Bayliss Wagner

Professor Eric Song

Milton

4 April 2018

“Be Fruitful and Multiply”: Food, Sex, & Bodily Fluids in Milton’s A Masque and Paradise Lost

In Book 9 of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, “The serpent sly/ Insinuating”—a sibilant

phrase describing Satan in the serpent’s body—tells Eve that he can articulate himself because

the Forbidden Fruit raised him up from animal to human-like creature. He argues that if the fruit

increased his rank in the hierarchy of beings, Eve, too, would rise in this chain to become

“human god,” as the Serpent is “internal man” (4.347-8, 8.710-12). Instead, in what seems an

ironic parallel to Satan’s fall from angel to devil to bottom-feeder, God makes Eve mortal and

she becomes sexually “debased.” This parallel is further nuanced by the fact that the Satan is

“mixed with bestial slime” when he entered the Serpent, which is reminiscent of the fact God

ejects Adam and Eve, formerly godlike, because they bring “unharmonious mixture foul” into

Eden (11.51). This is not the first time Milton has associated sex with the consumption of food

and drink—in Milton’s A Masque Performed at Ludlowe Castle, Comus’s charmed liquor turns

“intemperate” travelers into beastly creatures and represents the chaste Young Lady’s consent to

sex. The “gums of glutinous heat” that the Lady emits while Comus turns her into stone and the

“bestial slime” with which Satan mixes both come from Milton’s focus on bodily functions; the

question is what they entail for the spiritual conditions of Satan and the Lady. In this essay, I will

analyze these moments of crossover between eroticism and consumption of food and drink and

their spiritual ramifications in both works in order to illuminate the strange bodily liquids of the

Lady and the Serpent.

 In A Masque Performed at Ludlowe Castle, performed in 1634 before Milton’s first

marriage and published a few years later, lack of restraint over one’s physical desires not only

renders man less human, but also less godly. The antagonist Comus, a descendant of Circe and

Bacchus, tempts travelers parched by “the drought of Phoebus”—a phrase that itself mixes food

and sex, both signifying thirst that the sun’s heat causes and hinting at Phoebus’s intense sexual

desire for Daphne—with a charmed “liquor” (65-66). He transforms the “intemperate” who drink

his cup “into some brutish form,” replacing their heads, “Th’express resemblance of the gods”

(67-70), with the head of an animal. The brutes forget their homes and friends and “roll with

pleasure in sensual sty” (75-76). Because they both look and act as animals—though they are not

fully either one—they lose their heads and their minds, seeking only sustenance and sexual

pleasure. Milton compares Comus’s victims to Circe’s victim that “downward fell into a

groveling swine” after tasting her potion (51-53, my emphasis). In a very literal transformation,

they have “fallen” from the higher spiritual state of humanity to a both physically and

metaphorically lower state and have decreased their control over their own sexual and dietary

appetites.

In a similar manner, Adam and Eve lose both power of restraint over their desires and

their closeness to God after the original sin in a manner that causally links their dietary

immoderation with sexual sin. Adam decides to eat the fruit and immediately lusts after Eve,

“carnal desire inflaming” (9.1013). They have sex, which consummates the sin they both

committed (9.1043). They then weep of shame,

“For understanding ruled not, and the will

Heard not her lore, both in subjection now
To sensual appetite, who from beneath
Usurping over sov’reign reason claimed
Superior sway (1128-31).
 The negative connotations of the political language in this passage—“usurp,”

“sov’reign,” “ruled,” “claimed”—reiterate the concept of sin ruling by force when one does not

vigilantly guard his free will and virtue. Just as the “force of that fallacious fruit” leads Adam

and Eve to have sex, once they give up their independence to sin, they lose power over their own

reason and behavior. John Savoie even suggests a more concrete link between the two sins,

noting an echo of “fellatio” in the phrase “fallacious fruit” (9.1046) and concluding that Adam

and Eve’s sex is sinful because it is deviant oral sex (Savoie 161). In addition, the language in

the passage above reminds the reader that Adam and Eve have attempted to usurp God and have

alienated themselves from Him in doing so. They have become subject to a new deity, sin.

