Reflections of a Happy Old Man

Balance

2012-01-01T20:33:00.000-05:00

We old-timers (especially if we have heart failure) tend to see our balance getting precarious. Although I've played vigorous tennis 4 or 5 times a week for the last forty years, I've only rarely tipped over; that was when my wife lobbed over my head and I (indiscreetly) peddled backward with my head turned up to follow the ball. My scalp was repaired with several stitches.

But as the years go by my balance seems to worsen. No doctor has ever spoken to me about this, but I found (through the internet) that it's a natural consequence of inactivity.

I'm not inactive; in fact I'm very active, but much of the activity is mental, such as writing this post, so I should say that a diminished balance is a natural consequence of physical inactivity.

But I'm not that either (obviously). I recently came to see that balance requires special care to provide a boost. Balance, mental acuity and physical strength all depend upon practice. Use it or lose it holds true in all three cases (how many other cases? I wonder!)

So I'm practicing my balance, doing things like standing on one leg (how long can you stand on one leg?). Once upon a time I could stand on my head with ease, but that was before ageing 'got to rolling'.

What's Your Attitude

2011-12-31T14:57:00.000-05:00

How do you feel about the old (or euphemistically the elderly? All too often negatively. We don't want to think about getting old; it's not the world we live in. But many of us have a loved one who's old! and we have to think about it. (I'm old, and if you're reading this, you must be aware of that. Think about it.

You may not be aware of the fact that old people are often much happier than you are-- or I was. I retired from salaried work 23 years ago, and for a long time I used to preach the gospel that life begins with retirement. Maybe so, maybe not! Actually it depends upon how much of your life is invested in your job.

I know people (closely!) who dread retirement; they virtually equate it with dying. For me it was otherwise. I worked for bread to put on the table and welcomed the end of 'wage slavery'.

Once a young doctor had to visit an old woman; he asked her how she happened to get in the retirement center ('nursing home'). She explained that her husband had passed after 73 years of marriage. He asked her how things were; she replied it's heaven. He was shocked, but she smiled and "proceeded to describe how she had endured decades in an unhappy marriage with a gruff, verbally abusive man." Now she had her life back, and enjoyed every minute of it.

I can tell you that that sort of life script may be about as common as the kind with 'heavenly' marriages. (I'm happy to report that my marriage belongs to the second category.)

The moral of this story it don't start off feeling sympathetic when you encounter an old man or woman.

Ageing

2011-12-30T13:11:00.002-05:00

For many years I used to say, "this is the best year of my life".
But everything comes to an end.

2012 looms ahead as a stopping point. There will be many challenges; there will be triumphs-- and failures. This is par for the course, but right now with greater intensity than ever before.

Two years ago, when Ellie took up Blake, a great new vitality came into our lives. What had been my (occasional) obsession became a primary interest for us. For two years we have posted on William Blake: Religion and Psychology, one or the other each day (ramhornd.blogspot.com).

That was a new discipline for me; heretofore I did Blake sporadically for a few months and then something else for a few months. But every day!! No way, until two years ago. A salutary development. (It occurred to me that this
might have been the shape of my life, had not ten wartime years intruded over
most of my twenties.)

However this intensive mental activity came at a cost. After an intense two hours doing research I discovered I was sleepy (you might say my brain started getting sluggish). Strangely enough it was much like what happened to me after two intense hours of tennis.

Wow! a Discovery! Intense mental activity and/or physical activity led to a mininution of energy- for one or the other.

For an old man the challenge of this is to learn balanced habits that use the appropriate amount of the two activities-- to go from one to the other. Perhaps this was simple second nature to many people much younger that my (advanced) age, but for me it was a Revelation.

Memory is the greatest problem. Strangely enough a fairly large vocabulary was still in force, but I was frequently guilty of making up a sentence with appropriate words, only to the find the appropriate words forgotten before I got around to writing it; like going to the bathroom for something and forgetten the purpose before I got there.)

Memory is something to fight for. There are in fact two levels: the immediate memory continually diminished, but a (largely) unconscious reservoir exists available under certain circumstances. The challenge is to learn how to use it more consciously. Memory loss is one of the primary concominants of alzheimer's disease and similar disabilities.

How can we learn to remember?

