The council in Pandemonium

Satan opens the council from his throne. Four speeches follow, each Milton's portrait of a kind of evil. Moloch argues for open war, regardless of cost. Belial answers him with the smoothest speech in the poem: things, he says, could always be worse, and given enough time perhaps God's wrath will cool. Milton notes drily that "his tongue / Dropt manna" but his counsel "counselled ignoble ease." Mammon proposes a third way: forget heaven, build Hell into a kingdom worth ruling, dig out its mineral wealth.

Beelzebub rises last and carries Satan's authority. He dismisses the previous speakers and proposes what Satan has already decided in private: not war on heaven but corruption of the new creature God has just made. Take revenge by spoiling what God loves. The plan is adopted. Then the question that breaks the assembly — who will go? The journey through chaos is almost certainly fatal. Silence. No one volunteers. Satan rises and takes the mission himself, magnificent and doomed and conscious of how the magnificence works on the audience.

He flies to the gates of Hell. They are guarded by two figures: a woman from the waist up, a serpent below, with hell-hounds barking from her womb; and a shapeless darkness that rises to oppose him. They are about to fight when the woman cries out — she is his daughter Sin, sprung fully formed from his head when he first conceived rebellion. The dark figure is their son Death. They open the gates and cannot close them again. Satan flies out into chaos and beats upward toward the new world. The book ends with him in sight of it: "this pendent World, in size like a star / Of smallest magnitude close by the moon."