Dis (Divine Comedy)
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In Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, Dis is the City of the Dead (it.: La cittĂ infuocata di Dite). It is located in the Sixth Circle. The walls of Dis are guarded by fallen angels. The buildings of Dis which are mentioned are Mosques and furnaces. Dis is extremely hot. Punished within Dis are those whose lives were marked by active (rather than passive) sins: heretics, murderers, suicides, blasphemers, usurers, sodomites, panderers, seducers, flatterers, Simoniacs, sorcerors, barrators, hypocrites, thieves, false counsellors, schismatics, falsifiers and traitors. Dis is also mentioned in the sixth book of Virgil's "Aeneid", one of the principal influences on Dante in his depiction of hell. The city of Dis is encountered not long after Aeneas and the Sibyl enter the cavern of hell.
[edit] Direct references to Dis in other media
In Neil Gaiman's Preludes and Nocturnes Dream is imprisoned for decades by an occultist seeking immortality, and when he escapes, he must reclaim his objects of power while still in a weakened state, confronting the legions of Hell in the city of Dis. In the comic, the city is shown as a metamorphic collective of buildings.
In Andrew Reimann's The Lost Kings, Dis is a major city of the novel, which has taken on a modern look of black skyscrapers while retaining cobblestone walkways and candle-lit streetlights. This is the city where the murderers of the mortal world are condemned, regardless whether the nature of the murder was violent or accidental. Dis had been run by kings for centuries until a new government concentrating on the establishment of an infallible law overran the monarchies. The order of the city is dependent on the citizens’ feelings of security, which are destroyed when a terrorist discovers a way to submit souls to a state of eternal sleep.
In the song Dialogue Symphonie by Moi dix Mois Dis is quoted in the line "I'm Dis from darkness, of your destiny. I see pieces of blood flow".
Dis is a fictional planet where most of the action of Harry Harrison's novel Planet of the Damned takes place. The novel was first published as Sense of Obligation and it's the first in the Brion Brandd Series. Like the legendary city of Dis, the planet Dis is an extremely hot place.
In the computer action game Doom in which the player fights demons in hell with futuristic weapons, the last level is called Dis. The creators of Doom (John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, John Romero) were loosely inspired by Dante's Inferno and the Bible. Levels such as "Gate To Limbo" and the "House of Pain" were names taken from the poem. Other levels such as "They Will Repent" were taken from the Bible. The third chapter in Doom is called "Inferno."