I had taken with me a copy of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, which I considered then, as now, one of the most exalted statements of Satanism ever written. Satan is its true hero; its Christian moralisms are so pale and watery in comparison that I am surprised it and its author were not summarily burned upon its appearance in Cromwellian England. That it not only survived Puritan censorship but was actually lauded as a compliment to Christianity is yet another of those titanic ironies which have accompanied the Prince of Darkness on his tortuous journey across the eras of human civilization.
As much as I admired Paradise Lost, I was annoyed at its ever-present, if pro forma bias. The die was loaded against Satan; he might put up a good fight, but in the end he was doomed to defeat.
It was not so much that I wanted to see him triumph. Rather I felt that his power and position were equal to God’s if not more potent, and I wanted to see a contest that would more accurately represent the struggle between the Powers of Darkness and those of Light.
In early 1970 I took pen in hand and, during the moments when I was not occupied with military responsibilities [at the time I was based in the village of Lai Khe, directing PSYOP teams for the 1st Infantry Division], I began to write a restatement of certain themes from Paradise Lost. It was hardly an “ivory tower” meditation. I wrote in old, bombed-out buildings dating from the French occupation, in helicopters, in tents, and in the midst of underbrush . . . Part of the text of the “Statement of Beelzebub” had to be reconstructed from notes at one point when an incoming rocket blew a packet of papers [and the storage room holding them] to atoms. Often . . . I would be interrupted from my musings by the sudden necessity to dive for a sandbagged bomb shelter.
Slowly but inevitably, however, the manuscript crept towards completion. I say “inevitably” because I began to develop a most peculiar feeling about it. As I wrote the sequential passages, I seemed to sense, rather than determine what they should say. And if I penned words or phrases that “didn’t fit”, I would experience continual irritation and impatience until I had replaced them with the “correct” combination. It was as though the text had a life of its own . . .