[Greetings, friends, from Austin! With my class on Dante’s Inferno off and running, I emerge from every class with more insight and things to ponder than I entered (and I’m supposed to be the teacher!). It’s been a beautiful couple of weeks, and with four more classes remaining, needless to say, I’m excited to see where things go.
For those of you who may be interested in joining or just want to watch the YouTube recordings of the classes, the latest video (Class 2) can be found here, and the remainder can be found on my YouTube page. As a reminder, we meet on Zoom every Monday night from 6-7 PM CT. If you wish to receive the class invite or the outline of the Inferno that I put together and am walking through in the class, send me your email! And if you have any thoughts on what classical text I should teach next—send me those suggestions, too!
In last Monday’s class, we discussed Dante’s entry through Hell’s gates and the early parts of his descent. In Canto V, Dante and Virgil watch as the souls entering Hell march themselves before King Minos, who hears their confession, weighs them, judges them, spins his tail as many levels as they are to go down, and then sends them on their way for all eternity. It’s Dante’s take on an ancient motif known in Ancient Greek as “psychostasia” or “weighing of lives.” It is to the origins, development, and psychological insights of that motif that we devote the remainder of today’s essay.]
The idea of an afterlife assessment of a person is an ancient one. Our current historical field of vision suggests Ancient Egypt was the first civilization to detail this belief. The Egyptian account is set out in the Book of the Dead, designed to assist the newly deceased in navigating the ordeals that awaited them after life.
According to Egyptian lore, death’s journey begins with a crucible of strange gatekeepers leading to Osiris and the Hall of Judgment. There, the dead face a two-part proceeding: (1) a trial; and (2) a weighing. In the first phase (the trial), the dead stood before 42 divine judges and pled their innocence, using specific words to appease the judges. The purpose of this phase was to separate the deceased from their sins and see the faces of the gods.1
In the second phase, the dead had their heart set on a scale and weighed against a feather of the goddess Ma’at. Ma’at, the goddess of truth, justice, and righteousness, represented cosmic and social order—a criterion for personal conduct and character in the Ancient Egyptian world. She is the feather on one side of the scale. On the other side of the scale was the heart (ka), the vital organ that contained a ledger of all the individual’s actions in life. Thoth (the god of wisdom and knowledge) would record the result.
If the heart balanced with the feather, the dead were presented to Osiris and admitted into the Sekhet-Aaru (the Field of Reeds and land of eternal peace). But if the heart was heavier than the feather, the dead were rejected and fed to Ammit (the Devourer of Souls), where they were doomed to restlessness in Duat (the Egyptian underworld).
So it was for the Egyptians, who gave us an image of cosmic justice in which a being was judged after life according to an impartial and objective standard, and fates were determined by one’s actions in life.
This image would eventually find a full expression in medieval Christianity (as in Dante’s Inferno) but not before taking a form in Ancient Greek and Hebrew. In Book XXII of the Iliad, just before the long battle between Achilles and Hector comes to an end, Homer describes the final decision of Zeus this way:
But once they reached the springs for the fourth time,
then Father Zeus held out his sacred golden scales:
in them he placed two fates of death that lays men low—
one for Achilles, one for Hector breaker of horses—
and gripping the beam mid-haft the Father raised it high
and down went Hector’s day of doom, dragging him down
to the strong House of Death—and god Apollo left him.2
In this image, we get a picture of justice and fate that appear different than the Egyptians imagined. In this scene, Homer’s Zeus comes across as impartial, but elsewhere in the Iliad is seen (with other members of Mount Olympus) meddling in the affairs of man and placing their thumbs on the scales from time to time. (In On Eternal Justice, I mentioned how, in Book XXIV, Achilles describes Zeus as picking fates from two jars based on his somewhat subjective whims). Even if one makes the case that Zeus is impartial here, the fact remains that Achilles and Hector are being weighed against each other rather than against some eternal standard—a view of justice that Plato took issue with.
In Hebrew thought, we see an image similar to the Egyptians referred to in the Old Testament a few times. Near the end of his story, Job cries out: “Let me be weighed in a just balance, and let God know my integrity!”3 And in Daniel, we see the infamous judgment of Belshazzar written on the wall by a mysterious hand: “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin… Tekel: You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting.”4 (It should come as no surprise that certain Hebrew thought overlaps with the Egyptians, as Moses was raised in the house of the Pharaoh and made familiar with the traditions and customs of the Egyptians before leading the Israelites away in Exodus.)
