What are the "9 Circles of Hell" in Dante's "Divine Comedy"?

Question

Give their names and the known people or literary figures that can be seen in each circle, and the reason why they are there.

Pretty long, huh? But I'm serious!

Answer 1

The first circle is Limbo and the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan are there. Limbo includes the unbaptized and those who are not sinful but did not accept Christ.
The second circle is Lust. Francesca da Rimini is here because she and her brother-in-law committed adultery and where killed by her husband.
The third circle is Gluttony. Dante meets Ciacco.
The forth circle is avarice and prodigality . Plutus is the guardian of the fourth circle.
The fifth circle contains wrath and sullenness. Here Dante meets Filippo Argenti and he was Dante's enemy- political and personally. Also in this circle and fallen angels, the Three Furies and Meusa.
The sixth circle contains heretics. Epicurus is here because of his philosophy of pleasure being the most important thing. Dante also meets Guido Cavalcanti, Frederick II, Farinata, and Cavalcante de'Cavalcanti.
The seventh circle is violence and contains three rings which are-violence to other people, violence to oneself, and violence to God. This circle includes murder, suicide, blasphemy, sodomy, and usury. Pier della Vigna, a poet, represents suicide. Capabues, a King, represents blasphemy. Brunetto Latini represents sodomy.
The eight circle is fraud and it is made up of ten ditches- pimping and seducing, flattery, simony (the abuse of power within the church), sorcery, political corruption, and hypocrisy. Jason of Argos is the first ditch for seduction- he would seduce and then leave women. Simon Magnus represents simony. Manto is in the pit for sorcerers and astrologers.
The ninth circle is treachery and it is divided into four regions- Caina, Antenora, Ptolomea, and Judecca. Caina is named after Cain. Antenora refers to a Trojan prince and this region is for political traitors. The third region, Ptolomea, is for those who have betrayed friends or guests.
Judecca, named for Judas Iscariot, is the innermost region and the last circle of Hell. The people here have betrayed their masters or benefactors.

Answer 2

Circle One - Those in limbo
Circle Two - The lustful
Circle Three - The gluttonous
Circle Four - The hoarders
Circle Five - The wrathful
Circle Six - The heretics
Circle Seven - The violent
Ring 1. Murderers, robbers, and plunderers
Ring 2. Suicides and those harmful to the world
Ring 3. Those harmful against God, nature, and art, as well as usurers
Circle Eight - The Fraudulent
Bowge (Trench) I. Panderers and Seducers
Bowge II. Flatterers
Bowge III. Simoniacs
Bowge IV. Sorcerers
Bowge V. Barrators
Bowge VI. Hypocrites
Bowge VII. Thieves
Bowge VIII. Counselors
Bowge IX. Sowers of Discord
Bowge X. Falsifiers
Circle Nine - Traitors
Region i: Traitors to their kindred
Region ii: Traitors to their country
Region iii: Traitors to their guests
Region iv: Traitors to their lords

Answer 3

the Wikipedia article below will help - it gives you the context for this and more information about the history and reasoning. I did think about re-writing it for you, but to be honest the information in the article is well-written and easy to follow.

EDIT- actually, the last couple of answers are exactly the same info as contained in the Wikipedia article, so you've already seen it! Have a look at the article for more information, and for the background understanding.

Hope this helps!

Answer 4

Jehovah Witnesses. Why do you tweak the meanings of "divine", "god" & "son of God" as applied to Jesus? Tweak? As in trinity a teaching made up by men in the fourth century? This evidence is just too great for Christians to "tweak". Christians? Follower of Christ. Jesus had a God, prayed to God, relied on God. A follower imitates Jesus. You tweak what Jesus taught by teaching Jesus is some part of a trinity God. Yet you say JW's tweak the meanings? STOP TWEAKING!

