Month: June 2016

Long before I was exposed to Romantic Satanism, the radical tradition spearheaded by English Romanticism’s “Satanic Lord,”¹ George Gordon Lord Byron, I was heavily influenced by another irreverent George: comedy legend George Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008).

I am proud to proclaim George Carlin my lifelong hero. Having had the privilege of seeing him perform onstage twice, having been lucky enough to meet the man before he died (yes, died, not passed away or expired), and having had the honor to teach a class on Carlin’s comedy as a guest lecturer for a “Comic Vision” course are some of the finest memories of my life. Eight years ago today, news of Carlin’s death was broken to me by my mother, who knew it would strike me like the death of a close family member or mentor. Not a day has gone by without Carlin being abundantly present in my thoughts, however, and I have every intention of sharing his genuine genius with my own family in the hope that my children will not only be brought unparalleled laughter but will also learn fundamental lessons in freethinking in the process. That, of course, was the case with this Carlin aficionado.

George Carlin loomed large over my youth, and it is fair to say that he was the most significant influence on me during my formative years. Everyone in my childhood home was a Carlin fan, and his peerless comedic wit brought ceaseless laughter to our household. I grew up cherishing Carlin as someone who was funny as Hell, surely, but I admired Carlin much more for the invaluable lessons I learned from his unique social commentary. Ever comedy’s matchless wordsmith, Carlin made me hyperaware of the power of language, and from the razor-sharp wit he vocalized in his own poetic (and often perverse) rhetoric I learned the value of untrammeled free speech, the importance of questioning all things, and the need to drag all sacred cows to the satirical slaughterhouse.

I saw Carlin’s HBO stand-up special You Are All Diseased (1999) when I was twelve years old, and his all-out assault on not only organized religion but on God Himself—the “invisible man living in the sky”—struck a chord with me. “Between you and me,” he boldly stated from the stage, “in any decently run universe, this Guy would have been out on His all-powerful ass a long time ago.” Carlin’s memorable blasphemous skit (“There Is No God”) undeniably put this fellow Catholic on a path to militant atheism/anti-theism, but I daresay it also put me on a path to Miltonic-Romantic Satanism as well. After all, wasn’t Lucifer the one who aspired to put God out on His all-powerful ass?

 

 

Years after seeing Carlin’s misanthropic magnum opus You Are All Diseased, I encountered Satan the Heaven-defying anti-hero of Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost and embraced the radical tradition of Romantic Satanism the Miltonic arch-rebel inspired. During my studies of Romanticism’s “Satanic School,”² I gained a new Satanic hero in George Gordon Lord Byron, whose life and poetry are remarkable monuments to irreverent wit and humor in their own right. Nevertheless, it was unquestionably George Carlin who was my first Satanic hero, who was the one to plant in my mind the Satanic seeds of doubt which would one day compel me to conclude that—as Carlin himself put it—“Satan is cool.”³

 

— Christopher J. C.

 

Notes

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<sup>1. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, [1933] 1963), p. 81.↩
2. In the Preface to A Vision of Judgement (1821), Robert Southey alluded to Romantic icons Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley as heads of a “Satanic School”: “Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul! The school which they have set up may properly be called the Satanic School, for though their productions breathe the spirit of Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those loathsome images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to represent, they are more especially characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feeling of hopelessness wherewith it is allied.” Quoted in C. L. Cline, “Byron and Southey: A Suppressed Rejoinder,” Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 3 (Winter, 1954), p. 30.↩
3. George Carlin, Brain Droppings (New York: Hyperion, 1997), p. 186.↩</sup>

Spanish sculptor Ricardo Bellver rendered the Miltonic-Romantic Lucifer to perfection with El Ángel Caído (The Fallen Angel, 1877). The statue imagines Milton’s ruined archangel as a classical heroic nude reeling back off of a chunk of rocky cliff his serpent-coiled lower half rests atop, the angelic-winged Lucifer’s long, streaming locks of hair windswept upside his youthfully fair face, which is racked with fierce pain but exudes defiant pride as he releases an earthshattering scream toward the Heaven he has been banished from. I have always felt that Bellver’s masterpiece is the very apex of the Satanic sublime, and having at long last seen El Ángel Caído in person has certainly reinforced my position.

A native of Madrid, Ricardo Bellver was a student of the Spanish capital’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, and in 1874 he earned a pension to complete his studies in Rome, where he sculpted El Ángel Caído in 1877. Bellver’s statue, commissioned by the Duke of Fernán Núñez, was inspired by Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost (1667), as described in the following two passages from the poem’s infernal introduction of the fallen archangel:

                                                      …his Pride

Had cast him out from Heav’n, with all his Host

Of Rebel Angels… (I.36–38)

 

…round he throws his baleful eyes

That witness’d huge affliction and dismay

Mixt with obdúrate pride and steadfast hate… (I.56–58)

Milton’s Satan is already damned to Hell in these lines taken as inspiration for El Ángel Caído, and Bellver accordingly brought to life not a falling but a fallen angel. Yet Bellver portrayed Milton’s Satan as Lucifer, which is to say, the fallen angel, though already Hell-doomed in the dramatic moment the statue captures, retains his preeminent angelic beauty, including his massive feathery wings—both of which were major hallmarks of Romantic renditions of Milton’s Satan in the visual arts.

