ABSTRACT
As the Church's interest in hell became increasingly disciplinary, intrusive and inquisitorial, the literary form of religious imagination remained open to the primitive. Like Mantua, Dante's own city, Florence, was founded on the primitive that had been partially but unsuccessfully excluded from its later, more civil institutions. In Dante's 'Inferno' the people can find a cast of the characters that in his time had been placed beyond the pale of civilization. Dante describes the fate of those who took up divination and thus sought to know and perhaps even alter the future. In Sigmund Freud's theory, as the people have noted, what is repressed in collective memory is the experience of being under the power of an all-knowing, all-providing father or king who was the object of both adoration and hatred. To provide for oneself, to claim foreknowledge and to act as one's own provider would therefore be an act of lese-majesté.
