Dis

"Looking at it, I don't feel pity or anger or any feeling like that. Just disappointment. Though I suppose, I should have learned to live with it by now. Just like how your father did all those years ago."

- Lucifer.

Dis, or mistakenly known as Satan or Lucifer, is one of the most powerful demons in Hell and the prisoner and self-proclaimed Lord of the Ninth Circle of Hell, Treachery. He is also the greatest Prisoner of Treachery.

Overview
Dis is among most powerful demons in Hell and Emperor of the Kingdom Dolorous. He is known for his disturbing, degrading and eldritch looks. Dis is also the Demon of Death, The Father of Lies and one of the Rulers of Hell before being overthrown by the Demon Overlord Mundus and then join under him as a co-leader before Mundus' rule was overthrown after Lucifer conquered Hell. He was so powerful that he was one of the demons to be mistaken to be Lucifer or Satan.

He was once one of the cherubim until he became inflamed by his ego and superiority towards the other angels and was banished into Hell for it by God. He would later manipulate humans and other angels into going against God. He would trap his enemies in the Inferno where the murderers drown in the fiery blood of their own victims, and others are forced to cannibalize their own children.

As Dis beats his wings, he creates a cold wind that continues to freeze the ice surrounding him and the other sinners in the Ninth Circle. The winds he creates are felt throughout the other circles of Hell. He commands the demons Arioch, Baalzephon, Biffant, Bitru, Furcas, Merodach and Titivulus (who is normally under Belphegor).

Appearance
Dis is often known for his disturbing, degrading and eldritch looks and appears as a giant demon, frozen mid-breast in ice at the center of Hell. Dis has three heads, in a mockery of the Holy Trinity, each head is chewing on a dead soul, and a pair of bat-like wings affixed under each chin. Some say that its three heads are a mockery with the Holy Trinity (God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit), and each head is chewing on a dead soul.

Within Dis's left and right mouths feet-first are Brutus and Cassius, the murderers of Roman general and statesman Julius Caesar. In the middle mouth head-first is Judas Iscariot, former Apostle and betrayer of Jesus Christ. He suffers the worst torment of all, having his head chewed and back raked by Dis's claws for all eternity.

While being a god worshipped by the Roman Empire, Dis appears as three faced being (one black, one red, and one white), only oaths and curses worn while striking the ground can reach him.

Personality
Dis wishes for the destruction of everything in Creation because it wasn't created by himself. His hatred is also directed everything about himself that was given by the Creator, including his liberty, his beauty, his loyalty, his self-love, his power, his intelligence, and his goodness. With his angelic intelligence, Dis knew all of this would happen if he carried out his "arrogant rape", yet brought all of the tortures and crimes described in Inferno into existence without any remorse.

Dis possesses murderous hatred for all those that manage to atone and escape whatever form of hell they end up in, envious due to his inability and refusal to redeem, and spiteful towards them finding inner goodness that he abandoned. He hates Prometheus for being a rebel that eventually was freed from being pecked by an eagle and attempted to bring him down by pointing out their similarities. Prometheus rebuked this by stating he was stealing fire and wisdom to help mankind, while he was consumed by self-love and the desire to be superior to all things.

Powers and Abilities
As Dis beats his wings, he creates a cold wind that continues to freeze the ice surrounding him and the other sinners in the Ninth Circle. The winds he creates are felt throughout the other circles of Hell.

Origins
Dis was once a cherub (or seraph), an angel closer to the Love that Moves the Stars, second only to Helel, once "the highest of all creatures", above every angel and man gifted by the Highest Joy with immortality, invincibility, super intelligence, and perfect happiness. By virtue of the Love's unrivaled love for him, Dis was said to be one of the most beautiful angels ever conceived, only beaten by Michael and Helel. That is until he came to love his excellence more than he loved his father or even his true self. Dis came to love his superiority to the lower angels and only that superiority, making the supremacy of his Father unbearable. As a result of his Pride, this cherub could not bear to be less great than his creator, so he rallied every angel he could gain (about a couple hundred) and the first humans against his Heavenly Father in a violent attempt to be more godly than God.

