Mirroring Dante's Inferno By Dante Alighieri

Hell is a place of eternal punishment and torment. Mirroring Dante Alighieri's concept of symbolic retribution, sinners are afflicted by the chief sins they committed. Within my version of hell, more attention is given to the common suffering sinners experience on their journey to their individualized punishment based on whether they committed sins of thoughts or actions, thus helping underscore the idea that no matter the sin committed, they all sinned against their Creator and deserve to travel down a common path of pain and despair before being thrown into even greater horrors and being isolated for eternity in their own punishments.
Sinners face a journey of hundreds of miles before even reaching their place for eternal torment. The
voyage begins at a simple brown door intended to trick all who enter into thinking that this might not be as bad as they had imagined, but in fact it is much worse. Upon opening the door, sinners are pushed by a small troll into a tunnel, which seems to spin endlessly before their eyes, much like the slinky they used to play with as a child. In an instant the familiar spin of the slinky disappears as deep darkness descends followed by the steady emergence of a suffocating, noxious odor. Instead of lessening, the senses intensify, as the sinners become aware of the beasts that whisper their names as they reach out from the walls of the tunnel hoping to get a bite of their tasty flesh. The bites become sores that burn as sinners thrash in an attempt to avoid anymore wounds, helplessly screaming and forgetting the only advice the troll had given them before shoving them into their greatest nightmare,“screaming will only make you easier targets.”
The seemingly infinite fall, the first leg of the journey, only ends on the wet, bumpy tongue of a serpent, who serves as the enemy of all good and thus the guard to the next level of hell.
After being swallowed whole, within the snake's body all sinners are taken to a chamber, stripped and tied down as a hot metal iron bar is pressed into their foreheads, forever marking them with the sins they committed in their previous lives. They are then released as a part of the excrement of the serpent symbolizing their souls’ lack of worth and thrown into the arms of another monster, who promptly places them into a floating transparent bubble through which they are able to see the tortures of all those below them. Not only do they see, but they also feel the excruciating pain of all those they glance upon. The sinners begin to float to the right and left sides of a wall intended to separate those who sinned merely in thought and those who sinned in action. As they enter their designated areas, the sinners below start shooting arrows of ice, subsequently forcing the bubble to break and the sinners to fall into a bed of thumbtacks before being carried to a dark forest filled with dank caves and endless deserts. At the center of the deep forest, crawling with enough unimaginable beasts to keep any prisoner from trying to escape, the sinners are taken to an immense, heavy-looking buildings with granite doors and bolts no sinner could behold without trembling. But even closed doors
aren’t enough to silence the deep groans and cries of despair of those within.
Those that sinned merely in thought by being either prideful, envious, lustful, angry or greedy, receive solely punishments of the mind. As they enter the building, sinners are met with a blinding white light and an unexpected eerie silence, unexpected due to the dreadful yells and shrieks heard from outside. The thud of the door behind them symbolizes the disappearance of comfort. As their eyes grow accustomed to the brightness, sinners become aware of the endless array of rooms before them, all with transparent walls and customized objects tended to fill the minds of sinners with sensations of pain and grief. Despair, like a vulture, gnaws at every soul. Yet another snake appears and anchors its teeth into the sinners subsequently twisting and tangling its large body around them. The snake drags them along the labyrinth of horrors and leaves them, barely conscious, on the floor of their designated room, which will be the location of their method of torture appropriately named exposure. In a group filled with all those they have encountered, from loved ones to even strangers, every sinful thought that has crossed the sinner's mind is projected for everyone to see and read for themselves. The pain these comments have on the people gathered is then felt doubly by the sinners, as they experience the loss of love and caring towards them from each of the people, quickly replaced by a sense of hatred. This is repeated over and over again and the relationship with each of the people present, and God, is played back to the sinner displaying just how much they hurt that person with their thoughts. All caring, happiness and love is replaced with eternal mental misery and torture.
Those whose thoughts manifested themselves through words and actions are tortured with both eternal physical and mental misery. Each sinner undergoes terrible suffering related to the manner in which he or she has sinned. After entering the building, all sinners are thrown into a cave, where the walls and ceiling glow white at temperatures of over thousands of degrees. The muddy ground, on the other hand, exceedingly foul, sends forth pestilential odors and is covered with detestable vermin who attempt to disfigure the bodies of the sinners. Cramped together with no room to sit or lay down and barely any room to breathe, sinners wait to be taken to other pits of torture where one form of agony differs from another. There is no light, but thick darkness as demons attack those within the crowd hoping to press them against the walls, hear them howl in pain and see their skin burn and blister.
The sins of words and actions are split into three groups: sins against God, sins against oneself and sins against others, each with their own afflictions designed to make the sinner suffer to the greatest extent possible.
Those who sinned against God by committing the sins of idolatry, blasphemy, heresy and sacrilege are nailed to planks of wood, much like the Savior they denied, and are lowered upside down into pits of fire. Those who sinned against oneself by lacking moderation or restraint with regards to worldly pleasures are placed in a room with all their greatest desires, but these desires remain unattainable as the sinner engages in an endless chase, which only brings destruction by the demons surrounding him or her. Those who sinned against oneself by committing suicide continually attempt to kill themselves but always fail and are always faced with the pain of never truly being able to die. Those that sinned against others through murder, adultery, deceit and theft receive the actions they committed done by those they hurt. Thus, one again the punishment lines up based on the sins
committed.
Once again, the emphasis within my hell is placed on the shared journey of all sinners, which brings them to their separate punishments. This is done in order to point out the similarity of all sin and its terrors before specializing and breaking off into other branches of sins. Only after are the sins divided into sins of thought and action and even further in the latter of the two into sins against God, oneself and others. This shows the secondary importance of the type of sins committed and once again points out that most important is the single fact that wrong was done.