Manuscript of the Flemish school of Le Pélerinage de l’âme, dating to 1435, paraphrase in prose of the poem by Guillaume de Deguileville, kept in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
The image shows a cosmological representation of the Christian medieval Otherworld: around the center, which consists in the mouth of Hell, monstrous jaws which enclose the damned destined to eternal torment, develop in concentric circles the Limbo, where the unbaptized children reside, then the Purgatory, where the souls of sinners wait to be purified, accompanied by their guardian angels, and lastly the circle of the rainbow, which permits the access to the Paradisiacal world, where God receives the righteous’ souls.
As Jacques Le Goff has demonstrated in his well-known analysis, the belief in the Purgatory developed in Western Christianity between about 1150 and 1250, as the conception of an intermediary Otherworld, in which the deceased are submitted to trials, a “purification”, which could be abbreviated by the living’s suffrage. The elements that in the XII century coagulate, giving birth to Purgatory, dates back to more ancient times. In the Purgatory’s fire takes new form the concept of a cleansing, regenerating fire, which was recurrent in many ancient religions. The passage through fire became rite of passage, ordeal. This ancient heritage “explains, to my view, one of the reasons of the Purgatory’s success, consisting in having resumed some very ancient symbolic realities. What anchors itself to a tradition has more probabilities of success. The Purgatory is a new idea of Christianity, which however it derived from preceding religions a part of its main accessories” (Le Goff 1982, p.15).

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