SOURCE: “The ‘Satanism’ of Cain in Context: Byron's Lucifer and the War Against Blasphemy,” in Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 44, 1995, pp. 182-215.

In the following essay, Schock views Lucifer in Lord Byron's Cain as an ambiguous figure—at once both “the traditional tempter” and “the Promethean metaphysical rebel”—and discusses Byron's purposes in manipulating the Satanic myth.

In Cain: A Mystery (1821), Byron offers the reader the enigma of his Lucifer, a demonic figure who oscillates between traditional diabolism and all that is implied by “Romantic Satanism.” On the one hand, Byron seems to introduce a conventional if unusually haughty, aloof, and sadistic tempter into his revision of Genesis 4. Because Cain yearns to recover his “just inheritance,” the Eden his parents briefly knew, or at least to learn what he calls “the mystery of my being,” Lucifer breaks him down, first promising metaphysical knowledge, then revealing and ridiculing the hopelessness of...