Among the hundreds of millions of texts that we have written, a few stand alone in their endurance, in the degree to which they have survived attempts at cultural extermination, in the degree to which individuals have given all to their preservation. Such texts are often the first ones from a given culture to be translated into other languages. They are expressions of a unifying substrate of experience that Rumi, Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, and myriad other mystics (including even scientific rationalists like Carl Sagan and Sam Harris) have written about from from the standpoints of multitudes of human cultures. These are among the qualities that might define texts as being sacred.

These texts have an enormous impact on the lives of every human being on a daily basis. Communities everywhere have formed around them. Laws are made, laws affecting adherents and non-adherents alike, based on what is said in this texts and on the interpretations thereof. People kill other people because of these texts, all over the world, every day. It is unavoidable that we should take certain texts as being sacred — I don’t think that there’s anyone who would advocate that we don’t venerate or at least even hold as important any texts ever for any reason — but we should evaluate them very cautiously and never hold them beyond questioning. Nor should we restrict ourselves to the point of view of one particular canon or another. We should neither accept nor reject anything from the various canons of human history without careful evaluation on their own merits in every possible context.

My question is, should Paradise Lost, John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem concerning the fall of Satan from Heaven, be considered a sacred text, especially with regard to the Satanist?

The popular view is that texts might be considered sacred because of their metaphysical content, their claims about reality, especially with regards to theology and cosmology. But there are plenty of recent texts of this nature that are pure garbage and that I’m confident will disappear over the coming centuries (such as a great deal of New Age drivel like Mutant Message Down Under and The Celestine Prophecy). And there are others that explicate cosmologies without giving them any aspect of reverence or spiritual expression, such as Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Such explications are interesting, valuable, and entirely necessary, but I don’t think that they are ever sacred. (Some works, like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, unabashedly straddle the line between the two worlds).

To such a degree as given text correlates with the expression of the human experience of the sacred, and especially to such a degree as that correlates with other such expressions from other texts, that text might be considered sacred. And of course different groups hold different texts to be sacred, but that’s entirely to be expected. When our deepest experiences of our humanity are expressed in the form of sacred art, we hardly expect that it would all come out looking the same. Even as there is a great deal of overlap between our experiences (and thus our ability to relate to art in any capacity), the experiences themselves remain highly personal, and it should surprise no one that Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is an entirely different expression of profound religious experience than William Blake’s Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne. Why would we expect different of religion when even our artistic — and therefore our most personal — experiences of the divine never come out at all the same?

Although this is an assumption resulting from a particularly Western way of looking at religion, one typically assumes that a sacred text would have to claim to have been divinely authored or inspired, as the Bible and the Koran are claimed to be. Milton himself indeed believed his text to have been divinely inspired: the text begins with an invocation to Heaven to inspire him to write as the prophets had:

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed

In the beginning how the heavens and earth

Rose out of Chaos… I:1-10

In the notes for the above passage (added in 1898), John A. Himes writes:

Paradise Lost differs in its opening from its ancient models, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Æneid, in having a double invocation. The first is to the Genius of Sacred Song, elsewhere called Urania, who is the inspirer of the rhythmical language in versified portions of the Holy Scriptures… She has to do with expression. The Holy Spirit, who is next invoked for enlightenment and instruction, has to do with substance rather than with form. To Him the poet prays for knowledge and ability to set forth the truth. This implies an intention to hold fancy in check and to subordinate everything to the correct presentation of great spiritual facts. They make a radical mistake who say that certain things in the poem may be poetry but are not theology.

To what degree do we now most commonly see Satan in his manifestation as the Adversary, who was cast out of Heaven with one third of the host of angels after raising a rebellion against God? This scenario is only even hinted at in a few verses in one chapter of one book of the Bible that almost got left on the cutting room floor (Revelation 12:9), in contrast to several instances where Satan appears as the Accuser in core texts (the Accuser being the more-Biblically-traditional notion of Satan, the divine being serving as God’s prosecutor in Heaven). And to what degree are names like Mammon, Belial, Beelzebub, and others known to the general public as the names of demons? Few of them are mentioned in the Bible, none at any length, and none to such a degree as they are featured in Paradise Lost, a widely-popular narrative where all the above are main characters.

The narrative that casts Satan as the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, who tempted Eve to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, is at best a dubious aspect of the original story as told in the second creation narrative in the Biblical book of Genesis. Nowhere in the Bible is the Serpent of Genesis directly equated with Satan; only two passages in the Book of Revelation (12:9 and 20:2) relate Satan to serpents in any way, but no mention is made of Satan being the particular serpent from the Garden of Eden. And yet this conception of Satan as the Serpent of Genesis is the popular one, and it was Paradise Lost in which that conception was codified.