Though they still have the erect bodies of creatures given dominion over animals by God, their

lack of thought for God’s commandment makes them like the brutes whose godlike

countenances Comus effaced, focused only on sex and pleasure—at least until the aphrodisiac

effect of the fruit wears off and they repent, an act that creates “fruits of more pleasing savor” for

God.

In A Masque, because the Lady, a virgin, successfully resists Comus’s sexual temptation

and does not drink his cup, yet she still emits the decidedly sexual “gums of glutinous heat” onto

her chair while unconscious she is petrified in stone. Because it seems unjust that Comus

transgresses the chaste (and sinless, as far as the audience can tell) Lady’s free will while

“sensual appetite” only usurped Adam and Eve’s reason in PL because of a sin they committed.

But perhaps the lack of her own sin points to the original sin of the Fall. These questions surface

in the angel Michael’s speech to Adam in book 8:

Since thy original lapse, true liberty

Is lost…
Reason in man obscured
Immediately inordinate desires
 And upstart passions catch the government
From reason, and to servitude reduce
Man till then free (8.86-90)

What Raphael says here is that the Fall has forever altered free will and therefore

humans’ ability to defend themselves against sin. When Adam later bemoans Eve’s debasement,

he says “How are thou lost, how on a sudden lost,/ Defaced, deflow’red, and now to death

devote?” (9.900-901). The alliteration of D’s leading to the word “death” reiterate Eve’s error: in

striving to attain knowledge reserved for God, she has made herself less godly. That she is

“defaced” recalls the effaced countenances of Circe’s pigs and Comus’s victims. She is

“deflow’red”: though she did not yet sin sexually, simply her sin has made sex dirty at the same

time as it has taken her ignorant innocence, which removes the necessity that a sexual sin be

committed for sex to be sinful. Without this causal link, we can postulate that the Lady’s sexual

desire may be a marker of her existence in a postlapsarian world. However, the Lady’s emission

could also simply indicate that she is not as fond of chastity as she professes to be, and that she

wishes to have sex with Comus. But Milton believed in original sin throughout his life, which

entails that no one except Jesus Christ can live sinlessly on earth. As Adam and Eve have

become less godlike in the Fall, it is likely that the Lady’s failure to control a manifestation of

conscious or unconscious sexual desire results from the hopelessness of virtuous humans to

avoid the cycle of loss of reason and sin that Raphael describes.

How does Milton reconfigure this unconscious and sticky mixture of rational behavior

and bodily desire in relation to Satan’s “bestial slime”? Satan’s soliloquy before his entrance into

the snake graphically emphasizes the descent from angel to beast:

O foul descent! that I who erst contended

With gods to sit the highest, am now constrained
Into a beast, and mixed with bestial slime,
This essence to incarnate and imbrute,
 That to the height of deity aspired;
But what will not ambition and revenge
Descend to? (9.163-173)

Interestingly, Satan says that he not only assumes the body of the serpent, but that he

himself is “mixed with bestial slime,” entails that his once-angelic spirit, his “essence,” is now

tainted with earthly matter that is even lower on the hierarchy of beings than the humans—who

infuriate him for being “exalted” by God from “base so original,” though he has not yet entered

the body of the snake (9.150). He speaks of his dignity. But what is this “bestial slime”? The

word “slime” initially disgusts the reader, but also heightens the erotic register introduced by the

phallic serpent, as bestiality is sex between an animal and a human. This slime reinforces

