Upon seeing the marvels of Eden, Satan leaps over the verdurous wall and sits atop the garden’s highest and centermost tree, the tree of life. By putting Satan in the highest spot of the garden—a watchtower so to speak—Milton is addressing yet another of the characteristics of the paradeisos: the fact that these parks were furnished with towers that provided vantage points for the hunters (0.27).

In this regard, the rhetoric of the poem leaves no doubt:

… As when a prowling wolf,

Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,

Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve

In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,

Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the fold…¹

Of course, the idea of a hunter-devil takes a definitive form in the christian imaginary: the tempter of God’s flock, which is exactly what Milton has in mind:

So clomb this first grand thief

into God’s fold.²

Thus, if it is God who has arranged the Garden of Eden (gan eden)—the primeval human domus—it is Satan who takes the chance and turns it into a hunting ground, a paradeisos in the Persian sense of the word. The thick forest of paradise, full of shady hideouts and abundant prey, is the perfect place for hunting:

Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flock

Grazing the tender herb, were interposed,

Or palmy hillock, or the flowery lap

Of some irriguous valley spread her store,

Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose…³

Once nature, and humanity itself, have become the embodiment of the other, the abundance and amenability associated with a place of pleasure (i.e., in eden roses are thornless), becomes an invitation to the hunt and slaughter. In the figure of Satan-venator we see a first intimation of the political theology implicit in the hunting park.

This orthodox interpretation, which takes for granted the kindness of Yahweh in providing us with our original home, is inverted by Gnosticism. According to a tradition initiated by the Ophites, the serpent would have been “the first being to attempt to release mankind from bondage to an unknowing God who had identified himself with the absolute and thus blocked the way to the tree of eternal life.”⁴ Seen thus, the biblical God is the architect of the original paradeisos and the serpent the agent of liberation. Gan Eden is actually hell, a netherworld of sorts that we must escape with the help of a liminal being (0.23), which will lead us to a reckoning of our simultaneous condition of self and other, human and animal.

---

1. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 183-187. ↩︎
2. Ibíd. ↩︎
3. Ibid, IV, 251-256. ↩︎
4. Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 49. ↩︎