Abstract
In the closing moments of Dante’s Inferno, as the pilgrim protagonist and his guide, the Roman poet Virgil, finally emerge from the dark depths of hell, their hope of reaching paradise is rekindled as they look up, ‘to see once again, the stars.’ This directional shift has been effected at the centre of a spherical earth, where Dante and Virgil had to invert themselves in order to start the journey to the southern hemisphere. To find his way back to the ‘right road,’ Dante has had to turn himself upside down, but in order to craft a redemptive iter for mankind, he must also, as poet, turn the whole world upside down. Thus, what was once ‘down’ has become ‘up’ and what was the underside of the world – shaped by Satan’s fall - has now become the pathway to Earthly, and ultimately, Heavenly Paradise. By locating Eden antipodal to Jerusalem, Dante reimagines the southern hemisphere as the place of postlapsarian humanity’s renewal. The ends of the earth have brought him and us, back to the beginning. That Dante sees a constellation that resembles the Southern Cross, continues to intrigue scholars who debate the extent of fourteenth-century knowledge of the southern skies. However, this paper focuses less on Dante’s astronomical insights and more on his thematic preoccupation with oppositions: up versus down, and backwards versus forwards. It examines how these motifs, intertwined with the cosmography of Dante’s journey, embody the salvific upheaval heralded in the gospel message ‘the first will be last’ and Christ’s overturning of the money changers’ tables in the Temple.
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Recommended Citation
Watt, Mary A.
(2026)
"Dante Down Under: Poetic Inversion and the Way Back to Eden,"
International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage:
Vol. 14:
Iss.
1, Article 14.
Available at:
https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ijrtp/vol14/iss1/14