THE HIMALAYAN TALK: PALASH BISWAS TALKS AGAINST CASTEIST HEGEMONY IN SOUTH ASIA

THE HIMALAYAN TALK: PALASH BISWAS TALKS AGAINST CASTEIST HEGEMONY IN SOUTH ASIA INDIA AGAINST ITS OWN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

PalahBiswas On Unique Identity No1.mpg

Sunday, June 6, 2010

The INFERNO We Do Genetically Inherit and the BEATRICE ILLUSION All Round!

The INFERNO We Do Genetically Inherit and the BEATRICE ILLUSION All Round!

Indian Holocaust My Father`s Life and Time- Three Hundred Eighty SIX

Palash Biswas

http://indianholocaustmyfatherslifeandtime.blogspot.com/

None of us may claim to produce Classic Poetry as Dante did. But we did replicate a little bit to create the same INFERNO which Dante created in his Poetry.Rather we INHERIT it Genetically! The Beatrice Illusion of Brahaminical Zionist Religion and Culture Overlapped our Lifeline and Free Market Democracy made the Exclusive Hell as Real as it seems to be in the Poetry of Dante. We are Hallucinated with the Appearance of the Lady with Light and live in Eternal darkness!

I had been little INDISPOSED perhaps because of some sun struck and climate Change phenomenon with some insertion of Rain and wind this evening while the day under scorching Sun and amidst Unbearable Humidity was absolutely engaged in hectic activities leading to Food Poison. Dysentery, Vomiting and Dehydration took over for few hours but fortunately, it may Never stop me as I often am inflicted with Back Log Work Load.

I am just introducing the topic to stimulate your SENSES and hope, that we may understand the Global Phenomenon better as well as the Aboriginal Indigenous Enslaved Humanscape Worldwide subjected to economic Ethnic Cleansing. The Present set up of Indian Republic and Government led by Super slaves of US War Economy and India Incs, MNCs and LPG Mafia may be an Excellent Case Study provided we decide to RISE above the INFERNO and dare to be Disillusioned with the Dead Beatrice Beauty and Intrigue!

Why should we discuss Inferno and Divine Comedy? French Revolution and Renaissance? Dante and Virgil? Just because the Post Modern Zionist Manusmriti order have killed those Values so much so Underlined during Italian and French Revolution and Survived even during the Great Industrialisation, World Wars, Fascist Regime in Italy and Germany, Marxist and Maoist Revolution as well. In fact the the values of Equality, Fraternity, Justice and Liberty sustained the Dreams of our Ancestors which could resist the Genome Racial  Superiority so that some Lenin and Stalin, Gandhi and Ambedkar, George Washington, Martin Luther King and Barrack Obama, Nelson Mandela and Yaser Arafat could emerge as the Scientists and alchemists of History and Time.

Unfortunately,Free  Market Corporate World Order has killed all those values. Human Species have to survive with the Darwin Kit best known as survival of the Fittest. More than One Third of Indian Landscpae still inhibited by the Aboriginal Indigenous Humanscape, Excluded as well the  other Black Untouchable SC, ST, OBC and Minority communities, underclasses, Slum Dwellers and Refugees, making Eighty Five Percent of the national Demography! Just because, the Adivasies have  Never been Hindu, the HEGEMONY manipulation of Democracy and Constitution, Governance and Policy Making, Economy and Politics, the State Power, Civil  Society, Intelligentsia and Media may not Capture them with the DEAD Beatrice!But we so called mainstream educated empowered influential minority purchasing co opted market dominating minority and Non Tribal communities co opted and converted as Hindus and divided in six thousand castes are stranded within the Infernos created with the ever unsolved Riddles of Hinduism.

And mind you, it is not a GEOPOLITICS specific Phenomenon limited to any specific Demography. What  Marxists and Maoists could NEVER do, the Political Borders have in fact Withered away and we are defined as either Emerging Market or Market in Recession and in every given situation not the State, it is the Market which Rules. Genome Superiority translated in Cultural and Economic dominance, the Hegemonies RULE worldwide and Indulge us Suicidal Unprecedented Violence to sustain the Hindu Zionist Corporate World Order Nuclear!

In Dante's Inferno, battle through the 9 circles of Hell facing fierce and hideous monsters, your own sins, and a dark past of unforgivable war crimes.Well, it is our SIN that we remain so ignorant, Unorganised, Illiterate, Disorganised and Careless! We remain Divided and Indulge ourselves in the Hindutva which Enslaved us! We are the UPROOTED People who have No Nationality, No Identity and Identify with those who owns a Hegemony Excluding us! We Visualise Beatrice Personified in Economic Reforms, Privatisation, Disinvestment and Demographic adjustment and readjustment, Parliamentary Floor Adjustment, Ideological betrayal, Reality shows, Information Technology, Knowledge economy and create the INFERNO which resembles our own Vision of Heaven and allow our own People to be Persecuted, Curbed, Excluded, Segregated, Displaced, Deported and Selected to be Killed in economic ethnic Cleansing. We do live in the World on Fire and have not the Senses to feel the Inferno within!

We are quite Happy to be thus ENSLAVED and bonded as the Illusion of Beatrice all round keep us Asleep with the dreams of Equality, Fraternity, Liberty, Inclusion and co Option! which we Never do inherit surrendering our sovereignty to Genome superiority! We believe to be in a Republic which is Killed long before. We have faith in rule Of Law which Never did exist under the Hegemony Rule! We do feel glorified to be Elevated to some status meant Power sharing and position above the level of merit and masses and try to defend the Killer system with Everything on stake!
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Dante's Inferno (2007) More at IMDbPro »

Overview

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Down 6% in popularity this week. See why on IMDbPro.
Director:
Sean Meredith
Writers:
Dante Alighieri (novel)
Sandow Birk (writer)
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Genre:
Comedy See more »
Tagline:
The epic film of a lost young man's journey through hell. See more »
Plot:
A darkly comedic travelogue of the underworld - set against an all-too-familiar urban backdrop of used car lots, gated communities, strip malls, and the U.S. Capitol. And populated with a contemporary cast of reprobates, including famous - and infamous - politicians, presidents, popes, pimps. And the Prince of Darkness himself. Full summary » | Add synopsis »
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Game Review: 'Dante's Inferno'
 (From FEARnet. 15 February 2010, 4:07 PM, PST)
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I spelled Allegeri correct the first time! See more (11 total) »

Cast

  (Credited cast)

Dermot Mulroney ... Dante (voice)

 James Cromwell ... Virgil
rest of cast listed alphabetically:

Scott Adsit ... Judge Minos (voice)

Matt Besser ... Curtis Le May (voice)

 Bill Chott ... Ciaccio (voice)
Mike Coleman ... Charon (voice)

Andrew Daly ... Jim Jones (voice)
John Fleck ... Brunetto Latini

 Tony Hale ... Pope Nicholas 3rd (voice)
Tom Hallick ... George Sanders
Brandon Johnson ... Pimp (voice)
Laura Krafft ... George Sand (voice)

Martha Plimpton ... Celia

Kit Pongetti ... Francesca (voice)
Mark Ritts ... Gianciotto
Tami Sagher ... Penelope (voice)

Dana Snyder ... Ulysses - Strom Thurmond

 Janet Varney ... Intercom (voice)

Matt Walsh ... Fox Reporter (voice)
Paul Zaloom ... Lucifer (voice)
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479008/

Inferno (Dante)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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For other uses, see Inferno.
"Dante's Inferno" redirects here. For other uses, see Dante's Inferno (disambiguation).
Gustave Doré's engravings illustrated the Divine Comedy (1861–1868); here Dante is lost in Canto 1 of the Inferno
This article is part of a series about
Dante's Divine Comedy
Inferno · Purgatorio  · Paradiso
v • d • e

Inferno (Italian for "Hell") is the first part of Dante Alighieri's fourteenth-century epic poem Divine Comedy. It is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is an allegory telling of the journey of Dante through what is largely the medieval concept of Hell, guided by the Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine circles of suffering located within the Earth. Allegorically, the Divine Comedy represents the journey of the soul towards God, with the Inferno describing the recognition and rejection of sin.[1]

Contents

[hide]

[edit] Overview and Vestibule of Hell

The poem begins on the day before Good Friday in the year 1300. The narrator, Dante Alighieri himself, is thirty-five years old, and thus "halfway along our life's path" (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita)—half of the Biblical life expectancy of seventy (Psalm 90:10). The poem finds him lost in a dark wood, assailed by three beasts (a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf) he cannot evade, and unable to find the "straight way" (diritta via)—also translatable as "right way"—to salvation. Conscious that he is ruining himself and that he is falling into a "deep place" (basso loco) where the sun is silent (l sol tace), Dante is at last rescued by the Roman poet Virgil, and the two of them begin their journey to the underworld. Each sin's punishment in Inferno is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice; for example, fortune-tellers have to walk forwards with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, because they tried to look ahead to the future in life.

The Barque of Dante by Eugène Delacroix

Dante passes through the gate of Hell, which bears an inscription, the ninth (and final) line of which is the famous phrase "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", or "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"[2] Before entering Hell completely, Dante and his guide see the Uncommitted, souls of people who in life did nothing, neither for good nor evil (among these Dante recognizes either Pope Celestine V or Pontius Pilate; the text is ambiguous). Mixed with them are outcasts who took no side in the Rebellion of Angels. These souls are neither in Hell nor out of it, but reside on the shores of the Acheron, their punishment to eternally pursue a banner (i.e. self interest) while pursued by wasps and hornets that continually sting them while maggots and other such insects drink their blood and tears. This symbolizes the sting of their conscience and the repugnance of sin. As with the Purgatorio and Paradiso, the Inferno has a structure of 9+1=10, with this "vestibule" different in nature from the nine circles of Hell, and separated from them by the Acheron.

After passing through the "vestibule," Dante and Virgil reach the ferry that will take them across the river Acheron and to Hell proper. The ferry is piloted by Charon, who does not want to let Dante enter, for he is a living being. Virgil forces Charon to take him by means of another famous line Vuolsi così colà ove si puote, which translates to "So it is wanted there where the power lies," referring to the fact that Dante is on his journey on divine grounds. The wailing and blasphemy of the damned souls entering Charon's boat are a contrast to the joyful singing of the blessed souls arriving by ferry in the Purgatorio. However, the actual passage across the Acheron is undescribed since Dante faints and does not wake up until he is on the other side.

Virgil then guides Dante through the nine circles of Hell. The circles are concentric, representing a gradual increase in wickedness, and culminating at the centre of the earth, where Satan is held in bondage. Each circle's sinners are punished in a fashion fitting their crimes: each sinner is afflicted for all of eternity by the chief sin he committed. People who sinned but prayed for forgiveness before their deaths are found not in Hell but in Purgatory, where they labour to be free of their sins. Those in Hell are people who tried to justify their sins and are unrepentant.

Allegorically, the Inferno represents the Christian soul seeing sin for what it really is, and the three beasts represent three types of sin: the self-indulgent, the violent, and the malicious.[3] These three types of sin also provide the three main divisions of Dante's Hell: Upper Hell (the first 5 Circles) for the self-indulgent sins; Circles 6 and 7 for the violent sins; and Circles 8 and 9 for the malicious sins.

[edit] The Nine Circles of Hell

[edit] First Circle (Limbo)

In Limbo reside the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans, who, though not sinful, did not accept Christ. They are not punished in an active sense, but rather grieve only because of their separation from God, without hope of reconciliation. Limbo shares many characteristics with the Asphodel Meadows; thus the guiltless damned are punished by living in a deficient form of Heaven. Without baptism ("the portal of the faith that you embrace"[4]) they lacked the hope for something greater than rational minds can conceive. Limbo includes green fields and a castle, the dwelling place of the wisest men of antiquity, including Virgil himself, as well as the Islamic philosophers Averroes and Avicenna. In the castle Dante meets the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, the Amazon queen Penthesilea, the mathematician Euclid, the philosophers Socrates and Aristotle, and many others, including Julius Caesar in his role as Roman general ("in his armor, falcon-eyed"[5]). Interestingly, he also sees Saladin in Limbo (Canto IV). Dante implies that all virtuous non-Christians find themselves here, although he later encounters two (Cato of Utica and Statius) in Purgatory and two (Trajan and Ripheus) in Heaven.

Beyond the first circle, all of those condemned for active, deliberately willed sin are judged by Minos, who sentences each soul to one of the lower eight circles by wrapping his tail around himself a corresponding number of times (Minos initially hinders the poets' passage, until rebuked by Virgil). The lower circles are structured according to the classical (Aristotelian) conception of virtue and vice, so that they are grouped into the sins of incontinence, violence, and fraud (which for many commentators are represented by the leopard, lion, and she-wolf[6]). The sins of incontinence—weakness in controlling one's desires and natural urges—are the mildest among them, and, correspondingly, appear first, while the sins of violence and fraud appear lower down.

Gianciotto Discovers Paolo and Francesca by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

[edit] Second Circle (Lust)

In the second circle of Hell are those overcome by lust. Dante condemns these "carnal malefactors"[7] for letting their appetites sway their reason. They are the first ones to be truly punished in Hell. These souls are blown about to and fro by the terrible winds of a violent storm, without hope of rest. This symbolizes the power of lust to blow one about needlessly and aimlessly.

In this circle, Dante sees Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Achilles, Paris, Tristan, and many others who were overcome by sensual love during their life. Dante is told by Francesca da Rimini how she and her husband's brother Paolo Malatesta committed adultery, but then died a violent death, in the name of Love, at the hands of her husband, Giovanni (Gianciotto). Francesca reports that their act of adultery was triggered by reading the adulterous story of Lancelot and Guinevere (an episode sculpted by Auguste Rodin in The Kiss). Nevertheless, she predicts that her husband will be punished for his fratricide in Caina, within the ninth circle (Canto V).

The third circle, illustrated by Stradanus

The English poet John Keats, in his sonnet "On a Dream," imagines what Dante does not give us, the point of view of Paolo:

"... But to that second circle of sad hell,
Where 'mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss'd, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm."[8]

[edit] Third Circle (Gluttony)

Cerberus guards the gluttons, forced to lie in a vile slush produced by ceaseless foul, icy rain (Virgil obtains safe passage past the monster by filling its three mouths with mud). In her notes on this circle, Dorothy L. Sayers writes that "the surrender to sin which began with mutual indulgence leads by an imperceptible degradation to solitary self-indulgence."[9] The gluttons lie here sightless and heedless of their neighbours, symbolising the cold, selfish, and empty sensuality of their lives.[9] Just as lust has revealed its true nature in the winds of the previous circle, here the slush reveals the true nature of sensuality – which includes not only overindulgence in food and drink, but also other kinds of addiction.[10]

In this circle, Dante converses with a Florentine contemporary identified as Ciacco, which means "hog."[11] A character with the same nickname later appears in The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio.[12] Ciacco speaks to Dante regarding strife in Florence between the "White" and "Black" Guelphs. In one of a number of prophecies in the poem, Ciacco "predicts" the expulsion of the White party, to which Dante belonged, and which led to Dante's own exile. This event occurred in 1302, after the date in which the poem is set, but before the poem was written[11] (Canto VI).

In Gustave Doré's illustrations for the fourth circle, the weights are huge money bags

[edit] Fourth Circle (Avarice and Prodigality)

Those whose attitude toward material goods deviated from the appropriate mean are punished in the fourth circle. They include the avaricious or miserly (including many "clergymen, and popes and cardinals"[13]), who hoarded possessions, and the prodigal, who squandered them. The two groups are guarded by Plutus, the Greek god of wealth (who uses the cryptic phrase Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe). The two groups joust, using as weapons great weights which they push with their chests:

"… I saw multitudes
to every side of me; their howls were loud
while, wheeling weights, they used their chests to push.
They struck against each other; at that point,
each turned around and, wheeling back those weights,
cried out: Why do you hoard? Why do you squander?' "[14]

The contrast between these two groups leads Virgil to discourse on the nature of Fortune, who raises nations to greatness, and later plunges them into poverty, as she shifts "those empty goods from nation unto nation, clan to clan."[15] This speech fills what would otherwise be a gap in the poem, since both groups are so absorbed in their activity that Virgil tells Dante that it would be pointless to try to speak to them – indeed, they have lost their individuality, and been rendered "unrecognizable"[16] (Canto VII).

The fifth circle, illustrated by Stradanus

[edit] Fifth Circle (Wrath and Sullenness)

In the swamp-like water of the river Styx, the wrathful fight each other on the surface, and the sullen lie gurgling beneath the water, withdrawn "into a black sulkiness which can find no joy in God or man or the universe."[17] Phlegyas reluctantly transports Dante and Virgil across the Styx in his skiff. On the way they are accosted by Filippo Argenti, a Black Guelph from a prominent family. When Dante responds "In weeping and in grieving, accursed spirit, may you long remain,"[18] Virgil blesses him. Literally, this reflects the fact that souls in Hell are eternally fixed in the state they have chosen, but allegorically, it reflects Dante's beginning awareness of his own sin[19] (Cantos VII and VIII).

The lower parts of Hell are contained within the walls of the city of Dis, which is itself surrounded by the Stygian marsh. Punished within Dis are active (rather than passive) sins. The walls of Dis are guarded by fallen angels. Virgil is unable to convince them to let Dante and him enter, and the Furies and Medusa threaten Dante. An angel sent from Heaven secures entry for the poets, opening the gate by touching it with a wand, and rebuking those who opposed Dante. Allegorically, this reveals the fact that the poem is beginning to deal with sins that philosophy and humanism cannot fully understand[19] (Cantos VIII and IX).

[edit] Sixth Circle (Heresy)

In the sixth circle, Heretics, such as Epicurians (who "say the soul dies with the body"[20]) are trapped in flaming tombs. Dante holds discourse with a pair of Epicurian Florentines in one of the tombs: Farinata degli Uberti, a Ghibelline (posthumously condemned for heresy in 1283); and Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, a Guelph, who was the father of Dante's friend and fellow poet Guido Cavalcanti. The political affiliation of these two men allows for a further discussion of Florentine politics (Canto X).

In response to a question from Dante about the "prophecy" he has received, Cavalcante explains that what the souls in Hell know of life on earth comes from seeing the future, not from any observation of the present. Consequently, when "the portal of the future has been shut,"[21] it will no longer be possible for them to know anything.

Lower Hell, inside the walls of Dis, in an illustration by Stradanus. There is a drop from the sixth circle to the three rings of the seventh circle, then again to the ten rings of the eighth circle, and, at the bottom, to the icy ninth circle.

