Raphael’s account in Book 6 of the Satan’s rebellion in Heaven suggests that instrumentality may be a direct symptom of the fallen angels’ sin. As we saw in the previous chapter, when Raphael describes to Adam and Eve how Satan’s troops are crushed under Heaven’s uprooted mountains, he also reveals that their bodies have thickened because of their sin. The pun on the word “wind” in Raphael’s remark that Satan’s troops took a long time to “wind / Out of” their warped suits of armor, compares the crushed spirits to the meteorological forces they will control in the fallen world and identifies their substance with the thick, vaporous part of the atmosphere where these forces predominate (6.659-61; my italics). But the play-on-words also suggests that the
spirits’ resemble the “wind” inside of instruments.59 As in Hell their exhalation-like bodies supply the wind and music emanating from its grand pipe organ, so in Heaven do they expel sounds from pipe-like chambers:
Their armor helped their harm, crushed in and bruised Into their substance pent, which wrought them pain Implacable, and many a dolorous groan.
(6.656-8)
The word “pent” used to describe the rebel angels’ confinement within their metal armor evokes Francis Bacon’s characterization of the disposition of the air inside of wind instruments and organs. Bacon uses this term repeatedly to describe the necessary physical conditions for propagating sound: “where the air is pent and straitened, there breath or other blowing, (which carry but a gentle percussion) suffice to create sound; as in pipes and wind-instruments.”60 The acoustical diction Milton uses to describe the constriction or penning in of the angels’ vaporous bodies analogizes them to the air within musical instruments and represents their groans as the notes emitted by flutes or a pipe organ.
Early readers would be especially apt to visualize the demons as embodying instruments because of familiar representations in the visual arts. In the iconography
59 Milton uses “wind” in a similarly witty vein to characterize the pneumatic conveyance of sound in L’Allegro (“Lap me in soft Lydian Aires, /…/ In notes with many a winding bout” [136-9]) and in Comus (“Wind me into the easie-hearted man” [163]). The word evokes the airy quality of sound that enables it to wiggle into physically and psychologically confined spaces. See John Milton, Poems of Mr. John Milton (London: printed by Ruth Raworth for Humphrey Moseley, 1645).
60 Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 2, 391, § 116. See also, for example, p. 404, § 164 and p. 422, § 232.
inspired by Athanasius’ Life of St. Anthony, for instance, demons equipped with musical instruments and trumpet-shaped noses are often depicted as terrorizing the saint.61 Jacques Callot’s 1635 etching The Temptation of St. Anthony is particularly creative and grotesque in the variety of ways it imagines devils using musical instruments. Among other things, the picture portrays a band of infernal musicians, devils blowing
instruments from the clouds, and trumpet-nosed creatures snorting dissonance at St.
Anthony. In a few instances, demons with trumpets protruding from their backsides spew out what one presumes are toxic sounds and gasses. Though these representations may seem appalling to us, Callot’s picture captures the early modern conception of the demonic body. Its organs are artificial rather than biological; they are incorporated musical instruments, engines, and implements with which to harass and deride man.
Satan risks becoming like these musical cyborgs as he increasingly embodies his status as prince of the air and uses it as a platform for acoustical warfare. In the
mountain-throwing episode, his troops fall victim to their own violent acoustical methods when crushed by their armor and unwillingly transformed into instruments. Their pitiful concert of groans ironically echoes Hell’s “dulcet symphonies.” It also anticipates Satan’s
instrumentation of Eve and the serpent, and finally, the moment in Book 10 when the devils are reduced to mere hissing serpents. Trapped in their suits of armor, their sounds are involuntary—a condition of their bodily imprisonment and punishment.
61 See, for instance, Michelangelo, The Torment of Saint Anthony, c. 1487-88, The Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth; Hieronymous Bosch, Triptych of Temptation of St. Anthony, c. 1500, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon; Jacques Callot, The Temptation of St. Anthony, c. 1635, The Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas.