So across even contrasting philosophies, Paradise Lost appears as a central text in the correlation of our religious experiences. Old and blind, Milton dictated this work to his amanuenses, and it has been passed down to us across almost four centuries, inspiring both doctrine and art all the while. In this, the text clearly meets the criteria of preservation and of relevance, and the passages above indicate that it meets the criterion of divinity as well, or at least a claim to it.

The text is certainly of great spiritual significance to the Luciferian, Luciferianism being the Satanic religion or philosophy that venerates Satan the Adversary as an inspirational icon of liberation, rebellion, and knowledge. Milton was a Christian but knew that he would be dishonest if he portrayed Satan without the measure of respect owed to him, and the noble characteristics thereby expressed, which are nowhere mentioned in the Bible, are the keystone of Luciferian thought.

As an example of this, take this passage in the text, which occurs after Satan has been cast from paradise and finds himself and his host in the desolate, fiery wastes of Hell. Satan says to Beelzebub:

All is not lost — the unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield:

And what is else not to be overcome.

That glory never shall his wrath or might

Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace

With suppliant knee, and deify his power

Who, from the terror of this arm, so late

Doubted his empire — that were low indeed;

That were an ignominy and shame beneath

This downfall; since, by fate, the strength of Gods,

And this empyreal substance, cannot fail;

Since, through experience of this great event,

In arms not worse, in foresight much advanced,

We may with more successful hope resolve

To wage war by force or guile eternal war,

Irreconcilable to our grand Foe,

Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy

Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heaven.

I:106-124

This willful defiance of fate in the face of torment and despair is both admirable, iconic, and worthy of veneration. Satan was brutally defeated, and yet stands here even in the early verses of the text as triumphant. “That glory never shall his wrath or might extort from me.” Satan could only ever have rebelled against God. If you take some theologies at their word, it was Their will in the first place. But even an omnipotent God could not take from Satan and their host “revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to submit or yield.” God as much as admits to this, saying, upon seeing Satan’s escape from Hell: “Seest thou what rage transports our Adversary? whom no bounds prescribed, no bars of Hell, nor all the chains heaped on him there, nor yet the main Abyss wide interrupt, can hold” (III:80-84).

Some might see revenge and hate as ignoble virtues, but they are virtues that I think should, given appropriate targets, resonate with anyone possessing even a modicum of moral character. Against whom do I want revenge? The Catholic Church, for making religion into doctrine and for fucking children and covering it up. For whom do I feel immortal hate? Islamists who turn such realizations as Rumi had of God into reasons to kill the innocent. And in Satan, I have courage never to submit or yield to the conceptions of God held by such.

I think Paradise Lost may be a superior moral exemplar to much of the Bible. Which text outlines the permissible circumstances under which one may, with full divine endorsement, sell their daughter into sexual slavery? If the notion of Paradise Lost as a sacred text were to somehow gain wider acceptance, I cannot say for certain that it would not or could not be interpreted in such a way as would justify oppressive laws or deplorable behavior. The human capacity to find excuses for evil seems boundless. But at the least, I don’t think that Paradise Lost gives us any greater reason for this than the Bible does, and while the Bible offers remarkable wisdom, it also contains atrocities the likes of which are nowhere to be found in Milton’s text.

What else of Paradise Lost might be worthy of veneration?

When Satan is seeking the exit from Hell, he encounters Sin and Death, whom God has set to guard Hell’s gate. At first they bar Satan’s way, but then Satan offers that his venture beyond the gates will lead him to a place “where [Sin] and Death shall dwell at ease, and up and down unseen wing silently the buxom air, embalmed with odors. There ye shall be fed and filled immeasurably; all things shall be your prey.” Death responds:

The key of this infernal Pit, by due

And by command of Heaven’s all-powerful King,

I keep, by Him forbidden to unlock

These adamantine gates: against all force

Death ready stands to interpose his dart,

Fearless to be o’ermatched by living might.

But what owe I to His commands above,

Who hates me, and hath hither thrust me down

Into this gloom of Tartarus profound,

To sit in hateful office here confined,

Inhabitant of Heaven and heavenly-born —

Here in perpetual agony and pain,

With terrors and with clamors compassed round

Of mine own brood, that on my bowels feed?

