I Love “Lucifer”: Part 1 of 3

The Satanic Scholar” struck me as an appropriate moniker for the resource dedicated to preserving the tradition established by the Satanic School of English Romanticism. Truth be told, I hold the name/title Lucifer in much higher regard than Satan, though I am obliged to more often invoke the latter, which abounds in the field of Miltonic-Romantic Satanism: e.g., “Milton’s Satan,” “Romantic Satanism,” “the Satanic School,” (Miltonic) “Satanists” and “anti-Satanists.” Be that as it may, this grand tradition—despite the frequency with which the name Satan appears in it—restored not only the fallen angel’s celestial luster, but also his luminous name, which I find both aesthetically and philosophically fitting.

The tradition of the Devil having possessed the name Lucifer (Latin for “Light-Bearer”) before falling from Heaven and being rechristened Satan (Hebrew for “Adversary”) was the product of the early Christian Church, when the concept of the Devil was in its infancy. Lucifer signified the prestigious celestial status the fallen angel once possessed and forever lost1—an interesting addition to the cosmic cautionary tale. The name Lucifer originates from the fourteenth chapter of the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, which the Church Fathers absorbed into the Satanic biography beginning to take shape to further flesh out the character of the Devil, who was to play a major role in Christian theology.

William Blake, Satan in His Original Glory - “Thou Wast Perfect Till Iniquity was Found in Thee” (ca. 1805)
William Blake, Satan in His Original Glory – “Thou Wast Perfect Till Iniquity was Found in Thee” (ca. 1805)

Patristic exegesis of Isaiah 14 concretized the Devil’s prelapsarian name and the sin of prideful ambition to godhead that led him to forfeit it. “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” thunders the biblical prophet Isaiah, “For thou hast said in thine heart…I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.…I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit” (Isaiah 14:12–15). The extravagant imagery employed by Isaiah to overstress the overriding pride and commensurate downfall of “the king of Babylon” (Isaiah 14:4) led patristic writers to conclude that the king himself, rather than the vivid language used to describe his spectacular fall from the seat of power, was figurative—a mortal means to describe the Devil’s supernatural fall from grace. For the Church Fathers, Isaiah’s diatribe revealed that Satan became Satan because he aspired above his station, Lucifer the angelic rebel having established himself as simia Dei,2 arrogating divine attributes in his blasphemous ambition to “be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:14).3

Lucifer, as invoked in Isaiah 14:12, is Latin for “light-bearer,” and the original Hebrew reads Helel ben Shahar, “Day Star, son of the Dawn.” It is a reference to Venus, the Morning Star, which is the light-bringer, appearing to herald the light of the rising Sun. Day Star transitioned into Lucifer in Latin translations of the Bible, such as St. Jerome’s fourth-century Latin Vulgate Bible. All English translations of the Bible familiar to Milton4 maintained Lucifer as a proper name, and Milton stuck to this tradition in Paradise Lost,5 retelling the traditional story he inherited as best it could be told. “Lucifer… / (So call him, brighter once amidst the Host / Of Angels, than that Star the Stars among)…” (VII.131–33), relates the archangel Raphael, who alternately emphasizes that—like all fallen angels, who’ve had their names “blotted out and ras’d / By thir Rebellion, from the Books of Life” (I.362–63)—the ruined archangel was stripped of his honorific: “Satan, so call him now, his former name / Is heard no more in Heav’n” (V.658–59).

Traditionally, Lucifer was the highest angel in Heaven, second only to God Himself,6 and despite the qualification Milton places upon Lucifer’s heavenly rank—“he of the first, / If not the first Arch-Angel”7 (V.659–60)—the angelic aristocrat’s celestial status is attested to by Milton’s emphasis on splendor denoting rank in the hierarchy of Heaven. Milton affirms that “God is Light” (III.3; cf. 1 John 1:5), as well as the “Fountain of Light” (III.375), God’s angelic sons the “Progeny of Light” who are by the Almighty “Crown’d…with Glory” (V.600, 839). The title of Light-Bearer thus signifies just how “great in Power, / In favor and preëminence” (V.660–61) the prelapsarian Lucifer was—a point emphasized by Raphael/Milton:

