Many different cultures have different views on suicide, like Christanity the person get sent to hell, in Hinduism they instead are to become a ghost, forever wandering the earth, and in Wicca, it is frowned upon but there is no real punishment. That differs from the divine comedy of Dante Alighieri “Inferno”, where if they kill themselves, they receive a punishment that will go on for eternity. To give more background on the text, Dante’s “Inferno” is about a man named Dante that travels through the 9 circles of hell with his mentor and guide, Vigil. With each new circle he travels, new sins and worse punishments for said sins accur, from a simple area of waiting forever at the start, to a perpetual state of anger and fighting nearing the end. And with each circle traveled, he finds people to talk to, to share their stories with the outside world when he gets out of hell. However this essay will be dealing with a particular circle, well a circle within a circle really. In circle seven, sub-circle two, are the souls who were once alive, then committed suicide for whatever reason. Their punishment is that their souls would become trees and that whatever happens to the tree, they would feel excruciating pain from that area. And to make matters worse, God sends harppies to go to the trees and rip them apart. However this is only one cultures take on suicide, out of the thousands of other cultures that most likely have a different take on the matter. In this essay I will be comparing and contrasting between the different cultures around the world, to Dante’s “Inferno”. 

When it comes to a positive outlook on suicide, people can look towards some Asian cultures, the most famous being the japanese culture and how killing themselves can bring honor to their family. According to the article, “Reducing Suicide: A National Imperative.” by SK Goldsmith and more, “In Japan, hara-kiri was a traditional suicide completed by warriors in the feudal era… a disembowelment, is slow and painful and considered by some to symbolize exercising power over death.. and as recently at 1945 army officers completed suicide after the defeat of Japan”. However, that is not the only reason they decided to kill themselves. They also do it in order to feel like they have control over their life. For example in the same text it states that, “Suicide in Japan may be a culturally acceptable response to disgrace… some sanction and even glorify suicide when done for “good” reasons for controlling one’s own destiny (Tierney, 1989). The Hindu code of conduct condones suicide for incurable diseases or great misfortune (Weiss, 1994).” It is interesting to point out that the japanese sometimes kill themselves for such a reason, where as in Dante’s Inferno if a person kill themselves, they get punished because suicide is like they disreagred God’s plan for them and spit in his face. By taking “control of their fate” they believe themselves higher than God which is disrespectful. 

Also the Japanese, (in the proper circumstance) viewed such an act as suicide as something to look up too, where as in Inferno people would look at you with pity, disgust, or other negative emotions; as it states in Page 187-189, “Why do you rip me? Have you no sense of pity whatsoever? Men were we once, now we have changed to scrub; but even if we had been souls of serpents, your hand should have shown more pity than it did… “0 wounded soul, ” my sage replied to him, “if he had only let himself believe what he had read in verses I once wrote, he never would have raised his hand against you”. The disparity between the two culture is apparent here as in Dante’s Inferno, no matter what you will get sent to the second ring of the seventh circle of hell if you kill yourself, but in Japanese culture in the past as long as you kill yourself with the intent of honoring yourself and family, you were looked up to. However if you just killed yourself just because, you were considered a coward, just as the people in Inferno viewed the same people. 

A kind of neutral ground from both Dante’s views on suicide and the Japanese veiws on suicide is Hiduisum. In the Hindu culture, suicide is viewed as a bad thing, not as viewing the person as bad, but rather something is wrong with the family. As it is stated in “About Suicides in Hinduism” by Jayaram V, they talk about how if somebody killed themselevs it would bring, “social stigma and bad reputation to the family members, and they may have to live with that for long.”. This is more aligned to Inferno’s views upon the matter, just in a more social aspect, meaning the souls of hell pitying themselves knowing that what they left behind was a bunch of shame for both their family but more importantly, themselves. This shows both a comparison to Inferno due to the fact that in both cultures if a person kills themselves for selfish reasons, not only are they punished, looked down upon as a coward and a shamed upon, and are basically telling God that they do not care for his miracle. But they also bring their family down, both socially and emotionally. If a person decides to kill themselves, others will question what made them do it. Was it the way the family treated them, did it have to do with the parents neglecting their child in any way, is the family really as stable as they seem on the outside? These questions will bring down a family’s reputation and make it seem as if they were possibly complicit with the act. This is also comparable to the way the Japanese people dealt with people who killed themselves in an act of selfishness. 

However there is a big contrast from Inferno and India/Hindu culture, and it is the fact that there are exceptions to this rule. In Dante’s Inferno no matter how dedicated a person is to the lord, no matter how justified their reason was in killing themselves, the result stays the same. If someone commit suicide, their soul will arrive in ring two of the seventh circle of hell for the rest of eternity, as it is said by a sinner who committed this same sin that met with Dante, “My mind, moved by scornful satisfaction, believing death would free me from all scorn, made me unjust to me, who was all just. By these strange roots of my own tree I swear to you that never once did I break faith with my lord, who was so worthy of all honor.”. In the Hindu culture however, there are three different ways that killing yourself was not only permitted, but looked up upon. In the text by Jayaram V, they state that, “in specific instances on the path of liberation it acknowledges self-destruction as a meritorious act of self-sacrifice and example of extreme devotion, renunciation and surrender. It is not even termed suicide, but self-sacrifice (atmahuti).”. The three ways of self sacrifice were: Agnipravesham, suicide by fire, which was believed that in doing so, the fire would purify your body and, “removing the residual karma”, thus freeing the soul. The second way was Prayopavesa, which was death by starvation, which was giving yourself up to the air and “merging your energies”. The last way was samadhi, death by entering an isolated area and giving your body as an offering to the earth. Doing any of these three tasks and instead of receiving a punishment, you would receive the ultimate enlightenment. SK Goldsmith & co said something similar in their article, “Reducing Suicide: A National Imperative.”, “in India it is acceptable for a widow to burn herself on her husband’s funeral pyre in order to remain connected to her husband rather than to become an out-cast in society. The traditional belief is that with this act, a husband and wife will be blessed in paradise and in their subsequent rebirth (Tousignant et al., 1998).”.

From what is gathered from this research, it can be said that yes, different cultures have different approaches to suicide, but not completly unalike from one another. It seems as if most culture views align with Dante’s Inferno’s stance about the matter, that suicide as something bad, as if it is to be shamed upon and rightfully so. However that’s where some comparisons end. The exceptions to this mentality are somewhat few and even then they are somewhat hard to achieve. It can be said that the times where killing yourself is appropriate are only when you are not doing it for yourself and being selfish, but for the sake of others. Then not only are you alleviated from your initial punishment, but given a reward for their deed. But when all is said and done the one thing that many people and cultures can agree upon is that life is something precious and should not be wasted because of something you cannot fix or want to fix. You just have to keep on getting up because that is what life is all about.

Alighieri, Dante, and Mark Musa. The Divine Comedy Vol.1 Inferno. Vol. 1, Penguin Books.

Goldsmith, SK. Society and Culture – Reducing Suicide – NCBI Bookshelf. 2002, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220948/.

Martinez, Andrew. “Attitudes toward Suicide, Depression Treatment Varies Widely across Culture.” Daily Sundial, 16 Sept. 2014, https://sundial.csun.edu/81675/lifestyle/dysfunctional-is-what-we-say-it-is/.

V, Jayaram. About Suicides in Hinduism, https://www.hinduwebsite.com/hinduism/h_suicide.asp.