Romantic Satanism: Milton, Blake, Byron and the Rebel Angel

Romantic Satanism is the name scholars give to the reinterpretation of Satan as a heroic rebel, a figure of liberty, energy and defiance, by poets and thinkers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Building on the magnetic Satan of John Milton's Paradise Lost, writers such as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire and Giosuè Carducci turned the Devil into a symbol of revolt against tyranny and orthodoxy. None of them founded a religion, but historians regard this literary current as the most important ancestor of modern Satanism.

Milton's Satan and the Heroic Rebel§

The story begins with Paradise Lost, published in ten books in 1667 and in twelve in 1674. Milton set out to "justify the ways of God to men", and his Satan is a fallen archangel whose pride leads him to corrupt humanity. Yet the opening books give Satan some of the most memorable speeches in English poetry: he rallies the fallen angels on the burning lake, refuses submission and declares it "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n." His courage, grief and rhetorical power make him far more vivid than the poem's depiction of God.

Readers noticed this early. John Dryden remarked in 1697 that Satan might seem to be Milton's real hero, and in the age of revolutions the observation took on political meaning. The radical philosopher William Godwin suggested in Political Justice (1793) that Satan's rebellion could be understood as resistance to an arbitrary assumption of power. Milton, a defender of the English republic and of the execution of Charles I, was easily read as a poet whose sympathies lay with rebellion. The longer theological history behind this figure, from the Hebrew "adversary" to Lucifer of Isaiah 14, is traced in The History of Satan and the Devil.

Blake and the Devil's Party§

William Blake gave the Romantic reading its most famous formulation. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, etched around 1790–1793, the "Voice of the Devil" argues that energy is eternal delight and that the conventional opposition of good and evil is merely the opposition of passive reason to active energy. Blake added that Milton wrote freely of devils and hell because he was a true poet "and of the Devils party without knowing it."

Blake was not praising evil. His "devils" stand for creative energy, desire and prophetic vision suppressed by the institutional religion and moral codes he called "Angels". The work's "Proverbs of Hell" are aphorisms of a visionary wisdom that turns ecclesiastical morality upside down. Peter Schock has shown that Blake, like his younger contemporaries, used the myth of the rebel angel to reflect on the French Revolution and on the political repression that followed it in Britain. Blake's place among visionary artists is considered further in Occult Literature and Art.

Shelley, Byron and the "Satanic School"§

The second generation of English Romantics made the theme notorious. Shelley admired Milton's Satan but found him morally flawed by revenge and ambition; in the preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820) he explained that he preferred Prometheus as a purer image of resistance to tyranny. In A Defence of Poetry, written in 1821 and published posthumously in 1840, he nonetheless insisted that Milton's Devil, as a moral being, was far superior to Milton's God.

Byron went further in dramatic form. His Manfred (1817) presents a Faustian hero who refuses to submit to any spirit, and Cain: A Mystery (1821) gives Lucifer the role of a Socratic guide who leads the first murderer through the abyss of space, questioning the goodness of a Creator who permits death and suffering. Reviewers and clergy were scandalised. In the preface to his poem A Vision of Judgement (1821), the Poet Laureate Robert Southey denounced the authors of a "Satanic school" whose works, he claimed, were inspired by a spirit of Satanic pride and impiety. Byron answered with his own satire, The Vision of Judgment (1822). The label stuck, and it is from this quarrel that later critics borrowed the term "Romantic Satanism".

Romantic Satanism on the Continent§

French, Italian, Russian and German writers developed the theme in their own directions. Alfred de Vigny's Éloa (1824) tells of an angel born from a tear of Christ who falls in love with Lucifer out of pity. Victor Hugo worked for decades on La Fin de Satan, published posthumously in 1886, which imagines the Devil's eventual redemption. Mikhail Lermontov's The Demon, revised through the 1830s and long banned in Russia, made a lonely fallen spirit the tragic hero of a love story in the Caucasus.

Charles Baudelaire gave the theme a darker, aesthetic turn. Les Fleurs du mal (1857), prosecuted for offences against public morals in the year of its publication, contains "Les Litanies de Satan", a mock litany addressing Satan as the consoler of the outcast and the wisest of the angels. Baudelaire was a Catholic sensibility in revolt, and his Satan expresses ambivalence rather than devotion; his influence on the Decadents runs directly to J.-K. Huysmans and the literary Black Mass.