                                        …great indeed

His name, and high was his degree in Heav’n;

His count’nance, as the Morning Star that guides

The starry flock… (V.706–09)

Doré 10
Gustave Doré, Paradise Lost, Bk. IV., 73-74, “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?” (1866)

In spite of how illustriously highborn he was in Heaven, “great Lucifer” (V.760), who “sdein’d subjection, and thought one step higher / Would set [him] highest” (IV.50–51), finds himself cast down into “utter darkness… / As far remov’d from God and light of Heav’n / As from the Center thrice to th’ utmost Pole” (I.72–74). Heaven’s erstwhile Morningstar is outcast and reduced to “the Prince of Darkness” (X.383).

The supernal splendor Lucifer once enjoyed intensifies his loss, for though the fallen archangel nobly refuses to “repent or change, / Though chang’d in outward luster” (I.96–97), exchanging the lost glory of his person for the glory of his will,8 he is obviously chagrined by his “faded splendor wan” (IV.870), particularly in the presence of divine radiance. Milton’s fallen Lucifer, “And thence in Heav’n call’d Satan” (I.82), laments his loss of luster in his apostrophe to the Sun atop Mt. Niphates:

…O Sun…how I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Sphere;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down
Warring in Heav’n against Heav’n’s matchless King… (IV.37–41)

As close as Milton ostensibly stuck to tradition in his portrayal of Lucifer/Satan, he undeniably took radical departures. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan is Lucifer in all but name.

 

