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Paradise Lost:

JOHN MILTON, in his epic poem Paradise Lost, provides a picture of a vertical universe with Heaven at the top, Hell at the bottom, and Chaos in between. As for Earth, it dangles on a golden chain dropped from Heaven. Eventually, a bridge is built to connect Earth directly to Hell to facilitate the transfer of the legions of the damned.

Heaven, the highest point of the universe, is where God and his loyal angels reside. It’s a place of light, and such is the purity of the light of God that no one can look directly at him. He must be observed through a cloud.

The angels have bodies of light that emit colours. Milton described the Archangel Raphael as being made of “colours dipt in Heaven”.

God sits on a throne at the top of a mountain, the highest point in the cosmos from where he can see everything. A cloudy mist surrounds him to protect everyone else from the intensity of the light he emanates. On a throne on his right side sits God the Son. (Milton secretly subscribed to the Arian heresy that placed the Son as inferior to the Father.)

Surrounding the mountain, on a great celestial plain, are the angels grouped into nine hierarchical categories (“choirs”): Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.

Although the Seraphim are the highest order of angels, it’s often said in Christian theology that the most important angels are the archangels such as Michael, Raphael, Uriel and Gabriel. Michael is the leader of the heavenly host, which seems to place him above the Seraphim. (On the other hand, Satan himself was originally the highest angel and he was a Seraph.)

As often happens in Christianity, two independent traditions are being built on. The first tradition, that of the ancient Hebrews, is simple and has many ordinary angels, led by archangels who are God’s chief captains. The second and much more complex tradition, involving the nine choirs, is the typical elaborate accretion that gets tagged onto the simple version to answer entirely different theological issues. The two versions are incompatible but no one seems to notice or care. This happens all the time in Christianity. The best example is the Nativity. Was the infant Jesus visited by shepherds or kings of the East? Didn’t the kings arrive twelve days later, and, come to think of it, weren’t they wise men (Magi) rather than kings? Well, who cares? The shepherds and kings (Magi) just get lumped together in Christmas cribs as if they all arrived at the same moment. All the believers like it that way. It’s a better story. The truth is neither here nor there.

Heaven is called the Empyrean, which in ancient Greek cosmology was composed of the element of pure fire (or aether – the quintessence – in Aristotle’s philosophy). It is an indestructible realm of light and is the source of creation.

The angels of light are immortal, so when the angelic civil war erupts in heaven between the followers of the Satan and those loyal to God, the losers are not annihilated but cast out…to Hell. They fall for nine long days, to the very bottom of the universe. The journey renders them unconscious. When they awake, they are lying chained on the surface of a lake of fire, surrounded by sulphurous fumes.
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Hell:

Unbowed, the fallen angels manage to release themselves from their chains and rise from the fire. They set to work and build a capital – Pandemonium, the place of “all the demons” – designed by the architect Mulciber. He constructs an infernal palace of magnificent size and splendour for Satan, with a great throne (a travesty of God’s heavenly throne), where Satan can sit as Hell’s king. (In Dante’s Inferno, Satan has three faces in mockery of the three persons of the Holy Trinity.)

The devils were industrious and intelligent. They built hell into a dark imitation of Heaven. Instead of God, they had Satan. Yet without the absolute beauty and truth of Heaven, everything remained corrupt and ugly. It was a sham Heaven.

Hell is as far as possible from the Empyrean. It’s totally cut off from the divine light. This is heaven’s antithesis. If heaven is the zenith of the universe, this is the nadir. In relation to Earth, it’s the Underworld. It’s literally under everything.

The archetypal Miltonic description of Hell is: “As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames / No light, but rather, darkness visible.”

“Darkness visible” is one of the most evocative phrases in literature. Everything in the Empyrean emanates celestial light, but here, in Hell, light cannot penetrate. Nothing here can emit God’s light, not even the flames. The pure light of heaven is also pure goodness. The non-light of Hell – the infinite darkness – is pure evil. As God’s perfect light blinds, this non-light provides perfect visibility. All of the horrors of Hell are seen with the greatest clarity of all.

