Chrysti the Wordsmith > Radio Scripts

In 1667, the English poet John Milton published his most celebrated work Paradise Lost, an epic account of the Biblical stories of Lucifer's rebellion against Heaven, and the creation of the Earth and its first couple, Adam and Eve.

Milton's poem opens with the Satanic hosts plotting to thwart God's plan of creation. The Devil and his cohorts are gathered in a place that Milton calls Pandemonium, or, in the words of the poet, "the high Capital Of Satan and his Peers...Citie and proud seate Of Lucifer."

Milton, a classical language scholar, fashioned his word from the Greek prefix pan, meaning "all," and daimon, "demon." Milton's Satanic city, Pandemonium, is literally and etymologically the "dwelling place of all the demons."

The poet's literary successors adopted this word as a synonym for Hell. By the late 18th century, pandemonium came to represent any place of notorious wickedness. The word was colored a slightly different shade in the mid 1800s when writers used it as a general reference to chaos, confusion and tumult -- the kind that might have been generated in Milton's hellish Pandemonium, "the high Capital of Satan and his Peers," and "the dwelling place of all the demons."

Radio Script > Pandemonium