Pausing for a moment before the steep descent to the foul-smelling seventh circle, Virgil explains the geography and rationale of Lower Hell, in which violent and malicious sins are punished. In this explanation, he refers to the Nicomachean Ethics and the Physics of Aristotle (Canto XI). In particular, he asserts that there are only two legitimate sources of wealth: natural resources ("nature") and human activity ("art"). Usury, to be punished in the next circle, is therefore an offence against both:[22]

"From these two, art and nature, it is fitting,
if you recall how Genesis begins,
for men to make their way, to gain their living;
and since the usurer prefers another
pathway, he scorns both nature in herself
and art her follower; his hope is elsewhere."[23]

[edit] Seventh Circle (Violence)

The seventh circle houses the violent. Its entry is guarded by the Minotaur, and it is divided into three rings:

  • Outer ring: This ring houses the violent against people and property, who are immersed in Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood, to a level commensurate with their sins: Alexander the Great is immersed up to his eyebrows. The Centaurs, commanded by Chiron, patrol the ring, firing arrows into those trying to escape. The centaur Nessus guides the poets along Phlegethon and across a ford in the river (Canto XII). This passage may have been influenced by the early medieval Visio Karoli Grossi.[24]
The Gianfigliazzi family was identified by a heraldic device of a lion (blue on yellow background).
  • Middle ring: In this ring are the suicides (the violent against self), who are transformed into gnarled thorny bushes and trees, which are fed on by the Harpies. Unique among the dead, the suicides will not be bodily resurrected after the final judgement, having given their bodies away through suicide. Instead they will maintain their bushy form, with their own corpses hanging from the limbs. Dante breaks a twig off one of the bushes and from the broken, bleeding, branch hears the tale of Pier delle Vigne, who committed suicide after falling out of favour with Emperor Frederick II (his presence here, rather than in the ninth circle, indicates that Dante believes that the accusations made against him were false[25]). The trees are a metaphor for the state of mind in which suicide is committed.[26] The other residents of this ring are the profligates, who destroyed their lives by destroying the means by which life is sustained (i.e. money and property). They are perpetually chased by ferocious dogs through the thorny undergrowth (Canto XIII).
  • Inner ring: Here the violent against God (blasphemers) and the violent against nature (sodomites and, as explained in the sixth circle, usurers) all reside in a desert of flaming sand with fiery flakes raining from the sky. The blasphemers lie on the sand, the usurers sit, and the sodomites wander about in groups. Dante converses with two Florentine sodomites from different groups. One of them is Dante's mentor, Brunetto Latini. Dante is very surprised and touched by this encounter and shows Brunetto great respect for what he has taught him ("you taught me how man makes himself eternal; / and while I live, my gratitude for that / must always be apparent in my words"[27]), thus refuting suggestions that Dante only placed his enemies in Hell.[28] The other sodomite is Iacopo Rusticucci, a politician, who blames his wife for his fate. Those punished here for usury include the Florentines Catello di Rosso Gianfigliazzi, Ciappo Ubriachi, and Giovanni di Buiamonte; and the Paduans Reginaldo degli Scrovegni and Vitaliano di Iacopo Vitaliani. They are identified not primarily by name, but by heraldic devices emblazoned on the purses around their necks – purses which "their eyes seemed to feast upon"[29] (Cantos XIV through XVII).

[edit] Eighth Circle (Fraud)

The last two circles of Hell punish sins that involve conscious fraud or treachery. These circles can be reached only by descending a vast cliff, which Dante and Virgil do on the back of Geryon, a winged monster traditionally represented as having three heads or three conjoined bodies,[30] but described by Dante as having three mixed natures: human, bestial, and reptile.[30] Geryon is an image of fraud, with his face appearing to be that of an honest man, and his body beautifully coloured, but with a poisonous sting in his tail[31] (Canto XVII).

Jason and Medea, by John William Waterhouse (1907).
Dante's guide rebuffs Malacoda and his fiends between Bolgie 5 and 6, Canto 21.
Dante climbs the flinty steps in Bolgia 7, Canto 26.
Dante sees the Trojan Horse as an evil trick, punished in Bolgie 8 and 10 (The Fall of Troy, by Johann Georg Trautmann).

The fraudulent—those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil—are located in a circle named Malebolge ("Evil Pockets"), divided into ten Bolgie, or ditches of stone, with bridges spanning the ditches:

  • Bolgia 1: Panderers (pimps) and seducers march in separate lines in opposite directions, whipped by demons (Dante makes reference here to a recent traffic rule developed for the Jubilee year of 1300 in Rome: keep to the right[32]). Just as the panderers and seducers used the passions of others to drive them to do their bidding, they are themselves driven by demons to march for all eternity.[32] In the group of panderers, the poets notice Venedico Caccianemico, who sold his own sister to the Marchese d'Este. In the group of seducers, Virgil points out Jason, who gained the help of Medea by seducing and marrying her, only to later desert her for Creusa.[32] Jason also seduced Hypsipyle, but "abandoned her, alone and pregnant"[33] (Canto XVIII).
  • Bolgia 2: Flatterers also exploited other people, this time using language. They are steeped in human excrement, which represents the words they produced.[32] Dorothy L. Sayers, who worked in the advertising industry, comments "Dante did not live to see the full development of political propaganda, commercial advertisement, and sensational journalism, but he has prepared a place for them"[32] (Canto XVIII).
  • Bolgia 4: Sorcerers, astrologers, and false prophets here have their heads twisted around on their bodies backward, so that they "found it necessary to walk backward, / because they could not see ahead of them."[36] While referring primarily to attempts to see into the future by forbidden means, this also symbolises the twisted nature of magic in general.[37] In this Bolgia, Dante sees Amphiaraus, Tiresias, Michael Scot, and Guido Bonatti, among others (Canto XX).
  • Bolgia 5: Corrupt politicians (barrators) are immersed in a lake of boiling pitch, which represents the sticky fingers and dark secrets of their corrupt deals.[38] The barrators are the political analogue of the simoniacs, and Dante devotes several cantos to them. They are guarded by devils called the Malebranche ("Evil Claws"), who provide some savage and satirical black comedy. The leader of the Malebranche, Malacoda ("Evil Tail"), assigns a troop to escort Virgil and Dante safely to the next bridge. The troop hook and torment one of the sinners (identified by early commentators as Ciampolo), who names some Italian grafters and then tricks the Malebranche in order to escape back into the pitch. The promise of safe conduct the poets have received from the demons turns out to have limited value (and there is no "next bridge"[39]), so that the poets are forced to scramble down into the sixth Bolgia (Cantos XXI through XXIII).
  • Bolgia 6: In the sixth Bolgia, the poets find the hypocrites listlessly walking along wearing gilded lead cloaks, which represent the falsity behind the surface appearance of their actions – falsity that weighs them down and makes spiritual progress impossible for them.[39] Dante speaks with Catalano and Loderingo, two members of the Jovial Friars, an order which had acquired a reputation for not living up to its vows,[39] and which was eventually suppressed by Pope Sixtus V. Caiaphas, the high priest responsible for ordering Jesus crucified, is also seen here, crucified to the ground and trampled (Canto XXIII).
  • Bolgia 7: Two cantos are devoted to the thieves, who are guarded by the centaur Cacus, who has a fire-breathing dragon on his shoulders (in Roman mythology, Cacus was not a centaur, but a fire-breathing monster slain by Heracles). The thieves are pursued and bitten by snakes and lizards. The full horror of the thieves' punishment is revealed gradually: just as they stole other people's substance in life, their very identity becomes subject to theft here,[40] and the snake bites make them undergo various transformations. Vanni Fucci is turned to ashes and resurrected; Agnello is blended with the six-legged reptile that is Cianfa; and Buoso exchanges shapes with the four-legged Francesco: "The soul that had become an animal, / now hissing, hurried off along the valley; / the other one, behind him, speaks and spits."[41] (Cantos XXIV and XXV).
  • Bolgia 8: Two further cantos are devoted to the fraudulent advisers or evil councillors, who are concealed within individual flames. These are not people who gave false advice, but people who used their position to advise others to engage in fraud.[42] Ulysses and Diomedes are condemned here for the deception of the Trojan Horse. Ulysses also tells the tale of his fatal final voyage (an invention of Dante's), where he left his home and family to sail to the end of the Earth, only to have his ship founder near Mount Purgatory. Guido da Montefeltro recounts how he advised Pope Boniface VIII to capture the fortress of Palestrina, by offering the Colonna family inside it a false amnesty, and then razing it to the ground after they surrendered. Guido became a Franciscan in 1296, and died two years later. Guido describes St. Francis as coming to take his soul to Heaven, only to have a demon assert prior claim. Although Boniface had absolved Guido in advance for his evil advice, Dante points out the invalidity of that, since absolution requires contrition, and a man cannot be contrite for a sin at the same time that he is intending to commit it[43] (Cantos XXVI and XXVII).
  • Bolgia 9: In the ninth Bolgia, a sword-wielding demon hacks at the sowers of discord, dividing parts of their bodies as in life they divided others.[44] As they make their rounds the wounds heal, only to have the demon tear apart their bodies again. Dante encounters Muhammad, who tells him to warn the schismatic and heretic Fra Dolcino. Dante describes Muhammad as a schismatic,[44][45] apparently viewing Islam as an off-shoot from Christianity, and similarly Dante seems to condemn Ali for schism between Sunni and Shiite (for more on Dante's relationship to Islam, see the relevant section of the main article). In this Bolgia, Dante also encounters Bertran de Born, who carries around his severed head like a lantern, as a punishment for (Dante believes) fomenting the rebellion of Henry the Young King against his father Henry II (Cantos XXVIII and XXIX).
  • Bolgia 10: In the final Bolgia, various sorts of falsifiers (alchemists, counterfeiters, perjurers, and impersonators), who are a "disease" on society, are themselves afflicted with different types of diseases.[46] Potiphar's wife is briefly mentioned here for her false accusation of Joseph, as is Sinon, the Greek spy who tricked the Trojans into taking the Trojan Horse into their city (Sinon is here, rather than in Bolgia 8, because his advice was false as well as evil). In the notes on her translation, Dorothy L. Sayers remarks that the descent through Malebolge "began with the sale of the sexual relationship, and went on to the sale of Church and State; now, the very money is itself corrupted, every affirmation has become perjury, and every identity a lie;"[46] so that every aspect of social interaction has been progressively destroyed (Cantos XXIX and XXX).
Dante speaks to the traitors in the ice, Canto 32.

[edit] Ninth Circle (Betrayal)

The Ninth Circle is ringed by classical and Biblical giants, who perhaps symbolise the pride and other spiritual flaws lying behind acts of treachery.[47] The giants are standing on a ledge above the ninth circle of Hell,[48] so that from the Malebolge they are visible from the waist up. They include Nimrod, as well as Ephialtes, who with his brother Otus tried to storm Olympus. The giant Antaeus lowers Dante and Virgil into the pit that forms the ninth circle of Hell (Canto XXXI).

The traitors are distinguished from the "merely" fraudulent in that their acts involve betraying a special relationship of some kind. There are four concentric zones (or "rounds") of traitors, corresponding, in order of seriousness, to betrayal of family ties, betrayal of community ties, betrayal of guests, and betrayal of liege lords. In contrast to the popular image of Hell as fiery, the traitors are frozen in a lake of ice known as Cocytus, with each group encased in ice to progressively greater depths.

  • Round 1 is named Caïna, after Cain, who killed his brother. Traitors to kindred are here immersed in the ice up to their faces – "the place / where shame can show itself"[49] Mordred, who attacked his relative King Arthur, is one of the traitors here: "him who, at one blow, had chest and shadow / shattered by Arthur's hand;"[50] (Canto XXXII).
  • Round 2 is named Antenora, after Antenor of Troy, who according to medieval tradition, betrayed his city to the Greeks. Traitors to political entities, such as party, city, or country, are located here. Count Ugolino pauses from gnawing on the head of his rival Archbishop Ruggieri to describe how Ruggieri imprisoned him along with his children, condemning them to death by starvation. A number of correspondences, such as allusions to the same passage of the Aeneid, link this passage to the story of Paolo and Francesca in the second circle,[51] indicating that this icy hell of betrayal is the final result of consent to sin[51] (Cantos XXXII and XXXIII).
  • Round 3 is named Ptolomaea, probably after Ptolemy, son of Abubus, who invited Simon Maccabaeus and his sons to a banquet and then killed them.[51] Traitors to their guests are punished here, lying supine in the ice, which covers them, except for their faces. They are punished more severely than the previous traitors, since the relationship to guests is an entirely voluntary one.[52] Fra Alberigo, who had armed soldiers kill his brother at a banquet, explains that sometimes a soul falls here before Atropos cuts the thread of life. Their bodies on Earth are immediately possessed by a demon, so what seems to be a walking man has reached the stage of being incapable of repentance (Canto XXXIII).
  • Round 4 is named Judecca, after Judas Iscariot, Biblical betrayer of Christ. Here are the traitors to their lords and benefactors. All of the sinners punished within are completely encapsulated in ice, distorted in all conceivable positions. With no one to talk to here, Dante and Virgil quickly move on to the centre of Hell (Canto XXXIV).
Satan is trapped in the frozen central zone in the Ninth Circle of Hell, Canto 34.

In the very centre of Hell, condemned for committing the ultimate sin (personal treachery against God), is Satan (Lucifer). Satan is described as a giant, terrifying beast with three faces, one red, one black, and one a pale yellow:

he had three faces: one in front bloodred;
and then another two that, just above
the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first;
and at the crown, all three were reattached;
the right looked somewhat yellow, somewhat white;
the left in its appearance was like those
who come from where the Nile, descending, flows.[53]

Satan is waist deep in ice, weeping tears from his six eyes, and beating his six wings as if trying to escape, although the icy wind that emanates only further ensures his imprisonment (as well as that of the others in the ring). Each face has a mouth that chews on a prominent traitor, with Brutus and Cassius feet-first in the left and right mouths respectively. These men were involved in the assassination of Julius Caesar—an act which, to Dante, represented the destruction of a unified Italy and the killing of the man who was divinely appointed to govern the world.[54] In the central, most vicious mouth is Judas Iscariot—the namesake of Judecca and the betrayer of Jesus. Judas is being administered the most horrifying torture of the three traitors, his head gnawed by Satan's mouth, and his back being forever skinned by Satan's claws. What is seen here is a perverted trinity: Satan is impotent, ignorant, and full of hate, in contrast to the all-powerful, all-knowing, and loving nature of God.[54]

The two poets escape Hell by climbing down Satan's ragged fur, passing through the centre of the earth (with a consequent change in the direction of gravity), and emerge in the other hemisphere (described in the Purgatorio) just before dawn on Easter Sunday, beneath a sky studded with stars (Canto XXXIV).

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on page 19.
  2. ^ There are many English translations of this famous line. Some examples include
    3. Verbatim, the line translates as "Leave (lasciate) every (ogne) hope (speranza), ye (voi) that (ch') enter (intrate)."
  3. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on page 75.
  4. ^ Inferno, Canto IV, line 36, Mandelbaum translation.
  5. ^ Inferno, Canto IV, line 123, Mandelbaum translation.
  6. ^ There is no general agreement on which animals represent the sins incontinence, violence, and fraud. Some see it as the she-wolf, lion, and leopard respectively, while others see it as the leopard, lion, and she-wolf respectively.
  7. ^ Inferno, Canto V, lines 38–39, Longfellow translation.
  8. ^ John Keats, On a Dream.
  9. ^ a b Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto VI.
  10. ^ John Ciardi, Inferno, introduction, p. xi.
  11. ^ a b Wallace Fowlie, A Reading of Dante's Inferno, University Of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 51–52.
  12. ^ Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, Ninth Day, Novel VIII.
  13. ^ Inferno, Canto VII, line 47, Mandelbaum translation.
  14. ^ Inferno, Canto VII, lines 25–30, Mandelbaum translation.
  15. ^ Inferno, Canto VII, lines 79–80, Mandelbaum translation.
  16. ^ Inferno, Canto VII, lines 54, Mandelbaum translation.
  17. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto VII.
  18. ^ Inferno, Canto VIII, lines 37–38, Mandelbaum translation.
  19. ^ a b Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto VIII.
  20. ^ Inferno, Canto X, line 15, Mandelbaum translation.
  21. ^ Inferno, Canto X, lines 103–108, Mandelbaum translation.
  22. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XI.
  23. ^ Inferno, Canto XI, lines 106–111, Mandelbaum translation.
  24. ^ The punishment of immersion was not typically ascribed in Dante's age to the violent, but the Visio attaches it to those who facere praelia et homicidia et rapinas pro cupiditate terrena ("make battle and murder and rapine because of worldly cupidity"). Theodore Silverstein (1936), "Inferno, XII, 100–126, and the Visio Karoli Crassi," Modern Language Notes, 51:7, 449–452, and Theodore Silverstein (1939), "The Throne of the Emperor Henry in Dante's Paradise and the Mediaeval Conception of Christian Kingship," Harvard Theological Review, 32:2, 115–129, suggests that Dante's interest in contemporary politics would have attracted him to a piece like the Visio. Its popularity assures that Dante would have had access to it. Jacques Le Goff, Goldhammer, Arthur, tr. (1986), The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0 226 47083 0), states definitively that ("we know [that]") Dante read it.
  25. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XIII.
  26. ^ Wallace Fowlie, A Reading of Dante's Inferno, University Of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 224.
  27. ^ Inferno, Canto XV, lines 85–87, Mandelbaum translation.
  28. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XV.
  29. ^ Inferno, Canto XVII, line 57, Mandelbaum translation.
  30. ^ a b Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XVII.
  31. ^ Wallace Fowlie, A Reading of Dante's Inferno, University Of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 117.
  32. ^ a b c d e Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XVIII.
  33. ^ Inferno, Canto XVIII, line 94, Mandelbaum translation.
  34. ^ Inferno, Canto XIX, lines 2–6, Mandelbaum translation: "Rapacious ones, who take the things of God, / that ought to be the brides of Righteousness, / and make them fornicate for gold and silver! / The time has come to let the trumpet sound / for you; ..."
  35. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XIX.
  36. ^ Inferno, Canto XX, lines 14–15, Mandelbaum translation.
  37. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XX.
  38. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XXI.
  39. ^ a b c Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XXIII.
  40. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XXIV.
  41. ^ Inferno, Canto XXV, lines 136–138, Mandelbaum translation.
  42. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XXVI.
  43. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XXVII.
  44. ^ a b Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XXVIII.
  45. ^ Wallace Fowlie, A Reading of Dante's Inferno, University Of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 178.
  46. ^ a b Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XXIX.
  47. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XXXI.
  48. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XXXII.
  49. ^ Inferno, Canto XXXII, lines 34–35, Mandelbaum translation.
  50. ^ Inferno, Canto XXXII, lines 61–62, Mandelbaum translation.
  51. ^ a b c Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XXXIII.
  52. ^ Wallace Fowlie, A Reading of Dante's Inferno, University Of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 209.
  53. ^ Inferno, Canto XXXIV, lines 39–45, Mandelbaum translation.
  54. ^ a b Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto XXXIV.