This Hell has two aspects: internal and external. The inner Hell is the psychological one which everyone in Hell carries with them at all times. Satan himself declares: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell”. Hell’s lake of fire burns inside everyone’s head. It’s an abiding state of spiritual horror and torment. It can never be escaped. It’s much worse than any particular place, or any physical instrument of torture. Mental Hell is much worse than physical Hell. It sinks its hooks in much more deeply. Physical pain can stop. People can become desensitised to it. But there’s nowhere to flee from your own demons.

Satan’s Council consists of his chief devils: Beelzebub (“Lord of the Flies”: Hell’s second-in-command), Belial (handsome on the outside but false and hollow on the inside), Moloch (an advocate of total, unending war against Heaven), and Mammon (who is always gazing downwards looking for gold and precious stones, just as in Heaven he could never avert his eyes from the streets of gold). Other prominent demons are Osiris, Isis, Baal and Astaroth, Thammuz and Dagon. In other words, Milton is asserting that the pagan gods of the tribes that opposed the Hebrews were in fact not gods but fallen angels and demons masquerading as deities. The enemies of the Chosen People worshipped false gods: corrupted and demonic angels seeking to lure humanity away from the true path.
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Chaos and Night:

Between God on his throne and Satan on his is the domain of Chaos and his consort Night: an enormous discordant, disorganized, dismal chasm. It is the formless void that existed before Creation. It’s the abyss, the cosmic darkness, containing matter in its utterly unformed state.

If Chaos can be imagined as getting more and more disordered the further it is from Heaven then Hell lies at the bottom of limitless bedlam. Milton says of Chaos that it is “Eternal Anarchy”, a “wild Abyss”, “The Womb of nature, and perhaps her Grave, / Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, / But all these in their pregnant causes mixt / Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight.”

In their campaign against God, Satan and his devils decided to attack indirectly, by seducing God’s new creations: humanity. Satan assumes personal responsibility for the task. To get to Earth, he must journey through the vast, hostile tracts of Chaos and Night in one of the most arduous odysseys of all time. He launches himself into the cosmic abyss in search of God’s brand new creation – Earth. Milton thus inadvertently portrays Satan as a heroic figure, taking on the most daunting of challenges and pitting himself against the whole universe and God himself.

Many of those who disliked the Abrahamic God saw in Milton’s Satan a noble, inspirational figure of resistance and heroism who would not submit to the tyranny of Heaven. He is perhaps the anti-hero par excellence. He is the Rebel with a Cause, the fearless fighter taking on overwhelming odds and leading from the front. It wasn’t for nothing that William Blake said of Milton: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
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Earth:

In PARADISE LOST, God created Earth after the rebellion of Satan and his followers, with the purpose of replacing the fallen angels with a new type of angel – human angels. If they passed all of the tests of Earth, they would be promoted to Heaven and become a new Angel Order. Earth and the lesser heavens (Sun, Moon, planets, stars) by which it was surrounded were hung below the Empyrean on a golden chain.

Had Adam and Eve obeyed God, the chain would have slowly retracted, pulling Earth up to Heaven and merging the two. Instead, the chain was let out and Earth, weighed down by sin and evil, grew more distant from Heaven. At the same time, a wide bridge was built across Chaos to connect Hell to Earth.

Human beings are faced with a difficult ascent of the golden chain or an easy journey across the wide causeway to Hell.

The Garden of Eden is the paramount place on Earth and, just as the Empyrean has a divine mountain where God lives, so is Eden on a high hill, the highest place on Earth. When Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, they leave the most perfect place on Earth and descend to the flat, hard plains.
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Sin and Death:

Satan and his fallen angels vowed to wage eternal war against God, and never surrender.
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost;
the unconquerable Will
And study of revenge
immortal hate
And courage never to submit or yield

Satan believed that it was possible to psychologically transform Hell into Heaven, and vice versa:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n

Above all, he loathed being the slave of God. He would rather be king in Hell than servant in Heaven;
…preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile Pomp.
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell;
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.