Adam’s warning to Eve that Satan could “seduce” her (9.307). The logic of the Fall also enters

this description of a lesser, animalistic state. Satan, phallic snake, tells prelapsarian Eve that the

fruit was what raised him from base, sex-obsessed snake to a humanlike creature: “I was at first

as other beasts that graze/ The trodden herb, of abject thoughts and low,/ As was my feed, nor

aught but food discerned/ Or sex, and apprehended nothing high” (9.573-4). That he “trods” on

the same grass on which he feeds suggests that this slime could also be nutritive. Taken together,

these graphic physical details highlight Michael’s lesson: that those who sin are enslaved to their

desires. Paradise Lost ties up a “powerful aesthetic nexus that joins the oral act of eating the

forbidden fruit, inherent in the biblical source, with the oral seduction of Satan's temptation, the

dramatic focus of Milton’s poem,” according to John Savoie (161).

Yet Satan’s transubstantiation not entirely a fall in rank, at least not spiritually, as was

Adam and Eve’s was. Milton does place a nod to A Masque’s Circean beasts—perhaps

foreshadowing Adam and Eve’s ignominious transformation to mortals—in PL: Eve does not

notice Satan winding his way toward her in Book 9 because she is used to the animals coming to
meet her, “more duteous at her call/ Than at Circean call the herd disguised” (9.521-522). That

this herd is “disguised” foreshadows Satan’s deceit, since Eve does not know she speaks to Satan

and not an enlightened serpent. As Milton portrays the Circean metamorphoses from human to

pig as just punishment for humans who have let their physical desires usurp their virtue and

reason, Satan’s transformation into serpent in Paradise Lost seems a just punishment for the evil

he wishes upon humanity, as Kerrigan argues. “Satan dared to make himself, then to unmake

man. His ambition to wield the divine power of essence led him to mingle with another

species…Now God, master of essence, completes as punishment the foul transubstantiation,” he

writes (332-333). What Kerrigan mixes is that because Satan knows good and evil and has

chosen evil, he is morally lower than the ignorant serpent, so the mixture moves two ways. Satan

becomes bestial and the serpent is demoted morally and blamed for the Fall of humanity. Satan

ironically indicates his hubris when he compares his embodiment of the serpent to Jesus’s

incarnation as man when he describes his essence as “incarnate and imbrute.” Thusly, Satan’s

descent into serpenthood reiterates a motif that repeats itself over and over in the epic: the

ambitious attempt to raise one’s knowledge or godliness and God’s just humiliation of those who

dare to believe themselves capable of usurping him. And, most ironically, Eve’s yearning to be

immortal has made her utterly mortal. The just punishment for her incontinence in eating the

fruit and believing a snake over God is a transformation from immortal to mortal, godly to

earthly.

In a Fallen world, then, Milton sees humans as shamefully and inextricably tied to their

physicality and mortality. Though he nuances his seemingly disdainful views of sex in the

Doctrines on Discipline and Divorce, the sticky substances that Satan encounters and that the

Lady emits emphasize the continual cycles of irrational surrender to temptation and sin and
ambition to humiliation. In contrast to Satan and the Comus’s brutish victims, the Lady and

Adam and Eve retain their bodies and the likeness of God (the statue preserves the Lady’s

countenance), but still fall prey to their animalistic tendencies. When Adam explains his decision

to eat the fruit as “I feel/ The link of nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,/ Bone of my bone thou art,

and from thy state/ Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe” (9.914-15). Trained to spot heresy,

the Miltonic reader protests Adam’s choice of “nature” over his connection to God. The extent to

which Milton and his readers can amend Adam and Eve’s mistake and live virtuously in a fallen

world remains a central question from then on.

 Works Cited

Kerrigan, William. "Essence and Metamorphosis in Milton." Texas Studies in Literature and

Language 46.3 (2004): 324-339.

Milton, John. The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. Ed. William Kerrigan,

John Rumrick and Stephen M. Fallon. New York: Random House, 2007.

Savoie, John. "That Fallacious Fruit’: Lapsarian Lovemaking in ‘Paradise Lost." 45.3 (2011):

161-171.