Thou are my father, though my author, though

My being gav’st me; whom should I obey

But thee? whom follow? Thou wilt bring me soon

To that new world of light and bliss, among

The gods who live at ease, where I shall reign

At thy right hand voluptuous, as beseems

Thy daughter, and thy darling, without end. II:850-870

Death, like Satan, was created by God, but cast out into torment simply for being of his own nature. It’s no surprise, then, that Satan might seem a more fitting luminary. Likewise have many been cast out from the hegemony of the Christian world simply for being who they are, or for reasons such as daring to challenge the authority of the Church.

And as Satan’s host of fallen angels debates the way forward, his comrade Belial counsels him:

How wearisome

Eternity so spent in worship paid

To whom we hate! Let us not then pursue,

By force impossible, by leave obtained

Unacceptable, though in Heaven, our state

Of splendid vassalage; but rather seek

Our own good from ourselves, and from our own

Live to ourselves, though in this vast recess,

Free and to none accountable, preferring

Hard liberty before the easy yoke

Of servile pomp. II:239-257

Those who accept Paul the Apostle’s theology and notion of damnation for those who do not accept the gift of Jesus’ sacrifice for the sins of humankind must reconcile themselves as well to the fact that they have sold their souls to a petty tyrant and that their devotion ultimately comes not from true love of God, which would never so be felt except for fear of Hell, but rather only as a kind of Stockholm syndrome.

In considering Paradise Lost as a sacred text, one might counter that the texts of the Abrahamic tradition have already been canonized. But this view must necessarily assume that the canonized texts had, at some point in our history, sprung into existence fully-formed and accepted as doctrine. This is not at all the case. Taking the New Testament as an example, we now have, in it, a collection of four gospels (narratives of the life and sayings of Jesus), the book of Acts (which gives the history of some of the Church’s early apostles), 21 letters written by various Church Fathers (or forged in their names) laying out various aspects of Church doctrine, and one eschatological Apocalypse. But these are only 27 of what may have been hundreds of similar texts, some lost and some still extant, including other gospels, other histories, other letters (forged and authentic), and other apocalypses, all of which existed in a multitude of different versions. The now-canonical texts were written, selected, compiled, edited, and revised over centuries, with changes made to the Catholic canon as recently as 1870.

I think that a dead canon — one to which nothing can be added, one which inspires no new revelations of the likes of its core texts, one which does not admit to any degree of change or progress — means a dead religion. Paradise Lost has undoubtedly contributed to the Abrahamic religious tradition, more than the Bible in some particular regards. Why then hold the Bible alone as privileged?

One might counter that Paradise Lost is a work of epic poetry, hardly an appropriate genre for a sacred text. The Odyssey is a revered work, but is it a sacred text? It may well be, but I don’t think it’s widely perceived as such. The Old Testament contains poetry, but all of it is devotional rather than narrative. But the Hindu tradition includes the Mahabharata, the longest epic poem ever written, within its extensive canon, and among its many books and chapters is included the Bhagavad Gita, which, though not as authoritative as the Vedas or the Upanishads, is perhaps more widely known and beloved among common Hindus as a sacred text.

Why should the Satanist bother with Paradise Lost as a sacred text? After all, the Bible (in which Paradise Lost is rooted) is held as sacred by a substantial portion of the Hegemon, the collective of cultural authority that I’ve detailed elsewhere which includes such institutions as the Catholic Church and the U.S. government, to which I am and to which I believe any Satanist should be opposed. I’m confident that my writings so far have proven convincing that, if we are to take as a given that these are their sacred texts, those of the Hegemon seem remarkably unconcerned about what the texts actually say. Clearly these texts have power; if they can be used by those with power to maintain or assert power, regardless of whatever distortion or corruption of the texts themselves results, I think that they will likely do so, and history shows that they have done so at every opportunity. Given that appropriation, it seems rational to abandon the texts entirely, but I think that that would be a mistake. These storied texts correlate our shared mystical experiences; having so been the product of culture on the greatest possible scales, they provide a correlation to something we experience regularly but cannot express in discursive language. I think that it is more noble — and more Satanic — to wrench them back from those who have appropriated them rather than to passively hand them over.

It isn’t my place or intent to tell anyone, especially other Satanists, which texts they should hold sacred, but for those of any background who are looking to escape the yoke of doctrine and build religion for themselves, Paradise Lost is a great place to start. It’s a beautiful and inspiring work of literature with strong, inspirational values that have stood and will continue to stand the test of time.