Notes


1. See Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1977] 1987), pp. 195–97; The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1988] 1992), pp. 43–44; Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1987] 1989), pp. 134–36; The Satanic Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 51–54, 80–81; Luther Link, The Devil: A Mask without a Face (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1995), pp. 22–23; T. J. Wray and Gregory Mobley, The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil’s Biblical Roots (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 108–10.
2. See Maximilian Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, [1931] 1959), Ch. XII, “Diabolus Simia Dei,” pp. 120–29.
3. See Russell, The Devil, pp. 195–97; Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1981] 1987), pp. 130–33; The Prince of Darkness, pp. 78–80; Stella Purce Revard, The War in Heaven: Paradise Lost and the Tradition of Satan’s Rebellion (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 32–35, 47–49; Forsyth, The Old Enemy, pp. 134–39, 370–71; The Satanic Epic, pp. 44–45, 51–54, 80–81; Link, pp. 22–27; Wray and Mobley, pp. 108–12; Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 191–99.
4. See Matthew Stallard, ed. Paradise Lost: The Biblically Annotated Edition (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2011), p. xxix.
5. Some critics insist that Milton did not intend his references to Lucifer in Paradise Lost to be understood as Satan’s angelic name in Heaven, but rather as a means of denoting Satan’s erstwhile splendor, for his heavenly abode is referred to as “The Palace of great Lucifer, (so call / That Structure in the Dialect of men / Interpreted)” (V.760–62), his hellish abode “Pandæmonium, City and proud seat / Of Lucifer, so by allusion call’d, / Of that bright Star to Satan paragon’d” (X.424–26). Despite this, I believe it is safe to assume that Milton was conforming to Christian tradition with regards to the change of names from Lucifer to Satan. In his outlines for Adam Unparadiz’d—the verse drama Paradise Lost was originally planned to be—Milton refers to the Devil as Lucifer rather than Satan. See Barbara K. Lewalski, ed. Paradise Lost (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007), “Appendix: Sketches for Dramas on the Fall, from the Trinity Manuscript,” pp. 341–43. Additionally, Milton referred to Lucifer at various points in his political polemics, in part to add emphasis to his message against men imitating the sin which led to Lucifer’s loss of his illustrious name: prideful aspiring above one’s sphere. See Frank S. Kastor, Milton and the Literary Satan (Amsterdam: Rodopi N.V., 1974), p. 49.
6. See Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: the Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1984] 1986), pp. 173–74.
7. In the traditional Christian hierarchy of angels—seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, angels—Milton’s Satan would be placed second to last in the nine orders. However, although Milton invokes these traditional angelic ranks at various points in Paradise Lost, he does not keep their traditional order. Milton’s archangels are so-called because they are entrusted with tasks of great significance: the archangel Uriel is “Regent of the Sun” (III.690); the archangel Gabriel is “Chief of th’ Angelic Guards” (IV.550) in Eden; the archangel Raphael is placed in charge of educating Adam and Eve about Satan and the danger they are in (V.221–45); the archangel Michael is “of Celestial Armies Prince” (VI.44), is named “the Prince of Angels” (VI.281) on the heavenly battlefield, and is also placed in charge of banishing Adam and Eve from Eden after revealing to the fallen parents of the human race the hope of future salvation (XI.99–125). Just as Milton refers to Satan as “th’ Arch-fiend” (I.156) to emphasize that he is “the superior Fiend” (I.283), so too does he refer to Satan as “th’ Arch-Angel” (I.600) to emphasize his superior angelic rank—“Above them all…” (I.600).
8. Milton’s Satan makes repeated reference to the glory of his endeavors: “…the Glorious Enterprise” (I.89); “That Glory never shall his wrath or might / Extort from me” (I.110–11); “…that strife / Was not inglorious, though th’ event was dire…” (I.623–24); “From this descent / Celestial Virtues rising, will appear / More glorious and more dread than from no fall…” (II.14–16); “If I must contend… / Best with the best, the Sender not the sent, / Or all at once; more glory will be won, / Or less be lost” (IV.851–54); “…The strife which thou call’st evil…wee style / The strife of Glory…” (VI.289–90); “To mee shall be the glory sole among / Th’infernal Powers, in one day to have marr’d / What he Almighty styl’d, six Nights and Days / Continu’d making…” (IX.135–38); “…I in one Night freed / From servitude inglorious well nigh half / Th’ Angelic Name, and thinner left the throng / Of his adorers…” (IX.140–43); “…I glory in the name, / Antagonist of Heav’n’s Almighty King…” (X.386–87).
In his narration, Milton himself emphasizes Satan’s relentless pursuit of glory: “…aspiring / To set himself in Glory above his Peers…” (I.38–39); “Him follow’d his next Mate, / Both glorying to have scap’t the Stygian flood / As Gods…” (I.238–40); “And now his heart / Distends with pride, and hard’ning in his strength / Glories…” (I.571–73); “…Satan, whom now transcendent glory rais’d / Above his fellows, with Monarchal pride / Conscious of highest worth…” (II.427–29).

Little Lucifers of the Satanic School: Part 2 of 2: Shelley

Alongside Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley also possessed a penchant for the Satanic1—arguably more so than “the Satanic Lord.”2 In his study of Romantic Satanism, Peter A. Schock determines “Shelley – not Byron – to be the driving force in the development of the Satanist writing of this group,” for as devilish as Byron’s persona and poetry were, “In adopting the stance of the diabolical provocateur, Byron was led by the precedent of Shelley.”3 It is certainly true that Shelley anticipated Byronic Satanism with his amplification of his own rebellious characteristics through adoption of a devilish persona—less pessimistically than Byron, it must be said—and his employment of grandly Satanic characters in his poetry.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Amelia Curran (1819)
Amelia Curran, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)

Shelley, the youthful radical expelled from Oxford University for refusal to deny authorship and distribution of a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism (1811), entertained fantasies of himself as an ennobled Satanic opponent of the Christian Deity he demonized: “Oh how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him back to his native Hell never to rise again – I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.”4 Shelley echoes Milton’s Satan and his rebel angels, who refer to God with epithets typically reserved for the Devil, such as “enemy” (I.188, II.137) and “foe” (I.122, 179; II.78, 152, 202, 210, 463, 769). Shelley thus exhibits the true nature of Romantic Satanism, which is getting caught up in “Satan’s cult of himself”5 insofar as Romantic Satanists deliberately sided with the Miltonic Satan, accepting Satan’s own lofty image of himself. The Satanic Shelley followed the precedent set by his mentor and eventual father-in-law, William Godwin, whose analysis of Milton’s Satan in his radical Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) more or less took Satan at his word: “But why did he rebel against his maker? It was, as he himself informs us, because he saw no sufficient reason, for that extreme inequality of rank and power, which the creator assumed.”6

