Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

This theory, though not universally accepted, did explain why Dante’s Hell involved all the poets and artists and politicians he was personally familiar with over his lifetime. And why paintings of the Buddhist hells displayed all the ritual trappings of Chinese palaces: gardens and pools and harems of concubines. And why both Greek and Mesopotamian visions of the afterlife involved neat, orderly systems of justices, gatekeepers, and accountants armed with records and scales, processing lines of the dead the same way passport offices process citizens. At the end of the day, human beings preferred the predictable order of their known bureaucracies. One’s sins took on meaning in the context of their moral universe, comprised of their loved ones, their idols, their rivals, their victims. Dante saw philosophers and politicians. Aeneas saw ghosts of warriors past. One was hurt most by what one knew.