Notes

2010-10-13T13:32:00.002-04:00

Some notes on Blake

HOME
Notes
The Eternal Man; the fallen man; due to rise.

auguries:

God appears, and God is light To those poor souls who dwell in night, But does a human form display To those who dwell in realms of day. &nnbsp; (End of Auguries of Innocence)

Beulah in the Bible was the
href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah%2062:4;&version=9;"
target="-blank">name Isaiah gave to the Holy Land, when it was to be
redeemed. It means married. Blake used it as the place of
rest from the fierce contentions of Eternity.

"Both read the same Bible day and night

But you read black where I read white."

(from The Everlasting Gospel by William Blake)

name="bacon"> We have Blake's Annotations on
Bacon's Essays (erd 620-32), part of which you may read
at
href="http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Bacon/Advert-Touching-Holy-War.html"
target="-blank">this review of Bacon's thought.

Blake's God

Some understanding of Berkeley's thought is a good
preliminary to understanding the shape of Blake's
mature vision of God, which came to him definitively
about 1800.

You can say nothing other than the products of your
mind, which means that an objective God is a complete
unknown; Blake would say there's no such thing:

Mental Things are alone Real what is Calld Corporeal Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place it is in Fallacy & its Existence an Imposture Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool. (From, A Vision of The Last Judgment)

In Blakean theology Jesus is the only God; not the man
named Jesus: he's only a man. No! Blake's Jesus is the
indwelling spirit within the psyche- the fount of
imagination and forgiveness. Jesus is one.

Thus, when the two Great Commandments meld together,
the neighbor we're exhorted to love is the God within
the other. So to love God with all your heart and mind
and soul and strength involves loving God in all the
particulars-- not just your neighbor, but his animals,
insects,

insects, sticks and stones. Nature thus becomes what is groaning in travail; to love and care for it is to love God. "God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men" (MHH plate 16).

Creation This from Blake's Design of the Last Judgment

______________________________________________________________

Daughters of Beulah

In the upper left corner of the Arlington Tempera, behind the sleeping god, nymphs are playing upon musical instruments. To Digby in Symbol and Image in William Blake these were the daughters of Beulah. The picture here accurately represents their role - to attend the couches (like nurses in ICU); with their music they empower man's perception of the archetypal symbols which address the unconscious more directly than words might. The archetypal symbols are the oxygen, the medicines meant to heal the sufferer in Ulro from the 'mind forg'd manacles' of gross materialism; the unconscious offers us better things. (The daughters are mentioned 29 times in Blake's poetry.): Four Zoas Night 1 Page 5 line 33-5: "On all sides within & without the Universal Man The Daughters of Beulah follow sleepers in all their Dreams Creating Spaces lest they fall into Eternal Death." Or this one: Four Zoas Night 8 Page 113 line 32-6: But thou O Universal Humanity who is One Man blessed for Ever Receivest the Integuments woven Rahab beholds the Lamb of God She smites with her knife of flint She destroys her own work Times upon times thinking to destroy the Lamb blessed for Ever He puts off the clothing of blood he redeems the spectres from their bonds He awakes the sleepers in Ulro the Daughters of Beulah praise him They anoint his feet with ointment they wipe them with the hair of their head." Or this, Milton plate 34.20-21 E134: "And the Couches of the Martyrs: & many Daughters of Beulah Accompany them down to the Ulro with soft melodious tears." ______________________________________________________________

