s guilt at breaking the Baptistry of Saint John, the session ends with an internet crash.

For more information about the Mythgard Academy series on Dante's Inferno, visit https://mythgard.org/academy/inferno/

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Week 13: At the waterfall edge of the 7th circle Dante gives up his belt to conjure a ride. What is the truth which seems a lie? Poetic allegory of course. For Dante breaks the 4th wall to give his poem a name, Comedy, and to swear that he saw a beast swim in the air up the waterfall. Geryon is the impossible thing, but that’s ok, he’s a fraud. No, he’s The Fraud and through his depiction we see the truth. Fraud or no, the brute animal is the only way down into the 8th circle. And even with the command to be strong and daring, Dante is afraid like Phaethon and Icarus as Geryon descends.

For more information about the Mythgard Academy series on Dante's Inferno, visit https://mythgard.org/academy/inferno/

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Dante Finds Himself Among Friends

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