A history of fallen angels, pirates, revolutionaries and other daring insurgents who liberated humanity and founded the modern world.I planned to start this project from the beginning of civilization and make it a complete history of the devil. My doctoral advisers looked horrified and recommended I start with Milton. So I got the whole thing to just five chapters. But they're long chapters. And I'm also afraid,thanks to the rigor of academia, I've hidden some of the most astonishing gems of knowledge in stilted, overblown rhetoric. There are hundreds of little details in this book that will never cease to amaze me. The main argument of this book, simplified, is that our modern virtues and ideology of heroism are directly based on Satanic principles that have been whitewashed by two centuries of ethical inversion. The fact that most of this history--which includes hundreds of famous writers, artists and philosophers--is relatively unknown, and the fact that many westerners are practicing Satanists without knowing it, fascinates me to no end.I'm afraid, however, that by dressing the story up in academic language, I haven't made it accessible enough for the general public. Few but Milton scholars will be very interested in the first two chapters, but they're important in order to understand how crucial Paradise Lost has been in the history of Western civilization. Unless you've studied philosophy, psychology or critical theory, chapter five may put you to sleep--although I think my biggest contributions to Milton criticism (if any) will be found there. I'm calling this a Paradise Lost "Study Guide" because most of the recommended texts still used in English departments around the world are one-sided and can be frustrating for students who, like me, resist the orthodox reading.