Mighty Lucifer
He is inescapable. Everywhere you look,
he is there. Satan lives in our culture. Our literature, movies, music,
television shows, you name it, he is there. He has always been there
and he
will always be there. But who is Satan really and why is he so
infamous? How
much do we really know about him?
There are many descriptions of Satan. Most of the literature and media of today portray him as a red being with horns and a pitchfork. Some portray him as a man in all black, cape and all. People in the 1700s of England and America put the prince of darkness in many forms. He’s been put in forms from snakes to beautiful women. John Milton put Lucifer in four different forms. The prince of darkness goes from his former angelic glory to a mere snake. The bible puts Satan in many forms as well. He’s been a dragon and a snake for a clear example. Judging from what they thought back then and what we think today, none of us really know what the devil really looks like. We have always tried to picture what he looks like for a glamour affect on the viewers to teach or entertain them.
To get a clearer look at Satan, we need
to look at what Milton and the Bible’s various authors saw in their
imaginations. It has been stated in the past that Satan was once a
beautiful
angel named Lucifer. The Bible states that as a clear fact. “How art
thou
fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” says Isaiah 14:12.
Luke
10:18 says. “And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lighting fall
from
heaven.” Both verses say Satan was a being of light itself. Milton
himself has
even called him “Brighter Once” and “That Starr”. But soon, Lucifer’s
vanity
and ego spiraled out of control. He wanted power for himself. So what
does
Lucifer do? He gathers together a small army of rebel angels and fights
with
God over control of heaven. This rebellion proves to be unsuccessful
because
God throws Lucifer and his army down with all of his might and gives
Gabriel
Lucifer’s job. John Milton proves this with:
“The mother of mankind what time his
pride
Had cast him out from Heaven with all his
host
Of rebel angels…” (Paradise Lost
lines 36-38).
A star orbiting Venus is even named
Lucifer. According to myth, Venus was the Roman goddess of love and
beauty.
That seems to show that Lucifer and Venus have vanity and beauty in
common.
Satan, like his logic, is both ugly and beautiful. (Epic for Students
pg. 374) Lucifer goes from an angel to a vulture, cormorant, toad, and
at last
a snake. (Epic for Students pg. 374) As he ego grows, the prince
of darkness
becomes uglier.
Here, Satan begins his transformation. In
Paradise Lost by John Milton, Satan becomes:
“By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea
beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean
stream:
Him, haply slumbering on the Norway foam,
The pilot of some small night-founded
skiff,
Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,
With fixed anchor in his scaly rind,
Moors by his side under the lee while
night
Invests the sea and wished morn delays.”
(Paradise Lost lines: 200-207.)
To break it down, Lucifer has become as
big as an island in the ocean when he is chained into the lake of fire.
It
doesn’t stop there. To be frank, Lucifer starts out after his exile
from heaven
being as big as the titans and giants in Greek mythology. A leviathan
is like
the Loch Ness monster. So Satan is now as big as “Nessie”. The bible
describes
Satan as a dragon. “And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels
fought
against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed
not;
neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon
was cast
out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the
whole
world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out
with him.”
(Revelation 12 7-9.) In Genesis Chapter three, Satan becomes a serpent.
Then as
the epic of Paradise Lost goes on, the prince of darkness
shrinks and
shrinks. Finally at the end of Paradise Lost, he becomes a
serpent. This
goes to show that ego and beauty have ruined Lucifer.
Satan throughout history has the power to
corrupt humans into evil. That is how the concept of sin started. Satan
tempted
Eve in the form of a serpent to take and eat from the tree of the
Knowledge of
Good and Evil. Eve gave in and ate the fruit. She gave Adam the fruit
and he
bit into it as well. One needs a better concept of how sin came to be.
According to Milton, Lucifer gave birth to sin. That occurred when he
first
thought about overthrowing God. Out from his head, Sin sprung out
full-grown
and beautiful. (It sounds just like the story of Zeus and Athena.) Sin
was so
charming that she became Lucifer’s secret lover. In time, Sin became
pregnant.