With his rebellion, the Devil introduced all the evil, suffering, and death that would ever be into the world while condemning any who followed him to Inferno, a realm of eternal torment where souls are forced to endure tortures such as being transformed into twisted, broken trees; feasted upon by harpies; and being submerged in a river of boiling tar. In his impossible journey, the Highest Creature stripped himself of every gift that God gave into him, whether it be his intelligence, his beauty, and even his morality. Now, everything good with the angel has been reduced to a mindless monster, coming together in the ultimate work of evil.

From him came every desperate, twisted attempt to turn stories from expressions of love into means of domination and corruption. His mouth, which once spoke the sweetest words Dream ever inspired, was turned into a torture-chamber where men he corrupted will be shredded for eternity by his teeth. Now, he hopes to turn all poets and singers into speakers of death like himself, making him an eternal danger to the Scribes.

Due to him being stupid enough to rip apart everything he had, he became demented and feeble and so was easily able to defeated by Helel himself, who Dis originally wanted to be. After easily being defeated, Dis was personally thrown by Helel into the depths of Hell, Treachery, where he would remain as a slobbering beast for his existence, only able to make semi-avatars to move around Creation. However, this event had peak Ayin's interest in the Light Bringer who possessed unrivalled power and loyalty and so started her plan to tempt his mind and soul into darkness.

While originally believed to be a demon that is separate from Satan, it was revealed that Dis is in fact Satan himself, and moreover, said to be what remains of the Devil after his fall from Heaven. This could imply that Dis could be a "shell" of Satan's former glory and that the latter whom currently interacts with his subjects and demonic cohorts is in fact a physical avatar of Dis himself. The separation of the two left Dis as a wordless and slobbering beast whom was left within the deepest pits of the Ninth Circle and to forever remain as both a pillar and gatekeeper for Hell and Purgatory. Some depictions turn him into a seraph.

Venus' Revenge
After the Roman Goddess Venus found out that her favourite legacy Julius Caesar was assassinated by Brutus, and Cassius, she swore that she would punish those two traitors no matter what. She did this by first commanding Mark Antony, one of Julius' greatest supporters, to turn the general public against them and the manipulate events so both would die.

After they both perished, she quickly plucked them both from the Roman Underworld before Pluto would noticed and brought them to the Abrahamic Underworld, Hell. While in there, she met up with her adoptive father, the demon lord Lucifer himself, and requested him to punish the traitors, even specifying many different horrible punishments for them, which Lucifer happily granted. While the Demon Lord was originally going to place them with the other traitors in Treachery, he gained an even greater idea and went to the very bottom of the 9th Circle where Dis remained. There, Lucifer brought those two into the mouths of the demon, allowing them to be continually chewed on by Dis forever.

Divine Comedy
In The Inferno, Dis is trapped in Treachery, the ninth and lowest circle of Hell; the circle reserved for the treacherous and traitorous. Unlike many other circles of Hell, these sinners in Treachery remain unnamed. Even Dante Alighieri is afraid to enter this last circle, as he nervously proclaimed, "I drew behind my leader’s back again."

Uncharacteristically of Dante, he remains silent in Satan's presence. Dante examines the sinners who are covered wholly by ice, showing like straw in glass with some lying prone, and some erect, some with the head towards him, the others with the bottoms of their feet; another like a bow bent feet to face. This circle of Hell is a complete separation from any life and, for Dante, "the deepest isolation is to suffer separation from the source of all light and life and warmth."

Jesus' Actions
It is said that one day Jesus will forgive Judas Iscariot for the greatest betrayal in Abrahamic history and bring him to Purgatory so he can repent for all his sins and inner demons that claw his spiritual insides.

Myths and Legends
In his three mouths, he chews on Judas Iscariot, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Gaius Cassius Longinus. Scholars consider Dis to be "a once splendid being from whom all personality has now drained away". Dante Alighieri illustrates Dis as a less powerful Satan; he is slobbering, wordless, and receives the same punishments in Hell as the rest of the sinners. In the text, Dante vividly illustrates Satan's grotesque physical attributes.