He had the most spectacular throne built for him.
High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold
Satan exalted sat.

The gates of Hell are protected by Sin and Death. Sin is Satan’s daughter, and she incestuously mated with Satan to produce Death, making Death both the son and grandson of Satan. Death then raped his mother to produce the Hounds of Hell.

Sin and Death were the builders of the bridge from Hell to Earth.
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Rebel with a Cause:

What was the specific cause of Satan’s rebellion? Milton says that Satan – when he was Lucifer, glorious Angel of Light – was the principal archangel, second only to God. One day, God introduced him to his newly begotten Son and made it clear that the Son would now be second in the celestial hierarchy and King of the Angels. Satan was livid. He refused to serve the upstart. All Hell broke loose!

After the rebellion of Hell’s Angels, God decided to create the Earth to replace the fallen angels with a new type of being – US. If we did but know it, we are an angelic species. The first human beings – Adam and Eve – were astoundingly good looking. Eve was so stunning that when Satan first saw her he momentarily forgot his evil nature.
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John Milton (1608-1674):

Milton was an extremist Puritan who detested Catholicism. In the English Civil War, he naturally supported Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan leader of the Parliamentary forces, against the Monarchy.

After Cromwell executed King Charles I and took over as Lord Protector of England, he appointed Milton to the post of “Secretary of Foreign Tongues” (Foreign Secretary/Secretary of State).

Milton went blind but continued to work and write with the help of his daughters and aides. He was an advocate of animist materialism – the concept that everything in the universe is composed of a single material substance which is “animate, self-active, and free”. This substance can be in the form of stones and trees, bodies and minds, and includes souls, angels, and God.

This is not so different from the worldview of the ancient Stoics. For them, the material world was composed of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Earth and water were “heavy” while air and fire were “light”. The Stoics called the former “passives” and the latter “actives.” Air and fire – the higher, active elements – could combine in various proportions to produce something called pneuma (breath, spirit) that served the role of a fifth element; a quintessence like aether.

For the Stoics, everything was constituted of matter and pneuma, but that amounted to saying that everything was composed of the four elements since pneuma was composed of two of these elements. The all-pervading pneuma seeded with reason (Logos) structured the animal and physical world, and animated the living world of flora and fauna.

The Stoics regarded the cosmos as a single, whole entity: a living being with a soul. The cosmos was a vast sphere of matter held together, ordered and organised by Zeus through the agency of the Logos-bearing spirit (pneuma) that pervaded physical reality. Pneuma was itself a material entity, but of much more rarefied type than ordinary matter.

Pneuma comes in five grades (reflecting the relative proportions of fire and air of which it is composed) from the basic form that guides the most elementary matter to the pneuma that powers the divine.

The lowest grade provides cohesion, stability and shape and is present in inanimate objects such as stones and rocks. The second lowest grade is associated with plant life: it provides the life force. The next grade of pneuma is the soul which animates animals. The next grade provides the rational souls of mature human beings, while the highest grade belongs to the gods, but is really just a more perfected version of the human rational soul. Each human being has a fragment (divine spark) of the soul of God (Zeus).

The Stoics didn’t have a monistic materialism per se since there were four distinct material elements rather than one, but nor did they introduce any kind of mind-matter dualism. Rather, like modern scientific materialism, Stoicism made mind (pneuma, in effect), the product of combinations of material elements. Modern science has around one hundred elements rather than the four of the ancient Greeks, but the basic picture is much the same. In many ways, modern scientific materialism is simply the ancient Greek atomic theory combined with Stoicism. It’s not any radical departure from the views of the ancients; it’s just couched in more sophisticated mathematical and scientific jargon. The Stoics’ idea of the Logos (Reason) present in the pneuma is similar to the implication of scientific materialism that the rational laws of science (modern Logos) are somehow embodied in all matter.

Milton, with his concept of animist materialism, sought to avoid both the mind-body dualism of Plato and Descartes and the mechanistic determinism of Thomas Hobbes. Since his angels in Paradise Lost have material bodies, they can eat and have sex (indicating that angels can be male or female – can they also have baby angels and form angelic families?)

