For centuries, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno has been read as a moral and spiritual descent, a journey into sin, punishment, and divine justice. Timothy Burbery of Marshall University now argues that the poem also carries something far more physical. In his reading, Dante did not simply imagine Satan falling from Heaven. He pictured that fall as a violent planetary impact. That idea changes the scale of the story at once. Instead of treating Satan’s plunge as a symbolic collapse, Burbery proposes that Dante envisioned him as a fast-moving body striking the Southern Hemisphere and boring all the way to Earth’s center. In that scenario, Hell is not just a spiritual realm beneath the surface. It is the crater left behind by the collision, formed from the ground up as matter is forced outward and downward. The image is startling because it makes Dante sound less like a poet working in allegory and more like someone running a thought experiment about impact physics centuries before modern meteoritics existed. Dante and Virgil reach the ninth and lowest circle …