In Italy Giosuè Carducci's Inno a Satana (written 1863, published 1865) hailed Satan as the spirit of reason, nature and progress triumphing over clerical obscurantism, closing with the image of a steam locomotive as his emblem. Political radicals took up the same symbolism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon addressed an apostrophe to Satan as the slandered friend of liberty in his treatise on justice (1858), and Mikhail Bakunin's God and the State, published in 1882 after his death, described Satan as the first free-thinker and emancipator of humanity.

Lucifer as Liberator: Feminism and Esotericism§

Per Faxneld's research has shown that the Romantic Satan also served feminist writers who read the serpent of Eden as a liberator of Eve and, through her, of women in general. In this "Satanic feminism", the Devil represented independence, sexuality and knowledge denied to women by patriarchal religion. Some writers used the image ironically, others with real conviction.

Occultists absorbed the theme as well. Éliphas Lévi treated Lucifer as an ambivalent symbol of the astral light, and Helena Blavatsky named her London journal Lucifer in 1887 and presented the light-bringer in The Secret Doctrine (1888) as a bearer of spiritual wisdom, as discussed in Helena Blavatsky. At the end of the century the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski turned Romantic and Decadent imagery into something closer to a systematic Satanist philosophy, a step that historians see as a bridge between literature and religion.

Critics, Debates and the Legacy for Modern Satanism§

Not every reader accepted the Satanist reading of Milton. In A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) C. S. Lewis argued that Milton deliberately showed Satan's heroism decaying into absurdity and that admiring him was a misreading. Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin (1967) proposed that the poem intentionally seduces readers through Satan's rhetoric in order to make them recognise their own fallen state. William Empson, in Milton's God (1961), took the opposite view, finding Milton's God morally troubling. The debate remains one of the liveliest in English literary criticism.

Historians of religion, notably Ruben van Luijk, stress that the Romantics did not worship Satan; they used him as a myth to think with. Yet that myth made the Devil available as a positive symbol, and every later form of Satanism drew on it. Anton LaVey's Satan as a symbol of pride, carnality and rebellion, described in What Is Satanism?, is recognisably the Romantic rebel stripped of metaphysics. The Luciferian emphasis on light and enlightenment, outlined in Theistic Satanism and Luciferianism, descends from the same tradition. Romantic Satanism thus marks the point at which the Devil changed sides in Western culture, from the enemy of humanity to, for some, its champion.

Frequently asked questions§

What is Romantic Satanism?§

It is a literary and intellectual current of roughly 1790–1870 in which writers such as Blake, Shelley, Byron, Baudelaire and Carducci portrayed Satan as a heroic rebel or liberator. It was a way of expressing political, religious and artistic revolt, not a form of worship.

Who coined the term "Satanic school"?§

Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, used it in 1821 in the preface to A Vision of Judgement to attack Byron, Shelley and their circle as morally corrupting. Byron replied with the satire The Vision of Judgment the following year.

Is Satan the hero of Paradise Lost?§

Milton intended Satan as the poem's antagonist, but his eloquence led Dryden, Blake, Shelley and many later readers to see him as its true hero. Critics such as C. S. Lewis and Stanley Fish argued against that reading, and the question is still debated.

Did the Romantic poets worship Satan?§

No. They used Satan as a symbol of freedom, energy and resistance to authority. Their importance for Satanism is that they created a positive image of the Devil that twentieth-century Satanists later adopted.

Sources and further reading§

• Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley and Byron — Peter A. Schock, 2003
• Paradise Lost — John Milton, 1667
• The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — William Blake, 1790
• Prometheus Unbound — Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1820
• Cain: A Mystery — Lord Byron, 1821
• Les Fleurs du mal — Charles Baudelaire, 1857
• The Romantic Agony — Mario Praz, 1933
• A Preface to Paradise Lost — C. S. Lewis, 1942
• Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost — Stanley Fish, 1967
• Milton's God — William Empson, 1961
• Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture — Per Faxneld, 2017
• Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism — Ruben van Luijk, 2016