We again see this image of souls weighed in the afterlife appear in the early days of Christianity. In the Testament of Abraham, thought to be written by a Jewish Christian in Egypt in the 1st or 2nd century, we see a (fictional) account of the afterlife from the perspective of the Biblical patriarch Abraham.5 In the account, God tells the Archangel Michael to go to Abraham and give him a tour of the next world to alleviate his fears of death. During the journey, Abraham is shown an angel (Dokiel) who weighs the righteousness and sins of a soul according to the Justice of God.
Before the table sat an angel of light, holding in his hand a balance, and on his left sat an angel all fiery, pitiless, and severe, holding in his hand a trumpet, having within it all-consuming fire with which to try the sinners. The wondrous man who sat upon the throne himself judged and sentenced the souls, and the two angels on the right and on the left wrote down, the one on the right the righteousness and the one on the left the wickedness. The one before the table, who held the balance, weighed the souls, and the fiery angel, who held the fire, tried the souls. And Abraham asked the chief-captain Michael, What is this that we behold? And the chief-captain said, These things that you see, holy Abraham, are the judgment and recompense. And behold the angel holding the soul in his hand, and he brought it before the judge, and the judge said to one of the angels that served him, Open me this book, and find me the sins of this soul. And opening the book he found its sins and its righteousness equally balanced, and he neither gave it to the tormentors, nor to those that were saved, but set it in the midst.6
The idea of postmortem assessment of souls continued to flower in the mind of medieval Christianity. Which brings us to Dante. In Canto V of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil encounter King Minos,7 rendering judgments over the souls entering Hell, weighing them, and then sending them down to their appropriate place in the Inferno.
So I descended from the outer ring
down to the next, which belts less space about
but stings the souls to greater agony.
Horrible Minos grunts there like a bull,
weighs all the sins and sends the wicked down
according to how far he winds his tail.
I mean that when one born in evil hour
appears before him, he confesses all,
and then judge Minos, the sin-connoisseur,
Discerns what place in Hell is fit for him:
belts himself with this tail as many times
as there are grades the sinner must descend.
ever before him stand a crowd of souls.
They step up one by one to testify,
they speak and hear and then are flung below.8
With our tour of psychostasia—the “weighing of souls”—complete, we are now equipped to ask the question: why did the Egyptians imagine the soul being weighed, and why has the image endured for nearly 5,000 years?
These representations are more than just stories; they are outward expressions of intuitions. And what they attempt to express is this intuition that we are meant to be light (pure spirit) and sin (deviation from the divine) makes us heavy. When we take in too much of this world or become too attached to it, we fashion the chains that tie down a spirit made to go up—chains too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.9
In Dante’s universe, the weight of one’s sin sends them downward into the Inferno and prevents them from rising upward to Paradise. Sin is the weight that prevents us from rising to our telos and end. In Hebrews, there is a verse that reads we, “having laid aside every weight and sin easily entangling, should run with endurance the race lying before us…”10 If we want to run, we must run light; if we want to rise, we must release ourselves from what weighs us down.
Sins are weights because they hinder us in our pursuit of God. Sins are weights because they turn the gifts of God meant for life into instruments of self-destruction. “The wages of sin is death.”11 Death of spirit… in this life. In the eternity that starts now. Because what we cling to drags us down and prevents us from rising. Just as a camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle, a soul full of this world can never be heavenbound.
S.G.F. Brandon, Myth and Symbols: studies in honor of Mircea Eliade, p. 94.
Homer, Iliad, Book XXII, lines 248-254 (Fagles translation).
Job 31:6.
Daniel 5:25-28.
The Testament of Abraham, available at: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1007.htm.
The Testament of Abraham, par. 12.
In Ancient Greece, King Minos was made judge of the dead in the underworld after his death. Virgil also uses Minos as a judge in the Aeneid.
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto V, lines 1-15 (Esolen translation).
The quote is derived from an allegorical fable titled The Vision of Theodore by Samuel Johnson (1748): “It was the peculiar artifice of Habit not to suffer her power to be felt at first. Those whom she led, she had the address of appearing only to attend, but was continually doubling her chains upon her companions; which were so slender in themselves, and so silently fastened, that while the attention was engaged by other objects, they were not easily perceived. Each link grew tighter as it had been longer worn, and when, by continual additions, they became so heavy as to be felt, they were very frequently too strong to be broken.”
Hebrews 12:1.
Romans 6:23.