Posthumous Portrait of Shelley Writing Prometheus Unbound, Joseph Severn (1845)
Joseph Severn, Posthumous Portrait of Shelley Writing Prometheus Unbound (1845)

The would-be Antichrist Shelley’s insatiably deicidal desires were certainly gratified in his poetry. In Queen Mab (1813), Shelley invoked the mythic “Wandering Jew” Ahasuerus, transforming the doubting Semite into an idealized Satanic blasphemer, who channels the spirit of Milton’s Satan in his defiance of the tyranny of Heaven (VII.173–201). In the Preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820), Shelley went so far as to deem Satan the near-equal of that ultimate Romantic symbol of boundless human potential imprisoned within the bonds of divine oppression, Prometheus: “The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan.…the Hero of Paradise Lost…”7                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Doré
Gustave Doré, Paradise Lost, Bk. I., 331, “They heard, and were abashed, and up they sprung” (1866)

Shelley employed Satanism not only as a means of dramatically expressing his contempt for Christianity, but also for a more positive expression: admiration for the unfettered humanity he so longed for. The dramatic finish to Shelley’s Declaration of Rights (1812)—a clarion call for Man to assert his proper worth and rise from lowliness and degeneracy to loftiness and dignity—reads, “Awake!—arise!—or be forever fallen,”8 which is the concluding line of the fiery speech with which Milton’s Satan rouses his fallen compatriots from the burning lake of Hell (I.330). Shelley thus casts himself as Milton’s Satan, whose “heart / Distends with pride” at the sight of his fallen but reassembled brethren, who are promised, “this Infernal Pit shall never hold / Celestial Spirits in Bondage…” (I.571–72, 657–58). In the closing diatribe of A Declaration of Rights, the pride in Man’s innate dignity and lofty potential Shelley expresses is intermingled with scorn for his current state of abjection, Shelley thus attempting to awaken Man in the same way that Milton’s Satan summons his fallen legions (I.315–23). Shelley adopted the persona of the Miltonic Satan, who believes himself a noble liberator, whose supporters were “freed / From servitude inglorious” (IX.140–41) by him, a “faithful Leader” (IV.933) at whose resumed command “Celestial Virtues rising, will appear / More glorious and more dread than from no fall…” (II.15–16).

Shelley’s acceptance of Satan’s self-image and his willingness to incorporate the idealized Satanic spirit into his own self-dramatization verifies Southey’s claim that the members of the Satanic School were essentially among Satan’s number. Despite the lack of belief of Byron and Shelley—more prominently pronounced in the latter—it is easy to imagine them enlisted in the rebel archangel’s “Satanic Host” (VI.392), beneath “Th’ Imperial Ensign” passionately “Hurling defiance toward the Vault of Heav’n” (I. 536, 669).

 

Notes


1. See Ann Wroe, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself (New York: Vintage Books, [2007] 2008), pp. 319–22.

2. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, [1933] 1963), p. 81.
3. Peter A. Schock, Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 7, 8.
4. Quoted in Schock, p. 80.
5. Schock, p. 39.
6. Quoted in Schock, p. 1; my emphasis.
7. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York [2d rev. ed. 1977]: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2002), pp. 206–07.
8. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Declaration of Rights, in Shelley’s Prose: or the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark, pref. Harold Bloom (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988), p. 72.

Little Lucifers of the Satanic School: Part 1 of 2: Byron

Romantic Satanism was not about Devil worship, but rather identification with Satan the magnificent rebel angel out of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and adoption of his mythic/poetic revolt against the absolute authority personified in the Almighty as a sociopolitical countermyth. Romantic Satanists were essentially little Lucifers—Miltonic Satans in miniature.

