Introduction to reading Paradise Lost

Long is the way, and hard that out of Hell leads up to light

What should be obvious by now is that the quote I used at the start of the Road of Faith posts is lifted verbatim from Paradise Lost, book 1 to be more specific.

In the Road of Faith post 2 I talked about finding meaning through fiction. If not meaning, then at least distraction from what is a truly banal existence.

But hey! Happy thoughts! Back on track!

I'm planning to dip in and out of the poem and don't have an end-date for finishing it yet.

-----

John Milton's Paradise Lost is an epic poem, comprised out of 12 books that are centered on what is mostly, a retelling of some parts of the Bible's Genesis chapter. It also deals with the aftermath of the war in Heaven between God's angelic legions and the one third of the Heavenly Host that follows the Morningstar into perdition. The ensuing formation of a demonic hell and its capital of Pandemonium. And the seduction of mankind into its first disobedience, by the devil, at the heart of the garden of Eden and how this was brought about.

Milton's views were staunchly anti-monarchical and reading the poem with that in mind it is obvious that it is what inspired parts of it; Satan as the revolutionist to God's tyrant monarch.
But you know, while I don't give a shit about our own royal house of bloodsuckers either, in this day and age they are powerless and harmless enough to consider them unworthy of my time and indeed even my opinions. So I will just leave any political aspects to the poem restrained to this here small acknowledgment and reference it from this point on no further.

I'm of course here for the religious aspects; the mythology, and to see how it would clash and contradict or indeed work alongside with any earlier obtained knowledge from my early years of devout Bible reading.

Paradise Lost is a book that has been a long time on my radar. For various reasons I never actually picked it up; primarily the one that meant I would actually have to read a 10 or 12-book epic poem; and who the hell has time for that these days? and that because, as it really is a fiction, its claims of 'Justifying the ways of God to men' struck me as highly pedantic, arrogant and idiotically self-satisfied.

It's odd that I never did though, because despite my misgivings and qualms, it still is, of course, the mother of all the mythological stories that has a sympathetic Lucifer at its heart. Arguably one of the earliest out-and-out anti-hero stories ever put down on paper.
But with a potential tv-adaptation of the poem in the early stages of development, by Martin Freeman I might add, I figured I should really read the source text now, before all the hipsters think it's a cool thing to go and do, and my eyeballs start to drop out my sockets out of utter eye-rolling contempt.
Does that make me a hipster too? No, it doesn't. Shut up.

The start of book 1 begins with an invoking of the muse, in what is a poet's tradition.
Probably here, in my obviously biased and evil opinion, as a means of disguising what is really at the heart of Milton's epic: A dangerous subversion, an alignment on the side of the Devil. But because Milton calls on the muse; to give divine inspiration to the tale, the responsibility for some of its more controversial elements can be directly assigned to the outside influence that governs the muse; God. If you follow this conceit, then Paradise Lost becomes a true look at the other side of the veil; it is the tale of the Devil.

With Paradise Lost then there's an obvious focus on the side of the fallen.
And honestly, it is why I am here. I've always been attracted to the dark stuff and having been raised in a Christian home, reading my Bible alot, dark means the devil and it always bothered me that there was so little in there about him.
He only really comes into focus whenever he has to be the primary antagonist and the source of all evil: In the garden itself, or when he tries to seduce Jesus in the desert.

*Small rambling sidenote.*

The source of all evil;

I personally think it is preposterous to proclaim this; that we would actually need an outside force of evil. Man is awful and selfish enough in and of itself to not need a dark passenger, whispering seductions and hate in his ear. This is not a new idea.

But then also, as Liggotti states in his Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution.

And while doing my three stories of awakening consciousness post I was struck by an odd thought recently, It seems the Bible has a tale for it; the arising of consciousness resulting from the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

It's an interesting little idea: the devil as an allegory for cerebral evolution.

*Small rambling sidenote end.*

As such, a book, centrally about the devil, and his, arguably, greatest achievement; the seduction of Eve in the garden of Eden and the ensuing fall of man into sin, with hints to the rift between God and his once second highest angel, a war in heaven. a conflict on the most magnificent and grand scale imaginable; something that casts such a dramatic and far-reaching shadow; a myth to explain the insane levels of horror and depravity that we dwell in these days, is nigh on irresistable.

I would have ended up here eventually.

Plainly stated. Because and despite of my upbringing; I love dark mythology.

Going Forward.

I struggled a while with how to approach this project.
What I'll certainly not even pretend to do is give an actual review of Paradise Lost as that kind of hubris would just be silly, I imagine everything has already been said at any rate.
Hmm, I guess I'll have to see though.

Mostly I'm just committed to do a blogpost for each of the 12 individual books in the poem in order to force myself to continue reading it with attention to detail rather than hurrying along and getting it done, or worse, just abandoning it altogether.
Above all, this must be for fun.

Right now I'm fixed on doing a short recap of each book in my own words, which is primarily for those among you who might be interested in the story but who wouldn't actually want to read such a large poem. I have also already made comparisons to my own views of religion in the overly long and overly revealing personal Road of Faith posts so I should think, the main stuff is out of the way by now, and doesn't have to be touched upon again. But we'll see if the need should ever arise during the reading.

I'll start out every post with some of my cloud pictures as the symbolism inherent should be obvious but mostly because pictures of the same book's cover over and over are a little boring.
I'll call out interesting bits but really, I think the recap, told in my own words, is the most important thing to me.
Ooh, Ooh. I'll also do a Badass quotes section. How did I not think of that before? The text suits itself marvelously for it.

Now, enough dallying.

Onwards, to Hell.