Milton was right to go down the path of monism rather than dualism, but wrong to make it a materialistic monism. In fact, reality reflects an idealistic monism. Mind is the supreme reality but is able to create the material world through mathematics and dimensionality.

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A remarkable point worth commenting on is that the grandeur and majesty of Dante’s vision is possible only within Roman Catholicism. Protestantism, an ugly, drab religion, is incapable of producing the beauty and glory of the divine. The most magnificent religious artistic creation of Protestantism is Paradise Lost which can almost be interpreted as a glorification of Satan (the embodiment of Protestantism) defying “God” – Catholicism! Paradise Lost, at least at the beginning, makes the Devil into a fabulously heroic and noble individual challenging the might of the divine empire.

Hell, it might be said in this view, is the Protestant Church standing opposed to Heaven, the Catholic Church. Satan goes to Earth to seduce humanity away from obedience to Catholicism and the Church hierarchy and to place their trust much more in themselves. He gives them the Bible – the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil – in the form of their own national language rather than in Latin, the language of Catholicism (which most people couldn’t read). He delivers them from ignorance by giving them “knowledge”.

Milton wrote so brilliantly about Satan because he subconsciously identified Satan with the Protestant challenge to Catholicism, and, during the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, with the Parliamentary challenge to the English king. In the Civil War, Milton was on the side of Cromwell and Parliament against the “rightful”, divine authority of King Charles I.
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The Devil and Hell:

It’s often stated that the Devil’s primary objective is to be worshipped by humanity as God. He wishes to rival the power and glory of the True God and to create a realm equal to Heaven. Isn’t that agenda exactly the one pursued by the Abrahamist “God”?

Many commentators have pointed out the Devil is virtually never mentioned in the Old or New Testaments. They’re wrong. He’s on every page. He’s Jehovah!

According to Christian myth, when Satan was the highest angel in heaven (when he supposedly bore the name of Lucifer), he was made of an aethereal, shimmering substance and had great wings (six or twelve) that glistened with living gold. His throne was on God’s left side. (If God the Son was on the right, surely God the Holy Spirit should have been on the right, but he always seems to be mysteriously missing.)

It was said that God promised Lucifer dominion over Earth, and he certainly got it (as Jehovah!). According to some tellings, Lucifer found himself so superlative that he thought he was God’s equal and he refused to be subservient in any way. Eventually he developed the idea that he was the greatest being of all, the authentic God of the universe, and everyone must worship him.

When God vacated his throne to busy himself with creating the Earth, Satan ascended the divine throne and took it for himself. He proclaimed to the Angelic Host – the nine choirs – that he was their new leader and he would usher in a Golden Age the like of which had never been experienced before. Were they not creatures of free will, he asked? Then they were free to worship him. A third of the angels, thoroughly bored with the tedious worship of the old God, hailed their new Lord and bowed before him. He and the rebel angels took over the North of Heaven and made preparations for war.

Michael the Archangel took command of the loyal angels and angelic civil war erupted in Heaven itself. When God returned from the Garden of Eden, it was to find Satan on his throne and full-scale war raging. Satan’s great wings were flaming bright with sin. God, enraged, hurled the rebels from Heaven for all eternity. Over 133 million angels, their pure, shining light bodies turning black and oily as they fell from the sky like raindrops, were cast out of paradise.

Down and down they fell, into the bottomless abyss. For nine long days they crashed downwards, growing heavier and heavier with sin. According to some telling, it was Earth itself upon which they landed, crashing through the crust and coming to a dead stop at the centre of creation – the hellfire and brimstone at the core of the Earth where they would burn forever. The perfumed air of Heaven was replaced by choking, toxic fumes. And here Satan was forced to establish his new kingdom. He vowed that in time it would be greater than Heaven. He would never stop opposing God and all of his plans.