Answer 5

-----------------------
Vedic heaven: Freaks, vedic euphorics(vedics), " assholes "(quoted by Satan in his bible), and personal pagans.
-----------------------
Extradimensional void/space: Supernatural planets and floating rocks, this is the boundries of hell, trees that grow on floating rocks, lifesize planets, and phantasmal stars made by arcana, their is nothing in this area, it symbolizes the hell dimensions tiny boundries, it is considered another realm, so hell has its own outer space, which their can be no life anywhere but hell, the Moon of Cerberus, The Deathstar, a fake Earth, and lots of stars float around the realm of hell.

The Dark Woods: The Dark Woods contains wolves and evil spirits, as well as the leopard, its just really outer terrain. The Dark Woods is visited by the Lion of Judah(Leo) with vestibule and Limbo, Virgil, Beatrice, and Dante are here as well.

Vestibule: Vestibule, a place for angels that sinned when God and Lucifer waged war, they are punished by wasps and maggots.

1st Circle " Limbo ": Pietious violence(Ie, military, police, fighter), sadomasochists(Ie wrestling, bondage, lesbians, sensuality paraphiliacs, fruitless sex), rhetoric poets and realists, virtuous pagans&piety masterminds. Hercules is said to be punished and reside in Limbo when he is not in heaven, passing through Dantes Gate to Limbo.
-----------------------
Upper hell: Psychos, honor failures, fruits of life.
-----------------------
2nd Circle " The Lustful ": Sinners based on sex, rapists, perverts, adulterers, possessive wrath, unmarried sex, relationship jealousy.

3rd Circle " The Gluttonous ": Obese people, these individuals are put in moats of feces and urine, and ripped apart by the jaws of Cerberus, symbolizing their uncontrollable hunger in their former lives.

4th Circle " Hoarders and Wasters ": Greedy people, materialists that were to good for anybody but themself or others that loathe in wealth.

5th Circle " River Styx ": The depressed, bi polars, anger sinners.

6th Circle " City of Dis ": Atheists, blooming criminals, social sinners.
-----------------------
Lower hell: Demons, evildoers, criminals, insanity, satan worshippers.
-----------------------
7th Circle " The Violent ": Murderers, bullies, suicides. Adolph Hitler is in the 7th Circle of Hell, Goliath, Alexander the Great, Ghengis Kahn, and Al Capone.

8th Circle " The Fraudulent ": Unreal ego's/self esteem, thieves, arcane experts, doublemindedness.

9th Circle " The Treacherous ": The most evil that deform from punishment are put to spin and float in a arcane void for eternity. This is where your cryptids, witches on Earth, and satanic animals and insects were spawned from, as well as Scorpio, Scorpio was spawned from the 9th Circle of Hell. Entities in the 9th Circle, you will find Satan, Cain, Judas, Cryptids you never seen before, deformed spirits and demons through sin, and is also where hell devises science to use in hell, like torture machine or mechanical beings.

Answer 6

The Circles of Hell
First Circle (Limbo). Here 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 their separation from God, without hope of reconciliation. The chief irony in this circle is that Limbo shares many characteristics with Elysian Fields, thus the damned are punished by living in their deficient form of heaven. Their crime was that they lacked faith-- the hope for something greater than rational minds can assume. Limbo includes fields and a castle, the dwelling place of virtuous souls of wisdom, including Virgil himself. In the castle Dante meets the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. (Canto IV) One is led to assume that all virtuous pagans find themselves here, but at least two are found in heaven and one in purgatory.
All of the condemned sinners are judged by Minos, who sentences each soul to one of the lower eight circles. These 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-wolf3). The sins of incontinence — weakness in controlling one's desires and natural urges — are the mildest among them, and, correspondingly, appear first:

Second Circle. Those overcome by lust are punished in this circle. These souls are blown about to and fro by a violent storm, without hope of rest. This symbolizes the power of lust to blow one about needlessly and aimlessly. Francesca da Rimini tells Dante how she and her husband's brother Paolo committed adultery and died a violent death at the hands of her husband. (Canto V)

Third Circle. Cerberus guards the gluttons, forced to lie in the mud under continual cold rain and hail. Dante converses with a Florentine contemporary identified as Ciacco ("Hog" - probably a nickname) regarding strife in Florence and the fate of prominent Florentines. (Canto VI) Dante shares in the sin by being a "glutton for information," by atempting to extract information about the future from Ciacco for political gain.