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, Richard Westall (1813)
Richard Westall, George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1813)

Before Lord Byron found himself implicated in Robert Southey’s Satanic School diatribe,1 English clergyman Reginald Heber had identified in Byron “a strange predilection for the worser half of manicheism,” accusing Byron of having “devoted himself and his genius to the adornment and extension of evil.”2 This, “being interpreted,” reflected Byron himself, “means that I worship the devil…”3 Heber would go on to explain that “Lord Byron misunderstood us. He supposed that we accused him of ‘worshipping the Devil.’ We certainly had, at the time, no particular reason for apprehending that he worshipped anything.”4 Byron’s failure—or refusal, rather—to bend the knee in worship of anything, however, was what made Byron so Satanic, and the same goes for Shelley, the militant atheist who imagined himself very much like the heroically unbowed Satan: “Did I now see him [God] seated in gorgeous & tyrannic majesty as described, upon the throne of infinitude – if I bowed before him, what would virtue say?”5 Just as “narcissists” are simply individuals who bear the likeness of the mythical Narcissus, Byron and Shelley were “Satanists” not because they worshipped the Devil, but because of their likeness to the arch-rebel—an image they often deliberately donned.

Satanism was certainly at the heart of Byronism, the cultural phenomenon that saw Byron hurled haphazardly into the limelight. “I awoke one morning and found myself famous,”6 Byron stated of the meteoric rise to stardom Cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) afforded him. The poem was largely a success on account of its eponymous hero, who marks the arrival of a truly Satanic character type, the “Byronic Hero,” which Peter L. Thorslev, Jr. considers “the most popular phenomenon of the English Romantic Movement and the figure with the most far-reaching consequences for nineteenth-century Western literature…”7 During his years of fame in English high society, Byron titillated an enthralled public with a series of bold and brooding figures enigmatically treading the line between virtue and villainy. These Byronic Heroes are hallmarks of the poet’s preoccupation with Milton’s Satan, for they were all clearly cast in the mold of Milton’s “Hell-doom’d” (II.697) anti-hero.8 Byronic Satanism would reach its zenith when Byron, in the wake of the public collapse of his ill-suited marriage, was compelled to exile himself from England on account of the cancerous rumors of his scandalous sexual escapades of incest with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and indulgence in the capital crime of sodomy. Outcast from the realm of which he was a peer, the tortured Byron produced works so irreverent that he ultimately crafted a Byronic Hero who is not only Satanic9 but Satan himself—or Lucifer, rather.

Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips (1814)
Thomas Phillips, Lord Byron (1814)

Byronic Heroes were in part poetic self-portraits, as Byron cultivated a notoriously “mad – bad – and dangerous to know”10 persona—to the point of claiming Satanic status. With ironic Calvinist certainty, Byron asserted that he was not destined for Heaven, but doomed to Hell, viewing his clubbed foot as his own personal mark of Cain. As far as Byron was concerned, his deformed foot may as well have been a cloven hoof. “He saw it as the mark of satanic connection,” relates Benita Eisler in her biography of Byron, “referring to himself as le diable boiteux, the lame devil.”11 Byron’s dogged sense of sin was mostly the product of the perverted form of Calvinism literally beat into him as a young boy by his Scottish nurse, May Gray, who also introduced the young Byron to the sins of the flesh. Being “Majestic though in ruin” (Paradise Lost, II.305) was part and parcel of the Byronic persona, however, and so “Byron seized for himself the starring role of fallen angel,” Eisler explains, “the outcast branded with the mark of Cain.”12

Claiming fallen angel status, Byron went so far as to profess himself literally “a stranger in this breathing world, / An erring spirit from another hurled” (Lara 18.27–28) to his wife, his legendary womanizing presumably the result of having been among those angels of Genesis 6 who descended to Earth to make love to mortal women13—a subject Byron explored in Heaven and Earth (1823). A seething sense of damnation was central to the Byronic persona, for, in the words of Mario Praz, “like Satan, Byron wished to experience the feeling of being struck with full force by the vengeance of Heaven.”14 Byron should hardly have been surprised when Southey accused him of having “rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society” and establishing a “Satanic School.…characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety…”15

