We finally reach something in hell that even Virgil cannot believe. Dante and his guide find the high priest Caiaphas, crucified on the ground in the sixth of the malebolge of fraud, the pouch of the hypocrites. But why does Virgil gawk? The answer is not as easy as you might think.

Dante has slowed down to talk to two of the hypocrites who have caught his Tuscan dialect. He might be prepared to face friars, notorious for their hypocrisy. Instead, he meets political hypocrites right out of his own past and Florence’s chaos.

Dante and Virgil have slid down the slope into the sixth pit of fraud, the sixth of the malebolge, and find themselves in a monastic procession among guys wearing gilded coats of lead. Welcome to the hypocrites—who are a lot more dangerous than you might think.

An overview of the entire fifth evil pouch, one of the malebolge, in the eighth circle of hell, Inferno’s vast landscape of fraud. I’ll read the entire narrative sequence from Inferno, Canto XXI, line 1 through Canto XXIII, line 57—then I’ll offer some general comments about this vast and spectacular story set inside INFERNO.

The fifth of the malebolge, the evil pouch of fraud all about political grifting, ends up at a literary fantasia about the writing of COMEDY, the creation of meaning from what you read, and the ways that texts predict (!) what will happen to you—which is Dante’s hope for COMEDY.

A nameless political grifter has proposed a game for a bunch of demons in Inferno’s eighth circle: Let’s see how many of my damned ilk I can call out of the boiling pitch. Instead, he gets away. As do Dante and Virgil. And the demons are furious!

The nameless grifter in the fifth of the malebolge, the evil pouches, has a trick up his sleeve. He’s going to try to play a fast one on the demons in INFERNO—which Dante the poet is playing fast ones on his readers!

Our nameless barrator starts to name names in an attempt to save his own skin in this horrifying episode from the fifth of the evil pouches, the malebolge, in the eighth circle of INFERNO—and in an episode that looks forward to ones ahead on the very floor of hell.

Violence escalates in the fifth of the malebolge (the evil pouches) that make up the eighth ring of INFERNO, the subsets of fraud. One poor barrator is about to be flayed alive. What do we make of the escalating violence in Dante’s COMEDY?

Dante the pilgrim and Virgil are strolling along the fifth pouch of the malebolge in the circle of fraud—and meanwhile, Dante the poet is working very hard behind the scenes to make sure his fraudulent poetics have all the trappings of realism.

Evil Tail has mustered the demons. They’re ready to set off. The pilgrim Dante has some qualms. Virgil is very confident. They’re both right as COMEDY descends to its lowest point—not the pit of hell but the most vulgar, street comedy of the poem.

Dante the pilgrim and his guide, Virgil, are stopped in their tracks above the fifth evil pouch in INFERNO’s eighth circle of fraud. Here, at one of the malebolge, we get some of Dante’s lowest, street-level comedy with this pack of demons whose names alone tell us they’re both a joke and a menace.

An interpolated episode in the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE, all about demons and Dante: who were these creatures, where did they come from, and what traditions is Dante using as the demons become more and more prominent in INFERNO?

The demon’s low speech, Virgil’s high rhetoric, and the poor pilgrim Dante, squatting behind a rock. This passage from Inferno, the fifth of the malebolge in the eighth circle of fraud, is full of high drama, silly comedy, and even a bit of Dante-the-poet’s autobiography. In other words, classic INFERNO.

The demons are howling and tearing apart a sinner. Virgil is preening and overly confident. And Dante the pilgrim is going into hiding. It’s a lot of drama in the fifth of the malebolge in the eighth circle of fraud in INFERNO. And there may even be some Augustinian allegory, too. Complicated? Yep! It’s Dante.

Virgil brings the pilgrim—and maybe the poet Dante—back to the plot at hand. An old-school demon is on the run with a grifter hooked through the tendon. We’re descending into one of the most chaotic, vulgar, and wild sequences in all of INFERNO. Get ready for Canto XXI the fraudsters on the political take.

We descend to the fifth of the malebolge with an incredible opening: the poet names his poem, turns coy, and then crafts a gangly, wild, unhinged simile that’s really just a complicated tautology: A = A, pitch = pitch. What’s going on in this most self-conscious of openings before the sin of barratry?

The last of the soothsayers in the 4th of the malebolge, the evil pouches, of the 8th circle of INFERNO, the giant wheel of fraud. The passage ends in a literary tour de force: irony, whimsy, careful structure, and even a final note of sheer bravado. How else do you end the damnation of those who told the future when you’re the poet trying to do the same thing?

Virgil tells the story of the founding of his hometown, Mantua. Except it’s not the story he tells in his own poem, THE AENEID. What’s more, he then dares us to call his poem fraudulent. A curious passage in which Dante either practices his own vengeance on this poetic master or saves him from the fate of being called a magician.

Virgil turns unspeakably hard on our pilgrim, Dante, while looking down at the soothsayers in the fourth evil pouch of the eighth circle of hell. But things are never as they seem in INFERNO. Virgil may be up on his high horse but he misquotes all his classical sources and garbles his references in the wizardry of poetic citations and rewritings.