[edit] External links

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Portrait de Dante.jpg Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)
Works in Latin: De vulgari eloquentia • De Monarchia • Eclogues • Letters
Works in Italian: La Vita Nuova • Le Rime • Convivio
Divina Commedia: Inferno • Purgatorio • Paradiso
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Beatrice Portinari

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Beatrice Portinari

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beata Beatrix, 1863.
BornBeatrice di Folco Portinari
1265/66
Florence
DiedJune 1290 (age 24)
Florence
Other namesBice (nickname)
Known forInspiration for Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy
Spouse(s)Simone dei Bardi (m.1287)
ParentsFather: Folco di Ricovero Portinari

Beatrice "Bice" di Folco Portinari[1] (1266–1290) was a Florentine woman and the principal inspiration for Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova. Beatrice also appears as his guide in Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia) in the last book, Paradise, and in the last four canti of Purgatory. There she takes over as guide from the Latin poet Virgil because, as a pagan, Virgil cannot enter Paradise and because, being the incarnation of beatific love, as her name implies, it is Beatrice who leads into the Beatific vision.

Contents

[hide]

[edit] Biography

[edit] Life

Although not unanimous, the tradition that identifies Bice di Folco Portinari with the Beatrice loved by Dante is now generally accepted by scholars. Boccaccio, in his commentary on the Divine Comedy, explicitly refers to the young woman. Clear documents on her life have always been scarce, helping make even her existence doubtful. The only hard evidence is the will of Folco Portinari from 1287 which says " ..item d. Bici filie sue et uxoris d. Simonis del Bardis reliquite ..., lib.50 ad floren" - essentially a bequest to his daughter who was married to Simone dei Bardi. Folco Portinari was a rich banker, born in Portico di Romagna. He moved to Florence and lived in a house near Dante where he had six daughters. Folco also gave generously to found the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Beatrice was related to the other family of great bankers, the Bardi.

[edit] Beatrice and Dante

According to Dante, he first met Beatrice at the age of nine when his father took him to the Portinari house for a May Day party. At the time, Beatrice was eight years old, a year younger than Dante. Dante was instantly taken with her and remained so throughout her life even though she married another man, banker Simone dei Bardi, in 1287. Beatrice died three years later in June of 1290 at the age of 24. Dante continued to hold an abiding love and respect for the woman after her death, even after he himself married Gemma Donati in 1285 and had his own children. After Beatrice's death, Dante withdrew into intense study and began composing poems dedicated to her memory. The collection of these poems along with others he had previously written in his journal in awe of Beatrice became La Vita Nuova.

Dante and Beatrice, by Henry Holiday. Dante looks longingly at Beatrice (in center) passing by with friend Lady Vanna (red) along the Arno River

According to the autobiographic La Vita Nuova, Beatrice and Dante met only twice during their lives. Even less credible is the numerology behind these encounters, marking out Dante's life in periods of nine years. This amount of time falls in line with Dante's repeated use of the number three or multiples of, derived from the Holy Trinity. It is more likely that the encounters with Beatrice that Dante writes of are the two that fulfill his poetic vision, and Beatrice, like Petrarch's Laura, seem to blur the line between an actual love interest and a means employed by the poet in his creations.

Beatrice used to pray at Santa Margherita de' Cerchi where she is interred

Following their first meeting, Dante was so enthralled by Beatrice that he later wrote in La Vita Nuova: Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi ("Behold, a deity stronger than I; who coming, shall rule over me.") Indeed, she and Dante frequented parts of Florence, his home city, where he thought he might catch even a glimpse of her. As he did so, he made great efforts to ensure his thoughts of Beatrice remained private, even writing poetry for another lady, so as to use her as a "screen for the truth".

Dante's courtly love for Beatrice continued for nine years, before the pair finally met again. This meeting occurred in a street of Florence, which she walked along dressed in white and accompanied by two older women. She turned and greeted him. Her greeting filled him with such joy that he retreated to his room, to think about her. In doing so, he fell asleep, and had a dream which would become the subject of the first sonnet in La Vita Nuova.

In this dream, a mighty figure appeared before him, and spoke to him. Although he could not make out all the figure said, he managed to hear "Ego dominus tuus", which means "I am your Lord". In the figure's arms was Beatrice, sleeping and covered by a crimson cloth. The figure awoke Beatrice, and made her eat Dante's burning heart. An English translation of this event, as described in La Vita Nuova, appears below:

Tomb of Beatrice in Santa Margherita de' Cerchi.

This was the last encounter between the pair, since Beatrice died eight years later at the young age of twenty-four in 1290.

...And betaking me to the loneliness of mine own room, I fell to thinking of this most courteous lady, thinking of whom I was overtaken by a pleasant slumber, wherein a marvelous vision was presented to me: for there appeared to be in my room a mist of the colour of fire, within the which I discerned the figure of a Lord of terrible aspect to such as should gaze upon him, but who seemed there-withal to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see. Speaking he said many things, among the which I could understand but few; and of these, this: "I am thy Lord". In his arms it seemed to me that a person was sleeping, covered only with a crimson cloth; upon whom looking very attentively, I knew that it was the Lady of the Salutation, who had deigned the day before to salute me. And he who held her held also in his hand a thing that was burning in flames, and he said to me "Behold thy heart". But when he had remained with me a little while, I thought that he set himself to awaken her that slept; after the which he made her to eat that thing which flamed in his hand; and she ate as one fearing.

The manner in which Dante chose to express his love for Beatrice often agreed with the Middle Ages concept of courtly love. Courtly love was a secret, unrequited and highly respectful form of admiration for another person. Yet it is still not entirely clear what caused Dante to fall in love with Beatrice. Since he knew very little of the real Beatrice, and that he had no great insight to her character, it is perhaps unusual that he did. But he did, and there are clues in his works as to why:

"She has ineffable courtesy, is my beatitude, the destroyer of all vices and the queen of virtue, salvation."

Dante saw Beatrice as a saviour, one who removed all evil intentions from him. It is perhaps this idea of her being a force for good that he fell in love with, a force which he believed made him a better person. This is certainly viable, since he does not seem concerned with her appearance - at least not in his writings. He only once describes her complexion, and her "emerald" eyes.

[edit] Influence on Dante's work

Beatrice appears to Virgil at the start of Paradiso, in an illustration by Gustave Doré.

Beatrice's influence was far from simple inspiration, she appeared as a character in his two greatest works—La Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy.

She first appeared in La Vita Nuova, which Dante wrote in about 1293. The book was filled with poems about Beatrice, and entirely complimentary to her; she was described as "gentilissima" and "benedetta" (meaning "kind" and "blessed" respectively).

Having already referred to Beatrice as his salvation, this idea is further touched upon in Divine Comedy, where she appears as a guide through Heaven. Here she is described as being "maternal, radiant and comforting".

Although they converse in personal terms, this is no more than the imagination of Dante. Since their relationship had no contact, the Beatrice of his works was shaped entirely by his own mind. He once called her "La gloriosa donna della mia mente", which means "the glorious lady of my mind".

[edit] Wider influence

Beatrice Portinari has been immortalized not only in Dante's poems but in paintings by Pre-Raphaelite masters and poets in the nineteenth century.

Subjects taken from Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova (which Rossetti had translated into English) and mostly the idealisation of Beatrice Portinari had inspired a great deal Dante Gabriel Rossetti's art in the 1850s, in particular after the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as "Beata Beatrix".

[edit] References

  1. ^ [1]
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Dante Alighieri

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"Dante" redirects here. For other uses, see Dante (disambiguation).
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Dante Alighieri
head-and-chest side portrait of Dante in red and white coat and cowl
Dante Alighieri, painted by Giotto in the chapel of the Bargello palace in Florence. This oldest portrait of Dante was painted during his lifetime before his exile from his native city.
Bornmid-May to mid-June 1265
Florence
Died September 14, 1321 (aged about 56)
Ravenna
Occupation Statesman, poet, language theorist
Nationality Italian


Dante Alighieri (May/June c.1265 – September 14, 1321), commonly known as Dante, was an Italian poet of the Middle Ages. He was born in Florence. He died and is buried in Ravenna. The name Dante is, according to the words of Jacopo Alighieri, a hypocorism for Durante. In contemporary documents it is followed by the patronymic Alagherii or de Alagheriis; it was Boccaccio who popularized the form Alighieri.

His Divine Comedy, originally called Commedia by the author and later nicknamed Divina by Boccaccio, is often considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature.[1]

In Italy he is known as "the Supreme Poet" (il Sommo Poeta) or just il Poeta. Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio are also known as "the three fountains" or "the three crowns". Dante is also called the "Father of the Italian language".

Contents

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[edit] Life

The exact date of Dante's birth is not known, although it is generally believed to be around 1265. This can be deduced from autobiographic allusions in La Divina Commedia, "the Inferno" (Halfway through the journey we are living, implying that Dante was around 35 years old, as the average lifespan according to the Bible (Psalms 89:10, Vulgate) is 70 years, and as the imaginary travel took place in 1300 Dante must have been born around 1265). Some verses of the Paradiso section of the Divine Comedy also provide a possible clue that he was born under the sign of Gemini - "As I revolved with the eternal twins, I saw revealed from hills to river outlets, the threshing-floor that makes us so ferocious", XXII 151-154), but these cannot be considered definitive statements by Dante about his birth. However, in 1265 the Sun was in Gemini approximately during the period 11 May to 11 June. His birth date is listed as "probably in the end of May" by Robert Hollander in "Dante" in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, volume 4. In summary, most students of Dante's life believe that he was born between about the middle of May and about the middle of June 1265, but there is little likelihood a definite date will ever be known.

A portrait of Dante, from a fresco in Palazzo dei Giudici, Florence

Dante claimed that his family descended from the ancient Romans (Inferno, XV, 76), but the earliest relative he could mention by name was Cacciaguida degli Elisei (Paradiso, XV, 135), of no earlier than about 1100. Dante's father, Alighiero di Bellincione, was a White Guelph who suffered no reprisals after the Ghibellines won the Battle of Montaperti in the mid 13th century. This suggests that Alighiero or his family enjoyed some protective prestige and status.

Dante's family was prominent in Florence, with loyalties to the Guelphs, a political alliance that supported the Papacy and which was involved in complex opposition to the Ghibellines, who were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor. The poet's mother was Bella degli Abati. She died when Dante was not yet ten years old, and Alighiero soon married again, to Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. It is uncertain whether he really married her, as widowers had social limitations in these matters. This woman definitely bore two children, Dante's brother Francesco and sister Tana (Gaetana). When Dante was 12, he was promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, daughter of Messer (Sir) Manetto Donati. Contracting marriages at this early age was quite common and involved a formal ceremony, including contracts signed before a notary. Dante had already fallen in love with another woman, Beatrice Portinari (known also as Bice). Years after his marriage to Gemma, he met Beatrice again. He had become interested in writing verse, and although he wrote several sonnets to Beatrice, he never mentioned his wife Gemma in any of his poems.


Dante on the Italian €2.00 coin based on a portrait by Raphael

Dante fought in the front rank of the Guelph cavalry at the battle of Campaldino (June 11, 1289). This victory brought forth a reformation of the Florentine constitution. To take any part in public life, one had to be enrolled in one of "the arts". So Dante entered the guild of physicians and apothecaries. In following years, his name is frequently found recorded as speaking or voting in the various councils of the republic.

Dante had several children with Gemma. As often happens with significant figures, many people subsequently claimed to be Dante's offspring; however, it is likely that Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni and Antonia were truly his children. Antonia became a nun with the name of Sister Beatrice.

[edit] Education and poetry

Not much is known about Dante's education, and it is presumed he studied at home. It is known that he studied Tuscan poetry, at a time when the Sicilian School (Scuola poetica Siciliana), a cultural group from Sicily, was becoming known in Tuscany. His interests brought him to discover the Occitan poetry of the troubadours and the Latin poetry of classical antiquity (with a particular devotion to Virgil).

During the "Secoli Bui" (Dark Ages), Italy had become a mosaic of small states, Sicily being the largest one, at the time under Angevin rule, and as far (culturally and politically) from Tuscany as Occitania was: the regions did not share a language,[citation needed] culture or easy communications. Nevertheless, we can assume that Dante was a keen up-to-date intellectual with international interests.

Statue of Dante at the Uffizi, Florence

When he was nine years old he met Beatrice Portinari, daughter of Folco Portinari, with whom he fell in love "at first sight", and apparently without even having spoken to her. He saw her frequently after age 18, often exchanging greetings in the street, but he never knew her well; he effectively set the example for the so-called "courtly love". It is hard now to understand what this love actually consisted of, but something extremely important was happening within Italian culture. It was in the name of this love that Dante gave his imprint to the "Dolce Stil Novo" (Sweet New Style) and would lead poets and writers to discover the themes of Love (Amore), which had never been so emphasized before. Love for Beatrice (as in a different manner Petrarch would show for his Laura) would apparently be the reason for poetry and for living, together with political passions. In many of his poems, she is depicted as semi-divine, watching over him constantly. When Beatrice died in 1290, Dante tried to find a refuge in Latin literature. The Convivio reveals that he had read Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae and Cicero's De amicitia. He then dedicated himself to philosophical studies at religious schools like the Dominican one in Santa Maria Novella. He took part in the disputes that the two principal mendicant orders (Franciscan and Dominican) publicly or indirectly held in Florence, the former explaining the doctrine of the mystics and of Saint Bonaventure, the latter presenting Saint Thomas Aquinas' theories.

At 18, Dante met Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia and soon after Brunetto Latini; together they became the leaders of the Dolce Stil Novo. Brunetto later received a special mention in the Divine Comedy (Inferno, XV, 28), for what he had taught Dante. Nor speaking less on that account, I go With Ser Brunetto, and I ask who are His most known and most eminent companions. Some fifty poetical components by Dante are known (the so-called Rime, rhymes), others being included in the later Vita Nuova and Convivio. Other studies are reported, or deduced from Vita Nuova or the Comedy, regarding painting and music.

[edit] Florence and politics

Dante, like most Florentines of his day, was embroiled in the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict. He fought in the battle of Campaldino (June 11, 1289), with the Florentine Guelphs against Arezzo Ghibellines, then in 1294 he was among the escorts of Charles Martel of Anjou (grandson of Charles I of Naples more commonly called Charles of Anjou) while he was in Florence. To further his political career, he became a pharmacist. He did not intend to actually practice as one, but a law issued in 1295 required that nobles who wanted public office had to be enrolled in one of the Corporazioni delle Arti e dei Mestieri, so Dante obtained admission to the apothecaries' guild. This profession was not entirely inapt, since at that time books were sold from apothecaries' shops. As a politician, he accomplished little, but he held various offices over a number of years in a city undergoing political unrest.

Dante Alighieri, detail from a Luca Signorelli's affresco della cappella di San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto

After defeating the Ghibellines, the Guelphs divided into two factions: the White Guelphs (Guelfi Bianchi) -- Dante's party, led by Vieri dei Cerchi -- and the Black Guelphs (Guelfi Neri), led by Corso Donati. Although initially the split was along family lines, ideological differences rose based on opposing views of the papal role in Florentine affairs, with the Blacks supporting the Pope and the Whites wanting more freedom from Rome. Initially the Whites were in power and expelled the Blacks. In response, Pope Boniface VIII planned a military occupation of Florence. In 1301, Charles de Valois, brother of Philip the Fair king of France, was expected to visit Florence because the Pope had appointed him peacemaker for Tuscany. But the city's government had treated the Pope's ambassadors badly a few weeks before, seeking independence from papal influence. It was believed that Charles de Valois would eventually have received other unofficial instructions. So the council sent a delegation to Rome to ascertain the Pope's intentions. Dante was one of the delegates.

[edit] Exile and death

Boniface quickly dismissed the other delegates and asked Dante alone to remain in Rome. At the same time (November 1, 1301), Charles de Valois entered Florence with Black Guelphs, who in the next six days destroyed much of the city and killed many of their enemies. A new Black Guelph government was installed and Messer Cante de' Gabrielli da Gubbio was appointed Podestà of Florence. Dante was condemned to exile for two years, and ordered to pay a large fine. The poet was still in Rome, where the Pope had "suggested" he stay, and was therefore considered an absconder. He did not pay the fine, in part because he believed he was not guilty, and in part because all his assets in Florence had been seized by the Black Guelphs. He was condemned to perpetual exile, and if he returned to Florence without paying the fine, he could be burned at the stake. (The city council of Florence finally passed a motion rescinding Dante's sentence in June 2008.[2])

A recreated death mask of Dante Alighieri (in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence)

He took part in several attempts by the White Guelphs to regain power, but these failed due to treachery. Dante, bitter at the treatment he received from his enemies, also grew disgusted with the infighting and ineffectiveness of his erstwhile allies, and vowed to become a party of one. Dante went to Verona as a guest of Bartolomeo I della Scala, then moved to Sarzana in Liguria. Later, he is supposed to have lived in Lucca with a lady called Gentucca, who made his stay comfortable (and was later gratefully mentioned in Purgatorio, XXIV, 37). Some speculative sources claim he visited Paris between 1308 and 1310 and others, even less trustworthy, take him to Oxford: these claims, first occurring in Boccacio's book on Dante several decades after his death, seem inspired by readers being impressed with the poet's wide learning and erudition. Evidently Dante's command of philosophy and his literary interests deepened in exile, when he was no longer busy with the day-to-day business of Florentine domestic politics, and this is evidenced in his prose writings in this period, but there is no real indication that he ever left Italy. In 1310, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg, marched 5,000 troops into Italy. Dante saw in him a new Charlemagne who would restore the office of the Holy Roman Emperor to its former glory and also re-take Florence from the Black Guelphs. He wrote to Henry and several Italian princes, demanding that they destroy the Black Guelphs. Mixing religion and private concerns, he invoked the worst anger of God against his city, suggesting several particular targets that coincided with his personal enemies. It was during this time that he wrote De Monarchia, proposing a universal monarchy under Henry VII.

