PDF / SLIDES: Parallelisms between Dante's infrworlds and the Indo-Buddhist and shamanic tradition of Asia

We make available for download the slides we used in the two conferences on Dante and the inframondi in the oriental tradition - that of yesterday for UniTreEdu and that of today at the General States of Psychedelia in Italy 2021. The notes are based on our essay with the same title forthcoming in the annual register of the magazine ยซARTHOSยป, n. 30 / year 2021.

It does not seem so peregrine to attempt a comparative comparison between Dante's otherworldly journeys in the "three worlds" of the Divine Comedy and traditional Indo-Buddhist descriptions of posthumous soul journeys into the subtle and "infernal" subworlds, starting with the Bardo Thodol, plus known in the West as the "Tibetan Book of the Dead". Fantastic accounts of otherworldly journeys similar to Dante's one swarm in the Tibetan tradition, especially as regards the "tales made by people who are temporarily dead and who return to this world from a journey to the afterlife to tell what they have seen". A literary genre which, as Tucci dutifully emphasizes, in several places seems to betray the influence of shamanic conceptions spread throughout Central and Northern Asia: "the two spheres", he specifies, "have in common the exit from themselves and the return, the journey to the afterlife and the redemption of the soul; in the Buddhist context this redemption is equivalent to the elimination of moral contamination and sin โ€. Here it will be sufficient to mentally extend the comparison with the Dante sphere and even with the Hindu and shamanic one of the Eurasian steppes (and, again, with the Platonic, Pythagorean and Orphic one) and it will become clear - as we will try to demonstrate here - that the traditions of to which it has been said can only appear as the multiple spokes of the Sapientia Perennis wheel, by whatever definition you want to call it.

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