Overview
In the third Bolgia, Dante places the Simonists. We don't hear much about Simonists these days, although you could say that some modern churchmen commit a similar crime. A Simonist was a member of the clergy that would accept cash in exchange for ecclesiastical favors. In other words, you gave them your money and they did absolutely nothing at all real for you in return.
The punishment for these people was to be shoved, headfirst, into holes set in the ground, with their feet lit on fire. The holes were meant to represent baptismal fonts, basins in church to be filled with holy water. When new arrivals came to this Circle, no new holes were created; they simply pushed a current resident deeper into his hole and shoved the new one in on top of him.
In The Infernova it is the home for racists.
Comments
The images from Dante of great heat, huge vessels, and the relentless forcing down of the condemned, together resonated with something I saw in my childhood that fairly traumatized me.
Growing up in western NY in the 1970s, we'd often regularly visit an amusement park across the Canadian border called Crystal Beach. That park is gone now. In some ways, it was a place of sheer joy. There was a funhouse, the Magic Palace, the likes of which one doesn't find anymore. And they had one of the huge slides no longer exist, apparently, where you'd hike up the stairs and then ride down the series of slopes and plateaus atop a burlap bag. Several dozen slides were set in parallel tracks that made it all look like a huge sheet of multicolored, warped corrugated metal.
But there was an absolute horror at Crystal Beach as well. It was a ride called Jungle Land. The ride itself involved riding along in a small boat that floated down a slow moving waterway inside a dark building, which was filled with various crocodile-filled dioramas meant to mildly scare or amuse. However it was the display on the outside of the building that was the problem for me. For at the entrance stood several life-sized animatronic cannibals and a huge pot set atop the image of a fire. In the pot was some unfortunate explorer they had captured and were slow-cooking. His face was a rictus of unspeakable terror and excruciating pain. The "cook" would turn her head from side to side, with the same slow, regular cadence at which she'd push the head of the missionary down. She had to keep doing that because he kept trying to get out of the boiling pot, apparently. Up and down his head went.
So every summer we'd go to Crystal Beach, and every summer I'd stand in complete sick fascination of that Jungle Land display. Part of me would dread it. Part of me secretly wanted to see it. I thought about how that poor fellow would be in the boiling water forever. I used to think about it even in the winter - I knew he was still in the pot, and his expression would be the same. The park would be closed, the electricity would be off, so he would not be moving, but he'd still be there. And then the next summer his horrible cannibal captors would be cooking him again. (I wonder if that display still exists in someone's garage.)
It occurred to me while writing The Infernova that it was sort of my own creation of a Jungle Land. There's some really nasty stuff in there, but it's full of animatronics only. Nobody deserves to spend eternity in the boiling pot.
The variety of evil that is so often informed by religious belief, that I chose to replace the Simonists with, is Racism. The racism that comes from thinking that your Jealous God favors your people more than others. The racism supported by biblical passages that were cited by slave owners for many, many years. And the racism that could be used to dehumanize others enough that you felt no qualms about eating them.
(I did eventually go on the ride, one year, after much prodding from the family. I remember mostly my fright at getting in the boat and going into the darkness, but the images inside the place were actually rather tame compared to what stood outside.)
