The Pandemonium Council is the great deliberative assembly through which the Rebel Angels attempt to transform military defeat into a durable political order. Held in Pandemonium, the capital built by fallen spirits in Hell, it begins as a spectacle of infernal magnificence and ends with a unanimous decision to target humanity. Its central significance lies in this conversion of rebellion into policy: the fallen host does not merely continue its war against Heaven in the same manner, but establishes a council, debates alternatives, identifies a vulnerable frontier of God's kingdom, and assigns Satan the dangerous mission of finding it.

Setting and Convocation

The council follows the construction of Pandemonium, a vast infernal structure raised with extraordinary speed and technical skill. Its builders prepare cells beneath the plain, sluice liquid fire from the Lake of Fire, separate and refine the ore, and fill the building's hollows through an elaborate system compared to an organ receiving one blast of wind and distributing sound through many pipes. The resulting edifice rises like an exhalation and resembles a temple, with pilasters, Doric pillars, golden architraves, a sculpted cornice and frieze, and a roof worked in gold. Its magnificence is explicitly set against Babylon, Al Cairo, and the ancient splendor associated with Belus and Serapis. Infernal architecture thus supplies the council with more than a meeting place: it materializes the fallen angels' claim that art, labor, and collective organization can reproduce or rival the glories of Heaven. The building's architect is identified as the fallen angel later called Mulciber in ancient Greece. His fame comes from the towers he once built in Heaven, where sceptered angels held princely residences. The old fable that he was cast from Heaven by Jove onto Lemnos is corrected by the poem's narration: he fell with the rebellious host long before the Greek story arose, and his ingenuity did not save him from being sent to Hell with his industrious crew. The correction places pagan mythology inside the larger history of the rebellion and makes Pandemonium's splendor an artifact of a defeated, not independent, order. Winged heralds then proclaim a solemn council by command of Satan and the infernal powers. The summons gathers the worthiest members of every regiment, selected by place or choice, and the gates, porches, and great hall become crowded with hundreds and thousands. The host is compared to bees pouring from a hive in spring to attend to the affairs of their populous citadel. Yet the multitude's apparent immensity is also theatrically controlled: at the signal, the incorporeal spirits reduce their enormous forms to the size of the smallest dwarfs, allowing numberless beings to fill the hall. In a private recess, however, the great Seraphim and Cherubim retain their full dimensions and sit in secret conclave, a thousand demigods on golden seats. The council consequently has both a mass political body and an aristocratic inner chamber.

The Opening Political Program

At the opening of the council, Satan sits high upon a throne of royal state, raised by merit and now occupying the bad eminence of leadership. He presents the recent defeat as only a partial recovery. Because immortal vigor cannot be permanently held down, he argues that the fallen powers have risen from despair into a throne granted with the consent of their companions. His rhetoric turns subordination into legitimacy: he claims that his leadership rests on prior creation, free choice, counsel, fighting, and achieved merit, while the burdens of ruling in Hell make his position dangerous rather than enviable. Satan also argues that Hell may possess an advantage absent from Heaven. No one, he says, will envy the leader who stands foremost against the Thunderer's aim and bears the greatest share of endless pain. Since no one in Hell will seek precedence for the sake of a small increase in suffering, faction may be replaced by union, firm faith, and accord. The council's first political task is therefore to consolidate authority by presenting obedience to Satan as a common defense against a greater enemy. The defeated host is invited to imagine Hell not as a prison but as an inheritance that can be reclaimed through collective action. The immediate question is whether that action should take the form of open war or covert guile. Satan leaves the choice to the assembly, inviting anyone able to advise to speak. The procedure gives the appearance of deliberative equality, but the council is already structured by hierarchy, reputation, and the emotional pressure of shared defeat. The eventual decision emerges from competing conceptions of liberty, dignity, survival, revenge, and political power rather than from a neutral search for peace.

