'The Devil holds the strings which move us!' (Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 1857.) Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer... the Devil has many names and faces, all of which have always served artists as a source of inspiration. Often commissioned by religious leaders as images of fear or veneration, depending on the society, representations of the underworld served to instruct believers and lead them along the path of righteousness. For other artists,...

The Bible is indeed a world of the strange and mysterious when it comes to the variety of creatures that are presented in its texts. These often times serve as images of good versus evil, or order versus chaos. Flat and narrowly myopic literal readings of the Bible that at times lacks for imagination and creative insight to the Bible's occasional and amazingly metaphorical maze fall far short of what is needed to appreciate the full depth of the biblical...

"A poet who crafted the greatest character in literary history with his engaging anti-hero of Satan, John Milton connected personal experience with the breadth of cosmic epic. His Paradise Lost is a touchstone of English literature. In the latest entry in Ig's celebrated Bookmarked series, author Ed Simon considers Paradise Lost within the scope of his own alcoholism and recovery, the collapse of higher education, the imbecility of the canon wars,...