Pandemic and Alchemy in Dante’s Inferno

Abstract

The pandemic is symbolic of an apparent absolute evil that afflicts human materialism in its essence, as seen in the fundamental masterpiece of Italian literature, Dante’s poem. In it, pestilence becomes a symbol of fraud and is associated with the perverse, falsifying and destructive use of intellect for the will of oppressing the others and an uncontrollable greed of wealth and power. In the Divine Comedy appears the symbolic vision of a terrible epidemic, affecting the deep infernal areas and associating itself with the wrong arrogant use of alchemical science (Inf. XXIX–XXX). We are in the presence of a real ideological and technical-scientific perversion which, instead of offering help to our world, only causes continuous diseases for our body and spirit.