Competing Proposals

Moloch, the strongest and fiercest spirit to have fought in Heaven, argues for open war. He rejects the expertise of stratagems and insists that millions already stand armed and await only the signal to ascend. To remain in Hell, he says, is to accept the dwelling place of the power that reigns over them; immediate assault with Hell flames and fury would at least express their refusal. Moloch's position treats action itself as preferable to delay and humiliation, even when the prospects of victory are uncertain. Belial offers the opposite counsel, though his reasoning is presented as ignoble ease disguised in the garments of reason. He accepts that the fallen host cannot resist the omnipotent decree and suggests that endurance may eventually soften the Supreme Foe's anger. Time, habituation, and the transformation of their essence might make the fires less painful and the darkness less terrible. The torments could become their elements; their altered nature could conform to Hell; and the long succession of future days might bring an unexpected change. Belial therefore recommends peaceful sloth rather than true peace, a settlement with suffering rather than a renewed war. Mammon develops a more systematic defense of withdrawal from Heaven. If war is intended to dethrone the King of Heaven, it is vain; if it is intended merely to regain their former rights, that too is impossible, since Heaven has no place for them while its supreme Lord remains in power. Even a pardon would be unacceptable, because it would require them to return as splendid vassals, perform forced hymns, and offer servile worship to the ruler they hate. Mammon's alternative is to live for themselves in Hell, preferring hard liberty to an easy yoke of servile pomp. He imagines the infernal environment as capable of being mastered through labor and art: hidden gems and gold can support magnificence, darkness can imitate the majesty of Heaven, and pain itself may gradually become familiar. Mammon's speech receives strong applause because the assembly fears another field of battle more than Hell. The memory of Heaven's thunder and the Sword of Michael still remains within the fallen angels, while the desire to establish a nether empire promises a positive project. His proposal shifts the council's value structure from immediate victory to durable autonomy: the central question becomes not how to recover Heaven but how to build a rival power below it.

Beelzebub's Strategic Resolution

Beelzebub rises after perceiving the assembly's inclination toward a new empire. His bearing combines public care, deliberation, and the remnants of princely authority; except for Satan, none sits higher. He first punctures the council's hope that Hell can become a realm beyond God's jurisdiction. The King of Heaven has made Hell a dungeon, not a secure retreat, and distance cannot release the fallen from divine rule. God's empire extends into Hell, where he governs with an iron scepter just as he governs Heaven with a golden one. For Beelzebub, this fact makes the opposition between war and peace misleading. War has already determined their condition and produced irreparable loss; no terms of peace have been offered, and a peace imposed on enslaved beings would mean custody, punishment, and arbitrary stripes. Their proper response is therefore continuing hostility and slow revenge, not a reckless assault on Heaven's invulnerable walls. The council's politics become a politics of indirect resistance: if the conqueror cannot be defeated directly, his conquest can be made less complete and less joyful. Beelzebub then introduces the existence of another world, the future home of a new race called Man. This world is described as a happy seat, inhabited by beings made somewhat like the fallen angels but inferior in power and excellence, yet more highly favored by God. Its creation has been announced among the heavenly powers and confirmed by an oath that shook the circumference of Heaven. The information changes the council's strategic horizon. Humanity is not merely a possible enemy; it is the privileged object through which God's satisfaction can be interrupted. The proposed operation is deliberately flexible. The fallen angels may attack the new world suddenly with Hell fire, seize it, drive out its weak inhabitants, or seduce them into the infernal party. The most valuable outcome would be to make God the enemy of his own works and to turn the happiness of his darling Sons into participation in Hell. Beelzebub's plan is thus revenge by corruption: it seeks not only to injure humanity but to force a crisis in the relation between God and the beings he favors. The assembly approves the design unanimously. The narrator identifies the counsel as first devised by Satan and only partly proposed through Beelzebub, revealing that the public debate has also been a controlled presentation of a prior scheme. The council's apparent deliberation therefore culminates in the ratification of Satan's policy. Its success is political rather than military: rebellion acquires a target, a rationale, and an authorized course of action.