Fourth Circle. Those whose concern for material goods deviated from the desired mean are punished in this circle. They include the avaricious or miserly, who hoarded possessions, and the prodigal, who squandered them. Guarded by Plutus, each group pushes a great weight against the heavy weight of the other group. After the weights crash together the process starts over again. (Canto VII)

Fifth Circle. In the swamp-like water of the river Styx, the wrathful fight each other on the surface, and the sullen or slothful lie gurgling beneath the water. 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. (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 Styx. 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 threaten Dante. An angel sent from Heaven secures entry for the poets. (Cantos VIII and IX)

Sixth Circle. Heretics are trapped in flaming tombs. Dante discourses with a pair of Florentines in one of the tombs: Farinata degli Uberti, a Ghibelline; and Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, a Guelph who was the father of Dante's friend, fellow poet Guido Cavalcanti. (Cantos X and XI)
Seventh Circle. This circle houses the violent. Its entry is guarded by the Minotaur, and it is divided into three rings:
Outer ring, housing the violent against people and property, who are immersed in Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood, to a level commensurate with their sins. The Centaurs, commanded by Chiron, patrol the ring. The centaur Nessus guides the poets along Phlegethon and across a ford in the river. (Canto XII)
Middle ring: In this ring are the suicides, who are transformed into gnarled thorny bushes and trees that are only able to speak when a branch is broken. They are torn at by the Harpies. Unique among the dead, the suicides will not be bodily resurrected after the final judgment. Instead they will maintain their bushy form, with their own corpses hanging from the limbs. Dante breaks a twig off of one of the bushes and hears the tale of Pier delle Vigne, who committed suicide after falling out of favor with Emperor Frederick II. The profligate wasters, the other residents of this ring, are chased by ferocious dogs through the thorny undergrowth. (Canto XIII)

Inner ring: The violent against God (blasphemers), the violent against nature (sodomites), and the violent against art (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: Brunetto Latini, a poet; and Iacopo Rusticucci, a politician. (Cantos XIV through XVII) It is important to note that it was not Dante's position that all sodomites were destined for hell fire, for sodomites can be found on the top of Mount Purgatory.

The last two circles of Hell punish sins that involve conscious fraud or treachery. The circles can be reached only by descending a vast cliff, which Dante and Virgil do on the back of Geryon, a winged monster represented by Dante as having the head of an honest man and a body that ends in a scorpion-like stinger. (Canto XVII)

Eighth Circle. The fraudulent—those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil—are located in a circle named Malebolge ("Evil Pockets"), divided into ten ditches, with bridges spanning the ditches:
Ditch 1: Panderers and seducers walk in separate lines in opposite directions, whipped by demons. (Canto XVIII)
Ditch 2: Flatterers are steeped in human excrement. (Canto XVIII)
Ditch 3: Those who committed simony are placed head-first in holes, with flames burning on the soles of their feet. One of them, Pope Nicholas III, denounces as simonists two of his successors, Pope Boniface VIII and Pope Clement V. (Canto XIX)
Ditch 4: Sorcerers and false prophets have their heads twisted around on their bodies backward, so they can only see what is behind them. (Canto XX)
Ditch 5: Corrupt politicians (barrators) are immersed in a lake of boiling pitch, guarded by devils, the Malebranche ("Evil Claws"). Their leader, Malacoda ("Evil Tail"), assigns a troop to escort Virgil and Dante to the next bridge. The troop hook and torment Ciampolo, who identifies some Italian grafters and then tricks the Malebranche in order to escape back into the pitch. (Cantos XXI through XXIII)
Ditch 6: Hypocrites listlessly walk along wearing gold-gilded lead cloaks. Dante speaks with Catalano and Loderingo, members of the Jovial Friars. (Canto XXIII)
Ditch 7: Thieves, guarded by the centaur (as Dante describes him) Cacus, are pursued and bitten by snakes. The snake bites make them undergo various transformations, with some resurrected after being turned to ashes, some mutating into new creatures, and still others exchanging natures with the snakes, becoming snakes themselves that chase the other thieves in turn. (Cantos XXIV and XXV)
Ditch 8: Fraudulent advisors are encased in individual flames. Dante includes Ulysses and Diomedes together here for their role in the Trojan War. Ulysses tells the tale of his fatal final voyage, where he left his home and family to sail to the end of the Earth. He equated life as a pursuit of knowledge that humanity can attain through effort, and in his search God sank his ship outside of Mount Purgatory. This symbolizes the inability of the individual to carve out one's own salvation. Instead, one must be totally subservient to the will of God and realize the inability of one to be a God onto her/himself. Guido da Montefeltro recounts how his advice to Pope Boniface VIII resulted in his damnation, despite Boniface's promise of absolution. (Cantos XXVI and XXVII)
Ditch 9: A sword-wielding devil hacks at the sowers of discord. As they make their rounds the wounds heal, only to have the devil tear apart their bodies again. Muhammad tells Dante to warn the schismatic and heretic Fra Dolcino. (Cantos XXVIII and XXIX)
Ditch 10: Groups of various sorts of falsifiers (alchemists, counterfeiters, perjurers, and impersonators) are afflicted with different types of diseases. (Cantos XXIX and XXX)
The ninth circle is ringed by classical and Biblical giants. The giant Antaeus lowers Dante and Virgil into the pit that forms the ninth circle. (Canto XXXI)