At some point during his exile he conceived of the Comedy, but the date cannot be specified. The work is much more assured, and on a larger scale, than anything he had produced in Florence, and it is likely that he would have undertaken such a work only after he realized that his personal political ambitions, which had been central to him up to his banishment, would have to be put on hold for some time, possibly for ever. It is also noticeable that Beatrice has returned to his imagination with renewed force and with a wider meaning than in the Vita Nuova; in Convivio (written c.1304-07) he had declared that the memory of this youthful romance belonged to the past. One of the earliest outside indications that the poem was under way is a notice by the law professsor Francesco da Barberino, tucked into his I Documenti d'Amore (Lessons of Love) and written probably in 1314 or early 1315: speaking of Virgil, da Barberino notes in appreciative words that Dante followed the Roman classic in a poem called the Comedy, and that the setting of this poem (or part of it) was the underworld, that is, Hell[3]. Unfortunately, the brief note gives no incontestable indication that he himself had seen or read even Inferno, or that this part had been published at the time, but it indicates that composition was well under way and that the sketching of the poem may likely have begun some years before. We know that Inferno had been published by 1317; this is established by quoted lines interspersed in the margins of contemporary dated records from Bologna, but there is no certainty whether the three parts of the poem were published each part in full or a few cantos at a time. Paradiso seems to have been published posthumously.

Statue of Dante in the Piazza di Santa Croce in Florence

In Florence, Baldo d'Aguglione pardoned most of the White Guelphs in exile and allowed them to return; however, Dante had gone too far in his violent letters to Arrigo (Henry VII), and the sentence on him was not recalled.

In 1312, Henry assaulted Florence and defeated the Black Guelphs, but there is no evidence that Dante was involved. Some say he refused to participate in the assault on his city by a foreigner; others suggest that he had become unpopular with the White Guelphs too and that any trace of his passage had carefully been removed. In 1313, Henry VII died (from fever), and with him any hope for Dante to see Florence again. He returned to Verona, where Cangrande I della Scala allowed him to live in a certain security and, presumably, in a fair amount of prosperity. Cangrande was admitted to Dante's Paradise (Paradiso, XVII, 76).

In 1315, Florence was forced by Uguccione della Faggiuola (the military officer controlling the town) to grant an amnesty to people in exile, including Dante. But Florence required that as well as paying a sum of money, these exiles would do public penance. Dante refused, preferring to remain in exile. When Uguccione defeated Florence, Dante's death sentence was commuted to house arrest, on condition that he go to Florence to swear that he would never enter the town again. Dante refused to go. His death sentence was confirmed and extended to his sons. Dante still hoped late in life that he might be invited back to Florence on honorable terms. For Dante, exile was nearly a form of death, stripping him of much of his identity and his heritage. He addresses the pain of exile in Paradiso, XVII (55-60), where Cacciaguida, his great-great-grandfather, warns him what to expect:

Mural of Dante in the Uffizi Gallery, by Andrea del Castagno, c. 1450
... Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta ... You shall leave everything you love most:
più caramente; e questo è quello strale this is the arrow that the bow of exile
che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta. shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste
Tu proverai sì come sa di sale of others' bread, how salty it is, and know
lo pane altrui, e come è duro callehow hard a path it is for one who goes
lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale ...ascending and descending others' stairs ...

As for the hope of returning to Florence, he describes it as if he had already accepted its impossibility, (Paradiso, XXV, 1–9):

Se mai continga che 'l poema sacroIf it ever come to pass that the sacred poem
al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra, to which both heaven and earth have set their hand
sì che m'ha fatto per molti anni macro, so as to have made me lean for many years
vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra should overcome the cruelty that bars me
del bello ovile ov'io dormi' agnello, from the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb,
nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra; an enemy to the wolves that make war on it,
con altra voce omai, con altro vello with another voice now and other fleece
ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte I shall return a poet and at the font
del mio battesmo prenderò 'l cappello ... of my baptism take the laurel crown ...

Prince Guido Novello da Polenta invited him to Ravenna in 1318, and he accepted. He finished the Paradiso, and died in 1321 (at the age of 56) while returning to Ravenna from a diplomatic mission to Venice, possibly of malaria contracted there. Dante was buried in Ravenna at the Church of San Pier Maggiore (later called San Francesco). Bernardo Bembo, praetor of Venice in 1483, took care of his remains by building a better tomb.

Dante's tomb in Ravenna, built in 1780.

Cenotaph at Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence.

Cenotaph in Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence.

On the grave, some verses of Bernardo Canaccio, a friend of Dante, dedicated to Florence:

parvi Florentia mater amoris"Florence, mother of little love"

The first formal biography of Dante was the Vita di Dante (also known as Trattatello in laude di Dante) written after 1348 by Giovanni Boccaccio.[4]; several statements and episodes of it are seen as unreliable by modern research. However, an earlier account of Dante's life and works had been included in the Nuova Cronica of the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani.[5]

Eventually, Florence came to regret Dante's exile, and made repeated requests for the return of his remains. The custodians of the body at Ravenna refused to comply, at one point going so far as to conceal the bones in a false wall of the monastery. Nevertheless, in 1829, a tomb was built for him in Florence in the basilica of Santa Croce. That tomb has been empty ever since, with Dante's body remaining in Ravenna, far from the land he loved so dearly. The front of his tomb in Florence reads Onorate l'altissimo poeta - which roughly translates as "Honour the most exalted poet". The phrase is a quote from the fourth canto of the Inferno, depicting Virgil's welcome as he returns among the great ancient poets spending eternity in Limbo. The continuation of the line, L'ombra sua torna, ch'era dipartita ("his spirit, which had left us, returns"), is poignantly absent from the empty tomb.

In 2007, a reconstruction of Dante's face was completed in a collaborative project. Artists from Pisa University and engineers at the University of Bologna at Forli completed the revealing model, which indicated that Dante's features were somewhat different than was once thought.[6][7]

[edit] Works

See also Category:Works by Dante Alighieri.

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and of another of his works, La Vita Nuova. While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and knowledge to appreciate. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa" - "at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).

Dante, poised between the mountain of purgatory and the city of Florence, displays the famous incipit Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita in a detail of Domenico di Michelino's painting, Florence 1465

By its serious purpose, its literary stature and the range - both stylistically and in subject matter - of its content, the Comedy soon became a cornerstone in the evolution of Italian as an established literary language. Dante was more aware than most earlier Italian writers of the variety of Italian dialects and of the need to create a literature beyond the limits of Latin writing at the time, and a unified literary language; in that sense he is a forerunner of the renaissance with its effort to create vernacular literature in competition with earlier classical writers. Dante's in-depth knowledge (within the realms of the time) of Roman antiquity and his evident admiration for some aspects of pagan Rome also point forward to the 15th century. Ironically, while he was widely honoured in the centuries after his death, the Comedy slipped out of fashion among men of letters: too medieval, too rough and tragical and not stylistically refined in the respects that the high and late renaissance came to demand of literature.

He wrote the Comedy in a language he called "Italian", in some sense an amalgamated literary language mostly based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, with some elements of Latin and of the other regional dialects. The aim was to deliberately reach a readership throughout Italy, both laymen, clergymen and other poets. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. In French, Italian is sometimes nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break free from standards of publishing in only Latin (the language of liturgy, history, and scholarship in general), but often also of lyric poetry). This break set a precedent and allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience - setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future. However, unlike Boccaccio, Milton or Ariosto, Dante didn't really become an author read all over Europe until the romantic era. To the romantics, Dante, like Homer and Shakespeare, was a prime example of the "original genius" who sets his own rules, creates persons of overpowering stature and depth and goes far beyond any imitation of the patterns of earlier masters and who, in turn, cannot really be imitated. Throughout the 19th century, Dante's reputation grew and solidified, and by the time of the 1865 jubilee, he had become solidly established as one of the greatest literary icons of the Western world.

Profile portrait of Dante, by Sandro Botticelli (1444–1510)

Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment) and works written in any other language were assumed to be more trivial in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy," in the classical sense, refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy or "amusing" ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, as Dante himself wrote in a letter to Cangrande I della Scala, the progression of the pilgrimage from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

Dante's other works include the Convivio ("The Banquet")[8] a collection of his longest poems with an (unfinished) allegorical commentary; Monarchia,[9] a summary treatise of political philosophy in Latin, which was condemned and burned after Dante's death[10][11] by the Papal Legate Bertrando del Poggetto, which argues for the necessity of a universal or global monarchy in order to establish universal peace in this life, and this monarchy's relationship to the Roman Catholic Church as guide to eternal peace; De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"),[12] on vernacular literature, partly inspired by the Razos de trobar of Raimon Vidal de Bezaudun; and, La Vita Nuova ("The New Life"),[13] the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, who also served as the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Comedy. The Vita Nuova contains many of Dante's love poems in Tuscan, which was not unprecedented; the vernacular had been regularly used for lyric works before, during all the thirteenth century. One of the most famous poems is Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare, which many Italians can recite by heart. However, Dante's commentary on his own work is also in the vernacular - both in the Vita Nuova and in the Convivio - instead of the Latin that was almost universally used. References to Divina Commedia are in the format (book, canto, verse), e.g., (Inferno, XV, 76).

[edit] References

  1. ^ Bloom, Harold (1994). The Western Canon. 
  2. ^ Malcolm Moore "Dante's infernal crimes forgiven", Daily Telegraph, 17 June 2008. Retrieved on 18 June 2008.
  3. ^ see [1] and Tigerstedt, E.N. 1967, Dante; Tiden Mannen Verket ("Dante; The Age, the Man, the Work"), Bonniers, Stockholm, 1967
  4. ^ "Dante Alighieri" (in English). The Catholic Encyclopedia. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04628a.htm. Retrieved 2 May 2010. 
  5. ^ Vauchez, André; Dobson, Richard Barrie; Lapidge, Michael (2000). Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. ; Caesar, Michael (1989). Dante, the Critical Heritage, 1314(?)-1870. London: Routledge. 
  6. ^ Pullella, Philip (January 12, 2007). "Dante gets posthumous nose job - 700 years on". statesman (Reuters). http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSL1171092320070112. Retrieved 2007-11-05. 
  7. ^ Benazzi S. (2009). "The face of the poet Dante Alighieri reconstructed by virtual modelling and forensic anthropology techniques". Journal of archaeological science 36 (2):278–283. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2008.09.006
  8. ^ "Banquet". Dante online. http://www.danteonline.it/english/opere.asp?idope=2&idlang=UK. Retrieved 2008-09-02. 
  9. ^ "Monarchia". Dante online. http://www.danteonline.it/english/opere.asp?idope=4&idlang=UK. Retrieved 2008-09-02. 
  10. ^ Anthony K. Cassell The Monarchia Controversy. The Monarchia stayed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum from its inception until 1881.
  11. ^ Giuseppe Cappelli,La divina commedia di Dante Alighieri, in Italian.
  12. ^ "De vulgari Eloquentia". Dante online. http://www.danteonline.it/english/opere.asp?idope=3&idlang=UK. Retrieved 2008-09-02. 
  13. ^ "New Life". Dante online. http://www.danteonline.it/english/opere.asp?idope=5&idlang=UK. Retrieved 2008-09-02. 

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

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Portrait de Dante.jpg Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)
Works in Latin: De vulgari eloquentia • De Monarchia • Eclogues • Letters
Works in Italian: La Vita Nuova • Le Rime • Convivio
Divina Commedia: Inferno • Purgatorio • Paradiso
Persondata
NAMEAlighieri, Dante
ALTERNATIVE NAMESDurante degli Alighieri; Dante
SHORT DESCRIPTIONItalian poet
DATE OF BIRTHc. 1 June 1265
PLACE OF BIRTHFlorence, Italy
DATE OF DEATHSeptember 13-14, 1321
PLACE OF DEATHBetween Ravenna and Venice


Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri"

Divine Comedy

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"The Divine Comedy" redirects here. For other uses, see The Divine Comedy (disambiguation).
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Dante shown holding a copy of the Divine Comedy, next to the entrance to Hell, the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory and the city of Florence, with the spheres of Heaven above, in Michelino's fresco.
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The Divine Comedy (Italian: La Divina Commedia) is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature,[1] and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature.[2] The poem's imaginative and allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife is a culmination of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church. It helped establish the Tuscan dialect in which it is written as the Italian standard.[3] It is divided into three parts, the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

On the surface the poem describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven; but at a deeper level it represents allegorically the soul's journey towards God.[4] At this deeper level, Dante draws on medieval Christian theology and philosophy, especially the teachings of Thomas Aquinas.[5] At the surface level, the poem is understood to be fictional.[6]

Originally the work was simply titled Commedia and was later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio. The first printed edition to add the word divine to the title was that of the Venetian humanist Lodovico Dolce,[7] published in 1555 by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari.

Contents

[hide]

[edit] Structure and story

Detail of a manuscript in Milan's Biblioteca Trivulziana (MS 1080), written in 1337 by Francesco di ser Nardo da Barberino, showing the beginning of Dante's Comedy.

The Divine Comedy is composed of over 14,000 lines that are divided into three canticas (Ital. pl. cantiche) — Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) — each consisting of 33 cantos (Ital. pl. canti). An initial canto serves as an introduction to the poem and is generally considered to be part of the first cantica, bringing the total number of cantos to 100. The number 3 is prominent in the work, represented here by the length of each cantica. The verse scheme used, terza rima, is hendecasyllabic (lines of eleven syllables), with the lines composing tercets according to the rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded, ....

The poem is written in the first person, and tells of Dante's journey through the three realms of the dead, lasting from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300. The Roman poet Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, Dante's ideal woman, guides him through Heaven. Beatrice was a Florentine woman whom he had met in childhood and admired from afar in the mode of the then-fashionable courtly love tradition which is highlighted in Dante's earlier work La Vita Nuova.

In central Italy's political struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, Dante was part of the Guelphs, who in general favored the Papacy over the Holy Roman Emperor. Florence's Guelphs split into factions around 1300, the White Guelphs, and the Black Guelphs. Dante was among the White Guelphs who were exiled in 1302 by the Lord-Mayor Cante de' Gabrielli di Gubbio, after troops under Charles of Valois entered the city, at the request of Pope Boniface VIII, who supported the Black Guelphs. This exile, which lasted the rest of Dante's life, shows its influence in many parts of the Comedy, from prophecies of Dante's exile to Dante's views of politics to the eternal damnation of some of his opponents.[citation needed]

In Hell and Purgatory, Dante shares in the sin and the penitence respectively. The last word in each of the three parts of the Divine Comedy is stelle, "stars."

[edit] Inferno

Gustave Doré's engravings illustrated the Divine Comedy (1861–1868); here Charon comes to ferry souls across the river Acheron to Hell.
Main article: Inferno (Dante)

The poem begins on the night before Good Friday in the year 1300, "halfway along our life's path" (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita). Dante is thirty-five years old, half of the biblical life expectancy of 70 (Psalms 90:10), lost in a dark wood (understood as sin[8][9][10]), assailed by beasts (a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf) he cannot evade, and unable to find the "straight way" (diritta via) - also translatable as "right way" - to salvation (symbolized by the sun behind the mountain). Conscious that he is ruining himself and that he is falling into a "deep place" (basso loco) where the sun is silent ('l sol tace), Dante is at last rescued by Virgil, and the two of them begin their journey to the underworld. Each sin's punishment in Inferno is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice; for example, fortune-tellers have to walk with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, because that was what they had tried to do in life:

"they had their faces twisted toward their haunches
and found it necessary to walk backward,
because they could not see ahead of them.
…and since he wanted so to see ahead,
he looks behind and walks a backward path.[11]

Allegorically, the Inferno represents the Christian soul seeing sin for what it really is, and the three beasts represent three types of sin: the self-indulgent, the violent, and the malicious.[12] These three types of sin also provide the three main divisions of Dante's Hell: Upper Hell (the first 5 Circles) for the self-indulgent sins; Circles 6 and 7 for the violent sins; and Circles 8 and 9 for the malicious sins.

Dante gazes at Mount Purgatory in an allegorical portrait by Agnolo Bronzino, painted circa 1530

[edit] Purgatorio

Main article: Purgatorio

Having survived the depths of Hell, Dante and Virgil ascend out of the undergloom, to the Mountain of Purgatory on the far side of the world. The Mountain is on an island, the only land in the Southern Hemisphere, created by the displacement of rock which resulted when Satan's fall created Hell[13] (which Dante portrays as existing underneath Jerusalem[14]). The mountain has seven terraces, corresponding to the seven deadly sins or "seven roots of sinfulness."[15] The classification of sin here is more psychological than that of the Inferno, being based on motives, rather than actions. It is also drawn primarily from Christian theology, rather than from classical sources.[16] However, Dante's illustrative examples of sin and virtue draw on classical sources as well as on the Bible and on contemporary events.

Allegorically, the Purgatorio represents the Christian life. Christian souls arrive escorted by an angel, singing in exitu Israel de Aegypto. In his Letter to Cangrande, Dante explains that this reference to Israel leaving Egypt refers both to the redemption of Christ and to "the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace."[17] Appropriately, therefore, it is Easter Sunday when Dante and Virgil arrive.

The Purgatorio is notable for demonstrating the medieval knowledge of a spherical Earth. During the poem, Dante discusses the different stars visible in the southern hemisphere, the altered position of the sun, and the various timezones of the Earth. At this stage it is, Dante says, sunset at Jerusalem, midnight on the River Ganges, and sunrise in Purgatory.

[edit] Paradiso

Main article: Paradiso (Dante)
Dante and Beatrice speak to Piccarda and Constance of Sicily, in a fresco by Philipp Veit, Paradiso, Canto 3

After an initial ascension, Beatrice guides Dante through the nine celestial spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical, as in Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. While the structures of the Inferno and Purgatorio were based on different classifications of sin, the structure of the Paradiso is based on the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues.

Dante meets and converses with several great saints of the Church, including Thomas Aquinas, St Bonaventure, St Peter, and St John. The Paradiso is consequently more theological in nature than the Inferno and the Purgatorio. However, Dante admits the vision of heaven he receives is the one that his human eyes permit him to see, and the vision of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante's own personal one.

