There are nine circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. Dante imagines Hell as a vast funnel descending beneath Jerusalem, with nine increasingly severe circles devoted to different sins.
The first circle is Limbo, followed by circles for lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery. The punishments generally mirror or symbolically expose the sins committed by the damned. As Dante travels downward with Virgil, the structure becomes more morally severe, especially once he reaches fraud and betrayal.
The ninth circle is not a fiery chamber but a frozen lake called Cocytus. It contains traitors, whose cold-hearted betrayal is represented by eternal entrapment in ice. At the center stands Lucifer, whose wings create the freezing wind that keeps the lake solid.
Readers sometimes count only the eight circles beneath Limbo, producing the incorrect answer eight. Limbo is still counted as the first circle, so the canonical total for Dante’s Hell is nine. The vestibule outside the circles, where the neutral souls linger, is not counted as a circle.