Ninth Circle. Traitors, distinguished from the "merely" fraudulent in that their acts involve betraying one in a special relationship to the betrayer, are frozen in a lake of ice known as Cocytus. Each group of traitors is encased in ice to a different height, ranging from only the waist down to complete immersion. The circle is divided into four concentric zones:
Zone 1: Caïna, named for Cain, is home to traitors to their kindred. (Canto XXXII)
Zone 2: Antenora is named for 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 and starved him and his children. (Cantos XXXII and XXXIII)
Zone 3: Ptolomæa is probably named for Ptolemy, the captain of Jericho, who invited Simon Maccabaeus and his sons to a banquet and there killed them. Traitors to their guests are punished here. Fra Alberigo explains that sometimes a soul falls here before the time that Atropos (the Fate who cuts the thread of life) should send it. Their bodies on Earth are immediately possessed by a fiend. (Canto XXXIII)
Zone 4: Judecca is for traitors to their lords and benefactors. At the center is Satan, who has three faces, each having a mouth that chews on a prominent traitor. Satan himslf is represented as a giant, terrifying beast, weeping bloody tears from his six eyes. He is waist deep in ice, and beats his six wings as if trying to escape, but the icy wind that emanates only further ensures his imprisonment (as well as that of the others in the ring). The sinners in the mouths of Satan are Brutus and Cassius, who were involved in the assassination of Julius Caesar (an act which, to Dante, represented the destruction of a unified Italy), and Judas Iscariot (the namesake of this zone), who betrayed Jesus. Judas is in the center mouth, and alone among the three is has his head inside a mouth. (Canto XXXIV) What is seen here is a perverted trinity. Satan is importent, ignorant, and evil while God can be attributed as the opposite: all powerful, all knowing, and good.

Answer 7

First Circle (Limbo). Here 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 their separation from God, without hope of reconciliation. The chief irony in this circle is that Limbo shares many characteristics with Elysian Fields, thus the damned are punished by living in their deficient form of heaven. Their crime was that they lacked faith-- the hope for something greater than rational minds can assume. Limbo includes fields and a castle, the dwelling place of virtuous souls of wisdom, including Virgil himself. In the castle Dante meets the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. (Canto IV) One is led to assume that all virtuous pagans find themselves here, but at least two are found in heaven and one in purgatory.
All of the condemned sinners are judged by Minos, who sentences each soul to one of the lower eight circles. These 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-wolf3). The sins of incontinence — weakness in controlling one's desires and natural urges — are the mildest among them, and, correspondingly, appear first:

