Underworld

Sometime between 1578 and 1588, Galileo Galilei stepped onto the stage of the Florentine Academy and presented calculations on the underworld’s magnitude — and not just any underworld, but the Inferno of Dante Alighieri, the hellscape through which Dante is guided in the Divine Comedy (ca. 1320). While Galilei was far from being the first to calculate the underworld’s size, his renowned speeches mark a general paradigm shift in European understandings of the underworld — turning it from a religious concept into a tangible thing. Over the course of this shift, the underworld was carefully stripped of its transcendental quality and subjugated to man-made laws. The underworld was to become an object (a ‘key thing’) of the early modern world.

Antonio Maretti. Profilo, Piante e Misure dell'Inferno di Dante [Section, Plan and Dimensions of the Inferno] (from Dante, Divine Comedy). Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library U1449_0043. ca.1529.

Traditionally, the underworld has served one primary purpose — to furnish a space as an abode for the dead. Nurturing a connection to the dead is deeply innate to human nature. Nearly every culture envisions a detailed version of an afterlife, which suggests that there is something fundamentally human in imagining a post-mortal existence for ourselves and those around us. Stories of approaching an afterlife conceived in spatial terms would seem to cater to a basic human need to know where and how the deceased sojourn. The oldest surviving example, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, was written approximately 3000–4000 years ago.

In a European context, subtle shifts in how underworld journeys are told can be traced back Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante wove together medieval science with the narrative strands of the image-rich and traditionally separate afterlife tours prevalent in Europe at the time: Greco-Roman journeys to Hades and Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tours. Dante’s approach prefigures early modern approaches to objects of differing conceptual origins which might seem unfamiliar to us today: in the domestic realm, Christian objects of devotion, such as crucifixes and Marian reliefs, happily sat next to mythological statuettes and seemingly more mundane utensils, such as painted broth bowls or ewers.

In weaving these strands together, Dante created an infernal kaleidoscope of religion, mythology, and science. Combining science with a myriad of suggested measurements, Dante’s Inferno seemed to be tailor-made for later mathematical ventures. Dante’s comparison between the size of Nimrod’s head in the Inferno and a pinecone at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome provided the springboard for Galilei’s calculations. While this, to our modern ears, might seem more reminiscent of a “fun” activity to train our mathematical skills at school, in the Renaissance, it entailed far-reaching consequences. From being able to calculate the in-experienceable, and therefore incalculable, it was just a stone’s throw away from ascertaining that no hell was down there at all.

Around the beginning of the 16th century, allusions to possible commercial interests in the world below began to appear in tales. This attribution of a human value system furthered the metamorphosis of a metaphysical underworld into an object (a ‘thing’). Literature captured the dynamics of the underworld’s material turn. In Girolamo Fracastoro’s Syphilis or the French disease (1530), for instance, the underworld’s metaphysical quality is still upheld. But the origin myths on the early modern remedies against syphilis (guaiacum and mercury) inadvertently hint at the potential import of guaiacum from the Americas and subsequently mercury from the world below — intertwining human health with human exploitation and interference. To enable this combination, Fracastoro composed a form of narrative coordinate system, which crossed the horizontal axis of the earth’s upper layer with the vertical axis of its lower spheres. Syphilis-ridden Ilceus travels to a metal-rich underworld, in which nymphs are busy mining, melting, and mixing metals. A nymph cures Ilceus by pouring mercury over his body in an almost ceremonial manner.

Giovanni Augurello’s alchemical epic Chrysopoeia (1515), despite being published fifteen years prior to Fracastoro’s text, seems already to be a step further in the early modern materialization of the underworld. Here, Lynceus peeks into several caves, where he sees Achelous, the god of rivers. This mythological foreplay appears to prepare the reader for an infernal tour of the caves by Lynceus, but the story moves on without him; the narrator, instead, relates alchemical wisdom on sulfur, mercury, silver, and gold discovered in the earth on behalf of Lynceus. As Lynceus enters the earth with its cabinet full of geological, petrological, and metallurgical curiosities, the objects take the lead in the narrative. Lynceus and the journey itself become redundant in the face of physical wealth. In a way, Lynceus’ disappearance from the narrative forebodes the vanishing of factory workers behind their workforce’s material output in the processes of industrialization.

Limoges enamel of Aeneas and the Sybil in the Underworld (back). Fitzwilliam Museum M7-1945, Cambridge. ca. 1527 – 1530.

