Dante’s Poem of Fire

In Dante’s Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy), the journey through the universe represents the integration of the human intellect into the cosmos as it was envisaged at the fourteenth-century apogee of the Classical worldview. The cosmic ladder of Dante’s work stretches fully from the top to the bottom of that universe. Characteristically of afterlife narratives, there are two types of space in Dante’s Commedia. The universe that is traversed in Dante’s journey is also set forth in a revelatory vision toward the end of the work, at Paradiso XXVIII. In our final chapter, we concentrate on this vision, which is both a culmination of the afterlife vision we’ve seen elsewhere in the book, and a departure from it. Whereas the vision we see earlier is a vehicle toward psychic harmonization, the vision in Dante explores not merely the need for psychic harmonization but the difficulties of it. This is done through a series of complexifying and interlocking images, of mirror and reflection, music, rhythm and note. All of these images fall short in expressing the goal of harmony of soul and universe. Psychic harmonization can only be achieved, finally, at the price of silence. When the soul is harmonized with the universe, it is undifferentiated from it. We can no longer speak of the universe as of something outside ourselves. Thus Dante’s poem falls silent.

The Road Map

This chapter studies the underworld journey of Virgil, Aeneid 6. It examines a series of possible models for afterlife space in Aen. 6. In particular it looks at the underworld journey of Aen. 6 in the light of ancient geographical traditions. We learn that a point-by-point idiom of representing space was much more widespread than you might imagine in antiquity. It’s found across many different genres, involving real and imagined space: geography, poetry, and art. The author argues that idioms of spatial expression are constant across representations of imagined and real space and across image and text. It is possible for Virgil to use the components of a “real” geography to construct his imaginary world. The afterlife is modeled on our concept of the “real” world, but in turn the “reality” we model it on is in large part a construct of the human artistic imagination, of our propenstiy for simplification and schematization. Like a map, the afterlife landscape allows us to simplify and schematize our environment, because it imposes no limits: it is imaginary. The afterlife landscape, in Virgil and elsewhere, acts as a fulcrum between real and imaginary space. There is no strict dichotomy between real and imagined space; instead there is a continuity between the “imagined” space of Virgil’s underworld, and the space of geographical accounts; between the world of the soul and the “real” world.

The Splitting of Herakles

The Herakles passage in Homer’s Odyssey 11.601–4 has been seen as problematic because it is not one thing: the vision it gives of Herakles’ place in the afterlife is double—his eidōlon (“image”) and the autos (“self”); the underworld and the heavens. This chapter explores the following questions: Should the afterlife be one thing rather than a plurality of things? Should we mark out as “anomalous” what we think doesn’t “fit”? On what criteria should this be done? The spatial problem of Herakles in Od.11 has been interpreted through a series of oppositions: earlier or later, authentic and inauthentic, Homeric and “Orphic,” “negative” and “positive” eschatologies. In fact, though, Herakles can be interpreted as a force for unity. In one brief moment he maps the extremes of the universe with radical economy. It is the job of eschatology to encompass the world.

Interplanetary Harmonies

This chapter studies the first of three of Plato’s afterlife myths treated in this book, namely the Spindle of Necessity from the Myth of Er in the Republic. The Spindle is a representation of the planetary orbits, along with the sound they are said to produce, which we know as the harmony of the spheres. The author argues against the traditional interpretation of this harmony as an octave scale, arguing instead for the Spindle as an anticipation of the harmonic series. In this she has called upon evidence for ancient recognition of tones as composite, and for the use of harmonics in ancient performance practice. This is important because, as she argues, Plato is striving toward an abstract, mathematical framework for consonance, which, further, carries ethical connotations. Combining as it does astronomy and music, the Spindle represents the role of sound and vision in shaping our understanding of the cosmos of which the soul is a part. Musical concord acts as a blueprint for the souls’ right ethical conduct during incarnation, which ought to follow natural laws, among which is the law of harmony. In the Myth of Er, the human soul is privileged to a vision of concord, in order to understand what to strive for.

The Cloak of Stars

This chapter studies the vision of the cosmos set out in the speech of Anchises at Virgil’s Aeneid 6.724–51, comparing it to the response of Dante in Paradiso Canto IV. This passage of the Aeneid draws predominantly, the author argues, on the account of the universe in Plato’s Timaeus. The result of the combination of this speech with the underworld journey is that there are two kinds of space in Aen. 6: the linear journey, and the synoptic vision. Virgil commentators, ancient and modern, have tried to simplify Virgil’s space through allegory, whereby the underworld is seen as merely a cover for the cosmos. The former is ascribed to Virgil’s epic voice, the latter to his philosophical one. In the author’s view the philosophical voice does not silence the epic one. Rather than seeing the underworld as a veil, a “fiction” thinly concealing the philosophical “truth” of a celestial afterlife, we can see Virgil’s underworld as a mesh through which the upper world appears.