Death

Entering the Door of Death (Frontspiece of Jerusalem) The word die is carefully avoided by most of us; when a loved one dies, we say he/she passed away. The question is-- what dies? The Roman Empire died; the British Empire died? But those were not people per se; they were states, conglomerates of materiality. So death is relative-- from what to what? Ellie asked a workmate if he considered himself a body or a spirit; "a body", he said; "a spirit", she said. So what dies? A body or a spirit or both? (In mortal life our bodies are said to actually die (cell by cell) and be renewed every 7 years.) So at the end of mortal life what dies? the body of course, the garment that we acquired when we descended into the Sea of Time and Space and the 'daughters of Enitharmon' began to cut and splice it. When Odysseus (or Luvah) threw the garment back to the sea goddess, he was on his way back to Eternity, where we all go sooner or later. In the French Quarter in N.O. a black friend told me about her dead son; he had had an incurable and painful disease; he came to her and asked her permission to die, which she of course granted. In one of Charles Williams' delightful metaphysical thrillers two characters are especially memorable: a saintly lady fully in tune with the life of the Spirit, and a man who generations before had been hanged; his spirit still hanged around that locale, which happened to be outside her window. She met him there and gave him permission to depart in peace. In the series called William Blake Meets Thomas Paine we witness a conversation that Bill Blake had with his brother, Robert (long deceased), and we're led to believe that this was commonplace in Blake's life. But when once I did descry The Immortal Man that cannot die, Thro' evening shades I haste away To close the labours of my day."(From Gates of Paradise) "Every Death is an improvement in the State of the Departed." (Letter 74 - to Linnell; Erdman 774) By Death Eternal Blake implied descent into mortal life. By Life Eternal he meant return to our Eternal Origin. "But what have you and I learned here in our mortal life? (One Post can do no more than introduce this subject; it has other major ramifications.) ************************************************************** The Divine Vision represented the radiance of the spiritual realm in its ascendance over the material. In the Christian world its primary appearance of course is Jesus. The term appears 48 times in Blake's major poems (The Four Zoas and Jerusalem) according to href="http://www.english.uga.edu/~nhilton/ee/home.html">the Blake concordance. Here is one instance: "For the Divine Lamb Even Jesus who is the Divine Vision.." (Four Zoas [Nt 2], 33.11; E321. Blake used the word divine in many other senses, for example: "For the Divine Lamb Even Jesus who is the Divine Vision" (FZ night ii 33:11). the Divine Family for the communion of saints, the bride of Christ; close in they are a multitude; from afar they are One, Christ. (For this idea he leaned heavily on John 17.) cocoon: Blake developed a vividly graphic image of the priestly cocoon in his major work called Milton (See plate 33). His poetry here is almost invincibly opaque, but the meaning has extreme significance in regard to his pscyhology, his world view, his religious outlook. The Mundane Shell represents fallen man, and particularly the worship of materiality rather than spirit. And more particularly the encrustation of organized religion (and law) over the spirit of humanity. Viewed individually it represents the psyche of a person whose consciousness has not yet evolved form the purely material. Or to look at this from another viewpoint: a child who has lost his innocence. In "Proverbs of Hell" of the target="-blank"> Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake wrote:

"Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of and enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast."

Enion was the consort of the 4th Zoa, Tharmas. He represented the basic physical aspect of Albion. In relation to Carl Jung's four functions Tharmas would be sensation (however among scholars there is some disagreement about that, borne out by a passage found in Milton and again in Jerusalem: "For Four Universes round the Mundane Egg remain Chaotic One to the North; Urthona: One to the South; Urizen: One to the East: Luvah: One to the West, Tharmas; They are the Four Zoas that stood around the Throne Divine". Tharmas and Enion were the parents of Los and Enitharmon. In his larger mythological works, especially The Four Zoas, Blake gave to Enion some of the most intense poetry that he wrote. For an introduction to Tharmas and Enion go to href="chap9.htm#tharmas" target="-blank">Chapter 9.

The term, Death Eternal, means something far different from the conventional intonation. To Blake it meant captivity to the Material for someone completely oblivious to the realm of Spirit.

Female love did not mean for Blake what one might think. Female love is love of materiality, nature, beauty, anything to keep you from spirit. Note that in My Spectre Blake has us agree to give up female love, and a few lines on agree to give up love (means the same thing).

______________________________________________________________ "There is not one Moral Virtue that Jesus Inculcated but Plato & Cicero did Inculcate before him what then did Christ Inculcate. Forgiveness of Sins This alone is the Gospel & this is the Life & Immortality brought to light by Jesus." (Blake's textual notes to The Everlasting Gospel, Erdman 875)

Golgonooza

Furnaces

Golgonooza appears a number of times in Blake's works: 17 times in 4Z; 22 times in Milton, and 22 times in Jerusalem. Interpretations of the term are quite varied, depending to a large degree on the interpreter's spiritual orientation: "Los builded Golgonooza": Los represents the fallen imagination, ie the creative builder of the material realm. Eventually Jerusalem takes the place of Golgonooza.

More blood has been shed in the name of Christ than almost any other source.

Good and Evil The Creation Story in the Bible ascribes man's fall to eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Blake made this a touchstone of his metaphysical system. Look at what Blake said in his Design of the Last Judgment. Good and evil might be considered the fallen equivalent of truth and error The trouble with good and evil is that you value your attitudes, actions, etc. as good and the others' as evil. This has motivated wars through the ages. Blake believed that in Eternity there is no good and evil. Instead truth and error are resolved with "intellectual spears, and long winged arrows of thought" (Jerusalem 34:15 180)

In href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/nph-1965/blake/erdman/erd/@Generic__BookTextView/9599;pt=9683" target="-blank">Milton Eternal Death meant leaving Heaven (as Jesus is reported to have done) to improve the sad situation on Earth.

