The Diviners

In Canto twenty, Dante encounters the diviners. One in particular stands out--Tiresias. We know Tiresias from Oedipus, but we also know his backstory. He was born male, Hera turned him into a woman for seven years, and he was blinded when he found Athena bathing. Athena later took pity on him (after Tiresias' mother pleaded) and gave him the ability to see the future.

I think it's entirely possible to argue that Tiresias technically didn't do anything wrong by seeing the future especially since the blindness and the ability was inflicted on him. Moreover, the Bible speaks of prophets and that's essentially what Tiresias was. However, I think Dante put Tiresias in the realm of the diviners for two reasons: 1. He was pagan (he didn't know God and therefore had to go somewhere in hell) and 2. the word "diviner" is another word for "soothsayer" which is another word for "psychic/fortune teller". That being said, Dante could have associated Tiresias with being a psychic which implies he got his gift from pagan sources. This is plausible since the gods were pagans and not the true God (keep in mind that although the Greek/Roman gods are not real, for the sake of the story Dante considers them as such). 

The punishment for the diviners makes perfect sense since they focused on the future and they can now never see what's ahead of them again. I think my favorite lines concerning the state of the diviners are lines 22-24: "When I looked on our human image there / so gone awry and twisted, that the eyes / shed tears that trickled dow the buttocks' crack." I don't mean for that to come off as crass, I promise, I just find the imagery funny. And that's the note I'm going to end this post on.

I commented on Nate and Daniel's posts.