More than 7 Circles Hell Has
I recently whipped up a graphic using the Google Books Ngram dataset—mostly as an excuse to make a visual pun. It tracks how often phrases like “first circle of Hell”, “second circle of Hell”, etc., appear in published books. The width of each ring corresponds to its frequency:
So, How Many Circles Does Hell Actually Have?
If you’re thinking of a Hell with multiple circles, you’re probably channeling Dante. In his 14th-century poem Inferno, Dante describes nine concentric circles, each one reserved for a progressively worse sin.
Naturally, you’d expect authors to fixate on the extremes—the first and ninth circles—for poetic drama. But surprisingly, the seventh circle gets the most mentions by far.
In Dante’s model, the seventh circle punishes the violent. The eighth is for fraudsters, and the ninth—Hell’s frozen core—is reserved for traitors. So why the special attention to the seventh?
Are People Just Getting It Wrong?
Maybe a lot of folks mistakenly think the seventh is the final circle. And the data suggests… yeah, that tracks. When you search for phrases like “N circles of Hell”, here’s what you get:
[Insert Line Chart of “N circles of Hell” frequencies]
(Other values of N barely make a blip.)
Where the Seven-Circle Idea Comes From
It turns out that not everyone is riffing on Dante. Some references come from entirely different cosmologies. For example, Islamic tradition describes Jahannam as having seven levels. And Christian art isn’t off the hook either—Fra Angelico’s The Last Judgement (painted about a century after Inferno) famously depicts a Hell divided into seven sections:
[Insert Fra Angelico’s Hell Image]
Still, a significant chunk of the references to “seven circles of Hell” clearly think they’re talking Dante. Even Victor Hugo slips up in Les Misérables, describing a chain gang as:
“Dante would have thought he saw the seven circles of Hell on their passage.”
Other Published Misfires
Here are a few more gems from Google Books:
Quantum Reality (1985):
“…the whole supported by the seven circles of hell…”
The Development of Western Civilization (1941):
“The two journey through the seven circles of Hell…”
The Gulf: Arabia’s Western Approaches (1979):
“…I found myself thinking gloomily of Dante’s Inferno and the seven circles of Hell…”
And it’s not just books. A quick search of Google News shows “seventh circle of Hell” used as if it’s the worst, not third-worst, level:
“He rents a room in a seventh-circle-of-hell-style basement apartment in Trenton.”
“Was last season’s 101 losses Dante’s seventh circle of hell or just the sixth?”
“The train was ‘hotter than the seventh circle of hell,’ which led to a cranky baby.”
Why the Confusion?
Two strong possibilities:
Alliteration – “Seventh circle” just sounds punchier.
The Seven Deadly Sins – People often (wrongly) assume that Dante’s circles correspond directly to pride, greed, wrath, etc. They don’t. Those appear in Purgatorio, not Inferno.
Literary critic Lillian Robinson calls out this confusion in In the Canon’s Mouth, roasting the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women for saying Dante had only seven circles. She writes:
“So there are, so there are, but then Dante, Virgil, and the reader proceed together to an eighth and a ninth!… Let Dante… spin in his grave—adding a whole new light show to Paradise, perhaps.”
A Note on Visual Accuracy
One last thing—about the graphic I started with. You know how people gripe about pie charts being misleading? The bullseye format has the same problem, only worse. If you scale rings by width, the area is misleading. If you scale by area, the width gets distorted.
Here’s a comparison:
[Insert Side-by-Side of Width-Scaled vs Area-Scaled Bullseye Charts]
Which one is more accurate? It depends. The width-scaled version feels right, but visually it’s deceptive. That’s why, for clarity’s sake, I also made this:
[Insert Bar Chart]
This good old bar chart shows the actual frequencies. Turns out, the width-scaled bullseye version matches the data better than you’d expect—but still, best not to rely on the bullseye format for serious data viz.
Source code for all charts is available on GitHub [insert link].
Tagged: data visualization, Dante, literature mistakes, chart design
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