Page 37 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

1.2 Inferno: “The violent, tortured in the Rain of Fire,” in Dante’s version of hell.
(Illustration by Gustave Doré, for Inferno 14.37–39, 1861)

them, confined to the third circle, were the gluttons experiencing unique mete-
orological torments of eternal cold and heavy rain, hail, and snow (6.6–11),
while in the seventh circle were those who had done violence to God, naked
souls weeping miserably, supine, sitting, wandering, muttering, under a steady
rain of “dilated flakes of fire” (14.18–27) (figure 1.2). Today we might add a
new caption to Gustave Doré’s illustration: Sulfurous rains fall on a wretched
humanity following artificial volcano experiment gone awry; two geoengineers
look on.
The heavens and “heaven” have never been strictly demarcated; in fact, they
have been closely intertwined, especially when it comes to something at once as
nebulous and portentous as atmospheric phenomena. Synergistic rather than
conflicting interactions between the numinous and the immanent appear to be
more the norm than the exception throughout history. Humans attempting to
intervene in the “realm of the gods,” whether through ceremonies or technolo-
gies, inevitably find themselves engaged in a complex dance with both novel and
traditional steps, where stumbling and falling from grace, or at least stepping on
toes, is more likely than perfect execution.

20 | StorieS of Control