In Blake's 'Milton' the poet, Milton, "goes to Eternal Death" from his home in heaven, like Jesus had done or Buddha, to rescue "the nations" from the toils of the God of this World (Milton Plate 14:14).

In 1800 at the invitation of the famous poet William Hayley, the Blakes moved to Felpham in Sussex, near the sea. By 1803 they were back in London.

Blake used "the God of this world" 7 times according to the href="http://www.english.uga.edu/~nhilton/ee/home.html"> target=""> Blake concordance. Two of them occur near the end of href="http://users.compaqnet.be/cn127848/blake/collected/chap-08.html" target=""> The Everlasting Gospel (page 523)

mind forg'd manacles: Blake found people, then (and now) uniformly blind to the mental chains that sentenced them to a mediocre existence. He used this href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/asguru/english/03contexts/14williamblake/popups/index_a.shtml" target="">famous term in his Songs of Experience. The term is used in this work repeatedly explaining Blake's approach to his prophetic poetry.

Moment of Grace: The Moment of Grace or the Felpham Moment in this work represents the turning point in Blake's life when he awakened to the riches of Christ. He commemorated it with the poem he called the href"chap4.htm#light">First Vision of Light. As per Friedlander: The young Blake had thought the great struggle in human life was between Luvah and Urizen, energy and its boundaries. By the end of the Felpham period, Blake had come to view the great struggle as being between the visionaries, who saw all men as part of the divine family, and the rationalizing masses, concerned only with personal security.

Mystery The exploitative use of superstition by religious authorities concerned Blake greatly. He called it Mystery Religion.

Thus was the Lamb of God condemnd to Death They naild him upon the tree of Mystery weeping over him And then mocking and then worshipping calling him Lord and King (Four Zoas 8-110[106][1st].3; E379)

Blake found much use of mystery in the Bible in both positive and negative forms. In Revelation the chief enemy is called the Great Whore, Babylon, and Mystery (17:5 (taken from Frye, The Bible as Literature, page 136).

The Four Zoas: a long href="http://www.english.uga.edu/nhilton/Blake/blaketxt1/the_four_zoas.html" target="-blank">poem that served as a kind of first draft to 'Milton' and 'Jerusalem'. Reading this closely one may discern the spiritual growth which Blake went through culminating in the target="-blank">Moment of Grace .

Plato's Myth of the Cave had a big influence on Blake's understanding.

Urizen was one of the four zoas: Broadly speaking the four zoas were href="chap9.htm#tharmas" target="-blank">Tharmas- the body. Urizen- the mind. Los- the imagination Luvah- the feelings

With the "narrow chinks of his cavern" found in Plate 11 of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake of course had an href="http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/greek/philosopher/myth_allegory_cave_plato.html" target="-blank">obvious source.

The Couches of the Dead is a universal symbol representing those who have died to Eternity in order to be born into our fallen world.

The main chance is a term Blake referred to for using his art (without integrity) for commercial purposes.

Oothoon

A quick summary of the political import of Visions of the Daughters of Albion came in a letter from Scholar James Rovira: "I read VDA (only in part) as a critique of US democracy in the light of its violation of democratic ideals (personified by Oothoon) by its legalization of slavery. The forces that would combat slavery are overly passive (Theotormon, God-tormented, conscience in the light of democratic ideals) while the forces of market capitalism that benefit from slavery (Bromion) actively rape/violate these ideals. But, these democratic ideals are still in charge, yet unable to fully give themselves to their ideals, so that the most seriously damaged victim of Bromion's rape was Theotormon, not Oothoon, who is still at least capable of selfless love and who is going to bring forth life." ______________________________________________________________ Blake defined the poetic genius as Principle 1 in target="">All Religions are One:

That the Poetic Genius is the true Man. and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius. which by the Ancients was call'd an Angel and Spirit and Demon. PINCIPLE 2d As all men are alike in outward form, So (and with the same infinite variety) b all are alike in the Poetic Genius. PRINCIPLE 3d No man can think write or speak from his heart, but he must intend truth. Thus all sects of Philosophy are from the Poetic Genius adapted to the weaknesses of every individual. PRINCIPLE 4. As none by traveling over known lands can find out the unknown. So from already acquired knowledge Man could not acquire more. therefore an universal Poetic Genius exists PRINCIPLE. 5. The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call'd the Spirit of Prophecy. PRINCIPLE 6 The Jewish and Christian Testaments are An original derivation from the Poetic Genius. this is necessary from the confined nature of bodily sensation.