In addition to portraying the devils’ embodied instrumentality as the inheritance of sin, Raphael’s account of the war in Heaven further reveals their meteorological procedure for lacing sounds with fraud. Satan’s “hollow engines”—“deep-throated”
instruments with mouths that roar, belch, and exhale smoke—illustrate the duplicitous and destructive aspects of his acoustics (Book 6, “Argument”). (The hollow engines also recall the hollow rocks with which the devils are compared in Book 2). The artillery causes havoc for the good angels in the usual way, by scattering their ranks with “Balls / Of missive ruin” (6.518-19, 590-99). But it also serves up a different kind of ammunition in the form of a piercingly loud and deceptive blast. By siphoning “sulphurous and nitrous” meteorological materials into their guns, Satan and his crew attempt to make a weapon that sounds as awful as thunder, the coveted armament of God.62 They succeed at least in producing an exceedingly violent and startling sound, “embowel[ing] with outrageous noise the air” (6.588).
Milton’s association of Satan’s guns with instruments and emphasis on their booming sounds is not a historically anomalous treatment of cannon fire. Along with the vibrational sounds of stringed musical instruments, the report of guns and artillery was a central subject of acoustical investigation in the early seventeenth century. In Sylva Sylvarum, for instance, Bacon refers to the “noise of great ordnance,” fired at long
distances, as an example of how sound does not immediately reach our ears and travels at
62 Satan predicts that on hearing (and feeling) the effect of his guns the angels will “fear we have disarmed / The thunderer of his only dreaded bolt” (6.490-1).
a slower speed than light.63 Several of Bacon’s seventeenth-century successors, including Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, and members of the Florentine Accademia del
Cimento, actually attempted to measure the speed of sound using a technique called
“blast-timing” which involved “timing the interval between seeing the flash and hearing the report of guns fired at a known distance.”64 Thus, in Milton’s day guns were valued not only for their military function, but also for their extraordinary sonority; no other manmade sound was as loud.
If the blast of Satan’s engines is meant to simulate the intimidating sound of thunder, then the initial appearance of the cannons augurs an altogether different kind of sound. To the “amused” angels, their shape expresses vocality:
their mouths With hideous orifice gaped on us wide, Portending hollow truce.
(6.576-78)
As the guns’ novel appearance momentarily diverts the heavenly soldiers, arguably paving the way for their fall, early modern readers may have connected their appearance with that of the basilisk, an imposing-looking medieval cannon that was aptly named after a mythical serpent who kills its prey with a glance. Thus, while Adam and Eve could not have intuited the serpentine associations of the weapons in Raphael’s tale, early
63 Just after this observation about canon fire, Bacon proposes a method for measuring sound delay by standing at a great distance from a bell in a steeple and recording the difference between the moment it is observed as struck and the moment its peal is heard. See, Sylva Sylvarum, Century 3, 4:270.
64 Frederick Vinton Hunt, Origins in Acoustics: The Science of Sound from Antiquity to the Age of Newton (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 85. For information on the “blast-timing”
experiments of Mersenne, Gassendi, and the scholars of the Accademia, see pp. 99-104.
audiences likely understood them as a direct type of the serpent in the garden, attributing their disarming appearance, shrewd mechanism, and savage acoustics to the latter Satanic instrument.
Raphael’s tale of the invention of firearms has a dual purpose: it warns the first humans of Satan’s slick acoustical tactics and then reveals the truly corrosive nature of his sounds. Satan initially appears as a deceptive maestro, adapting or emulating meteorological phenomena to fabricate machines whose amusing vocal appearance conceals their evil purpose. Later, the actual firing of the cannons reveals the lethal nature of these instruments. Raphael’s description of these events affords Adam and Eve a unique opportunity to visualize the physically injurious quality of satanic sounds. The infernal and Paradisal climates sustain the illusion that Satan’s sounds are benign by concealing his corruption within sweet music or charming rhetoric. Yet empyreal elements, like the “celestial temper” of Ithuriel’s spear and the air of high Heaven, preclude such deceit by conspicuously announcing evil disturbances, either with flames or signs of torment (4.812, 6.244-45, 304-305). Thus, in Raphael’s story, which takes place in Heaven, the sounds of Satan’s guns do not dissemble. What the angels hear when the cannons go off (“outrageous noise”) accurately reflects the ensuing damage: savage deformations of the air and the physical disorientation of the angels. In short, the episode warns Adam and Eve that satanic sounds pack a punch.