Satan and Beelzebub

Satan and Beelzebub form the central infernal partnership in Paradise Lost: once allied leaders in the War in Heaven, they become companions in defeat and the principal architects of resistance in Hell. Their relationship gives political and emotional structure to the fallen host. Satan supplies the defiant will and the appetite for revenge; Beelzebub receives, tests, and develops that will into counsel capable of directing an entire realm. Together they transform the remnants of rebellion into a deliberate campaign against God’s new creation.

Identity and Foundation

Beelzebub is introduced beside Satan in the Lake of Fire as the fallen angel “next himself in power, and next in crime.” The phrase establishes both hierarchy and intimacy. He is not an incidental member of the Rebel Angels but Satan’s closest comrade, joined to him by a “mutual league,” united thoughts and counsels, equal hope, and shared danger in the earlier enterprise against God. Their fellowship therefore predates Hell and rests on a common political project rather than on accidental proximity after the fall.

The two also share a transformed identity. They had once belonged to the bright celestial order, but their rebellion has stripped them of glory and placed them in a prison of eternal punishment. The fallen state does not dissolve their bond; it intensifies it. Misery has joined them in “equal ruin,” making Beelzebub the one figure to whom Satan can immediately address both the magnitude of their fall and the persistence of their purpose.

From Defeat to Infernal Counsel

When Satan surveys Hell, his first sustained exchange is with Beelzebub. Satan acknowledges the force of God’s victory but refuses repentance, presenting the lost battle as a temporary setback rather than a final defeat. His language of unconquerable will, immortal hate, revenge, and refusal to submit supplies the emotional and ideological basis of their partnership. Beelzebub answers with a more sobering assessment: Heaven has been lost, the host has suffered destruction, and their remaining strength may have been preserved not for freedom but for endurance, punishment, or service to the Conqueror.

Their disagreement is strategic rather than fundamental. Beelzebub recognizes the possibility that their preserved spirit may itself be an instrument of divine punishment. Satan rejects any interpretation that would turn their survival into submission. He declares that doing good will never be their task and that evil must remain their chosen delight because it opposes God’s will. If Divine Providence brings good out of their evil, Satan proposes to frustrate that purpose by turning good toward further evil. Beelzebub thus confronts the practical implications of defeat, while Satan converts those implications into a program of active resistance.

The conversation then becomes a joint movement from speech to action. Satan notices that the pursuit from Heaven has ceased and identifies an opportunity to regroup. He points toward the desolate shore, proposes that the afflicted powers assemble there, and calls for deliberation about how to offend their Enemy, repair their loss, and obtain either hope or resolution from despair. Beelzebub’s role is to confirm the political force of Satan’s voice: when Satan summons the fallen legions, Beelzebub predicts that the familiar voice of their leader will restore courage to those lying prostrate in the Lake of Fire.

Hierarchy and Political Function

The relationship is unequal but mutually reinforcing. Satan is the Arch-Enemy and the superior commander, while Beelzebub is the companion immediately beneath him in power and rank. Yet Beelzebub’s authority is substantial. In the Infernal Council he sits higher than every figure except Satan, and his appearance as a pillar of state signals deliberation, public responsibility, and political competence. Satan embodies charismatic sovereignty: he raises the fallen host, defines resistance, and presents himself as the mind that cannot be changed by place or time. Beelzebub supplies the grave, organized intelligence by which that sovereignty can govern.

This division becomes clearest during the debate over Hell’s future. Mammon advocates peace, labor, endurance, and the construction of a secure nether empire. Beelzebub recognizes that the assembly’s desire to found such an empire cannot escape God’s jurisdiction. Hell remains a dungeon under the rule of the King of Heaven, governed by an iron scepter rather than functioning as an independent state. Because defeat has already determined their condition, Beelzebub argues that no genuine peace is available to enslaved rebels; their only possible response is hostility, hate, and delayed revenge.

Beelzebub’s counsel is explicitly connected to Satan’s prior thinking. He proposes that the rebels seek another world, a place inhabited by a new race called Man, created less powerful than the Angels but more favored by God. The plan is to discover mankind’s nature, powers, and weaknesses and then attack, destroy, possess, or seduce the new creation. Beelzebub gives Satan’s malice its most consequential object: not Heaven’s impregnable walls, but Earth, where God’s favor can be wounded through vulnerable creatures.

The Plot Against Mankind

The proposal to corrupt mankind is the decisive achievement of the Satan–Beelzebub relationship. Its aim exceeds simple military retaliation. They want to disturb God’s joy, make humanity curse its own origins, and mingle Earth with Hell. Beelzebub imagines several possible methods—direct violence, possession, or seduction—because the essential objective is to turn God’s favored works against their Creator. The counsel is therefore simultaneously military, political, and psychological.

The council accepts the design, and Beelzebub renews it as the means by which the fallen may rise from the lowest deep toward their ancient position. He asks who can cross the “dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss,” pass through palpable obscurity, and evade the angelic sentries guarding the new world. No other champion volunteers. Satan alone accepts the danger, and Beelzebub’s counsel thereby produces the mission that sends Satan toward Earth and ultimately toward the temptation of Eve.

The scheme also reveals the limits of their apparent success. Their conspiracy is energized by the desire to make God suffer, yet the poem repeatedly frames their labor as an instrument of a larger providential design. Satan seeks evil for others, but his malice will bring confusion, wrath, and vengeance upon himself, while God draws goodness, grace, and mercy toward Man. Beelzebub’s strategy is therefore effective at the level of plot—humanity will indeed be attacked—but compromised at the level of ultimate consequence.

Theological and Narrative Significance

Satan and Beelzebub dramatize two linked forms of rebellion. Satan represents the refusal to accept dependence, hierarchy, or grace; Beelzebub represents the political intelligence that makes that refusal durable. Their shared language of loss, power, freedom, and revenge turns rebellion into a system of government. Against the divine order in which the Son’s authority is presented as legitimate and protective, their alliance constructs an alternative order founded on opposition and injury.

Their relationship also clarifies the poem’s contrast between divine and infernal economies. Satan interprets loss as a debt to be repaid through revenge, while Beelzebub converts that grievance into a plan to make another creation bear the cost. Against this logic stands the Son of God’s offer of life for life: where the infernal partnership seeks to transfer suffering outward, the Son voluntarily assumes mortal punishment to redeem mankind. The contrast makes Satan and Beelzebub’s companionship a dark parody of sacrificial mediation: they unite to impose ruin, while the Son unites obedience and love to overcome Sin and Death.

Finally, the partnership links the opening catastrophe to the later history of mankind. Beelzebub is present when Satan’s defeat becomes a program, when Hell becomes an organized political space, and when humanity is identified as the vulnerable frontier of divine creation. Satan remains the visible agent of the journey, but Beelzebub is the counselor whose interpretation of defeat makes that journey imaginable. Their alliance therefore does not end with the first fall from Heaven; it continues as the governing intelligence behind the attempt to reproduce rebellion on Earth.