Langdon later recalls part of his lecture in which he riffed on Dante's obsession with three squared: the 9 circles of Hell matched by the 9 celestial spheres of Paradise with the 9-tiered Mountain of Purgatory in the middle. But precisely for this reason it has sinister connotations in the poem of Hell, from the three beasts that menace Dante in the Dark Wood and three-throated Cerberus in the Circle of Gluttony to the three Furies at the entrance to Lower Hell and three-faced Lucifer lodged in the frozen pit of the underworld. The number three, standing for the Holy Trinity, is sacred for Dante.

įlashing back to a lecture he gave in Vienna two years earlier, Professor Langdon remembers eliciting a gasp from his audience when he presented Botticelli's illustration of Dante's triune devil. The circling, underlining, and scribbling really take off five pages later when 'three-headed, man-eating Satan' grabs my attention: Langdon sees the image on a carved seal and identifies it with the Black Death, but anyone who has even skimmed Dante's Inferno knows where this is headed-straight to the poet's Lucifer, whose three mouths chew on the shade-bodies of three arch-traitors, one per mouth (Brutus, Judas, and Cassius). I immediately pick up a pencil and begin to deface my recent purchase. But I take notice when 3 and 9, the most obvious Dantean ciphers, combine as the hotel room number ( 39) that pops into Robert Langdon's head when he believes he is speaking with the American Consulate. More ingenious decoders will discover deeper numerological meaning within Brown's novel. Brown chose May 14, 2013-5/14/13-for his book launch because the numerals in reverse (31415) match the first digits of pi, the irrational number essential to the symbolic properties of circles, including the fact that they can't be squared (except by God), as Dante reminds us in the finale to his poem. Shamefully easy prey for the book's marketing campaign, I auditioned for a spot among Dante's over-spenders in Circle 4 by paying an extra charge to have UPS deliver my copy right on the much-ballyhooed release date. A Dante scholar by trade, and an unrepentant fan of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons to boot, I was genetically susceptible to the contagion. Soon after its publication Dan Brown's Inferno predictably spawned an ecosystem-tweets, blog-posts, essays, books-telling us how he used and abused Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy in this thriller named for the poem's first and most famous part. Guy Raffa (The University of Texas at Austin) Dante Notes / March 22, 2018

Brown inferno