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It is often true that the darkest shadows of the human imagination produce some of the greatest art, and the literary and artistic treatments of Satan are a prime example.

There are many studies exploring how the Light-Bringer of ancient traditions was recast as a paragon of evil.

The gaping maw of a monstrous Satan languishing in Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell may be the most familiar form given to Lucifer in the Western imagination, but from the eighteenth century onwards, a new perspective began to emerge; a more Promethean figure whom many Romantic poets, artists and authors sought to redeem.

Sometimes termed “Literary” or “Romantic Satanism”, this was the result of multiple sociocultural shifts during the “long eighteenth century.” These included the primacy of the “Age of Reason” and the cultural impact of the French revolution.

As summarised by Ruben van Luijk in an anthology on Satan in Western culture:

While Christian mythology had banned Satan to Hell and blamed him for evil, Literary Satanism to a greater or lesser degree rehabilitated the fallen angel and proclaimed that he had stood in his right after all. Secondly... they resurrected him from the burial the Enlightenment had given him... In traditional Christian theology, Satan's fall had been associated with proud, unlawful insurrection against divine authority. The philosophes and French Revolution however, had given 'insurrection' a wholly new, positive meaning for substantial parts of Europe's intellectual elite; and this revaluation reflected on the myth of Satan as well.... Satan as noble champion of political and individual freedom remained the most important theme of Literary Satanism throughout the nineteenth century.1

The transformation of Milton's Lucifer into this new cultural hero carried over into France, where Satanism became a stock feature of the French occult milieu as well as of Decadent literature.2