Observations placeholder
Dante - Inferno [fraud]
Identifier
007295
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Fraud is nasty – it hurts far more people more often than simple theft. Yet in one of the worst anomalies of many countries' justice systems, it often goes unpunished, or if not unpunished at least the punishment never seems to fit the crime. Steal a sheep from a farmer and you might be put in jail. Steal from a pension fund or from your local government finances, or from the shareholders in a company and you affect thousands and at times millions – all of whom are hurt because of you. And if you're caught you might get just a hefty fine, none of which is returned to those you effectively stole from.
Dante's vision of the representative of the fraud systems was called Geryon, a truly terrifying dragon. I have always had a secret longing that Geryon should appear to some of those who ran Equitable Life.....
A description of the experience
Dante – The Divine Comedy INFERNO I
CANTO XVII
This is the savage beast with the pointed tail
Who sails over mountains and breaks walls and weapons;
There is the one who infects the whole world
So my escort began to say to me;
And made a sign that he should come to ground
Just at the end of our marble path
And that foul representative of Fraud
Came up, so that his head and chest arrived
But the bank did not accommodate his tail
His face was the face of a just man,
So mild, if you looked no deeper than the skin;
The rest of his body was a reptile's
He had two tentacles, hairy to the armpits;
His back, his breast, and both his flanks were garish
With a variety of knots and whirls
Tartars and Turks never made cloth with colours
Brighter than that, background and pattern together,
Nor did Arachne ever weave such webs
So that worst of wild beasts took his place
On the edge between the rock and the great sand.
His tail darted around still in the void
Twisting upwards the envenomed fork
With which the point was armed, as in a scorpion