OEITH #211 Guides to the Underworld

We examine how Homer, Virgil, and Dante help us navigate the underworld and our relationship to the dead, exploring: the meaning of the hero's descent into the underworld and its personal significance; Odysseus's method of dealing with the dead; what Homer tells us about the underworld and how to work with it; Virgil's Aeneid and the descent of Aeneas; the difference of status among the dead in Virgil; the different impacts upon us of the dead, as explored in Dante's Divine Comedy; The Divine Comedy as an epic wholly about the underworld; the nature of the dead in Dante; the structure of Dante's cosmos; Virgil and Beatrice as Dante's guides; The Divine Comedy as an experiential text; the nature of the dead in Dante; hell, purgatory, and heaven as familiar states of being; hell as a recognisable state of suffering without end; purgatory as the possibility of a willed exit from suffering; the fractal or holographic nature of heaven's bliss; heaven and the non-dual experience; the life of Piccarda Donati and her supposed "sin"; "sin" versus "karma"; sin in the kabbalistic tradition: chatah, pesha, and avon; the application of these ideas to Dante's dead; how we might apply these descriptions of the underworld to our own practice.

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Clive James (2013). Dante: The Divine Comedy. London: Picador.

Richmond Lattimore (2007). The Odyssey of Homer. New York: Harper Perennial.

Rabbi Yitzchak Luria (2022). Three different kinds of sin, https://tinyurl.com/2p8u5y2w. (chabad.org). Accessed February 2022.