She gave birth to a son named Death. Death then raped Sin and got her
pregnant
again. She gave birth to the hellhounds around her waist. Now, Sin and
Death
are trapped together and guard the gates of hell. Sin can take its toll
on
people. When in hell, Lucifer meets Sin and Death again. But, he
doesn’t
recognize them because they were once attractive but now, they are
ugly. This
is further proof that evil and corruptness not only destroys one
morally, but
often physically as well. John 44 shows us the end result: “Ye are of
your
father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a
murderer
from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no
truth in
him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar,
and the
father of it.” (John 44.) The only person who has resisted Lucifer’s
power is
Jesus himself. Why? Because Jesus is the Son of God. Satan changes
forms to deceive his
victims. He turned himself into a cherub and tricked Uriel, guardian of paradise, into letting him
through in order to
corrupt Adam and Eve to sin. Lucifer changes into a toad to tempt Eve
in a dream
to eat from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The prince of
darkness
tempts Eve again in the form of a serpent. But where did this
power come from? Milton suggests: “Mixed
with obdurate pride and steadfast hate.” (Paradise Lost line
58.)
Lucifer is so angry that he lost his war in home that he naturally
wants
revenge. He builds a kingdom out of the wasteland he now calls home. In
vengeance for being banished, Satan decides to seek God’s new world and
concur
it for his hellish kingdom. Sin, his incestuous daughter and keeper of
Hell’s
gates, lets him out for the promise of being his queen in the new
world. Satan
says
“To reign is worth ambition, through in
Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than to serve in
Heaven” (Paradise Lost lines: 261-262)
And
“A mind not be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of
Heaven.” (Paradise Lost lines: 253-255.) Lucifer’s logic in way
seems
both twisted and true. That is further prove on what evil and sin are.
They are
twist like a vine and yet so the painful truth. More evidence of
Satan’s
corrupt logic are the statements “What is dark in me illuminates.” and
“Evil be
thou my good”. It means, “Fill me up with evil and make it my good”. It
is
almost what Lady Macbeth said in “Macbeth”. To prove that
statement,
here’s her famous soliloquy:
“….Come you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me
here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe,
top-fill
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up th’ access and passage to
remorse,
That no compunctions visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace
between
Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s
breasts,
And take my mile for gall, you murd’ring
ministers,” (Macbeth act one, scene five lines 39-47)
Both Satan and Lady Macbeth want the evil
in them to conquer in order to reach their goals of success.
An interesting fact to notice is that
Satan is so evil that he brought most of his punishments on himself.
From his
exile to his demise in his angelic charm, his anger is expressed. It is
as if
he is punishing himself for serving God. His towering ego drove him to
want
more than to be a servant. (Bloom’s Notes pg. 45)
Satan is viewed as a villain in society
throughout the centuries. Satan’s name even means “enemy” or
“adversary” in
Hebrew. (Epic for Students pg. 373) In the bible he is defined
as the
enemy of God and humans. According to several scholars and readers, he
is a
hero in Paradise Lost. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s comment is:
“...The only
imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus is Satan; and
Prometheus
is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in
addition
to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent
force,
he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of
ambition,
envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement. The character
of Satan
engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh
his faults
with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all
measure.” [From Preface to Prometheus Unbound, 1820]
Shelley compares Satan to Prometheus.
Prometheus, like Lucifer, defied Zeus by giving fire to man. As his
punishment,
Prometheus is chained to a mountain and an eagle eats from her his
liver
everyday.
