Demogorgon with Ouroboros and Diana (c1590). Woodcut. 35 x 26. Demogorgon is a deity or demon, associated with the underworld and envisaged as a powerful primordial being, whose very name had been taboo. Although often ascribed to Greek mythology, the name probably arises from an unknown copyist's misreading of a commentary by a fourth-century scholar, Lactantius Placidus. The concept itself though can be traced back to the original misread term demiurge. The origins of the name Demogorgon are not entirely clear, though the most prevalent scholarly view now considers it to be a misreading of the Greek based on the manuscript variations in the earliest known explicit reference in Lactantius Placidus. Boccaccio, in his influential Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, cites a now lost work by Theodontius, and that master's acknowledged Byzantine source, Pronapides the Athenian, as authority for the idea that Demogorgon is the antecedent of all the gods. Art historian Jean Seznec concludes that Demogorgon is a grammatical error, become god. The name variants cited by Jahnke include the Latin demoirgon, emoirgon, demogorgona, demogorgon, with the first critical editor Friedrich Lindenbrog having conjectured as the prototype in 1600. Various other theories suggest that the name is derived from a combination of the Greek words daimon, or, less likely ῆ demos, and gorgos or Gorgon, the Ancient Greek monsters first attested in Hesiod's Theogony. Demogorgon is first mentioned in the commentary on Statius's Thebaid often attributed in manuscripts to a Lactantius Placidus. The Lactantius Placidus commentary became the most common medieval commentary on the poem by Statius and is transmitted in most early editions up to 1600. The commentary has been attributed incorrectly to a different Lactantius, the Christian author Lucius Caelius Firmianus Lactantius, even though the commentator appears to have been Mithraic. The name Demogorgon is introduced in a discussion of Thebaid 4.516, which mentionsthe supreme being of the threefold world. In one manuscript, the author says of Statius, Dicit deum Demogorgona summum, cuius scire nomen non licet. Prior to Lactantius, there is no mention of the supposed Demogorgon anywhere by any writer, pagan or Christian. However, as noted above, there are several different manuscript traditions, including one that gives demoirgon, which has been taken by most critical editors to indicate some form of misconstruction of the Greek demiourgon. Jahnke thus restores the text to read He is speaking of the Demiurge, whose name it is not permitted to know. However, this phantom word in one of the manuscript traditions took on a life of its own among later scholars. In the Early Middle Ages, Demogorgon is mentioned in the tenth-century Adnotationes super Lucanum, a series of short notes to Lucan's Pharsalia that are included in the Commenta Bernensia, the Berne Scholia on Lucan. By the late Middle Ages, the reality of a primordial Demogorgon was so well fixed in the European imagination that Demogorgon's son Pan became a bizarre variant reading for Hermes' son Pan in one manuscript tradition of Boccaccio's Genealogia Deorum gentilium, misreading a line in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Boccaccio's Demogorgon is mentioned as a primal god in quite a few Renaissance texts, and impressively glossed Demon-Gorgon, i.e., Terror-Demon or God of the Earth. The French historian and mythographer Jean Seznec, for instance, now determines in Demogorgon an allusion to the Demiurge of Plato's Timaeus. For a remarkable early text identifying Ovid's Demiurge as sovereign Demogorgon, see the paraphrase of Metamorphoses I in Abraham France, The third part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch, sig. A2v. Demogorgon was taken up by Christian writers as a demon of Hell: Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name Of Demogorgon,   John Milton, Paradise Lost II. 966. Note, however, Milton does not refer to the inhabitants of Hell, but of an unformed region where Chaos rules with Night. In Milton's epic poem Satan passes through this region while traveling from Hell to Earth. Demogorgon's name was earlier invoked by Faustus in Scene III of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus when the eponymous Doctor summons Mephistopheles with a Latin incantation. The sixteenth-century Dutch demonologist Johann Weyer described Demogorgon as the master of fate in hell's hierarchy.