The Journey of Initiation

Dante talks about the whole comedy as being a kind of a map of transformation. He's saying you can only enter these domains by participating in their life. As he descends into the Inferno into hell, his hellish side comes out more and more. And similarly up through Mount Purgatory, he encounters figures that reflect the possibility of his transformation to himMore than anything else, Dante discovers the divine within him which was there all along, but had got occluded.