He also describes Satan as: “Milton's
Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who
perseveres in
some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of
adversity and
torture is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph
inflicts the
most horrible revenge upon his enemy…” [From A Defense of Poetry,
1821]
While Samuel Taylor Coleridge replies: “This is the character which
Milton has
so philosophically as well as sublimely embodied in the Satan of his Paradise
Lost. Alas! too often has it been embodied in real life. Too often
has it
given a dark and savage grandeur to the historic page. And wherever it
has
appeared, under whatever circumstances of time and country, the same
ingredients have gone to its composition; and it has been identified by
the
same attributes. Hope in which there is no cheerfulness; steadfastness
within
and immovable resolve, with outward restlessness and whirling activity;
violence with guile; temerity with cunning; and, as the result of all,
interminableness of object with perfect indifference of means; these
are the
qualities that have constituted the commanding genius; these are the
marks that
have characterized the masters of mischief, the liberticides, and
mighty
hunters of mankind, from Nimrod to Bonaparte. Nay, whole nations have
been so
far duped bv this want of insight and reflection as to regard with
palliative
admiration, instead of wonder and abhorrence, the Molochs of human
nature, who
are indebted for the larger portion of their meteoric success to their
total
want of principle, and who surpass the generality of their fellow
creatures in
one act of courage, only that of daring to say with their whole heart,
"Evil, be thou my good!" [from The Statesman's Manual, 1816]
Both Shelley and Coleridge prove Satan to be a human being who made a
terrible
mistake.
To the modern reader, the prince of
darkness is a tragic hero just like Othello and Macbeth. Satan is far
from the
definition of a true hero. A hero is usually defined as a person with
great
morale, integrity, and preservation. Lucifer of course, has none of
these
traits. He is over ambitious, immoral, and over powering. All the more
making
him have the qualities of a tragic hero. In ways, Lucifer is like
Macbeth. Both
were driven by ambition to commit the dastardliest of deeds in order to
seize
power and both lost all of the morale they once had because of it. In
the end,
both Satan and Macbeth were defeat horribly. C.S. Lewis describes Satan
as a
mere peeping Tom spying on the privacy of two lovers. (Bloom’s Notes
pg.
45) That is what the dark one is in a sense once examined closely. If
one looks
at the whole perceptive closely, Lucifer was like a rebellious teenage
son. He
wanted to run the house but his father, God, kicked him out.
But oddly in one case, Lucifer seems to
be not as bad as one woman. In Thomas Heywood’s play, “A Woman
Killed with
Kindness”, Mrs. F compares herself to Lucifer when he fell about
her
unfaithful ways:
Oh, by what word, what title, or
what name,
Shall I entreat your pardon? Pardon! Oh!
I am as far from hoping such sweet grace,
As Lucifer from Heaven. To call you husband
(Oh me, most wretched!) I have lost that name;
I am no more your wife. (http://www.luminarium.org/editions/womankilled.htm)
I still say Lucifer has her beat.
Whether shamed or praised, Satan is a fascinating character to study in literature and theology. The reader gets the delight of seeing what happens when ambition and ego spirals out of control to the point of destruction to its victim’s soul and morals. Satan is almost like a car accident or a train wreck in life. You know how ill willed it is but you just can help but wait for the next thing to happen.
Works
Cited
Milton,
John. Paradise Lost
Bible
King James Version
Gale
Epic for Students “Paradise
Lost” (Pg. 373-374)
Heywood,
Thomas. "A Woman Killed with
Kindness"
The
Chief
Elizabethan Dramatists, Excluding Shakespeare.
William Allan
Neilson, Ed.
Cambridge,
MA: The Riverside Press, 1911. 485-508.:
<http://www.luminarium.org/editions/womankilled.htm>
Romantic
Comments on Milton's
Satan <http://stjohns-
chs.org/english/gothic/works/satanhero.html>
Lewis,
C.S. “A Preface to Paradise Lost”
(London: Oxford University Press, 1942), pp. 99-101
“Bloom’s
Notes: John Milton’s Paradise
Lost” by Harold Blooms (Pg. 44-47)
Shakespeare,
William Macbeth Glencoe
Literature : The Reader’s Choice.
New York: Glencoe
McGraw-Hill
Companies 2000. (284-351)
