Punished in bolgia four are the Fortune Tellers and the Diviners.  The sinners in this  wander the circle crying silently.  They are disfigured, with their heads on backwards. This is symbolic retribution...they spent their lives trying to see far farward in their lives and others, and so all they can see now is behind and walk backwards.  In this bolgia, the Poets see Amphiareus, Tiresias, Aruns, Manto, Eurypylus, Michael Scott, Guido Bonatti and Asdente.

Amphiareus forsaw his own death and tried to run from it, and so is here.  Tiresias was a Thebian diviner and magician, and father to Manto.  In the works of Ovid, he comes upon two snakes entwined, struck them apart, and was turned into a woman.  Seven years later, he finds to more snakes like the others, seperates them again, and is turned back.  Manto was a woman who wandered the earth, and finally settled in a swampy, wooded spot. Aruns was an Etruscan soothsayer, and fortold the war between Pompey and Julius Caesar, and that it would end with Julius Caesar's victory and Pompey's death.  Michael Scott was an Irish scholar who spent his whole life studying the occult.  Guido Bonatti was court astrologer to Guido da Monefeltro, advising him in  his wars.  Asdente was a shoemaker of Parma who changed to a diviner and was famous for his predictions in the last half of the thirteenth century. 

Virgil chides Dante for his treatment of these sinners, because he cries at the sight of the human body so deformed.  Virgil chides hime because he's showing pity for what God ordained. 

Time is rushing by, and the moon is now setting on the morning of Holy Saturday, and the Poets are moving on to the fifth bolgia.

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