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IF one counts the number of names in the catalogue of the chief fallen angels that Satan calls upon as the first action of his reign in Hell, one finds that there are twelve names in all: Moloch, Chemos also called Peor, Baalim, Astoroth, Astoreth also called Astarte, Thammuz, Dagon, Rimmon, Osiris, Isis, Orus, and, last, Belial. The demonic, iconographic parody is obvious: Satan is summoning his chief fallen angels while standing on "the bare strand" of the burning lake (1.379),1 just as in the gospels of Matthew and Mark, Jesus begins his ministry by calling his disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.2 The vehemence of the scorn directed toward the chief fallen angels, however, makes Milton's list of Satan's apostles more than a mere travesty and suggests connections with Milton's radical Protestant distrust of the cults of sainthood associated with the disciples, with his consistent dislike of the authority for a special priesthood derived from the twelve disciples, and with his polemic against the primacy of Peter among the disciples on which the Catholic Church based its claims for papal authority. The implicit attack upon the perversions of holiness associated with the disciples underlines Milton's belief that all salvation occurs not as the result of corporate membership, but as the result of divine grace visited upon the faithful individual. Further, the biblical stories of salvation and damnation from which the catalogue of Satan's apostles is constructed repeatedly illustrate Milton's view of faith.
Although it is surprising that the powerful and suggestive christological antitype of Satan's chief devils has gone unnoticed, one realizes what has created difficulty for scholars when one examines the accumulated annotation of the individual names of the pagan gods given to the fallen angels. Because they know so much, the annotators have counted only ten separate gods. Learned readers have known that Baalim was a plural form of Baal, and that both Chemos and Peor are alternative names for a local manifestation of Baal. Similarly, Astoroth is a plural form of Astoreth, which is followed immediately by a local manifestation of her, namely Astarte. Scholars have evidently conflated two names into one entity in both cases,3 and so, if they have bothered to count the names of the...