ABSTRACT
The virtual bodies of Dante's damned are typically subject to exactions, violence, and woundings of hostile agents confinements, cruel conditions, harassment, battery, defilement, violations, scorchings, scourgings, tortures, deformation, animal and vegetable metamorphoses, and mutilationsbut the ravages specific to disease are restricted to the falsifiers. If Adam still lies y-bounden in the disease and malaise consuming the last ditch of the Inferno's eighth circle, then Dante's convicted and condemned counterfeiter Master Adam presents humankind's divine image in appalling distress and decay. Myrrha and Schicchi are not altogether strange bedfellows; the mis-occupied conjugal bed can be interpolated into the mis-occupied deathbed. The two phantom-like impostors suddenly appearing to chase down the two practitioners extend alchemy's social persecution beyond the grave, but also represent the art's being hag-ridden by its own scientific pretenses and delusions, as if it were practically a mental disease.