When he succeeded in corrupting Adam and Eve, Satan delivered an immense blow to the divine plan. The pearly gates of Heaven were thenceforth shut to humanity, and only the sacrifice of Jesus Christ partially opened them again, to all true believers. For the time being, Heaven was CLOSED. Earth became a grim, horrific place, reflecting the Hell at its heart.

Protestant champion Martin Luther declared that few are saved and infinitely more are damned. It is said that only one in sixty people make it to Paradise. That’s just 1.7%. In other words, “God” created humanity in order to make 98.3% suffer forever. Do you really think that’s a God worth worshipping? How can anyone deny he’s the Torture God? All he cares about is universal Terror.

Those who are saved must ascend a Golden Ladder to paradise. The rest enjoy the express highway to Hell.

The word Hell comes from the old Germanic word Hölle meaning “hole in the ground or cave” (like the Hebrew Sheol).

Hell, in Catholic theology, has three domains: Hell proper, Limbo and Purgatory. Hell has entrances for souls, but no exits. Limbo likewise. Purgatory has entrances, but none leading to Hell proper, and it has one exit leading to Heaven. Purgatory is the only region of Hell from which sinners can be redeemed. Only there can you win the golden ticket out.
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Heaven in flames?:

THE REBEL ANGEL Xaphan suggested to the rebellious angelic horde that they burn Heaven to the ground. He was just about to light the fire when God cast all the rebels into the Abyss. Imagine if Xaphan had succeeded and Jehovah’s kingdom had lit the sky as it burned down; the greatest conflagration in history.

Now, Xaphan works the bellows of Hell, fanning the flames of damnation. Volcanoes act as the safety valves for the furnaces of Hell. If they didn’t relieve the pressure, Hell would explode and all Hell would literally break loose.

The fuel of Hell is supplied by burning the souls of sinners. This is the perfect solution to our fuel problems. Souls burn perfectly forever, with no toxic by-products!

Yet some parts of Hell are frozen. They’re so cold that bones snap like twigs.
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Hell’s Publishing Industry:

HELL has a vast publishing empire (run by Rupert Murdoch perhaps?), churning out blasphemy, porn and garbage. Tabloid newspapers, we might speculate, are its main product. Or perhaps it’s Torahs, Bibles and Korans.

Rock ‘n’ Roll is the main product of Hell’s music industry. There is also an infernal orchestra that forever plays the Dance of Death.
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Hell’s Capital (Washington D.C., Jerusalem?):

PANDEMONIUM – the place of “all demons” – is the capital city of Hell. It is the ultimate industrial city, the opposite of the Elysian Fields. It’s a grim, urban landscape, full of skyscrapers and overcrowding of the doomed and the damned who spend most of their time engaged in slave labour.
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Hell is a Black Hole?:

There are those who say that the Devil’s lair is like a black hole, sucking everything sinful into it. Once a soul has passed the Event Horizon of Sin, there’s no way back. The heavier a soul is with sin, the more easily it’s drawn into the Hell Hole of infinite Darkness.

Everyone in Hell is permanently alienated from God. They are weighed down by their estrangement from the divine. It’s the greatest burden imaginable.
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Hell: Them or Us?:

SARTRE: “Hell is other People.”
T.S. Eliot: “Hell is oneself.”
You get used to Hell if you’re there long enough: “He who is used to Hell is as comfortable there as anywhere else.” (Anonymous)
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The Keys to Hell:

ST PETER is said to hold the keys to Heaven. The fallen angel Dommiel performs the equivalent role in Hell, though he doesn’t actually have any keys because the gates are always open to incomers (and closed to those who want out).

The gates of Hell are never locked. Hell is ready for business 24/7 every day of the year, including Christmas!

Although the gate IN to Hell is always open, it is always locked in relation to getting out. It’s closed with seven seals that will not be broken until the Last Judgment.

Sometimes it’s said that Hell has three gates: one at the bottom of the ocean, one in an enormous wilderness and one in a city (with Paris typically being named as the place in question).

Each zone of Hell reflects the particular sin that brought the damned there. The demons of each zone are specialists in inflicting punishment worthy of the sin in question. The Devil himself punishes the worst sinners – traitors.

