Medieval devils and Milton

Your goal in this lesson: to follow the Lucifer image from medieval fear to the proud hero of the poets.

Dante’s frozen giant

Later tradition In Dante’s Inferno, written in the early fourteenth century, Lucifer stands frozen in ice at the very bottom of Hell (Canto 34). He has three faces, red, yellowish-white and black, with two great bat-like wings under each. Their beating makes the icy wind that freezes the lake. In each mouth he chews a traitor: Judas in the middle, Brutus and Cassius at the sides. He weeps from six eyes and does not speak. Dante’s Lucifer is not glamorous at all. He is huge, stupid and stuck, the end point of betrayal.

The pact and the witch trials

Later tradition Older European laws punished harmful magic as a crime. From the fifteenth century, many learned writers began to describe witches as an organized sect who made a pact with the Devil, renounced their baptism, worshipped him at night gatherings called sabbaths and received power to harm in return. The Malleus Maleficarum, written by the Dominican Heinrich Kramer and first printed around 1486 to 1487, helped spread this picture, though it was one book among many. Tens of thousands of people, most of them women, were executed in the trials that followed. The devil’s pact is a product of this demonology and of confessions often extracted by torture. It is not ancient lore.

Milton’s Satan

Later tradition John Milton published Paradise Lost in 1667 and revised it into twelve books in 1674. His stated aim was to “justify the ways of God to men”. The poem opens in Hell, with the defeated rebels on a burning lake and their leader rising to speak. Milton calls him Satan and uses “Lucifer” only rarely, for the name he bore before his fall. In Book 7 the angel Raphael tells Adam how “Lucifer from Heaven / (So call him, brighter once amidst the host / Of Angels, than that star the stars among,) / Fell with his flaming legions through the deep” (7.131 to 134). Milton’s Satan is eloquent, proud and tragic, which is exactly why readers found him so compelling.

Blake and the Romantics

Later tradition William Blake, poet and engraver, wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell around 1790 to 1793. It playfully gives energy and desire to “Hell” and reason and restraint to “Heaven”. Blake famously wrote that Milton “was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” His “Proverbs of Hell”, such as “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”, are often quoted online as occult doctrine. They are poetry, written by a deeply Christian, if unorthodox, visionary. Later Romantics such as Byron and Shelley also admired Milton’s rebel. Read more about this era in my page on Romanticism.

Try this

Today’s exercise: write two short descriptions of Lucifer, one as Dante saw him and one as Milton saw him. Then write one line on which picture is closer to the one you grew up with, and where you think you first met it.

Quick recap

• Dante’s Lucifer is a frozen, silent giant at the bottom of Hell.
• The devil’s pact and sabbath belong to fifteenth-century and later demonology.
• Milton’s Satan made the fallen angel eloquent and tragic.
• Blake read Milton as “of the Devil’s party”, in poetry, not doctrine.

Keep going

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Occultism and modern Luciferianism.

Need a refresher? Go back to Isaiah 14 and the fallen angel or see the whole course.

Sources

• Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 34.
• Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum (first printed about 1486 to 1487).
• John Milton, Paradise Lost, 2nd edition (1674), books 1 and 7.
• William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (about 1790 to 1793).

Go deeper: the Lucifer pages on this site

Mark as done