The Divine Comedy finishes with Dante seeing the Triune God. In a flash of understanding, which he cannot express, Dante finally understands the mystery of Christ's divinity and humanity, and his soul becomes aligned with God's love:[18]

"But already my desire and my will
were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,
by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars."[19]

[edit] Earliest manuscripts

First printed edition, 11 April 1472

According to the Italian Dante Society, no original manuscript written by Dante has survived, though there are many manuscript copies from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries - more than 825 are listed on their site.[20] The oldest belongs to the 1330s, almost a decade after Dante's death. The most precious ones are the three full copies made by Giovanni Boccaccio (1360s), who himself did not have the original manuscript as a source. The first printed edition was published in Foligno, Italy, by Johann Numeister and Evangelista Angelini da Trevi on 11 April 1472.[21] Of the 300 copies printed, fourteen still survive. The original printing press is on display in the Oratorio della Nunziatella in Foligno.

[edit] Thematic concerns

The Divine Comedy can be described simply as an allegory: Each canto, and the episodes therein, can contain many alternative meanings. Dante's allegory, however, is more complex, and, in explaining how to read the poem - see the Letter to Cangrande[22] - he outlines other levels of meaning besides the allegory: the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical.

The structure of the poem, likewise, is quite complex, with mathematical and numerological patterns arching throughout the work, particularly threes and nines, which are related to the Trinity. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante's skillful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; his bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and his powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, according to Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of the Inferno, allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to "[make] room in his poem for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety."[23]

Dante called the poem "Comedy" (the adjective "Divine" was added later in the 14th century) because poems in the ancient world were classified as High ("Tragedy") or Low ("Comedy"). Low poems had happy endings and were of everyday or vulgar subjects, while High poems were for more serious matters. Dante was one of the first in the Middle Ages to write of a serious subject, the Redemption of Man, in the low and vulgar Italian language and not the Latin language as one might expect for such a serious topic. Boccaccio's account that an early version of the poem was begun by Dante in Latin is still controversial.[24][25]

[edit] Dante's personal involvement

In his allegorical description of sin (in the Inferno) and virtue (in the Purgatorio and Paradiso), Dante draws on real characters from ancient Greek and Roman myths and history, and from his own times. However, his own actions often also illustrate the concepts he is discussing. For example, Dante shares the fleshly sins of the damned at several points in the upper circles of Hell. At the first circle where the virtuous pagans who pursued honor above all else are punished by eternally knowing they have fallen short for their lack of faith, Dante shares with them their love of honor, as evidenced by the word "honor" being used repeatedly in the Canto.[26] Similarly, at the third circle where Ciacco and other gluttons are punished for their appetites, Dante's appetite for political information about his fellow Florentines appears equally gluttonous:

"And I to him: I wish thee still to teach me,
And make a gift to me of further speech.

Farinata and Tegghiaio, once so worthy,
Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, and Mosca,
And others who on good deeds set their thoughts,

Say where they are, and cause that I may know them;
For great desire constraineth me to learn
If Heaven doth sweeten them, or Hell envenom."[27]

Conversely, in the Purgatorio, after leaving the terrace of the proud, Dante has learned from the example set by Omberto[28] and suppresses his own pride, declining to speak of his achievements:

"And I: Through midst of Tuscany there wanders
A streamlet that is born in Falterona,
And not a hundred miles of course suffice it;

From thereupon do I this body bring.
To tell you who I am were speech in vain,
Because my name as yet makes no great noise."[29]

[edit] Scientific themes

Albert Ritter sketched the Comedy's geography from Dante's Cantos: Hell's entrance is near Florence with the circles descending to Earth's centre; sketch 5 reflects Canto 34's inversion as Dante passes down, and thereby up to Mount Purgatory's shores in the southern hemisphere, where he passes to the first sphere of Heaven at the top.

Although the Divine Comedy is primarily a religious poem, discussing sin, virtue, and theology, Dante also discusses several elements of the science of his day (this mixture of science with poetry has received both praise and blame over the centuries[30]). The Purgatorio repeatedly refers to the implications of a spherical Earth, such as the different stars visible in the southern hemisphere, the altered position of the sun, and the various timezones of the Earth. For example, at sunset in Purgatory it is midnight at the Ebro (a river in Spain), dawn in Jerusalem, and noon on the River Ganges:[31]

Just as, there where its Maker shed His blood,
the sun shed its first rays, and Ebro lay
beneath high Libra, and the ninth hour's rays

were scorching Ganges' waves; so here, the sun
stood at the point of day's departure when
God's angel happy showed himself to us.[32]

Dante travels through the centre of the Earth in the Inferno, and comments on the resulting change in the direction of gravity in Canto XXXIV (lines 76–120). A little earlier (XXXIII, 102–105), he queries the existence of wind in the frozen inner circle of hell, since it has no temperature differentials.[33]

Inevitably, given its setting, the Paradiso discusses astronomy extensively, but of course in the Ptolemaic sense. The Paradiso also discusses the importance of the experimental method in science, with a detailed example in lines 94–105 of Canto II:

"Yet an experiment, were you to try it,
could free you from your cavil and the source
of your arts' course springs from experiment.

Taking three mirrors, place a pair of them
at equal distance from you; set the third
midway between those two, but farther back.

Then, turning toward them, at your back have placed
a light that kindles those three mirrors and
returns to you, reflected by them all.

Although the image in the farthest glass
will be of lesser size, there you will see
that it must match the brightness of the rest."[34]

A briefer example occurs in Canto XV of the Purgatorio (lines 16-21), where Dante points out that both theory and experiment confirm that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. Other references to science in the Paradiso include descriptions of clockwork in Canto XXIV (lines 13–18), and Thales' theorem about triangles in Canto XIII (lines 101–102).

Galileo Galilei is known to have lectured on the Inferno, and it has been suggested that the poem may have influenced some of Galileo's own ideas regarding mechanics.[35]

[edit] Islamic philosophy

In 1919, Professor Miguel Asín Palacios, a Spanish scholar and a Catholic priest, published La Escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia ("Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy"), an account of parallels between early Islamic philosophy and the Divine Comedy. Palacios argued that Dante derived many features of and episodes about the hereafter indirectly from the spiritual writings of Ibn Arabi and from the Isra and Mi'raj or night journey of Muhammad to heaven. The latter is described in the Hadith and the Kitab al Miraj (translated into Latin in 1264 or shortly before[36] as Liber Scalae Machometi, "The Book of Muhammad's Ladder"), and has some slight similarities to the Paradiso, such as a sevenfold division of Paradise,[37] although this is not unique to the Kitab al Miraj.

Some "superficial similarities"[38] of the Divine Comedy to the Resalat Al-Ghufran or Epistle of Forgiveness of Al-Ma'arri have also been mentioned in this debate. The Resalat Al-Ghufran describes the journey of the poet in the realms of the afterlife and includes dialogue with people in Heaven and Hell, although, unlike the Kitab al Miraj, there is little description of these locations,[39] and it is unlikely that Dante borrowed from this work.[40][41]

Dante did, however, live in a Europe of substantial literary and philosophical contact with the Muslim world, encouraged by such factors as Averroism and the patronage of Alfonso X of Castile. Of the twelve wise men Dante meets in Canto X of the Paradiso, Thomas Aquinas and, even more so, Siger of Brabant were strongly influenced by Arabic commentators on Aristotle.[42] Medieval Christian mysticism also shared the Neoplatonic influence of Sufis such as Ibn Arabi. Philosopher Frederick Copleston argued in 1950 that Dante's respectful treatment of Averroes, Avicenna, and Siger of Brabant indicates his acknowledgement of a "considerable debt" to Islamic philosophy.[42]

Although this philosophical influence is generally acknowledged, many scholars have not been satisfied that Dante was influenced by the Kitab al Miraj. The twentieth century Orientalist Francesco Gabrieli expressed skepticism regarding the claimed similarities, and the lack of evidence of a vehicle through which it could have been transmitted to Dante. Even so, while dismissing the probability of some influences posited in Palacios' work,[43] Gabrieli recognized that it was "at least possible, if not probable, that Dante may have known the Liber scalae and have taken from it certain images and concepts of Muslim eschatology". Shortly before her death, the Italian philologist Maria Corti pointed out that, during his stay at the court of Alfonso X, Dante's mentor Brunetto Latini met Bonaventura de Siena, a Tuscan who had translated the Kitab al Miraj from Arabic into Latin. According to Corti,[44] Brunetto may have provided a copy of that work to Dante. However, no evidence exists to support this speculation.

[edit] Literary influence in the English-speaking world and beyond

The work was not always so well regarded. After being recognized as a masterpiece in the first centuries following its publication,[45] the work was largely ignored during the Enlightenment, with some notable exceptions such as Vittorio Alfieri, Antoine de Rivarol, who translated the Inferno into French, and Giambattista Vico, who in the Scienza nuova and in the Giudizio su Dante inaugurated what would later become the romantic reappraisal of Dante, juxtaposing him to Homer.[46] The Comedy was "rediscovered" by William Blake – who illustrated several passages of the epic – and the romantic writers of the 19th century. Later authors such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, C.S. Lewis and James Joyce have drawn on it for inspiration. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was its first American translator,[47] and modern poets, including Seamus Heaney,[48] Robert Pinsky, John Ciardi, and W. S. Merwin, have also produced translations of all or parts of the book. In Russia, beyond Pushkin's memorable translation of a few triplets,[49] Osip Mandelstam's late poetry has been said to bear of the mark of a "tormented meditation" on the Comedy.[50] In 1934 Mandelstam gave a modern reading of the poem in his labyrinthine "Conversation on Dante".[51]

New English translations of the Divine Comedy continue to be published regularly. Notable English translations of the complete poem include:

Year TranslatorNotes
1805–1814Henry Francis CaryAn older translation, widely available online.
1867Henry Wadsworth LongfellowThe first US translation, raising American interest in the poem. It is still widely read, including online.
1933–1943Laurence BinyonIn an English version of terza rima.
1949–1962Dorothy L. SayersTranslated for Penguin Classics, intended for a wider audience, and completed by Barbara Reynolds.
1954–1970John CiardiHis Inferno was recorded and released by Folkways Records in 1954.
1981C. H. SissonAvailable in Oxford World's Classics.
1980–1984Allen MandelbaumAvailable online.
1967–2002Mark MusaAn alternative Penguin Classics version.
2000–2007Robert and Jean HollanderOnline as part of the Princeton Dante Project.
2002–2004 Anthony M. EsolenModern Library Classics edition.
2006–2007Robin KirkpatrickA third Penguin Classics version, replacing Musa's.

A number of other translators, such as Robert Pinsky, have translated the Inferno only.

[edit] In the arts

Rodin's The Kiss represents Paolo and Francesca from the Inferno.[52]
Main article: Dante and his Divine Comedy in popular culture

The Divine Comedy has been a source of inspiration for countless artists for almost seven centuries. There are many references to Dante's work in literature. In music, Franz Liszt was one of many composers to write works based on the Divine Comedy. In sculpture, the work of Auguste Rodin is notable for themes from Dante, and many visual artists have illustrated Dante's work, as shown by the examples above. There have also been many references to the Divine Comedy in cinema and computer games.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ For example, Encyclopedia Americana, 2006, Vol. 30‎. p. 605: "the greatest single work of Italian literature;" John Julius Norwich, The Italians: History, Art, and the Genius of a People, Abrams, 1983, p. 27: "his tremendous poem, still after six and a half centuries the supreme work of Italian literature, remains - after the legacy of ancient Rome - the grandest single element in the Italian heritage;" and Robert Reinhold Ergang, The Renaissance, Van Nostrand, 1967, p. 103: "Many literary historians regard the Divine Comedy as the greatest work of Italian literature. In world literature it is ranked as an epic poem of the highest order."
  2. ^ Bloom, Harold (1994). The Western Canon.  See also Western canon for other "canons" that include the Divine Comedy.
  3. ^ See Lepschy, Laura; Lepschy, Giulio (1977). The Italian Language Today.  or any other history of Italian language.
  4. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on page 19.
  5. ^ Charles Allen Dinsmore, The Teachings of Dante, Ayer Publishing, 1970, p. 38, ISBN 0836955218.
  6. ^ Peter E. Bondanella, The Inferno, Introduction, p. xliii, Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003, ISBN 1593080514: "the key fiction of the Divine Comedy is that the poem is true."
  7. ^ Ronnie H. Terpening, Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 166.
  8. ^ "Inferno, la Divina Commedia annotata e commentata da Tommaso Di Salvo, Zanichelli, Bologna, 1985". Abebooks.it. http://www.abebooks.it/INFERNO-DIVINA-COMMEDIA-ANNOTATA-COMMENTATA-TOMMASO/590245816/bd. Retrieved 2010-01-16. 
  9. ^ Lectura Dantis, Società dantesca italiana
  10. ^ online sources: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]
  11. ^ Inferno, Canto XX, lines 13–15 and 38–39, Mandelbaum translation.
  12. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Purgatory, notes on page 75.
  13. ^ Inferno, Canto 34, lines 121-126.
  14. ^ Richard Lansing and Teodolinda Barolini, The Dante Encyclopedia, p. 475, Garland Publishing, 2000, ISBN 0-8153-1659-3.
  15. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Purgatory, Introduction, pp. 65–67 (Penguin, 1955).
  16. ^ Robin Kirkpatrick, Purgatorio, Introduction, p. xiv (Penguin, 2007).
  17. ^ "The Letter to Can Grande," in Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri, translated and edited by Robert S. Haller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 99
  18. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradise, notes on Canto XXXIII.
  19. ^ Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, lines 142-145, C. H. Sisson translation.
  20. ^ "Elenco Codici". Danteonline.it. http://www.danteonline.it/english/codici_frames/elencocodici.asp. Retrieved 2009-08-05. 
  21. ^ Christopher Kleinhenz, Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1, Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0415939305, p. 360.
  22. ^ "Epistle to Can Grande". English.udel.edu. http://www.english.udel.edu/dean/cangrand.html. Retrieved 2009-08-05. 
  23. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, Introduction, p. 16 (Penguin, 1955).
  24. ^ Boccaccio also quotes the initial triplet:"Ultima regna canam fluvido contermina mundo, / spiritibus quae lata patent, quae premia solvunt /pro meritis cuicumque suis". For translation and more, see Guyda Armstrong, , Review of Giovanni Boccaccio. Life of Dante. J. G. Nichols, trans. London: Hesperus Press, 2002.
  25. ^ Hiram Peri, The Original Plan of the Divine Comedy, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 18, No. 3/4 (1955), pp. 189-210.
  26. ^ Inferno, Canto 4, lines 72, 73, 76, 80, 100, and 133, Mandelbaum translation
  27. ^ Inferno, Canto VI, lines 77–84, Longfellow translation.
  28. ^ Purgatorio, Canto XI, lines 58–67
  29. ^ Purgatorio, Canto XIV, lines 16–21, Longfellow translation.
  30. ^ Michael Caesar, Dante: The Critical Heritage, Routledge, 1995, pp 288, 383, 412, 631.
  31. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Purgatory, notes on p. 286
  32. ^ Paradiso, Canto XXVII, lines 1–6, Mandelbaum translation.
  33. ^ Dorothy L. Sayers, Inferno, notes on page 284.
  34. ^ Paradiso, Canto II, lines 94–105, Mandelbaum translation.
  35. ^ Mtholyoke.edu "Mark Peterson Sheds New Light on Discovery by Galileo," College Street Journal, March 8, 2002. Retrieved 2 April 2009.
  36. ^ I. Heullant-Donat and M.-A. Polo de Beaulieu, "Histoire d'une traduction," in Le Livre de l'échelle de Mahomet, Latin edition and French translation by Gisèle Besson and Michèle Brossard-Dandré, Collection Lettres Gothiques, Le Livre de Poche, 1991, p. 22 with note 37.
  37. ^ See the English translation of the Kitab al Miraj.
  38. ^ William Montgomery Watt and Pierre Cachia, A History of Islamic Spain, 2nd edition, Edinburgh University Press, 1996, pp. 125–126, ISBN 0-7486-0847-8.
  39. ^ Dionisius A. Agius and Richard Hitchcock, The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe, Ithaca Press, 1996, p. 70, ISBN 0-86372-213-X.
  40. ^ Kāmil Kīlānī and G. Brackenbury, Introduction to Risalat ul Ghufran: A Divine Comedy, 3rd ed, Al-Maaref Printing and Publishing House, 1943, p. 8.
  41. ^ The theory "receives little credence", according to Watt and Cachia, p. 183.
  42. ^ a b Frederick Copleston (1950). A History of Philosophy, Volume 2. London: Continuum. p. 200. 
  43. ^ Francesco Gabrieli, "New light on Dante and Islam", Diogenes, 2:61-73, 1954>
  44. ^ Maria Corti: Dante e l'Islam (interview)
  45. ^ Chaucer wrote in the Monk's Tale, "Redeth the grete poete of Ytaille / That highte Dant, for he kan al devyse / Fro point to point; nat o word wol he faille".
  46. ^ Erich Auerbach,Dante: Poet of the Secular World. ISBN 0-226-03205-1.
  47. ^ Irmscher, Christoph. Longfellow Redux. University of Illinois, 2008: 11. ISBN 978-0-252-03063-5.
  48. ^ Seamus Heaney, "Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet.” The Poet's Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses. Ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff. New York: Farrar, 2001. 239-258.
  49. ^ 'Dante in Russia' in "The Dante encyclopedia" by Richard H. Lansing and Teodolinda Barolini, [8]
  50. ^ Marina Glazova, Mandelstam and Dante: The Divine Comedy in Mandelstam's poetry of the 1930s Studies in East European Thought, Volume 28, Number 4, November, 1984.
  51. ^ James Fenton, Hell set to music, The Guardian, 16 July 2005
  52. ^ Le Normand-Romain, Antoinette (1999). Rodin:The Gates of Hell. Paris: Musée Rodin. ISBN 2-9014-2869-X. 