Satan's Mission and the Council's Ending

Beelzebub's renewed speech turns immediately to the practical problem of choosing an agent. Someone must cross the dark, bottomless Abyss, navigate palpable obscurity, evade the dense stations of watching Angels, and locate the happy island. The dangers include the ninefold enclosure of Hell, gates of burning adamant, the profound void that threatens the loss of being, and unknown dangers beyond it. No member of the assembled champions volunteers. Each sees his own dismay in the faces of the others, and silence briefly exposes the real cost of the policy they have just endorsed. Satan then accepts the mission alone. He argues that a throne and imperial sovereignty would be empty honors if danger could deter their holder from a public enterprise. Since honor and hazard belong together, the ruler must undertake at least as much risk as he claims authority. He orders the infernal powers to remain at home, seek whatever relief may make Hell more tolerable, and maintain vigilance against a wakeful foe while he travels through the coasts of dark destruction. His decision is presented as sacrifice for general safety, but the narration also marks its monarchal pride: he prevents others from offering, partly because a refused offer might allow rivals to gain reputation cheaply while he earns glory through the actual danger. The council responds by rising together with a sound compared to remote thunder and bending toward Satan in reverence. The fallen spirits praise him for despising his own safety on behalf of all, although the narration warns that even apparently virtuous deeds may conceal ambition varnished with zeal. The session ends in rejoicing around Satan as an incomparable chief. Heralds broadcast the result through the Abyss with trumpets, and the host answers with a deafening acclaim. The assembly has therefore produced a public acclamation of sovereignty as well as a strategic resolution. After the council dissolves, the infernal powers disperse into separate activities while waiting for Satan's return. Some race, drive fiery steeds, form brigades, or enact mock battles; others tear up hills and hurl mountains through the air; still others retreat to valleys, sing of their heroic deeds and fall, or debate Providence, foreknowledge, will, fate, good and evil, happiness, misery, passion, apathy, glory, and shame. The range of post-council occupations reveals a society combining militarism, spectacle, philosophical dispute, and artistic consolation. Its false hope gives the host temporary relief from restless thought, but the council's decision has already fixed the next movement of the plot: Satan departs from the infernal capital to seek the human world.

Political and Theological Significance

The Pandemonium Council stages sovereignty as a contest over who may decide the exception, define the enemy, and determine the acceptable form of freedom. Satan presents his rule as earned by merit and shared danger; Mammon defines freedom as life accountable to no superior; Beelzebub converts defeat into a program of indirect war. Yet the council's language of liberty repeatedly exposes its dependence on domination. The proposed rival empire is not a neutral refuge: its alternatives include conquest, expulsion, seduction, and the conversion of human beings into instruments of revenge. The council rejects servile submission to Heaven while preparing a new structure of mastery over a weaker race. The event also establishes a sharp contrast between the infernal council and the divine decisions reported elsewhere in the poem. In Heaven, commands are issued as decrees, appointments, and judgments, while the Pandemonium assembly uses speeches, applause, voting, and political theater. Nevertheless, both orders are shaped by decisions that determine the fate of others. The contrast is not simply between command and freedom: Abdiel's opposition to Satan's rhetoric shows that obedience may be understood as service to the worthiest ruler, while Satanic liberty can become enthrallment to the self. The council's political vocabulary therefore becomes one of the poem's main instruments for testing whether freedom means rational allegiance, independence, or merely the power to impose one's will. Its consequences extend far beyond the meeting itself. The council identifies Man as the vulnerable point in God's newly ordered creation, authorizes the campaign against that world, and sends Satan toward Eden. Later revelations make clear that the danger anticipated here will be answered not only by punishment but by a larger economy of grace and redemption. The Son of God offers life for life, accepts mortality, and undertakes to defeat Sin and Death through obedience, suffering, death, and resurrection. The infernal council's revenge thus becomes the negative beginning of the story's redemptive structure: its attempt to mingle Earth with Hell provokes the sequence through which humanity's fall, judgment, and possible restoration are interpreted.