Pandemonium

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˌpændɪˈməʊnɪəm/

Definitions

A state of wild disorder, chaos, and uproar involving many people or things in confused and noisy commotion
a chaotic scene of overwhelming noise, confusion, and uncontrolled activity where all sense of order has completely dissolved
widespread disorder characterized by frenzied commotion, tumultuous noise, and total lack of any organized control

Etymology: In the first book of Paradise Lost the fallen angels dig gold out of a hill in hell, melt it and pour it into moulds. In an hour they raise a building “like a Temple”, with Doric pillars and a roof of fretted gold. It comes up out of the ground, Milton says, “like an Exhalation”. Then the heralds proclaim “A solemn Councel forthwith to be held At Pandæmonium, the high Capital Of Satan and his Peers.” That line, printed in 1667, is the earliest use of the word on record, and popular dictionaries have credited Milton with making the word. The parts are Greek and the ending Latin. The core is “daimōn”, which the Oxford English Dictionary traces to the verb “daiesthai”, to divide. In classical Greek a daimōn was a god or goddess, a divine power, destiny or fate, or the good or evil genius that watched over a family or a person. The OED places the sense of an evil spirit, as a sense of its own, in Hellenistic Greek. In scripture the dark sense came through a second noun, “daimonion”. It is the neuter of an adjective meaning divine or marvellous, used for a divine power or a lesser divine being, and not a diminutive, “little spirit”, though that gloss has found its way into Wikipedia. Socrates said he was guided not by a daimōn but by a daimonion, an inner voice. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, the Septuagint chose “daimonion”, not “daimōn”, for the Hebrew “šēdīm”, the false gods to whom sacrifices were offered. The New Testament uses the same word for the spirits that are cast out. Latin took “daimonion” as “daemonium”, and Apuleius has it in the second century for the spirit Socrates claimed. By the end of that century Tertullian was using it for an evil spirit, and the Vulgate made it the usual word for the demons of scripture. “Pan-”, the other half, is the combining form of Greek “pas”, all. Pandemonium puts it in front of the demons and ends in a Latin “-ium”, which the OED says was probably modelled on “daemonium” itself. Merriam-Webster has read the ending differently, as probably a suffix of place. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary, glossed the word as “Literally, the Place of All the Demons.” Word for word, the parts say all the demons. On the OED’s reading, the sense of a place comes from Milton, who used the word as the name of hell’s capital. Milton himself calls it a capital, and later in the poem “Pandæmonium, Citie and proud seate Of Lucifer”. The first issue of 1667 carried no prose summaries. Samuel Simmons, the printer, added them to a later issue, and according to the Morgan Library he obtained them from Milton. In the Argument to Book I the building is “the Palace of Satan”. For nearly ninety years every use on record meant the place Milton described. Addison in 1713 wrote in the Guardian of a man who “wou’d have a large Piece of Machinery represent the Pan-dæmonium”: the earliest use on record after Milton’s own. In 1755 a pamphleteer wrote that he had “waggishly term’d the Audience my Pandemonium; a Hiss was the most proper Token of Applause”, the earliest figurative use on record. From there the meaning drifted to other places, real and imagined. Swinburne’s Travels Through Spain, in 1779, found that every province “would in turn appear a Paradise, and a Pandaemonium.” Adjectives followed: pandemonian is on record by 1788, pandemoniac from 1793. Lower case first appears on record in 1808, in the magazine Salmagundi’s “a tailor’s pandimonium”, though the capital letter held on long after. In 1813 the Examiner had the Emperor Tiberius writing to the Senate “from his pandæmonium at Capreæ”. Byron in 1816 brought it indoors: “To make a Pandemonium where she dwells, And reign the Hecate of domestic hells.” In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, two years later, a refuge is “as exquisite and divine a retreat as Pandæmonium appeared to the dæmons of hell”. The OED dates the sense now usual, sheer uproar with no place in view, from 1827, and the first citation still has the capital letter. Hardy in 1891 still had the place itself in view, and the OED files his “confusion as of Pandemonium” under Milton’s sense. In 2012 Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony had a section named “Pandemonium”, in acknowledgement of Milton and of Humphrey Jennings, whose anthology “Pandæmonium” Boyle called the “biggest single inspiration” for the ceremony. Jennings’s own note on his title reads: “Pandaemonium is the Palace of All the Devils.”

Synonyms: chaos, uproar, commotion

Antonyms: calm, order