Buried mid-breast in the glacier at the 9th and final Circle of Hell, the farthest away from God's light. His wings continuous flapping in order to free himself from the ice only further imprison him. This prison has a direct line to the concept of betrayal, as the deepest pit of Hell is reserved for traitors. Satan himself is trapped waist-deep in a sheet of ice. His wings beat in an eternal struggle to escape his frigid prison, yet the winds that his wings create only ensures that he is trapped further along with every other soul in Cocytus. Vergil and Dante escape Cocytus by climbing down Satan's fur through the center of the world, and reemerging at the mount of Purgatory.

Black sheep were sacrificed to him and the Roman Senate declared that every one hundred years a special three-day-long festival would be held to honor Dis who they believed was a god himself.

Religious Significance
Dis, as Dante's version of Satan, remains a common image in popular portrayals. The answer to the question of how Dis wound up in the bottom of the pit in Dante's Inferno lies in Christian theological history. Some interpretations of the Book of Isaiah, combined with apocryphal texts, explain that Dis was cast from Heaven, and fell to earth. Dis, the angel, was enamored of his own beauty, power, and pride, and attempted to usurp God's divine throne.

This immediately backfired on Dis. God sentenced him as a betrayer and banished him from Heaven. Dante uses this idea to create a physical place Dis created after his impact with the earth. According to Dante, the pit the Pilgrim climbs down to reach the center of Hell is literally the hole that Dis made when he fell to earth. The extra earth formed Mount Purgatory on the other side of the Earth.

William O'Grady has pointed out that those frozen in the ice perversely imitate God in the sense of being unmoved movers, but rather than moving by attracting us towards them, they move us by repelling us away from them, as evil was understood to do in scholastic philosophy. Thus, since they wanted to be God, Dante makes them godlike but at the farthest distance removed from God.

Quotes

 * "Dis is a "shell" that was shed by the Fallen Angel Satanel when he became the Devil Lord Satan. Despite its status, however, it suffers the same torment that all sinners had to face in Treachery, you know, the same way it was punished in Dante's Inferno. Such a pity though, once an aspect of a glorious Seraph, now it is nothing more than a slobbering and wordless beast." - Matt Wright.


 * "He wept with all six eyes, and the tears fell over his three chins mingled with bloody foam. The teeth of each mouth held a sinner, kept as by a flax rake; thus he held three of them in agony." - Dante Alighieri's physical description of Dis.


 * "The Emperor of the kingdom dolorous From his mid-breast forth issued from the ice; And better with a giant I compare Than do the giants with those arms of his; Consider now how great must be that whole, Which unto such a part conforms itself. Were he as fair once, as he now is foul, And lifted up his brow against his Maker, Well may proceed from him all tribulation. O, what a marvel it appeared to me, When I beheld three faces on his head! The one in front, and that vermilion was;" - Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy.

Trivia

 * The City of Dis was named after him.
 * In Dante Alighieri's classical poem the Divine Comedy, Dis was mistaken to be an alternative name for Satan.
 * It is believed that when the Attorney General John Ashcroft finally dies, he will take the place of Cassius in being chewed by Dis.

Image Sources

 * (1205lucifer.jpg) Dis/Lucifer from Dante's Inferno (True Source Unknown)
 * (DVinfernoLuciferKingOfHell m.jpg) Lucifer King of Hell by Gustave Doré
 * (Satan Hell.jpg) My vision of Satan by Sandoval-Art
 * (Devilman Lady Zennon Satan.png) Zennon from Devilman Lady Chapter 22
 * (Dis Satan.jpg) Dis/Satan Art by impfaust
 * (El-infierno-de-dante.jpg) Dante's Inferno Satan by Alberto Zardo
 * (LuciferFULL.jpg) Divine Comedy's Lucifer by ???
 * (Illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, object 72 Butlin 812-69 recto Lucifer.jpg) Dante's Inferno - Lucifer by William Blake