 

Notes


1. In the Preface to A Vision of Judgement (1821), Robert Southey wrote: “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.
2. Quoted in Peter A. Schock, Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 101.
3. Quoted in ibid., p. 190n. 48.
4. Quoted in Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 233.
5. Quoted in Schock, p. 80.
6. Quoted in Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2002), p. x.
7. Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: Lund Press, Inc., 1962), p. 3. Atara Stein traces the pervasiveness of the Byronic Hero beyond the nineteenth century and into modern popular culture in The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, [2004] 2009).
8. Childe Harold “would not yield dominion of his mind / To spirits against whom his own rebell’d; / Proud, though in desolation; which could find / A life within itself, to breathe without mankind” (III.12.105–8); the Giaour (“infidel”) was comprised “Of mixed defiance and despair!.… / If ever evil angel bore / The form of mortal, such he wore” (The Giaour [1813] 908–13); Conrad had “a laughing Devil in his sneer, / That raised emotions both of rage and fear” (The Corsair [1814] 9.31–32); Lara “stood a stranger in this breathing world, / An erring spirit from another hurled” (Lara [1814] 18.27–28).
9. Manfred, like Milton’s Satan, asserts that “The mind which is immortal makes itself / Requital for its good or evil thoughts— / Is its own origin of ill and end— / And its own place and time” (Manfred [1816–1817], III.iv.129–132); Cain and Lucifer are twin “Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in / His everlasting face, and tell him, that / His evil is not good!” (Cain: A Mystery [1821], I.i.138–40).
10. Lady Caroline Lamb, quoted in MacCarthy, p. 164. Her famous assessment of Byron did nothing to prevent their ill-fated love affair, but perhaps did a great deal to instigate it.
11. Benita Eisler, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 13.
12. Ibid., p. 299.
13. See Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), pp. 263, 271, 346.
14. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, [1933] 1963), p. 73.
15. Quoted in Cline, p. 30.

The Satanic Scholar

The Satanic Scholar is dedicated to preserving the Miltonic-Romantic legacy of Lucifer, the radical tradition established by English Romantic Satanism and its Satanic School: the spirited celebration of Milton’s Satan as a veritable Promethean champion of laudable revolutionary virtues.

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, Richard Westall (1813)
Richard Westall, George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1813)

As The Satanic Scholar, I follow in the irreverent footsteps of Romantic icons Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who were castigated as heads of a “Satanic School” in 1821 by Poet Laureate Robert Southey, a first-generation Romantic radical turned reactionary. Southey condemned these wayward second-generation Romantic poets for having “rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society” to the point of alliance with the fallen archangel out of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), inspired as their works were by “a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety…”1 Byron—the primary target of Southey’s diatribe, and a bitter rival—was dismissive of the Satanic branding: “…what is the ‘Satanic School?’ who are the Scholars?.…I have no school nor Scholars…”2 Despite his denial, Byron, along with Shelley, was at the forefront of a Satanic School, and I pride myself on being its Scholar.

I have found it to be my calling to bear the torch of the Satanic School. As the keeper of the Miltonic-Romantic-Satanic flame, I deem Milton’s “Apostate Angel” (I.125) nothing less than “the hero of Paradise Lost3 and, for his singularly “daring ambition and fierce passions,” celebrate Milton’s Satan as “the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem…”4; I find that the “only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan,”5 and boast Milton’s Satan unexceeded in “energy and magnificence”—even by the Deity Himself, to whom “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is…far superior…”6; I cherish the Miltonic-Romantic Satan brought to life in the visual arts as a humanized and heroicized figure by the likes of Henry Fuseli, Thomas Stothard, James Barry, Richard Westall, Sir Thomas Lawrence, William Blake, John Martin, and “the last of the Romantics,” Gustave Doré. Theirs was the handsome Devil of heroic proportions imagined by Milton, these artistic geniuses exchanging the traditional Satan’s grotesque horns and hooves for classical beauty, an athletic physique, and a passionate mien, the awe-inspiring artistic tradition of the Satanic sublime reaching its apex in Spanish sculptor Ricardo Bellver’s El Ángel Caído (The Fallen Angel, 1877). I take great pride in safeguarding this grand tradition, which restored luster to Lucifer’s much tarnished name and face.