[edit] External links

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Portrait de Dante.jpg Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)
Works in Latin: De vulgari eloquentia • De Monarchia • Eclogues • Letters
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Divina Commedia: Inferno • Purgatorio • Paradiso
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New World Order (conspiracy theory)

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This article is about the use of the term New World Order in conspiracy theory. For other uses, see New World Order.
The reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States (1776). The Latin phrase "novus ordo seclorum", appearing on the reverse side of the Great Seal since 1782 and on the back of the U.S one-dollar bill since 1935, means "New Order of the Ages" and only alludes to the beginning of an era where the United States of America is an independent nation-state, but is often improperly translated by conspiracy theorists as "New World Order".[1]

In conspiracy theory, the term New World Order or NWO refers to the emergence of a bureaucratic collectivist one-world government.[2][3][4][5][6]

The common theme in conspiracy theories about a New World Order is that a powerful and secretive elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through a totalitarian world government, which would replace sovereign nation-states and put an end to international power struggles. Significant occurrences in politics and finance are speculated to be orchestrated by an extremely influential cabal operating through many front organizations. Numerous historical and current events are seen as steps in an on-going plot to achieve world domination through secret political gatherings and decision-making processes.[2][3][4][5][6]

Prior to the early 1990s, New World Order conspiracism was limited to two American countercultures, primarily the militantly anti-government right, and secondarily fundamentalist Christians concerned with end-time emergence of the Antichrist.[7] Skeptics, such as Michael Barkun and Chip Berlet, have expressed concern that right-wing conspiracy theories about a New World Order have now not only been embraced by many left-wing conspiracy theorists but have seeped into popular culture, thereby inaugurating an unrivaled period of people actively preparing for apocalyptic millenarian scenarios in the United States of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Political scientists warn that this mass hysteria may not only fuel lone-wolf terrorism but have devastating effects on American political life, such as the far right wooing the far left into joining a revolutionary Third Position movement capable of subverting the established political powers.[3][8]

Contents

[hide]

History of the term

The signing of the UN Charter in San Francisco, 1945
Search Wikiquote Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: New World Order

During the 20th century, many statesmen, such as Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, used the term "new world order" to refer to a new period of history evidencing a dramatic change in world political thought and the balance of power after World War I and World War II. They all saw these periods as opportunities to implement idealistic or liberal proposals for global governance only in the sense of new collective efforts to identify, understand, or address worldwide problems that go beyond the capacity of individual nation-states to solve. These proposals led to the creation of international organizations, such as the United Nations and NATO, and international regimes, such as the Bretton Woods system and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which were calculated both to maintain a balance of power as well as regularize cooperation between nations, in order to achieve a peaceful phase of capitalism. These creations in particular and internationalism in general, however, would always be criticized and opposed by the American Old Right on isolationist grounds and by the New Right on benevolent imperalist grounds.[9]

In the aftermath of the two World Wars, progressives welcomed these new international organizations and regimes but argued they suffered from a democratic deficit and therefore were inadequate to not only prevent another global war but also foster global justice. Thus, activists around the globe formed a world federalist movement bent on creating a "real" new world order. A number of Fabian socialist intellectuals, such as British writer H. G. Wells in the 1940s, appropriated and redefined the term "new world order" as a synonym for the establishment of a full-fledged secular, social democratic world government.[10]

During the Red Scare of 1947–1957, conspiracy theorists of the American secular and Christian right increasingly embraced and mongered unfounded fears of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Jews being the driving force behind an "international communist conspiracy". The threat of world communism in the form of a state atheistic and bureaucratic collectivist world government, demonized as a "Red Menace", therefore became the main focus of apocalyptic millenarian conspiracism.[11]

In the 1960s, producerist groups like the John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby disseminated a great deal of right-wing conspiracy theories focused on the United Nations as the vehicle "internationalists" would use to create the "One World Government", and contributed to a conservative movement for United States withdrawal from the U.N. American writer Mary M. Davison, in her 1966 booklet The Profound Revolution, traced the alleged New World Order conspiracy to the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1913 by international bankers, who she claimed later formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921 as the shadow government. At the time the booklet was published, "international bankers" would have been interpreted by many readers as a reference to a postulated "international Jewish banking conspiracy" masterminded by the Rothschilds.[11]

Claiming that the term "New World Order" is used by a secretive elite dedicated to the destruction of all national sovereignties, American producerist writer Gary Allen, in his 1971 book None Dare Call It Conspiracy, 1974 book Rockefeller: Campaigning for the New World Order and 1987 book Say "No!" to the New World Order, articulated the anti-globalist theme of much current right-wing conspiracism in the U.S.. Thus, after the fall of communism in the early 1990s, the main demonized scapegoat of the American far right shifted seamlessly from crypto-communists who plotted on behalf of the Red Menace to globalists who plot on behalf of the New World Order. The relatively painless nature of the shift was due to growing right-wing opposition to the globalization of capitalism but also in part to the basic underlying apocalyptic millenarian paradigm, which fed the Cold War and the witch-hunts of the McCarthy period.[11]

In his 11 September 1990 Toward a New World Order speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, President George H. W. Bush described his objectives for post-Cold-War global governance in cooperation with post-Soviet states:

Until now, the world we've known has been a world divided—a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict and cold war. Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a "world order" in which "the principles of justice and fair play ... protect the weak against the strong ..." A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.

The New York Times observed that progressives were calling the new world order a rationalization for American imperial ambitions in the Middle East, while conservatives rejected new security arrangements altogether and fulminated about any possibility of U.N. revival.[12] However, Chip Berlet, an American investigative reporter specializing in the study of right-wing movements in the U.S., writes:

When President Bush announced his new foreign policy would help build a New World Order, his phrasing surged through the Christian and secular hard right like an electric shock, since the phrase had been used to represent the dreaded collectivist One World Government for decades. Some Christians saw Bush as signaling the End Times betrayal by a world leader. Secular anticommunists saw a bold attempt to smash US sovereignty and impose a tyrannical collectivist system run by the United Nations.[11]

American televangelist Pat Robertson with his 1991 best-selling book The New World Order became the most prominent Christian popularizer of conspiracy theories about recent American history as a theater in which Wall Street, the Federal Reserve System, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group, and Trilateral Commission control the flow of events from behind the scenes, nudging us constantly and covertly in the direction of world government for the Antichrist.[5]

Observers note that the galvanization of right-wing populist conspiracy theorists, such as Linda Thompson, Mark Koernke and Robert K. Spear, into militancy led to the rise of the militia movement, which spread its anti-government ideology through speeches at rallies and meetings, through books and videotapes sold at gun shows, through shortwave and satellite radio, and through fax networks and computer bulletin boards.[11] However, viral propaganda on the Internet is what most effectively contributed to their extremist political ideas about the New World Order finding their way into the far left literature of some black nationalists, but also the previously apolitical literature of many Kennedy assassinologists, ufologists, lost land theorists, and, most recently, occultists. The worldwide appeal of these subcultures then transmitted New World Order conspiracism like a "mind virus" to a large new audience of seekers of counterknowledge from the mid-1990s on.[5]

In Europe, National-Anarchism, a syncretic political ideology articulated by British post-Third-Position activist Troy Southgate, evolved into a radical political movement calling for an insurrection against, and secession from, the imagined "Zionist, capitalist New World Order".[13][14] National-anarchists see a convergence in the near-future between the decentralist left and decentralist right rising to combat the political and economic centralization of the New World Order.[15]

After the turn of the century, specifically during the financial crisis of 2007–2010, many politicians and pundits, such as Gordon Brown,[16] Henry Kissinger,[17] and Barack Obama, used the term "new world order" in their advocacy for a Keynesian reform of the global financial system and their calls for a "New Bretton Woods", which takes into account emerging markets such as China and India. These declarations had the unintended consequence of providing fresh fodder for New World Order conspiracism, and culminated in former Clinton administration adviser Dick Morris and conservative talk show host Sean Hannity arguing on his Fox News Channel program Hannity that "conspiracy theorists were right".[18] Fox News in general, and its opinion show Glenn Beck in particular, have been repeatedly criticized by progressive media watchdog groups for not only mainstreaming the New World Order conspiracy theories of the radical right but possibly agitating its lone wolves into action.[19][20][21][22]

In 2009, American film directors Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel released New World Order, a critically-acclaimed documentary film which explores the world of conspiracy theorists, such as American radio host Alex Jones, who are committed to exposing and vigorously opposing what they perceive to be an emerging New World Order.[23]

Conspiracy theories

There are numerous secular and religious conspiracy theories through which the concept of a New World Order is viewed. The following is a list of the major ones in relatively chronological order:[24]

End Time

For over 2,000 years, apocalyptic millenarian Christian theologians and laymen have feared a globalist conspiracy as the fulfillment of prophecies about the "end time" in the Bible, specifically in the Book of Ezekiel, the Book of Daniel, the Olivet discourse found in the Synoptic Gospels, and the Book of Revelation. They assert that human and demonic agents of the Devil are involved in a primordial plot to deceive humanity into accepting a satanic world theocracy that has the Unholy Trinity—Satan, the Antichrist and the False Prophet—at the core of an imperial cult. In many contemporary Christian conspiracy theories, the False Prophet will either be the last pope of the Catholic Church (groomed and installed by an Alta Vendita or Jesuit conspiracy) or a guru from the New Age movement or even the leader of a fundamentalist Christian organization like The Fellowship, while the Antichrist will either be the president of the European Union or the secretary-general of the United Nations or even a supercomputer.[5]

Some of the most vocal critics of end-time conspiracy theories come from within Christianity.[11] In 1993, American historian Bruce Barron wrote a stern rebuke of apocalyptic Christian conspiracism in the Christian Research Journal, when reviewing American televangelist Pat Robertson's 1991 book The New World Order.[25] Another critique can be found in American historian Gregory S. Camp's 1997 book Selling Fear: Conspiracy Theories and End-Times Paranoia,[2] which has been described as "impressive both as a historical and theological work".[11] Camp warns of the "very real danger that Christians could pick up some extra spiritual baggage" by credulously embracing conspiracy theories.[2] Progressive Christians, such as American preacher-theologian Peter J. Gomes, argue that the Bible must be read carefully to avoid misusing the text to legitimize reactionary prejudices in the dominant culture.[26] They caution conservative Christians that a "spirit of fear" can distort scripture and history by dangerously combining biblical literalism, apocalyptic timetables, demonization, and oppressive prejudices, such as sexism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism.[27] They therefore call on Christians to repent for indulging in conspiracism.[28][29]

More broadly, preterist Christians argue that some or all of the biblical prophecies concerning the end time refer literally or metaphorically to events which already happened in the first century after Jesus' birth. In their view, the "end time" concept refers to the end of the covenant between God and Israel, rather than the end of time, or the end of planet Earth. They argue that prophecies about the Rapture, the defiling of the Temple, the destruction of Jerusalem, the Antichrist, the Number of the Beast, the Tribulation, the Second Coming, the Last Judgment, and the resurrection of the dead were fulfilled at or about the year 70 when the Roman general (and future Emperor) Titus sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, putting a permanent stop to the daily animal sacrifices. According to Preterists, many passages in the New Testament indicate with apparent certainty that the second coming of Christ, and the end time predicted in the Bible were to take place within the lifetimes of Jesus' disciples rather than millennia later: Matt. 10:23, Matt. 16:28, Matt. 24:34, Matt. 26:64, Rom. 13:11-12, 1 Cor. 7:29-31, 1 Cor. 10:11, Phil. 4:5, James 5:8-9, 1 Pet. 4:7, 1 Jn. 2:18. Ultimately, full Preterists argue that all Christians should reject apocalyptic eschatology and embrace realized eschatology.[30]

Freemasonry

Anti-Masonic conspiracy theorists believe that "high-ranking" Freemasons are involved in conspiracies to create an occult New World Order. They claim that some of the Founding Fathers of the United States, such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, had Masonic symbolism interwoven into American society, particularly in the Great Seal of the United States, the United States one-dollar bill, the architecture of National Mall landmarks, and the streets and highways of Washington, D.C.. Conspiracy theorists speculate that Freemasons did this in order to bind their planning of a government in conformity with the luciferian plan of the Great Architect of the Universe whom, they are said to believe, has tasked the United States with the eventual establishment of the "Kingdom of God on Earth" in the form of an hermetic world theocracy, and the building of the Third Temple in New Jerusalem as its holiest site.[31]

A Masonic Lodge room

Freemasons rebut these claims of Masonic conspiracy. They assert that Freemasonry, which promotes a balance between rationalism and mysticism through an initiatory system of degrees and sacred geometry,[32] places no power in occult symbols themselves. It is not a part of Freemasonry to view the drawing of symbols, no matter how large, as an act of consolidating or controlling power.[33] Furthermore, there is no published information establishing the Masonic membership of the men responsible for the design of the Great Seal or the street plan of Washington, D.C.[34] The Latin phrase "novus ordo seclorum", appearing on the reverse side of the Great Seal since 1782 and on the back of the one-dollar bill since 1935, means "New Order of the Ages" and only alludes to the beginning of an era where the United States is an independent nation-state, but is often improperly translated by conspiracy theorists as "New World Order" or "New Secular Order".[1] Lastly, Freemasons argue that, despite the symbolic importance of the Temple of Solomon in their mythology, they have no interest in rebuilding it, especially since "it is obvious that any attempt to interfere with the present condition of things [on the Temple Mount] would in all probability bring about the greatest religious war the world has ever known".[35]

More broadly, Freemasons assert that a long-standing rule within regular Freemasonry is a prohibition on the discussion of politics in a Masonic Lodge and the participation of lodges or Masonic bodies in political pursuits. Freemasonry has no politics, but it teaches its members to be of high moral character and active citizens. The accusation that Freemasonry has a hidden agenda to establish a Masonic government ignores several facts. While agreeing on certain Masonic Landmarks, the many independent and sovereign Grand Lodges act as such, and do not agree on many other points of belief and practice.[36]

Also, as can be seen from a survey of famous Freemasons, individual Freemasons hold beliefs that span the spectrum of politics. The term "Masonic government" has no meaning since individual Freemasons hold many different opinions on what constitutes a good government, and Freemasonry as a body has no opinion on the topic.[36] Ultimately, Freemasons argue that even if it were proven that influential individuals have used and are using Masonic Lodges to engage in crypto-politics, such as was the case with the illegal Italian Lodge Propaganda Due, this would represent a cooptation of Freemasonry rather than evidence of its hidden agenda.[37]

Illuminati

The Order of the Illuminati was an Enlightenment-age secret society founded on 1 May 1776, in Ingolstadt (Upper Bavaria), by Adam Weishaupt, who was the first lay professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt. The movement consisted of freethinkers, secularists, liberals, republicans and pro-feminists, recruited in the Masonic Lodges of Germany, who sought to promote perfectionism through mystery schools. In 1785, the order was infiltrated, broken up and suppressed by the government agents of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, in his campaign to neutralize the threat of secret societies ever becoming hotbeds of conspiracies to overthrow his Bavarian monarchy and its state religion (Roman Catholicism).[38]

In the late 18th century, reactionary conspiracy theorists, such as Scottish physicist John Robison and French Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel, began speculating that the Illuminati survived their suppression and became the masterminds behind the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The Illuminati were accused of being enlightened absolutists who were attempting to secretly orchestrate a world revolution in order to globalize the most radical ideals of the Enlightenment: anti-clericalism, anti-monarchism, and anti-patriarchalism. During the 19th century, fear of an Illuminati conspiracy was a real concern of European ruling classes, and their oppressive reactions to this unfounded fear provoked in 1848 the very revolutions they sought to prevent.[39]

During the interwar period of the 20th century, fascist propagandists, such as British revisionist historian Nesta Helen Webster and American socialite Edith Starr Miller, not only popularized the myth of an Illuminati conspiracy but claimed that it was a subversive secret society which serves the Jewish elites that supposedly propped up both finance capitalism and Soviet communism in order to divide and rule the world. American evangelist Gerald Burton Winrod and other conspiracy theorists within the fundamentalist Christian movement in the United States, which emerged in the 1910s as a backlash against the principles of the Enlightenment, modernism, and liberalism, became the main channel of dissemination of Illuminati conspiracy theories in America. Right-wing populists subsequently began speculating that some collegiate fraternities, gentlemen's clubs and think tanks of the American upper class are front organizations of the Illuminati, which they accuse of plotting to create a New World Order through a one-world government.[5]

Skeptics argue that evidence would suggest that the Bavarian Illuminati was nothing more than a curious historical footnote since there is no evidence that the Illuminati survived its suppression in 1785.[39]

Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an antisemitic canard, originally published in Russian in 1903, alleging a Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy to achieve world domination. The text purports to be the minutes of the secret meetings of a cabal of Jewish masterminds, which has coopted Freemasonry and is plotting to rule the world on behalf of all Jews because they believe themselves to be the chosen people of God.[40] The Protocols incorporate many of the core conspiracist themes outlined in the Robison and Barruel attacks on the Freemasons, and overlay them with false antisemitic allegations about anti-Tsarist movements in Russia. The Protocols reflect themes similar to more general critiques of Enlightenment liberalism by conservatives who support monarchies and state religions. The interpretation intended by the publication of The Protocols is that if one peels away the layers of the Masonic conspiracy, past the Illuminati, one finds the rotten Jewish core.[11]

Cover of a 1920 copy of The Jewish Peril

The Protocols has been proven by polemicists, such as Irish journalist Philip Graves in a 1921 The Times article, and British academic Norman Cohn in his 1967 book Warrant for Genocide, to be both a hoax and a clear case of plagiarism. There is general agreement that Russian-French writer and political activist Matvei Golovinski fabricated the text for Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire, as a work of counter-revolutionary propaganda prior to the 1905 Russian Revolution, by plagiarizing it, almost word for word in some passages, from The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a 19th century satire against Napoleon III of France written by French political satirist and Legitimist militant Maurice Joly.[41]

Responsible for feeding many antisemitic and anti-Masonic hysterias of the 20th century, The Protocols is widely considered to be influential in the development of conspiracy theories related to a New World Order (such as the notion of a Zionist Occupation Government), and reappears repeatedly in contemporary conspiracy literature.[5] For example, the authors of the 1982 controversial book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail concluded that The Protocols was the most persuasive piece of evidence for the existence and activities of the Priory of Sion. They speculated that this secret society was working behind the scenes to establish a theocratic "United States of Europe". Politically and religiously unified through the imperial cult of a Merovingian sacred king, supposedly descended from a Jesus bloodline, who occupies both the throne of Europe and the Holy See, this "Holy European Empire" would become the hyperpower of the 21st century.[42] Although the Priory of Sion, itself, has been exhaustively debunked by journalists and scholars as a hoax,[43] fringe Christian eschatologists concerned with the emergence of a New World Order became convinced that the Priory of Sion was a fulfillment of prophecies found in the Book of Revelation and further proof of an anti-Christian conspiracy of epic proportions.[44]

Skeptics argue that the current gambit of contemporary conspiracy theorists who use the The Protocols is to claim that they "really" come from some group other than the Jews such as the Illuminati or alien invaders. Although it is hard to determine whether the conspiracy-minded actually believe this or are simply trying to sanitize a discredited text, skeptics argue that it doesn't make much difference, since they leave the actual, antisemitic text unchanged. The result is to give The Protocols credibility and circulation when it deserves neither.[7]

Round Table

English-born South African businessman, mining magnate, and politician Cecil Rhodes advocated the British Empire reannexing the United States of America and reforming itself into an "Imperial Federation" to bring about a hyperpower and lasting world peace. In his first will, of 1877, written at the age of 23, he expressed his wish to fund a secret society (known as the Society of the Elect) that would advance this goal:

To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.[45]

In his later wills, a more mature Rhodes abandoned the idea and instead concentrated on what became the Rhodes Scholarship, which had British statesman Alfred Milner as one of its trustees. Established in 1902, the original goal of the trust fund was to foster peace among the great powers by creating a sense of fraternity and a shared world view among future British, American, and German leaders by having enabled them to study for free at the University of Oxford.[45]

Milner and British official Lionel George Curtis were the architects of the Round Table movement, a network of organizations promoting closer union between Britain and its self-governing colonies. To this end, Curtis founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in June 1919 and, with his 1938 book The Commonwealth of God, began advocating for the creation of an imperial federation that eventually reannexes the U.S., which would be presented to Protestant churches as being the work of the Christian God to elicit their support.[46] The Commonwealth of Nations was created in 1949 but it would only be a free association of independent states rather than the powerful imperial federation imagined by Rhodes, Milner and Curtis.

