So I have been reacquainting myself with the Divine Comedy. I had always had a fascination with Dante and his quest into the 9 circles of hell to save Beatrice, his true love. If you have seen 'What dreams may come', it's a very loose adaptation of the Divine Comedy.
Long story short, it's about a man named Dante who battles his way through the 9 gates of hell to attempt to save his gal. He fights his way through Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery, against not only the demons that stand to block his path, but also against his own sins. I tend to find many parallels with it, and would think that pretty much anyone would. The struggles, the pain, the self realization, and so many of the other things Dante must struggle against.
I think that we all fight our ways through our own 9 rings, often chasing a seemingly unattainable phantom. Is it that I am chasing ghosts from the past? Is it that I am all too often afraid to face the things that I've done in my life? Do we all go through it?
I decided to look up definitions and synonyms for each circle. This is what I came up with.
Limbo - constant inability to remember (ummm... some would say that I am in a constant state of that)
synonyms for limbo: absentmindedness, abstraction, amnesia, blackout, blank, blockout, carelessness, dreaminess, fugue, heedlessness, hypomnesia, inattention, lapse of memory, laxness, lethe, loss of memory, negligence, nirvana, oblivion, obliviousness, paramnesia, repression, short memory, supression
Lust - appetite, passion (yup...)
synonyms for lust: animalism, aphrodisia, appentence, appetition, avidity, carnality, concupiscence, covetousness, craving, cupitidity, desire, eroticism, excitement, fervor, greed, hunger, itch, lasciviousness, lechery, lewdness, libido, licentiousness, longing, prurience, pruriency, salaciousness, salacity, sensualism, sensuality, thirst, urge, wantonness, weakness, yen
Gluttony - excess (check that one of... millions of times)
synonyms for gluttony: greed, greediness, voracity,epicurism, good living, high living, edactiy, gulosity, crapulence, guttling, guzzling, gormandering, omnivorous, crapulent, swinish, pampered, overfed, overgorged
Greed - overwhelming desire for more (one more in the yes column)
synonyms for greed: acquisitiveness, avarice, avidity, covetousness, craving, cupidity, eagerness, edacity, esurience, excess, gluttony, gormandizing, graspingness, hunger, indulgence, insatiableness, intemperence, longing, piggishness, rapacity, ravenousness, selfishness, swinishness, the gimmies, voracity
Anger - state of being mad, annoyed (been there... done that...)
synonyms for anger: acrimony, animosity, annoyance, antagonism, blow up, cat fit, chagrin, choler, conniption, dander, disappropriation, displeasure, distemper, enmity, exasperation, fury, gall, hatred, hissy fit, huff, ill humor, ill temper, impatience, indignation, infuriation, irascibility, ire, irritability, irritation, mad, miff, outrage, passion, peevishness, petulence, pique, rage, ranking, resentment, slow burn, soreness, stew, storm tantrum, temper, tiff, umbrage, vexation, violence
Heresy - unorthodox opinion, especially in religious matters (yeah...)
synonyms of heresy: agnosticism, apostasy, atheism, blasphemy, defection, disbelief, dissent, dissidence, divergence, error, fallacy, heterodoxy, iconoclasm, impeity, infidelity, misbelief, nonconformism, nonconformity, paganism, revisionism, schism, sectarianism, secularism, sin
Violence - extreme force, intensity (...ummm...)
synonyms of violence: abandon, acuteness, assault, attack, bestiality, bloodshed, blowup, brutality, brute force, clash, coercion, compulsion, confusion, constraint, cruelty, destructiveness, disorder, disturbance, duress, ferocity, fervor, fierceness, fighting, flap, foul play, frenzy, fury, fuss, harshness, murderousness, onslaught, passion, power, raging, rampage, roughness, ruckus, rumble, savagery, sharpness, storm, storminess, struggle, terrorism, tumult, turbulence, uproar, vehemence, wildness
Fraud - trickery, deception (...I used to say I was an 'upstanding member of society' in my old days)
synonyms for fraud: artiface, bamboozlement, barraty, blackmail, cheat, chicane, chicanery, con, craft, deceit, double-dealing, dupery, duping, duplicity, extortion, fake, fast one, fast shuffle, flimflam, fourberie, fraudulence, graft, guile, hanky-panky, hoax, hocus-pocus, hoodwinking, hustle, imposure, line, misrepresentation, racket, scam, sell, shakedown, sham, sharp practice, skunk, smoke, song and dance, song, spuriousness, sting, swindle, swindling, treachery
Treachery - disloyalty, dishonesty (...there was a time when my entire life was a lie...)
synonyms for treachery: betrayal, bunco, corruption, dirty dealing, dirty pool, dirty trick, dirty work, disaffection, dodge, double-cross, double-dealing, duplicity, faithlessness, fake, falseness, fast shuffle, flimflam, grift, gyp, infidelity, perfidiousness, perfidy, put-on, racket, recreancy, scam, sellout, shell game, skin game, spoof, stab in the back, sweet talk, treacherousness, treason, two-timing, whitewash
Now all of these definitions and synonyms are from Thesaurus.com so don't go biting my head off if you feel they are not accurate. In that, I know that this is just a story, and there are many different views of sin and hell. For me, both sin and hell are very real, and for most of my life I believed that I was going to hell, and there was nothing I could do about it. 'Sin was in,' and in my case, I felt I had violated all of God's laws with such a joy and fervency that there was no redemption for me. All of what was listed above, synonyms and all, described everything that I was. That view has long since changed, but there are still the days that it fills my mind and I contemplate the things I have done, and the struggles I still have. I still struggle with each one of these 'hells' every day, there is sometimes a whisper that attempts to romanticize all that once was.
Yet, for me, I feel like the pendulum has swung for me, and in that, I have come too far to turn back. My soul actually rests at times, I can exhale, I can sleep through the night solidly. In that, I will cover the antonyms next, and continue on in my journey.
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