“Come to Capocchio, one so fanged him nigh the neck-joint that he made his belly grind on the hard rock-floor as he dragged him by”
. . . . .
The final chasm of Circle VIII contains the Falsifiers, who are, as are the other sinners in other circles, suffering the pain of retribution. These sinners affected the senses of others, showing themselves or substances to be what they are not, thus they spend eternity in a corruption of the senses — filth, thirst, disease, stench, darkness, horrible shrieking, physical pain — these sinners are damned to an eternity of what they put others through in life. In Canto XXX, the two mythological examples of insanity are a link and/or a parallel the two sinners in this circle who suffer from insanity. Virgil stated earlier that God despised Malice the most, out of all of the possible sins, and these souls in the final chasm of Circle VIII are certainly guilty of Malice — they knew exactly what they were doing, and they did it with malicious intent. In this particular canto, readers should note that the sinners aren't suffering from an outside, foreign influence in the environment as in the other cantos. The sinners here are suffering from systemic infection within themselves. Alchemists have leprosy, impersonators are mad, counterfeiters have dropsy, and the liars have a fever that makes them stink. They are punished by the corrupt state of their minds and bodies. Their corrupt sense of values is symbolized by the corrupt state of their minds and bodies. The falsifiers (evil impersonators, false witnesses, money counterfeiters) are portrayed in Hell as cannibals, reversing the sacrament in which Christians ritually consume the body of Christ. One melting face hangs limply and drips over the edge of the platform, like the soft watches from Dali’s 1931 The Persistence of Memory.