“Each of us, once the human shape, here takes a stock’s”
. . . . .
Virgil and Dante now enter into a pathless wood. This is a dismal wood of strange black leaves, misshapen branches, and poisonous branches barren of fruit. The Harpies nest here, feeding on the branches of the gnarled trees. The Harpies were winged creatures with the faces of women and were symbolic of the whirlwind or the violent storm. They stole anything; hence, in the woods, they symbolize the violence of the suicide and the stealing away of his soul. when the soul is torn from the body by suicide, it is sent by Minos to the seventh circle, where it falls to the ground, sprouts, and grows. The Harpies eat its leaves, giving it great pain. The spirits will all be called to the Last Judgment and will reclaim the mortal bodies forsaken by them. However, they will never regain their immortal souls that they took from themselves and will remain forever trapped in this strange wood. Their bodies will remain suspended on the trees that enclose the spirits of their owners. In Hell, those who on Earth deprived themselves of their bodies are deprived of human form In classical times, when a person could no longer live in freedom, or heroically, it was considered a stoic virtue to die by one's own hand. The last great act that a person could perform was to take his or her own life, which was the last free choice that person could make. With the coming of Christianity, however, Jesus preached the concept that a man is free inwardly, and no amount of imprisonment or disgrace could destroy one's spiritual self. Thus, where the suicide was a virtue in the ancient days, for the Christian, it became one of the cardinal sins; murdering the body that God gave unto one. The naked men pursued and torn to pieces by hounds are Spendthrifts, reckless squanderers, who did not actually take their own lives, but destroyed themselves by destroying the means of life. The difference between these sinners and the Spendthrifts of the fourth circle is that the earlier cases arise from weakness, and the later cases from a deliberate act of the will.