Dante's Satan

Within Dante's poetic cosmology (reported in accounts of Inferno, Canto XXXIV), this being is a once-splendid angel whose pride and rebellion against the Divine resulted in a fall. Dante narrates that the impact of that fall excavated the underworld pit that becomes Hell and displaced earth to form Mount Purgatory on the opposite side of the globe; this is presented as Dante's cosmological account within the poem rather than as extrapoetic history.

Dante's depiction presents a grotesque giant frozen in the ice at the center of Hell (variously described as frozen up to the waist). He has three faces/mouths; each mouth holds and chews one of the chief traitors—Judas Iscariot in the central mouth and Brutus and Cassius in the other two. Each of his three chins bears a pair of bat-like wings beneath it. He weeps with six eyes, and his tears fall over the three chins mingling with bloody foam. The figure is bloated and degraded, slobbering and largely wordless compared to his former angelic perfection.

Dante attributes the perpetually freezing winds of the Ninth Circle to the beating of his bat-like wings: as Satan flaps them he generates a cold wind that keeps the surrounding ice frozen and thus sustains the immobility of the worst sinners. He physically chews and holds the three named traitors in his mouths as an eternal torment and symbolic statement of betrayal. Aside from producing the cold winds and this symbolic consumption, Dante's portrait emphasizes loss of personality and voice—the being is diminished and immobilized rather than an active ruler.