Hell has one-way gates for the damned: they can get in easily, but they can never get out. And isn’t that true of so many aspects of life? Addiction in all of its forms has a lot in common with Hell – easy in, hard out.
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Pride before a Fall:

IN THE ISLAMIC telling of Satan’s rebellion, Adam was brought before the Angelic Host and Allah demanded that every angel bow to his new creation. Satan refused, saying, “Why should I, a son of fire, bow down before a son of clay?” Instantly, Allah cast him out of Paradise.

What is it with Allah and his obsession with getting people to bow? Look at all the trouble it’s caused.
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Christ the Fraud:

LET US TELL YOU A STORY. Once upon a time, a being of ultra-evil called Satan enslaved the human race and said that all of them would be despatched to Satan’s cosmic torture chamber where he would inflict infinite pain forever: a place he named Hell.

Hearing of Satan’s monstrous plan, God declared, “No, take me instead.” Satan was overjoyed and agreed immediately. He imprisoned God in Hell and subjected him to the greatest pain conceivable, a pain that would never end.

So, if the tale we have told was about the “real” Jesus Christ then all of humanity would be forever in Christ’s debt. Christ’s love for humanity, his infinite self-sacrifice, saved humanity from a fate worse than death. He took upon himself all of the sins and suffering of humanity, a burden he would endure to Doomsday. We would be forever in his debt and his sacrifice would shine as the greatest beacon in history.

But let’s see what actually happened. It wasn’t Satan who built Hell – it was God! It wasn’t Satan who declared that humanity was guilty of Original Sin and hence damned to Hell forever – it was God. Jesus Christ didn’t sacrifice himself to spare humanity from Satan’s evil decrees, but from his own. Jesus Christ allegedly lived for 33 years and then died on the Cross – does that constitute a significant sacrifice in the context of eternity? Enormous numbers of human beings have endured much worse fates than Jesus Christ, and often at the hands of followers of Jesus Christ.

There is NOTHING about the story of Jesus Christ that makes any sense. It’s ludicrous. He died to save us not from Satan but from himself. What kind of crazy shit is that?

The little tale we told at the start makes sense, but not the actual tale of Jesus Christ. Shouldn’t we define Satan as the person who creates Hell and sentences souls to eternal suffering in Hell? In that case, there’s only one person who fits the bill – the Abrahamic God! If he’s not Satan then who is? Who could possibly have done more damage to humanity than Hell’s Creator and Judge – “God”? The only role “Satan” has in Hell is to act as God’s Torturer-in-Chief. If God wanted him to stop, Satan would. After all, God is infinitely powerful and could crush Satan in an instant if that was his wish.

No, let’s attribute humanity’s suffering to its one, true author – “God”. This monster must be fought to the last breath. He is humanity’s ultimate and eternal enemy.

“God” is the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, hence he is Satan. The True God is the friend of the people. The True God is Abraxas.
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The “Cosmology” of the Social Order:

SINCE ANCIENT TIMES, the master-slave paradigm had led people to be obsessed with hierarchies. This has always suited those at the top of the hierarchies, of course. They claimed they were there because that’s exactly where God had put them. Therefore to challenge them was to defy both the natural and the divine order.

As we have seen, the cosmos itself was seen as reflecting a strict hierarchy, with the Devil at the bottom and God at the top. Everyone had their place in the hierarchy and it was wrong for anyone to seek to be higher than God had decreed. It was a structure comparable to the Hindu caste system.

It wasn’t until the French Revolution when the Illuminists Robespierre and Saint-Just – two nobodies in the monarchical social order of France, despite their great talents – demanded and got the execution of Louis XVI that a decisive blow was struck against social hierarchies. Robespierre and Saint-Just announced to the world that merit rather than privileged birth would henceforth be the axis around which the world would revolve. Anyone was qualified to get to the top if they had the talent, and no one could block them according to the ancient idea of divine right to rule.

The meritocratic vision is that of a Round Table where the most talented can become the first minister according to the principle of primus inter pares: first amongst equals.
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