A likely inspiration for El Ángel Caído was Laocoön and His Sons, displayed in the Vatican—not least because of the serpents coiled around the fallen angel’s limbs—but Lucifer’s dramatic position also bears a striking resemblance to Gustave Doré’s 1866 engraving of Milton’s despairing Satan atop Mt. Niphates. But Bellver’s Fallen Angel strikes the viewer as far more heroic than these two iconic images. The look of Lucifer’s thunder-stricken countenance unleashing that desperate cry heavenward is best described as “mixed defiance and despair,” to borrow a line from Lord Byron (The Giaour [1813], l.908), the exiled angelic prince’s form best described as “Majestic though in ruin,” to borrow one from Milton (Paradise Lost, II.305).

Romantic iconography inspired by Paradise Lost visualized Milton’s Satan very much in the spirit of Romantic radical William Hazlitt’s paean to the arch-rebel: “His ambition was the greatest, and his punishment was the greatest; but not so his despair, for his fortitude was as great as his sufferings.…[T]he fierceness of tormenting flames is qualified and made innoxious by the greater fierceness of his pride…”¹ El Ángel Caído is quintessentially Romantic, yet uniquely so, for while Milton’s Satan was portrayed as singularly splendid amidst his loss by many Romantic artists, they tended to choose his most heroic moments—rising from the burning lake, summoning his legions, or facing off with Death himself—whereas Bellver chose Lucifer’s fall from Heaven/his realization of his ruin in Hell, but still capturing the dazzling splendor of Satan as Romantic hero.

El Ángel Caído crystallizes the Miltonic Lucifer’s defining moment of cataclysmic loss, but Bellver’s sublime statue evokes not mere fear but awe, compelling viewers to admire the glorious, godlike fallen angel for withstanding the omnipotent ire of “The Thunderer” (Paradise Lost, VI.491). Bellver’s is no horned half-beast Devil beneath the heel of a stoically triumphant St. Michael. Of course, the fallen angel is bound by hostile serpents, which stand in for Milton’s “Adamantine Chains” (I.48), as well as serve as a symbolic reminder that the Heaven-defying “Apostate Angel” (I.125) becomes “Th’ infernal Serpent” (I.34), who is “to [him]self enthrall’d” (VI.181). (“…Pride and worse Ambition threw me down,” Milton’s Satan cries, yet rejecting even the thought of atonement because repentance requires “submission; and that word / Disdain forbids me…” [IV.40, 81–82]). Nevertheless, Bellver’s Fallen Angel focuses attention on Lucifer in Romantic fashion, the defeated rebel angel’s catastrophe paradoxically portrayed in a flattering light, his heroic resolution shining forth despite his despair.

Bellver’s depiction of the Miltonic Lucifer in all his damned, defiant magnificence won the artist First Medal in Spain’s National Exhibition of Fine Arts, held in Madrid in 1878. In the same year, El Ángel Caído was cast in bronze for the third Paris World’s Fair (where, incidentally, the head of Lady Liberty was also on display). Bellver’s Fallen Angel enjoyed a brief stay in Madrid’s Prado Museum, and in 1879 Benito Soriano Murillo, director of the Prado, decided to hand the statue over to the City of Madrid, believing El Ángel Caído should be placed outdoors to fully capture The Fallen Angel’s dramatic effect. In 1885, The Fallen Angel was finally stationed in Madrid’s majestic Retiro Park, resting atop a grand pedestal erected by the renowned architect Francisco Jareño, which includes at its base various demonic faces spouting water into the fountain below, each demon clutching assorted reptiles and fish in their talons. (The bestial demonic busts aren’t the only Satanic cliché El Ángel Caído was subject to; the statue apparently stands 666 meters above sea level as well.) The Prado tried to reclaim El Ángel Caído in 1998, but the statue remains exalted in Retiro Park for all to see. Fortunately, however, a replica Fallen Angel, which can be admired up close, resides within Madrid’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, Bellver’s alma mater.

For me—as someone hell-bent on preserving the Miltonic-Romantic legacy of Lucifer—venturing to see El Ángel Caído was like a pilgrimage, for Ricardo Bellver’s statue truly brought this proud tradition’s Lucifer to life. Walking through Madrid’s Retiro Park is a wonderfully daunting experience to begin with, but to see The Fallen Angel in person was simply sublime. The countless photos of El Ángel Caído I had seen over the years simply could not compare to the overwhelming feeling of standing in the Plaza del Ángel Caído, staring up at this artistic masterpiece.

As amazing as the pedestaled Fallen Angel in Retiro Park was, I am tempted to say that visiting the replica in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando had more of an impact on me. There, El Ángel Caído rests at the top of the entryway staircase, and walking up to the statue, which was illuminated by the almost heavenly brilliance of the room’s natural light, was genuinely awe-inspiring. I was able to truly appreciate the massiveness of Lucifer’s figure; if the fallen angel were to come to his feet, he would probably tower over me at about eight or nine feet tall. There was not much traffic in the open room, and amid the remarkable quiet, which made my footfalls echo as if I were in a capacious cathedral, I was able to spend much time admiring every detail of Bellver’s exquisite work. This profoundly moving experience, in all honesty, induced the feeling of somehow coming face-to-face with Lucifer—as imagined by the Miltonic-Romantic tradition—frozen in his fall.

I highly recommend venturing to see both statues of El Ángel Caído in Madrid. While it was a deeply personal experience for me, I would be remiss if I did not share the videos and photos I managed to capture in Retiro Park and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando of Ricardo Bellver’s Fallen Angel—the visual culmination of the grand Miltonic-Romantic-Satanic tradition I am so very proud to preserve.

— Christopher J. C.

 

Notes

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^{1. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (1818), “Lecture III: On Shakespeare and Milton,” in The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), p. 384.↩}