Second Circle. Those overcome by lust are punished in this circle. These souls are blown about to and fro by a violent storm, without hope of rest. This symbolizes the power of lust to blow one about needlessly and aimlessly. Francesca da Rimini tells Dante how she and her husband's brother Paolo committed adultery and died a violent death at the hands of her husband. (Canto V)
Third Circle. Cerberus guards the gluttons, forced to lie in the mud under continual cold rain and hail. Dante converses with a Florentine contemporary identified as Ciacco ("Hog" - probably a nickname) regarding strife in Florence and the fate of prominent Florentines. (Canto VI) Dante shares in the sin by being a "glutton for information," by atempting to extract information about the future from Ciacco for political gain.
Fourth Circle. Those whose concern for material goods deviated from the desired mean are punished in this circle. They include the avaricious or miserly, who hoarded possessions, and the prodigal, who squandered them. Guarded by Plutus, each group pushes a great weight against the heavy weight of the other group. After the weights crash together the process starts over again. (Canto VII)
Fifth Circle. In the swamp-like water of the river Styx, the wrathful fight each other on the surface, and the sullen or slothful lie gurgling beneath the water. 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. (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 Styx. 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 threaten Dante. An angel sent from Heaven secures entry for the poets. (Cantos VIII and IX)

Sixth Circle. Heretics are trapped in flaming tombs. Dante discourses with a pair of Florentines in one of the tombs: Farinata degli Uberti, a Ghibelline; and Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, a Guelph who was the father of Dante's friend, fellow poet Guido Cavalcanti. (Cantos X and XI)
Seventh Circle. This circle houses the violent. Its entry is guarded by the Minotaur, and it is divided into three rings:
Outer ring, housing the violent against people and property, who are immersed in Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood, to a level commensurate with their sins. The Centaurs, commanded by Chiron, patrol the ring. The centaur Nessus guides the poets along Phlegethon and across a ford in the river. (Canto XII)
Middle ring: In this ring are the suicides, who are transformed into gnarled thorny bushes and trees that are only able to speak when a branch is broken. They are torn at by the Harpies. Unique among the dead, the suicides will not be bodily resurrected after the final judgment. Instead they will maintain their bushy form, with their own corpses hanging from the limbs. Dante breaks a twig off of one of the bushes and hears the tale of Pier delle Vigne, who committed suicide after falling out of favor with Emperor Frederick II. The profligate wasters, the other residents of this ring, are chased by ferocious dogs through the thorny undergrowth. (Canto XIII)
Inner ring: The violent against God (blasphemers), the violent against nature (sodomites), and the violent against art (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: Brunetto Latini, a poet; and Iacopo Rusticucci, a politician. (Cantos XIV through XVII) It is important to note that it was not Dante's position that all sodomites were destined for hell fire, for sodomites can be found on the top of Mount Purgatory.
The last two circles of Hell punish sins that involve conscious fraud or treachery. The circles can be reached only by descending a vast cliff, which Dante and Virgil do on the back of Geryon, a winged monster represented by Dante as having the head of an honest man and a body that ends in a scorpion-like stinger. (Canto XVII)


Dante's guide rebuffs Malacoda and his fiends between ditches five and six in the eighth circle of Inferno, Canto 21.Eighth Circle. The fraudulent—those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil—are located in a circle named Malebolge ("Evil Pockets"), divided into ten ditches, with bridges spanning the ditches:
Ditch 1: Panderers and seducers walk in separate lines in opposite directions, whipped by demons. (Canto XVIII)
Ditch 2: Flatterers are steeped in human excrement. (Canto XVIII)
Ditch 3: Those who committed simony are placed head-first in holes, with flames burning on the soles of their feet. One of them, Pope Nicholas III, denounces as simonists two of his successors, Pope Boniface VIII and Pope Clement V. (Canto XIX)
Ditch 4: Sorcerers and false prophets have their heads twisted around on their bodies backward, so they can only see what is behind them. (Canto XX)
Ditch 5: Corrupt politicians (barrators) are immersed in a lake of boiling pitch, guarded by devils, the Malebranche ("Evil Claws"). Their leader, Malacoda ("Evil Tail"), assigns a troop to escort Virgil and Dante to the next bridge. The troop hook and torment Ciampolo, who identifies some Italian grafters and then tricks the Malebranche in order to escape back into the pitch. (Cantos XXI through XXIII)
Ditch 6: Hypocrites listlessly walk along wearing gold-gilded lead cloaks. Dante speaks with Catalano and Loderingo, members of the Jovial Friars. (Canto XXIII)
Ditch 7: Thieves, guarded by the centaur (as Dante describes him) Cacus, are pursued and bitten by snakes. The snake bites make them undergo various transformations, with some resurrected after being turned to ashes, some mutating into new creatures, and still others exchanging natures with the snakes, becoming snakes themselves that chase the other thieves in turn. (Cantos XXIV and XXV)