The Dark Side of the Moon

This chapter brings us from Plato to a second-century CE reception of his dialogues, in the work of Plutarch. It concentrates on one dialogue of Plutarch, the De facie in orbe lunae (On the Face in the Moon’s Disc). In the myth that concludes this dialogue, the speaker, Sulla, references Homer’s Elysium from Odyssey 4. But Sulla lifts the Homeric Elysium from “the ends of the earth,” up a level, so that it is situated in the moon. This sets the scene for the rest of Plutarch’s eschatological myth, in which Elysium is repositioned as part of an ascending world-system. Cosmos in Plutarch is the theater for soul. Soul and cosmos in Plutarch are bound up in a sequence of functional interrelationships. Plutarch’s tripartite cosmos functions like the human entity and in fact is the physical area of operation in the life and death of the human entity. There is a truly intertwined relationship between the tripartite human entity and the tripartite cosmos: a three-stage cosmos gives a three-stage cycle of death to life and back, from the sun to the moon to the earth, over and over again. Plutarch’s whole cosmos takes on the role of an afterlife landscape. The De facie gives us the clearest instance we’ve yet seen of the phenomenon of psychic harmonization, in which the soul is entirely integrated with the universe.

The Lyre and the Cloak

This chapter studies Plato’s Phaedo. In the Phaedo, the afterlife journey and the synoptic vision of the universe are collapsed into one another. In the myth of the dialogue, we are all, all the time, said to be on an underworld journey, since we live in the “creases” of the earth, not on its surface. At the same time, the True Earth of the Phaedo mirrors in its shape the spherical universe of the vision, as we also see it in the Spindle of Necessity in Plato’s Republic, and in the flight of souls around the universe in Plato’s Phaedrus. The Phaedo is a true geography of soul, in that the fate of the soul is integrated with the shape and motive forces of the earth seen as a whole. What we have in the Phaedo is a complete synthesis of the mythical underworld with the “geographic” earth. Tartarus (Phaedo 111e7–112e3) is the lowest point of the world, but it is also the center of the sphere. The result of Plato’s assimilation of the underworld, the landscape of the soul, with the “scientific” earth, is that earth and soul become analogous. They can be studied in the same way. In the ideal world, the universe itself is our eschatology.

Intermezzo

Knowledge of the nature of the universe is a prerequisite in afterlife accounts. It is necessary because the soul’s ultimate aim is identification with the universe, the phenomenon the author calls “psychic harmonization.” For this to happen, the soul must understand the universe. The apparent need for a vision of the universe is the key to understanding the doubling of eschatological space: within any afterlife journey must come the revelation, in which the world is glimpsed in sum. But what is this universe with which the soul must come into line? It is not a constant. Over time, as the reach of human concepts of the universe expands, human cycles are assimilated into an increasingly expansive universe. It is the need to accommodate ever-larger areas of lateral motion within a fundamental casing of circular order that causes the universe to “expand.” As we discover more areas of disorderly motion, the outer skin of order just gets bigger, reducing the significance of the original areas of disorder. Congruently, the soul’s arena of activity expands alongside the model of the universe. This chapter shows both how the cycles of the universe function and how the universe expands between Homer and Dante (and beyond).

Conclusion

What we call the afterlife is the desire in the present, unachievable and so projected into the future, for a joining of faculties, the dissolution of the divide between us and the universe, the closing of the perceptual loop between what we are and what is. For this, we need to stop perceiving the universe as extraneous to ourselves. The presence of the vision of the universe in the landscape of the afterlife is one attempt to do this—to encapsulate cosmos in the landscape of soul. This is the function of what the author has called in this book the journey-vision paradigm of afterlife space.

A Sprinkling of Science

This chapter examines how the journey-revelation paradigm we discern in afterlife texts manifests itself in Plato’s Phaedrus. The author argues for points of contact between the Phaedrus and the so-called Orphic gold leaves. In her view the Phaedrus is modeled after the gold leaves, on the idea of a quasi-religious journey-to-vision progression. The parallels with the leaves bring the Phaedrus into the realm of reincarnation, which, in the leaves, is to be avoided through religious initiation. In the Phaedrus, initiation is transfigured into philosophical knowledge. In this case, philosophers who have conscious knowledge (anamnesis) of the eschatological vision of the universe escape the wheel of reincarnation more quickly. Plato substitutes for the Orphic mysteries the mysteries of the universe, his “sprinkling of science”: knowledge of the universe is essential, here as in the Republic, for the soul’s self-knowledge, and ultimately for its fate in the afterlife.