The Council on Foreign Relations began in 1917 with a group of New York academics who were asked by President Woodrow Wilson to offer options for the foreign policy of the United States in the interwar period. Originally envisioned as a British-American group of scholars and diplomats, some of whom belonging to the Round Table movement, it was a subsequent group of 108 New York financiers, manufacturers and international lawyers organized in June 1918 by Nobel Peace Prize recipient and U.S. secretary of state, Elihu Root, that became the Council on Foreign Relations on 29 July 1921. The first of the council's projects was a quarterly journal launched in September 1922, called Foreign Affairs.[47] The Trilateral Commission was founded in July 1973, at the initiative of American banker David Rockefeller, who was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations at that time. It is a private organization established to foster closer cooperation among the United States, Europe and Japan. The Trilateral Commission is widely seen as a counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Conspiracy theorists believe that the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission are "globalist" think tanks that serve as front organizations for the Round Table of the "Anglo-American Establishment", which they believe has been plotting from 1900 on to rule the world through an "international banking cabal". Conspiracists therefore fear that the international bankers of financial capitalism are planning to eventually subvert the independence of the U.S. by subordinating national sovereignty to a strengthened Bank for International Settlements.[48]

The research findings of historian Carroll Quigley, author of the 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, are taken by both conspiracy theorists of the American Old Right (Cleon Skousen) and New Left (Carl Oglesby) to substantiate this view, even though he argued that the Establishment is not involved in a plot to implement a one-world government but rather British and American benevolent imperialism driven by the mutual interests of economic elites in the United Kingdom and the United States. Quigley also argued that, although the Round Table still exists today, its position in influencing the policies of world leaders has been much reduced from its heyday during World War I and slowly waned after the end of World War II and the Suez Crisis. Today the Round Table is largely a ginger group, designed to consider and gradually influence the policies of the Commonwealth of Nations, but faces strong opposition. Furthermore, in American society after 1965, the problem, according to Quigley, was that no elite was in charge and acting responsibly.[48]

Larry McDonald, the 2nd president of the John Birch Society and a conservative Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives who represented the 7th congressional district of Georgia, wrote a forward for Allen's 1976 book The Rockefeller File, wherein he stated:

The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government, combining super-capitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control ... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.[49]

In his 2002 autobiography Memoirs, Rockefeller wrote:

For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents ... to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.[50]

Barkun argues that this statement is partly facetious (the claim of "conspiracy" or "treason") and partly serious—the desire to encourage trilateral cooperation among the U.S., Europe, and Japan, for example—an ideal that used to be a hallmark of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party when there was an internationalist wing. The statement, however, is taken at face value and widely cited by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Council on Foreign Relations uses its role as the brain trust of American presidents, senators and representatives to manipulate them into supporting a New World Order in the form of a one-world government.

In a 13 November 2007 interview with Canadian journalist Benjamin Fulford, Rockefeller countered:

I don't think that I really feel that we need a world government. We need governments of the world that work together and collaborate. But, I can't imagine that there would be any likelihood or even that it would be desirable to have a single government elected by the people of the world ... There have been people, ever since I've had any kind of position in the world, who have accused me of being ruler of the world. I have to say that I think for the large part, I would have to decide to describe them as crackpots. It makes no sense whatsoever, and isn't true, and won't be true, and to raise it as a serious issue seems to me to be irresponsible.[51]

Some American social critics, such as Laurence H. Shoup, argue that the Council on Foreign Relations is an "imperial brain trust", which has, for decades, played a central behind-the-scenes role in shaping U.S. foreign policy choices for the post-WWII international order and the Cold War, by determining what options show up on the agenda and what options do not even make it to the table;[52] while others, such as G. William Domhoff, argue that it is in fact a mere policy discussion forum,[53] which provides the business input to U.S. foreign policy planning.[54] The latter argue that it has nearly 3,000 members, far too many for secret plans to be kept within the group; all the council does is sponsor discussion groups, debates and speakers; and as far as being secretive, it issues annual reports and allows access to its historical archives. However, all these critics agree that historical studies of the council show that it has a very different role in the overall power structure than what is claimed by conspiracy theorists.[53]

Open Conspiracy

In his 1928 book The Open Conspiracy British writer and Fabian socialist H. G. Wells called for the intelligentsia of all nation-states to organize for the establishment of a global federation of strengthened and democratized global institutions, with plenary constitutional power accountable to global citizens and a division of international authority among separate global agencies, in order to build a world social democracy.[55]

Wells warned, however, in his 1940 book The New World Order that:

... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we [must] bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.[10]

Wells' book was extremely influential in giving a second meaning to the term "new world order", which would only be used by both democratic socialist supporters and anti-communist opponents for generations to come.[56] But the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to a period of triumphalism by capitalists world wide, the elimination of the only obstacle to the spread of a neoliberal form of globalization, and a shattering of the confidence of those who hoped that Perestroika and Glasnost reforms of the late 1980s would return the Soviet Union (which had become a degenerated workers' state) to democratic socialism and transform it into one of the building blocks of the new world order envisioned by Wells. Right-wing conspiracy theorists, however, simply changed their focus from the Soviet Union to the United Nations as the bureaucratic collectivist menace.[53]

New Age

British neo-Theosophical occultist Alice Bailey, one of the founders of the so-called New Age movement, prophesied in 1940 the eventual victory of the Allies of World War II over the Axis powers (which occurred in 1945) and the establishment by the Allies of a political and religious New World Order. She saw a federal world government as the culmination of Wells' Open Conspiracy but argued that it would be synarchist because it was guided by the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, intent on preparing humanity for the mystical second coming of Christ, and the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. According to Bailey, a group of ascended masters called the Great White Brotherhood works on the "inner planes" to oversee the transition to the New World Order but, for now, the members of this Spiritual Hierarchy are only known to a few occult scientists, with whom they communicate telepathically, but as the need for their personal involvement in the plan increases, there will be an "Externalization of the Hierarchy" and everyone will know of their presence on Earth.[57]

Bailey's writings, along with American writer Marilyn Ferguson's 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy, contributed to conspiracy theorists of the Christian right viewing the New Age movement as the "false religion" that would supersede Christianity in a New World Order.[58] Skeptics argue that the term "New Age movement" is a misnomer, generally used by conspiracy theorists as a catch-all rubric for any new religious, spiritual or philosophical belief, symbol and practice that is not fundamentalist Christian. By their lights, anything that is not Christian is by definition actively and willfully anti-Christian. The implication is that these independent and sometimes contradictory schools of thought are all part of a monolithic whole. This is logically and empirically false, and rationally simplistic.[59]

Paradoxically, since the 2000s, New World Order conspiracism is increasing being embraced and propagandized by New Age occultists, who are people bored by rationalism and drawn to what Barkun calls the "cultural dumping ground of the heretical, the scandalous, the unfashionable, and the dangerous" — such as alternative medicine, astrology, quantum mysticism, spiritualism, and Theosophy.[5] Thus, New Age conspiracy theorists, such as the makers of documentary films like Zeitgeist, the Movie and Esoteric Agenda, claim that globalists who plot on behalf of the New World Order are simply misusing occultism for Machiavellian ends, such as adopting 21 December 2012 as the exact date for the establishment of the New World Order in order to take advantage of the growing 2012 phenomenon, which has its origins in the fringe Mayanist theories of New Age writers José Argüelles, Terence McKenna, and Daniel Pinchbeck.

Skeptics argue that the connection of conspiracy theorists and occultists follows from their common, fallacious premises. First, any widely accepted belief must necessarily be false. Second, counterknowledge—what the Establishment spurns—must be true. The result is a large, self-referential network in which, for example, UFO religionists promote anti-Jewish phobias while antisemites claim direct reception of prophetic material: the voice of the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl.[5]

Fourth Reich

Conspiracy theorists often use the term "Fourth Reich" simply as a pejorative synonym for the "New World Order" to imply that its state ideology and government will be similar to Germany's Third Reich. However, some conspiracy theorists take the research findings of American journalist Edwin Black, author of the 2009 book Nazi Nexus, to claim that some American corporations and philanthropic foundations—whose complicity was pivotal to the Third Reich's war effort, Nazi eugenics and the Holocaust—are now conspiring to build a Fourth Reich.

Conspiracy theorists, such as American writer Jim Marrs, claim that some ex-Nazis, who survived the fall of the Greater German Empire, along with sympathizers in the United States and elsewhere, given safe haven by organizations like ODESSA and Die Spinne, have been working behind the scenes since the end of World War II to enact at least some of the principles of Nazism (e.g. militarism, imperialism, widespread spying on citizens, use of corporations and propaganda to control national interests and ideas) into culture, government, and business worldwide, but primarily in the U.S.. They cite the influence of ex-Nazi scientists brought in under Operation Paperclip to help advance aerospace manufacturing in the U.S. with technological principles from Nazi UFOs, and the acquisition and creation of conglomerates by ex-Nazis and their sympathizers after the war, in both Europe and the U.S..[60]

This neo-Nazi conspiracy is said to be animated by an "Iron Dream" in which the American Empire, having overthrown its Zionist Occupation Government, gradually establishes the Fourth Reich, formally known as the "Western Imperium", a pan-Aryan world empire modeled after Adolf Hitler's New Order and the religious aspects of Nazism, as the best hope for the survival of Western civilization under the threat of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy.[61] Conspiracy theorists therefore believe that "the history of the world is the history of warfare between secret societies" for control of a New World Order.

Skeptics argue that conspiracy theorists grossly overestimate the influence of ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis on American society, and point out that American imperialism, corporatocracy and political repression have a long history that predates World War II. Some political scientists, such as Sheldon Wolin, have expressed concern that the twin forces of democratic deficit and superpower status have paved the way in the U.S. for the emergence of an inverted totalitarianism which contradicts many principles of Nazism.[62]

Alien Invasion

Since the late 1970s, extraterrestrials from other habitable planets or parallel dimensions (such as "Greys") and intraterrestrials from Hollow Earth (such as "Reptilians") have been included in the New World Order conspiracy, in more or less dominant roles, as in the theories put forward by American writers Stan Deyo and Milton William Cooper, and British writer David Icke.[5][63]

The common theme in such conspiracy theories is that aliens have been among us for decades, centuries or millennia, but a government cover-up has protected the public from knowledge of ancient astronauts and an alien invasion. Motivated by speciesism and imperialism, these aliens have been and are secretly manipulating developments and changes in human society in order to more efficiently control and exploit it. In some theories, alien infiltrators have taken human form and move freely throughout human society, even to the point of taking control of command positions in governmental, corporate, and religious institutions, and are now in the final stages of their plan to take over the world. A mythical covert government agency of the United States code-named Majestic 12 is often cited by conspiracy theorists as being the shadow government which collaborates with the alien occupation, in exchange for assistance in the development and testing of military "flying saucers" at Area 51, in order for U.S. armed forces to achieve full-spectrum dominance.[5]

Skeptics, who adhere to the psychosocial hypothesis for unidentified flying objects, argue that the convergence of New World Order conspiracy theory and UFO conspiracy theory is a product of not only the era's widespread mistrust of governments and the popularity of the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs but of the far right and ufologists actually joining forces. Barkun notes that the only positive side to this development is that, if conspirators plotting to rule the world are believed to be aliens, traditional human scapegoats (Freemasons, Illuminati, Jews, etc.) are downgraded or exonerated.[5]

Brave New World

Antiscience and neo-Luddite conspiracy theorists emphasize technology forecasting in their New World Order conspiracy theories. They speculate that the global power elite are modern Luciferians pursuing a transhumanist agenda to develop and use human enhancement technologies in order to become a "posthuman ruling caste", while change accelerates toward a technological singularity—a theorized future point of discontinuity when events will accelerate at such a pace that normal unenhanced humans will be unable to predict or even understand the rapid changes occurring in the world around them. Conspiracy theorists fear the outcome will either be the emergence of a Brave New World-like dystopia—a "Brave New World Order"—or the extinction of the human species.[64]

Democratic transhumanists, such as American sociologist James Hughes, and singularitarians, such as American inventor Raymond Kurzweil, counter that many influential members of the American Establishment are bioconservatives strongly opposed to human enhancement, as demonstrated by President Bush's Council on Bioethics's proposed international treaty prohibiting human cloning and germline engineering. Regardless, transhumanists and singularitarians claim to only support developing and making publicly available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities for the common good; as well as taking deliberate action to ensure that the Singularity—the moment when technological progress starts being driven by superintelligence—occurs in a way that is beneficial to humankind.[65][66]

Postulated implementations

Just as there are several overlapping or conflicting theories among conspiracists about the nature of the New World Order, so are there several beliefs about how its architects and planners will implement it:

Gradualism

Conspiracy theorists generally speculate that the New World Order is being implemented gradually, citing the formation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1913; the League of Nations in 1919; the International Monetary Fund in 1944; the United Nations in 1945; the World Bank in 1945; the World Health Organization in 1948; the European Union and the euro currency in 1993; the World Trade Organization in 1998; and the African Union in 2002 as major milestones.[5]

An increasingly popular conspiracy theory among American right-wing populists is that the hypothetical North American Union and the amero currency, proposed by the Council on Foreign Relations and its counterparts in Mexico and Canada, will be the next implementation of the New World Order. The theory holds that a group of shadowy and mostly nameless international elites are planning to replace the federal government of the United States with a transnational government. Therefore, conspiracy theorists believe the borders between Mexico, Canada and the United States are in the process of being erased, covertly, by a group of globalists whose ultimate goal is to replace national governments in Washington, D.C., Ottawa and Mexico City with a European-style political union and a bloated E.U.-style bureaucracy.[67]

Skeptics argue that the North American Union exists only as a proposal contained in one of a thousand academic and/or policy papers published each year that advocate all manner of idealistic but ultimately unrealistic approaches to social, economic and political problems. Most of these get passed around in their own circles and eventually filed away and forgotten by junior staffers in congressional offices. Some of these papers, however, become touchstones for the conspiracy-minded and form the basis of all kinds of unfounded xenophobic fears especially during times of economic anxiety.[67]

In March 2009, as a result of the financial crisis of 2007–2010, the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation have pressed for urgent consideration of a super-sovereign reserve currency and a U.N. panel has proposed greatly expanding the I.M.F.'s Special Drawing Rights. Conspiracy theorists have misinterpreted the proposal as vindication of their beliefs about a global currency for the New World Order.[68][69]

Judging that both national governments and global institutions have proven ineffective in addressing worldwide problems that go beyond the capacity of individual nation-states to solve, some political scientists, such as Mark C. Partrige, argue that regionalism will be the major force in the coming decades, pockets of power around regional centers: Western Europe around Brussels, the Western Hemisphere around Washington, D.C., East Asia around Beijing, and Eastern Europe around Moscow. As such, the E.U., the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the G-20 will likely become more influential as time progresses. The question then is not whether global governance is gradually emerging, but rather how will these regional powers interact with one another.[70]

Coup d'état

American right-wing conspiracy theorists, especially those who joined the militia movement in the United States, speculate that the New World Order will be implemented through a dramatic coup d'état by a "secret team", using black helicopters, in the U.S. and other nation-states to bring about a totalitarian world government controlled by the United Nations and enforced by troops of foreign U.N. peacekeepers. Following the Rex 84 and Operation Garden Plot plans, this military coup would involve the suspension of the Constitution, the imposition of martial law, and the appointment of military commanders to head state and local governments and to detain dissidents.[71]

These conspiracy theorists, who are all strong believers in a right to keep and bear arms, are extremely fearful that the passing of any gun control legislation will be later followed by the abolishment of personal gun ownership and a campaign of gun confiscation, and that the refugee camps of emergency management agencies such as F.E.M.A. will be used for the internment of suspected subversives, making little effort to distinguish true threats to the New World Order from pacifist dissidents.[22]

Before year 2000 some survivalists wrongly believed this process would be set in motion by the predicted Y2K problem causing societal collapse.[72] Since many left-wing and right-wing conspiracy theorists believe that the September 11 attacks were a false flag operation carried out by the United States intelligence community, as part of a strategy of tension to justify political repression at home and preemptive war abroad, they have become convinced that a more catastrophic terrorist incident will be responsible for triggering Executive Directive 51 in order to complete the transition to a police state.[73]

Skeptics argue that unfounded fears about an imminent or eventual gun ban, military coup, internment, or U.N. invasion and occupation are rooted in an extremist form of constitutionalism but also an apocalyptic millenarianism which provides a basic narrative within the American political right, claiming that the idealized society (i.e. "Christian nation", constitutional republic of "sovereign citizens") is thwarted by subversive conspiracies of liberal secular humanists who want "Big Government" and globalists who plot on behalf of the New World Order.[11]

Mass surveillance

Conspiracy theorists concerned with surveillance abuse believe that the New World Order is being implemented by the cult of intelligence at the core of the surveillance-industrial complex through mass surveillance and the use of Social Security numbers, the bar-coding of retail goods with Universal Product Code markings, and, most recently, RFID tagging via microchip implants.[5]

Original seal of the now defunct DARPA Information Awareness Office.