Ricardo Bellver, El Ángel Caído (The Fallen Angel, 1877)
Ricardo Bellver, El Ángel Caído (The Fallen Angel, 1877)

Like the Romantics, I was quite overwhelmed when I first encountered the eloquent fallen angel found in the pages of Milton’s Paradise Lost, awestruck by Satan’s heroic defiance, though “Hell-doom’d” (II.697). It swiftly occurred to me that I was, to cite Blake’s famous line, “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,”7 and so I discovered my affinity with the Romantic radicals who laid claim to Milton’s Satan as one of their own, magnifying their own diabolical dispositions. Over a decade ago, an immersive study of diabology in general and Miltonic-Romantic Satanism in particular led me to intellectual enrollment in the Satanic School, as it were. A diabolical autodidact with of course no actual Satanic School to attend, I transformed my undergraduate and graduate work into ventures in Satanic studies, ultimately teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost and its Satan controversy at my alma mater.

This site is the product of the independent scholarship of a seasoned neo-Romantic Satanist, one who identifies with that “Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety” pervasive in the poetry, prose, and politics of Byron, Shelley, and their circle. In fact, I daresay I feel the “Satanic spirit” more intensely, for while the Romantics expressed occasional reservations about Milton’s “proud / Aspirer” (VI.89–90), I believe wholeheartedly that the magnificent Miltonic Satan should be set upon a pedestal.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Amelia Curran (1819)
Amelia Curran, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)

One simply cannot overstress the significance of the Romantic legacy of Lucifer, which enlisted a number of the era’s most titanic intellectuals, poets, prose writers, and visual artists. Romantic Satanism was rooted in the eighteenth-century intellectual circle presided over by radical publisher Joseph Johnson (which included Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and William Blake), and the movement reached its apex in the early nineteenth-century Satanic School of Byron and Shelley. Romantic Satanists celebrated Milton’s Satan, with his “dauntless courage” in the face of “the Tyranny of Heav’n” (I.603, 124), as the sublime hero of Paradise Lost and an illustrious symbolic standard-bearer for unfettered humanity. Southey’s demonization of Byron and Shelley was undeniably inclined to hyperbole (“Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations.…labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul!”8), but the paranoid Poet Laureate was nevertheless remarkably accurate in his charge of Satanism.

James Barry, Satan and His Legions Hurling Defiance toward the Vault of Heaven (ca. 1792-95)
James Barry, Satan and His Legions Hurling Defiance toward the Vault of Heaven (ca. 1792-95)

The Byronic/Shelleyan penchant for channeling the spirit of Milton’s arch-rebel and putting his celestial revolt to earthly use as a sociopolitical countermyth has had a greater impact on the Morningstar’s majesty than the proceedings of any occult order.9 Indeed, Romantic Satanism’s reevaluation of Milton’s Satan can truly be said to have mirrored the Miltonic mutiny of the angels, as Romantic Satanists challenged Judeo-Christian authority and exalted the fallen archangel to godlike glory as an idealized iconoclast in the face of the Almighty—or at least His mortal representatives wielding ecclesiastical and secular power. One may rightly be tempted to conclude that Romantic Satanism realized on Earth what the mythic Lucifer had vainly attempted in Heaven.

Lucifer Morningstar by Peter Gross
Vertigo’s Lucifer Morningstar ©Peter Gross

The tradition of Romantic Satanism became somewhat endangered as it came under heavy fire in the twentieth century, but Romantic sympathy for the Devil endured in the writings of those literary critics who continued to defend Milton’s Satan as a noble rebel against divine despotism, and who were accordingly (and appropriately) categorized as “Satanists.”10 While the Miltonic-Romantic-Satanic flame flickered in the twentieth century, it shows signs of new life in the twenty-first, and I intend to report modern-day sightings of the Miltonic-Romantic Satan and his influence on our cultural milieu. Significantly overt examples include the Paradise Lost film, which, despite numerous failures to launch over the past decade, I imagine will soon be successfully resurrected, and, more immediately, the Vertigo Comics series Lucifer (1999–2006), soon to enjoy a loose television adaptation on Fox. I cite these particular examples because they seem to indicate that it is the fallen Morningstar’s time to shine: such echoes of Miltonic-Romantic Satanism expose or will expose mass audiences to an idealized Devil largely absent from popular culture, hitherto predominantly saturated with Satans of the medievally monstrous or lightheartedly comical variety.

