The Climbing of Lucifer and Ascent from Hell

The Climbing of Lucifer and Ascent from Hell is the final, vertiginous action of the Inferno, the moment that transforms the entire journey's spatial logic. Having witnessed the threefold punishment of Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in Lucifer's three mouths, Dante and Virgil must now escape the frozen lake of Cocytus and the entire abyss. The ascent is not a simple retreat but a passage through the center of the earth, a reversal of direction that turns the travelers' world upside down and delivers them, at dawn, to the base of Mount Purgatory. It is the hinge between damnation and redemption, the last act of Hell and the first step toward the stars.

The Descent on Lucifer's Body

Virgil, seeing that the whole of Hell has been witnessed, declares that night is reascending and it is time to depart. He clasps Dante around the neck, seizes the moment, and as Lucifer's enormous bat-like wings are opened wide, Virgil lays fast hold upon the shaggy sides of the Emperor of the dolorous kingdom. From fell to fell—from one patch of hair to the next—the two poets descend downward between the thick hair and the frozen crust. They continue until they reach the point where the thigh revolves exactly on the thickness of the haunch. There, at the precise center of the earth's gravity, Virgil, with labour and with hard-drawn breath, turns his head around to where he had had his legs and grapples to the hair as one who mounts. Dante, feeling the inversion, thinks for a terrifying moment that they are returning to Hell.

The Inversion and the Explanation

Virgil, panting as one fatigued, tells Dante to keep fast hold, for by such stairs they must depart from so much evil. He then issues through the opening of a rock, seats Dante down upon the margin, and stretches toward him his wary step. Dante lifts his eyes, expecting to see Lucifer in the same position he had left him, but instead beholds the giant held upward with his legs reversed. Disquieted, he asks where the ice has gone, how Lucifer is fixed upside down, and how the sun has seemingly moved from evening to morning in so short a time. Virgil explains that Dante still imagines himself beyond the center, where he grasped the hair of the fell worm who mines the world. That side was where they were as long as they descended; when Virgil turned around, Dante passed the point to which all heavy things draw from every side. They are now beneath the hemisphere opposite the one that overhangs the vast dry-land, under whose cope the Man who without sin was born and lived was put to death. Dante's feet are on the little sphere that makes the other face of the Judecca; it is morning where it was evening there. Lucifer, who with his hair made a stairway for them, remains fixed as he was before, having fallen from heaven on this side long ago.

The Emergence into the Natural Cave

The place where they find themselves is not a palace corridor but a natural dungeon, with floor uneven and unease of light. A place exists below, as far receding from Beelzebub as the tomb extends, which is known not by sight but by the sound of a small rivulet that descends through a chasm within the stone, its course winding about and slightly falling. Virgil and Dante enter that hidden road to return to the bright world. Without care of having any rest, they mount up, Virgil first and Dante second, until Dante beholds through a round aperture some of the beauteous things that Heaven bears. Thence they come forth to rebehold the stars. The final line of the Inferno—"Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars"—echoes the opening of the poem, where Dante had lost the straightforward pathway, and now, having passed through the entire realm of the damned, he emerges into the pure air of the southern hemisphere, ready to begin the ascent of Purgatory.