Skeptics warn that some consumer privacy advocates, such as Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre,[74] who claim that corporations and government are planning to track every move of consumers and citizens with RFID as the latest step toward a 1984-like surveillance state, have become Christian conspiracy theorists who believe spychips must be resisted because they argue that modern database and communications technologies, coupled with point of sale data-capture equipment and sophisticated ID and authentication systems, now make it possible to require a biometrically associated number or mark to make purchases. They fear that the ability to implement such a system closely resembles the Number of the Beast prophesied in the Book of Revelation.[5]

In January 2002, the Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying information technology to counter asymmetric threats to national security. Following public criticism that the development and deployment of these technologies could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by the United States Congress in 2003.[75][76] The second source of controversy involved IAO's original logo, which depicted the "all-seeing" Eye of Providence atop of a pyramid looking down over the globe, accompanied by the Latin phrase scientia est potentia (knowledge is power). Although DARPA eventually removed the logo from its website, it left a lasting impression on privacy advocates.[77] It also inflamed conspiracy theorists,[78] who misinterpret the "eye and pyramid" as the Masonic symbol of the Illuminati,[34][79] an 18th-century secret society they speculate continues to exist and is plotting on behalf of a New World Order.[38][39]

American historian Richard Landes, who specializes in the history of apocalypticism and was co-founder and director of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, argues that new and emerging technologies often trigger alarmism among millenarians and even the introduction of Gutenberg's printing press in 1436 caused waves of apocalyptic thinking. The Y2K problem, bar codes and Social Security numbers all triggered end-time warnings which either proved to be false or simply were no longer taken seriously once the public became accustomed to these technologies.[80] Civil libertarians argue that the privatization of surveillance and the rise of the surveillance-industrial complex in the United States does raise legitimate concerns about the erosion of privacy.[81] However, skeptics of mass surveillance conspiracism caution that such concerns should be disentagled from secular paranoia about Big Brother or religious hysteria about the Antichrist.[5]

Occultism

Conspiracy theorists of the Christian right believe there is an ancient occult conspiracy—started by the first mystagogues of Gnosticism and perpetuated by their alleged esoteric successors, such as the Kabbalists, Cathars, Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and, ultimately, the Illuminati—which seeks to subvert the Judeo-Christian foundations of the Western world and implement the New World Order through a New Age one-world religion that prepares the masses to embrace the imperial cult of the Antichrist.[58] More broadly, they speculate that globalists who plot on behalf of a New World Order are directed by occult agencies of some sort: unknown superiors, spiritual hierarchies, demons, fallen angels or Lucifer. They believe that, like Nazi occultists, these conspirators use the power of occult sciences (numerology), symbols (Eye of Providence), rituals (Masonic degrees), monuments (National Mall landmarks), buildings (Manitoba Legislative Building[32]) and facilities (Denver International Airport) to advance their plot to rule the world.[5]

For example, in June 1979, an unknown benefactor under the pseudonym "R. C. Christian" had a huge granite megalith built in the U.S. state of Georgia, which acts like a compass, calendar, and clock. A message comprising ten guides is inscribed on the occult structure in many languages to serve as instructions for survivors of a doomsday event to establish a more enlightened and sustainable civilization than the one which was destroyed. The "Georgia Guidestones" have subsequently become a spiritual and political Rorschach test onto which any number of ideas can be imposed. Some New Agers and neo-pagans revere it as a ley-line power nexus while a few conspiracy theorists are convinced that they are engraved with the New World Order's anti-Christian "Ten Commandments". Should the Guidestones survive for centuries as their creators intended, many more meanings could arise, equally unrelated to the designer's original intention.[82]

Skeptics argue that the demonization of Western occultism by conspiracy theorists is rooted in religious intolerance but also in the same moral panics that have fueled witch trials in Early Modern Europe, and satanic ritual abuse allegations in the United States.[5]

Population control

Conspiracy theorists believe that the New World Order will also be implemented through the use of population control in order to more easily monitor and control the movement of individuals. The means range from stopping the growth of human societies through reproductive health and family planning programs, which promote abstinence, contraception and abortion, or intentionally reducing the bulk of the world population through genocides by mongering unnecessary wars, through plagues by engineering emergent viruses and tainting vaccines, and through environmental disasters by controlling the weather (HAARP, chemtrails), etc..[5] The Codex Alimentarius, a collection of internationally recognized standards, codes of practice, guidelines and other recommendations relating to foods, food production and food safety, has also become the subject of conspiracy theories about population control through famines and foodborne diseases.

Skeptics argue that fears of mandated population control can be traced back to the traumatic legacy of the eugenics movement's "war against the weak" in the United States during the first decades of the 20th century but also the Second Red Scare in the U.S. during the late 1940s and 1950s, and to a lesser extent in the 1960s, when activists on the far right of American politics routinely opposed public health programs, notably water fluoridation, mass vaccination and mental health services, by asserting they were all part of a far-reaching plot to impose a socialist or communist regime.[83] Their views were influenced by opposition to a number of major social and political changes that had happened in recent years: the growth of internationalism, particularly the United Nations and its programs; the introduction of social welfare provisions, particularly the various programs established by the New Deal; and government efforts to reduce perceived inequalities in the social structure of the U.S..[84]

Mind control

Social critics accuse governments, corporations, and the mass media of being involved in the manufacturing of a national consensus and, paradoxically, a culture of fear due to the potential for increased social control that a mistrustful and mutually fearing population might offer to those in power. The worst fear of some conspiracy theorists is that the New World Order will be implemented through the use of mind control—a broad range of tactics able to subvert an individual's control of his or her own thinking, behavior, emotions, or decisions. These tactics are said to include everything from Manchurian candidate-style brainwashing of sleeper agents (Project MKULTRA, "Project Monarch") to engineering psychological operations (water fluoridation, subliminal advertising, "Silent Sound Spread Spectrum", MEDUSA) and parapsychological operations (Stargate Project) to influence the masses.[85] The concept of wearing a tin foil hat for protection from such threats has become a popular stereotype and term of derision; the phrase serves as a byword for paranoia and is associated with conspiracy theorists.

Skeptics argue that the paranoia behind a conspiracy theorist's obsession with mind control, population control, occultism, surveillance abuse, Big Business, Big Government, and globalization arises from a combination of two factors, when he or she: 1) holds strong individualist values and 2) lacks power. The first attribute refers to people who care deeply about an individual's right to make their own choices and direct their own lives without interference or obligations to a larger system (like the government). But combine this with a sense of powerlessness in one's own life, and one gets what some psychologists call "agency panic", intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy to outside forces or regulators. When fervent individualists feel that they cannot exercise their independence, they experience a crisis and assume that larger forces are to blame for usurping this freedom.[86]

Alleged conspirators

According to Domhoff, many people seem to believe that the United States is ruled from behind the scenes by a conspiratorial elite with secret desires, i.e., by a small secretive group that wants to change the government system or put the country under the control of a world government. In the past the conspirators were usually said to be crypto-communists who were intent upon bringing the United States under a common world government with the Soviet Union, but the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 undercut that theory. Domhoff notes that most conspiracy theorists changed their focus to the United Nations as the likely controlling force in a New World Order, an idea which is undermined by the powerlessness of the U.N. and the unwillingness of even moderates within the American Establishment to give it anything but a limited role.[53]

In the 2008 book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, political scientist David Rothkopf argues that the world population of 6 billion people is governed by an elite of 6000 individuals. Until the late 20th century, governments of the great powers provided most of the superclass, accompanied by a few heads of international movements (i.e., the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church) and entrepreneurs (Rothschilds, Rockefellers). According to Rothkopf, in the early 21st century, economic clout—fueled by the explosive expansion of international trade, travel and communication—rules; the nation-state's power has diminished shrinking politicians to minority power broker status; leaders in international business, finance and the defense industry not only dominate the superclass, they move freely into high positions in their nations' governments and back to private life largely beyond the notice of elected legislatures (including the U.S. Congress), which remain abysmally ignorant of affairs beyond their borders. He asserts that the superclass' disproportionate influence over national policy is constructive but always self-interested, and that across the world, few object to corruption and oppressive governments provided they can do business in these countries.[87]

Conspiracy theorists go further than Rothkopf, and other scholars who have studied the global power elite, by claiming that "bloodlines" of the superclass whose members belong to the Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove, Club of Rome, Council on Foreign Relations, Rhodes House, Skull and Bones, Trilateral Commission, and similar think tanks and private clubs, are synarchists conspiring to create a totalitarian New World Order—the implementation of a bureaucratic collectivist world government through a strengthened United Nations and a global central bank to force humanity into permanent slavery.[5]

Domhoff counters:

The opponents are the corporate conservatives and the Republican Party, not the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderbergers, and Bohemians. It is the same people more or less, but it puts them in their most important roles, as capitalists and political leaders, which are visible and legitimate... If thought of this way, then the role of a CFR as a place to try to hear new ideas and reach consensus is more readily understood, as is the function of a social club as a place that creates social cohesion. Moreover, those understandings of the CFR and the clubs fit with the perceptions of the members of the elite.[88]

Progressives, who are skeptical of conspiracy theories, also accuse the global power elite of not having the best interests of all at heart, and many intergovernmental organizations of suffering from a democratic deficit, but they argue that the superclass are plutocrats only interested in brazenly imposing a neoliberal or neoconservative new world order—the implementation of global capitalism through economic and military coercion to protect the interests of transnational corporations [89] — which systematically undermines the possibility of a socialist one-world government. On the other hand, Marxists and anarchists, who believe the world is in the middle of a transition from the American Empire to the rule of a global ruling class that has emerged from within the American Empire,[90] point out that right-wing conspiracy theorists, blinded by their anti-communism, fail to see is that what they demonize as the "New World Order" is, ironically, "Empire"—the highest stage of the very capitalist economic system they defend.

Criticism

Skeptics of New World Order conspiracy theories accuse its proponents of indulging in the furtive fallacy, a belief that significant facts of history are necessarily sinister; conspiracism, a world view that centrally places conspiracy theories in the unfolding of history, rather than social and economic forces; and fusion paranoia, a promiscuous absorption of fears from any source whatsoever.[5]

Domhoff, a research professor in psychology and sociology who studies theories of power, writes in a March 2005 essay entitled There Are No Conspiracies:

There are several problems with a conspiratorial view that don't fit with what we know about power structures. First, it assumes that a small handful of wealthy and highly educated people somehow develop an extreme psychological desire for power that leads them to do things that don't fit with the roles they seem to have. For example, that rich capitalists are no longer out to make a profit, but to create a one-world government. Or that elected officials are trying to get the constitution suspended so they can assume dictatorial powers. These kinds of claims go back many decades now, and it is always said that it is really going to happen this time, but it never does. Since these claims have proved wrong dozens of times by now, it makes more sense to assume that leaders act for their usual reasons, such as profit-seeking motives and institutionalized roles as elected officials. Of course they want to make as much money as they can, and be elected by huge margins every time, and that can lead them to do many unsavory things, but nothing in the ballpark of creating a one-world government or suspending the constitution.[53]

Partridge, a contributing editor to the global affairs magazine Diplomatic Courier, writes in a December 2008 news article entitled One World Government: Conspiracy Theory or Inevitable Future?:

I am skeptical that "global governance" could "come much sooner than that [200 years]," as Gideon posits. For one thing, nationalism—the natural counterpoint to global government—is rising. Some leaders and peoples around the world have resented Washington's chiding and hubris over the past two decade of American unipolarity. Russia has been re-establishing itself as a "great power"; few could miss the national pride on display when China hosted the Beijing Olympics this summer; while Hugo Chavez and his ilk have stoked the national flames with their anti-American rhetoric. The departing of the Bush Administration could cause this nationalism to abate, but economic uncertainty usually has the opposite effect. [...] Another point is that attempts at global government and global agreements have been categorical failures. The WTO's Doha Round is dead in the water, Kyoto excluded many of the leading polluters and a conference to establish a deal was a failure, and there is a race to the bottom in terms of corporate taxes—rather than an existing global framework. And, where supranational governance structures exist, they are noted for their bureaucracy and inefficiency: The UN has been unable to stop an American-led invasion of Iraq, genocide in Darfur, the slow collapse of Zimbabwe, or Iran's continued uranium enrichment. That is not to belittle the structure, as I deem it essential, but the system's flaws are there for all to see.[70]

Although some cultural critics see superconspiracy theories as "postmodern metanarratives" that may be politically empowering, a way of giving ordinary people a narrative structure with which to question what they see around them,[91] skeptics argue New World Order conspiracism leads people into cynicism, convoluted thinking, and a tendency to feel it is hopeless even as they denounce the alleged conspirators.[88] The activities of conspiracy theorists (talk radio shows, books, websites, documentary videos, conferences, etc.) unwittingly draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from serious criticism and activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state, and their institutional background.[11]

Concerned that the apocalyptic millenarian theme in all conspiracy theories about a New World Order might motivate lone wolves to engage in leaderless resistance, which can encompass anything from patriot hacking to United States presidential assassination plots,[92] Barkun writes:

The danger lies less in such beliefs themselves ... than in the behavior they might stimulate or justify. As long as the New World Order appeared to be almost but not quite a reality, devotees of conspiracy theories could be expected to confine their activities to propagandizing. On the other hand, should they believe that the prophesied evil day had in fact arrived, their behavior would become far more difficult to predict.[5]

Warning of the threat to American democracy posed by right-wing populist movements and mob rule galvanized by a producerist worldview and the fear of a New World Order conspiracy, Berlet writes:

Right-wing populist movements can cause serious damage to a society because they often popularize xenophobia, authoritarianism, scapegoating, and conspiracism. This can lure mainstream politicians to adopt these themes to attract voters, legitimize acts of discrimination (or even violence), and open the door for revolutionary right-wing populist movements, such as fascism, to recruit from the reformist populist movements.[11]

Criticisms of New World Order conspiracy theorists also come from within their own community. Despite believing themselves to be "freedom fighters", many right-wing conspiracy theorists hold views that are incompatible with their professed libertarianism, such as eliminationism,[20] dominionism, and white supremacism.[11] This paradox has led Icke, who argues that Christian Patriots are the only Americans who understand the truth about the New World Order (which he believes is controlled by a race of reptilians known as the "Babylonian Brotherhood"), to reportedly tell a Christian Patriot group:

I don't know which I dislike more, the world controlled by the Brotherhood, or the one you want to replace it with.[5]

Literature

The following is a list of notable published non-fiction books by New World Order conspiracy theorists:

  • Davison, Mary M.. The Profound Revolution. The Greater Nebraskan. 
  • Allen, Gary. None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Buccaneer Books. ISBN 0899666612. 
  • Allen, Gary. Rockefeller: Campaigning for the New World Order. American Opinion. 
  • Allen, Gary. Say "No!" to the New World Order. Concord Press. 
  • Abraham, Larry (1988) [1971]. Call it Conspiracy. Double a Publications. ISBN 0-9615550-1-7. 
  • Still, William T. (1990). New World Order: The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies. Huntington House Publishers. ISBN 0-910311-64-1. 
  • Cooper, Milton William (1991). Behold a Pale Horse. Light Technology Publications. ISBN 0-929385-22-5. 
  • Martin, Malachi (1991). Keys of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0671747231. 
  • Robertson, Pat (1992). The New World Order. W Publishing Group. ISBN 0-8499-3394-3. 
  • Wardner, James (1994) [1993]. The Planned Destruction of America. Longwood Communications. ISBN 0-9632190-5-7. 
  • Keith, Jim (1995). Black Helicopters over America: Strikeforce for the New World Order. Illuminet Press. ISBN 1-881532-05-4. 
  • Jones, Alan B. (2001) [1997]. Secrecy or Freedom?. ABJ Press. ISBN 0-9640848-2-1. 
  • Cuddy, Dennis Laurence (1999). Secret Records Revealed: The Men, The Money and The Methods Behind the New World Order. Hearthstone Publishing, Ltd.. ISBN 1-57558-031-4. 
  • Marrs, Jim (2001). Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-093184-1. 
  • Lina, Jüri (2002). Under the Sign of the Scorpion: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. Referent Publishing. ISBN 9197289779. 
  • Lina, Jüri (2004). Architects of Deception. Referent Publishing. 
  • Tedford, Cody (2008). Powerful Secrets. Hannover. ISBN 1-4241-9263-3. 

In popular culture

Cultural critics, like Barkun, note that a vast popular audience has been introduced by some notable works of conspiracy fiction (novels, television series, and films) to various fringe theories related to New World Order conspiracism once confined to right-wing extremists.[5] The following is a list in chronological order:

References

  1. ^ a b Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews' Edition of Freund's Latin Dictionary: Revised, Enlarged, and in Great Part Rewritten by Charlton T. Lewis, Ph.D. and Charles Short, LL.D. The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1879, s. vv.
  2. ^ a b c d Camp, Gregory S. (1997). Selling Fear: Conspiracy Theories and End-Times Paranoia. Baker Books. 
  3. ^ a b c Berlet Chip; Lyons, Matthew N. (2000). Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. Guilford Press. ISBN 1572305622. 
  4. ^ a b Goldberg, Robert Alan (2001). Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300090005. 
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x Barkun, Michael (2003). A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. University of California Press; 1 edition. ISBN 0520238052. 
  6. ^ a b Fenster, Mark (2008). Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. University of Minnesota Press; 2nd edition. ISBN 0816654948. 
  7. ^ a b Berlet, Chip (September 2004). Interview: Michael Barkun. http://www.publiceye.org/antisemitism/nw_barkun.html. Retrieved 2009-10-01. 
  8. ^ Berlet, Chip (20/12/1990, revised 4/15/1994, 3 corrections 1999). Right Woos Left: Populist Party, LaRouchite, and Other Neo-fascist Overtures To Progressives, And Why They Must Be Rejected. http://www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9_TOC.html. Retrieved 2010-02-01. 
  9. ^ Buchanan, Patrick J. (1999). A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny. Regnery Publishing, Inc.. 
  10. ^ a b Wells, H. G. (2006). The New World Order. Hesperides Press. ISBN 1406722626. 
  11. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Berlet, Chip (Fall 1998, revised 4/15/99). Dances with Devils: How Apocalyptic and Millennialist Themes Influence Right Wing Scapegoating and Conspiracism. http://www.publiceye.org/apocalyptic/Dances_with_Devils_TOC.html. Retrieved 2009-07-23. 
  12. ^ "George Bush Meet Woodrow Wilson", New York Times, November 20, 1990
  13. ^ Preston, Keith (2003). "National-Anarchism and Classical American Ideals: Is A Reconciliation Possible?" (WebCite). Food for the European Mind. Archived from the original on 2008-02-18. http://www.webcitation.org/5eek58jcD. Retrieved 2008-02-18. 
  14. ^ Macklin, Graham D. (September 2005). "Co-opting the counter culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction". Patterns of Prejudice 39 (3): 301–326. doi:0.1080/00313220500198292. ISSN 0031-322X. http://www.new-right.org/?p=53. Retrieved 2009-02-17. 
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