Asserting oneself as the Devil’s defender is an unusual gesture, contemporary Satanic circles notwithstanding. In doing so, I defy both religionists and secular humanists, who would like to see Satan forsaken to the pit of Hell or discarded into the dustbin of history, respectively. Why promote myself to the peculiar position of Satanic Scholar? It would be more difficult for me to imagine why I wouldn’t. Like Paradise Lost’s fallen cherub Azazel, who claims the “proud honor” of unfurling Satan’s “mighty Standard” (I.533), I can think of no more worthwhile vocation than honoring the memory of “the sublimest creation of the mind of man,”11 the majestic Miltonic Satan. To perpetuate the legacy of the Heaven-defying, liberty-loving Lucifer radically apotheosized12 by Romantic Satanism and its Satanic School is not only a worthwhile endeavor, but one which makes me—to cite the old proverbial phrase—as proud as Lucifer.

 

Christopher J. C.

 

Notes


1. Quoted in C. L. Cline, “Byron and Southey: A Suppressed Rejoinder,” Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 3 (Winter, 1954), p. 30.
2. Quoted in ibid., p. 35.
3. Lord Byron, quoted in Jerome J. McGann, Don Juan in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 25; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820), in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York [2d rev. ed. 1977]: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2002), p. 207.
4. 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.
5. Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound, p. 206.
6. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821), in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 526.
7. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), Blake famously wrote: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it[.]” William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, [1965] 1988), p. 35; pl. 6.
8. Quoted in Cline, p. 30.
9. In “The ‘Satanism’ of Blake and Shelley Reconsidered,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 65, No. 5 (Oct., 1968), pp. 816–33, Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., despite his argument that Romantic Satanism is a grossly exaggerated movement, highlights the fact that Southey’s Satanic School diatribe for the first time in history employed the “Satanist” accusation most appositely, i.e., against actual Satanic sympathizers: “The terms ‘Satanist’ and ‘Satanism’ have historical liaisons that take us as far back as the Renaissance. During the sixteenth century these terms were used first in reference to the dissenters (1559), then the Arians (1565), and finally the Atheists (1589). By linguistic extension, ‘Satanism’ was broadened in the seventeenth century to include any devil-inspired doctrine or anyone with a diabolical disposition. Robert Southey, however, is the first to link Satanism with the Romantics, specifically Byron.…In our time, through linguistic specialization, ‘Satanism,’ with its full range of historical meanings, has come to refer specifically to the Romantic critics of Paradise Lost and more generally to those critics who evince a strong ethical sympathy for Satan” (pp. 817–18).
10. The most thorough definition of Miltonic Satanists is given by the anti-Satanist John S. Diekhoff in Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Commentary on the Argument (New York: The Humanities Press, Inc., [1946] 1963): “The literary heretics who have thought Satan the central figure in Paradise Lost, who have regarded him as a thoroughly admirable moral agent, and who have thought that Milton consciously or unconsciously, more or less, identified himself with Satan, have been classified together under the label Satanists” (p. 29).
11. George Cilfillan, quoted in Merritt Hughes, Ten Perspectives on Milton (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 176.
12. In Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), the only book-length treatment on the subject, Peter A. Schock over and again asserts that the apotheosis of Milton’s Satan in Romantic Satanism made for an apotheosis of humanity: “…the apotheosis of human desire and power” (3), “the apotheosis of human will and consciousness” (26), “the apotheosis of human desire” (36), and “an heroic apotheosis of human consciousness and libertarian desire…” (39).