In contrast, Conrad Celtis’ poem Amores 1.6 (1502) and the anonymous novel Fortunatus (1509) cultivate a defamiliarized underworld and offer a subtle comment on the consequences of discovering that nothingness awaits below. In both texts, the afterlife travelers are engulfed in darkness and existential fear, instead of having experiences which are traditionally associated with the texts’ respective underworld journeys. In Fortunatus’ case, the protagonist expects his visit to St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Ireland to be akin to established narratives of purgatorial tours (i.e., full of screams of punished, pricked and prodded sinners in devil-surveilled cauldrons or other confinements). Similarly, in Celtis’ poem one might expect the landscape of Greco-Roman Hades as the speaker of the poem seeks to follow the example of two prominent travelers: Theseus and Hercules. In Celtis’ poem and Fortunatus, however, the travelers’ experiences seem to border on modern existential crises, confronted with nothing but themselves and the uncanny raw matter of their subconscious. Instead of the warm comforting presence of a guide as oft seen in underworld tours, it is lifeless man-made measurements and mechanics which eventually come to their aid. In Fortunatus, the eponymous character is saved by the strings of a man, who used them to measure the cave. In Celtis’ poem, the speaker of the poem is brought down and up again from the underworld by a machine. In both texts, the metaphysical quality of the underworld morphs into a physical one. Purgatory and Hades turn into a cave.

This detachment from a religious, mythologically charged underworld goes hand in hand with human estrangement from mother earth as a living organism. Ancient societies also mined the earth. However, their behavior was accompanied by sacrificial rites as forms of compensation, and they understood themselves as part of a cosmic, animate world. During the rise of commercialized trade in the early modern period, this code of ethics gradually disappeared in dark mineshafts, where the promise of shimmering metals and future wealth lay. Among one of the cries for help on earth’s behalf is Paulus Niavis’ Jupiter’s Verdict (ca. 1495): here, a miner is accused of matricide against earth, depicted as a woman in a green dress with horrendous injuries all over her body. Mythological personnel give testimony: Pluto complains that noise pollution caused by miners puts his kingdom at stake; the water level of the underground rivers has become so low that Charon cannot float his boat with souls across Acheron anymore. The tables have turned: travelers to a metaphysical underworld had previously been at the mercy of its inhabitants; now, those who venture off to the physical world below dictate the terms. The materialization of the underworld also changed the upper world’s face: fauns testify that entire forests were doomed due to the insatiable hunger for fuel to melt mines’ ores. Jupiter’s Verdict reverberates with questions on sustainability, responsibility, and pollution — issues that sound all too familiar to our ears today. Since then, our attitude towards earth’s depths has hardly changed. In addition to mining for metals such as cobalt or iron, earth’s bowels have become storage units for things we do not want upstairs such as atomic waste or CO2. But at and for what price?

Katharina Strika is a Phd Candidate at the Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich.

Selected Bibliography.
Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia, 17th ed, ed. Giuseppe Vandelli (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1958).
Augurello, Giovanni Aurelio. Giovanni Aurelio Augurello (1441-1524) and Renaissance Alchemy: A Critical Edition of Chrysopoeia and Other Alchemical Poems, with an Introduction, English Translation and Commentary, ed. Matteo Soranzo (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
Celtis Protucius, Conradus. Quattuor Libri Amorum…, ed. Felicitas Pindter (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1934).
Galilei, Galileo. ‘Due Lezzioni all’Accademia Fiorentina circa la figura, sito e grandezza dell’Inferno di Dante’, in Alberto Chiari (ed.) Galileo Galilei: Scritti letterari (Florence: Le Monnier, 1943), pp. 47-80.
‘Fortunatus’, in Jan-Dirk Müller (ed.) Romane des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), pp. 383-585.
Fracastoro, Girolamo. Girolamo Fracastoro: Latin Poetry, trans. by James Gardner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Niavis, Paulus. Iudicium Iovis oder Das Gericht der Götter über den Bergbau: Ein literarisches Dokument aus der Frühzeit des deutschen Bergbaus, transl. and ed. by Paul Krenkel (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1953).
https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb00030187?page=,1

Selected Further Reading.

Johnson, Geraldine A. Renaissance Art. A very short introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Merchant, Carolyn. ‘Mining the Earth’s Womb’, in Joan Rothschild (ed.) Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983), pp. 99-117.
Piechocki, Katharina N. Cartographic Humanism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019).
Platthaus, Isabel. Höllenfahrt. Die epische katábasis und die Unterwelten der Moderne (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2004).
Robert, Jörg. ‘Fortunatus im Purgatorium. Literarische Höhlenforschung als Paradigma der Moderne’, in Joachim Hamm and Jörg Robert (eds.) Unterwelten: Modelle und Transformationen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014)

27 September 2022.