Our pilgrim has found the perfect perch to watch the scope and length of the great allegorical parade that happens at the top of Mount Purgatory. He sees seven merry women and seven somber men coming along behind the Roman victory chariot and its griffin, a fitting if open-ended conclusion to this grand spectacle of imaginative revelation.
Read MoreThe parade of revelation continues as a griffin pulls a Roman victory chariot between the four living creatures that beside it. Dante the poet is combining military history, Biblical allegory, and Roman mythology into a single passage that has a shocking absence right at its center.
Read MoreOur pilgrim, Dante, is standing at a great observation point as the parade of divine revelation passes by him across the river Lethe. After the twenty-four lords in white, he sees four animals with green fronds for crowns. But he doesn’t have much time to describe them. Just go out and read the Biblical text . . . especially the one I don’t agree with!
Read MoreOur pilgrim, Dante, turns back from Virgil to see more of the parade of revelation in the Garden of Eden . . . after the lady across Lethe reprimands him for paying way too much attention to the walking candlesticks. The poet heightens his craft to take in the tradition of apocalyptic literature while leaving lots of Easter eggs to his own text and altering Biblical imagery at will.
Read MoreThe pilgrim, Dante, stands on the shore of Lethe and witnesses the emergent revelation of the light in the forest. The air on fire? No, trees that walk? No, candelabra that walk. They emerge from the forest in a deft act of perception that brings a multiplicity of meanings into the open space of COMEDY.
Read MoreThe beautiful lady concludes her discourse with a fusion of revelation of reason to offer a fulcrum to the classical world and see its loss of The Golden Age as the Christian promise of the return to innocence, the cul-de-sac of redemption.
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