Dante climbs the flinty steps in Canto 26
Ditch 8: Fraudulent advisors are encased in individual flames. Dante includes Ulysses and Diomedes together here for their role in the Trojan War. Ulysses tells the tale of his fatal final voyage, where he left his home and family to sail to the end of the Earth. He equated life as a pursuit of knowledge that humanity can attain through effort, and in his search God sank his ship outside of Mount Purgatory. This symbolizes the inability of the individual to carve out one's own salvation. Instead, one must be totally subservient to the will of God and realize the inability of one to be a God onto her/himself. Guido da Montefeltro recounts how his advice to Pope Boniface VIII resulted in his damnation, despite Boniface's promise of absolution. (Cantos XXVI and XXVII)
Ditch 9: A sword-wielding devil hacks at the sowers of discord. As they make their rounds the wounds heal, only to have the devil tear apart their bodies again. Muhammad tells Dante to warn the schismatic and heretic Fra Dolcino. (Cantos XXVIII and XXIX)
Ditch 10: Groups of various sorts of falsifiers (alchemists, counterfeiters, perjurers, and impersonators) are afflicted with different types of diseases. (Cantos XXIX and XXX)
The ninth circle is ringed by classical and Biblical giants. The giant Antaeus lowers Dante and Virgil into the pit that forms the ninth circle. (Canto XXXI)


Ninth Circle. Traitors, distinguished from the "merely" fraudulent in that their acts involve betraying one in a special relationship to the betrayer, are frozen in a lake of ice known as Cocytus. Each group of traitors is encased in ice to a different height, ranging from only the waist down to complete immersion. The circle is divided into four concentric zones:
Zone 1: Caïna, named for Cain, is home to traitors to their kindred. (Canto XXXII)
Zone 2: Antenora is named for 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 and starved him and his children. (Cantos XXXII and XXXIII)
Zone 3: Ptolomæa is probably named for Ptolemy, the captain of Jericho, who invited Simon Maccabaeus and his sons to a banquet and there killed them. Traitors to their guests are punished here. Fra Alberigo explains that sometimes a soul falls here before the time that Atropos (the Fate who cuts the thread of life) should send it. Their bodies on Earth are immediately possessed by a fiend. (Canto XXXIII)

Satan is trapped in the frozen central zone in Canto 34.
Zone 4: Judecca is for traitors to their lords and benefactors. At the center is Satan, who has three faces, each having a mouth that chews on a prominent traitor. Satan himslf is represented as a giant, terrifying beast, weeping bloody tears from his six eyes. He is waist deep in ice, and beats his six wings as if trying to escape, but the icy wind that emanates only further ensures his imprisonment (as well as that of the others in the ring). The sinners in the mouths of Satan are Brutus and Cassius, who were involved in the assassination of Julius Caesar (an act which, to Dante, represented the destruction of a unified Italy), and Judas Iscariot (the namesake of this zone), who betrayed Jesus. Judas is in the center mouth, and alone among the three is has his head inside a mouth. (Canto XXXIV) What is seen here is a perverted trinity. Satan is importent, ignorant, and evil while God can be attributed as the opposite: all powerful, all knowing, and good.
The two poets escape by climbing the ragged fur of Lucifer, passing through the center of the earth, emerging in the southern hemisphere just before dawn on Easter Sunday beneath a sky studded with stars.