He originally ascribed this to Jesus, but then added Urthona and Los (the Lord's representatives in his system).

Rahab: the name Blake applied to the Whore of Babylon of Revelation. However the Bible, and Blake as well, used the name for some more honorable women.

In Blake's conception (as in the Bible) we come into the world with innocence, lose it (See 'Songs of Experience') and hopefully evolve to a higher level of consciousness. Blake and the Bible refer to these two developments as fall and return.

The mundane shell and the 'covering cherub' are two ways Blake described the fallen condition, and organized religion has a prominent place in both myths. Two (relatively) contemporary authors deserve mention: Joseph Chilton Pearce's Crack in the Cosmic Egg deserves study. It looks like an elaborate expansion of Blake's ideas here. I haven't recently determined what if any recognition he gave to Blake, although I found the mundane shell mentioned on page xiv of the 1988 edition. Marcus Borg, on page 114 of his The God We Never Knew, speaks of 'the hatching of the heart', i.e. the conversion of the hard heart to the open heart: "If what is within is to live, the egg must hatch, the shell must break, the heart must open." And he refers us to href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah%2031:31-37;&version=31;" target=-blank">Jeremiah's New Covenant. In Blake's long poem, Milton, the older poet, Milton, imitating his friend, Jesus, comes down from Heaven, and cracks the mundane egg on his way to the center. Marriage is a sacrament in Christian thought, and for many of us it's the primary sacrament of life. But in 19th century British society, we may get the idea (from Dickens or Trollope) that matrimony served commercial rather than religious purposes. Blake violently objected to that (obviously objectionable) custom; it led him to use such phrases as the marriage hearse.

            Rintrah

In Blake's poetry Rintrah is mentioned 48 times, first
in MHH, then in Europe, the Four Zoas, Milton, and
Jerusalem.  He obviously had a special meaning to
Blake, but shades and nuances of the meaning occurred
throughout.

1, At the beginning (and end) of MHH Rintrah roared;
perhaps in his mind at that moment Rintrah represented
the angry young man who would write the revolutionary
material just ahead.  

2. In plates 5 and 8 of Europe Rintrah is pictured as a
mailed knight of the queens of England and France,
daughters of Enitharmon, who entice Rintrah into the
hideous war between the two countries.

3. Rintrah's identity is best seen in The Four Zoas:

And these are the Sons of Los & Enitharmon. Rintrah Palamabron
Theotormon Bromion Antamon Ananton Ozoth Ohana
Sotha Mydon Ellayol Natho Gon Harhath Satan
Har Ochim Ijim Adam Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Dan Naphtali
Gad Asher Issachar Zebulun Joseph Benjamin David Solomon
Paul Constantine Charlemaine Luther Milton
       (FZ8-107.6 Erdman 380) 


4. At the beginning of Milton (Plates 3-7)  we have The Bard's 
Song.  Rintrah has a prominent place here.  Enitharmon - The 
Shadowy Female - has brought forth all Los's Family: Orc, Rintrah,
Palamabron, and finally Satan.  We see these last three in 
Plate 10. Satan is the fiery one; Rintrah is next, and behind
Rintrah is his peaceable brother, Palamabron.

(Elsewhere Blake referred to Satan as a state, not an
individal.  He is the 'state of Error'.)

The Selfhood is one of many super complex metaphors that fill Blake's works. We can see three different levels in which he used it: 1. At the moral level it represents the egocentricity, the term Blake gave for the fallen man, He also calls it the href="#spectre" target="-blank">Spectre and Satan. In modern psychological parlance it has the meaning of the egocentric self as opposed to the Self, which href="http://www.mtnmath.com/whatrh/node112.html" target="-blank">Jung equated with Christ- the Divine Image. 2. The blindness to the spiritual (Eternal) shown by the person (or culture) who depends exclusively upon the material, the life that one lives in the Sea of Time and Space. 3. A necessity to act in the material world. This led to Blake's understanding of the necessity to continually annihilate and continually regenerate the Selfhood. The Selfhood acts in the light of good and evil, chooses good to adhere to and evil to abhor or confront. In Eternity this is no longer necessary, but in this vale of tears there's no other way to interact. Christ gives the Christian work to do, and it must be done in the realm of materiality. Mortal life means materiality (among other things of course). (For an introduction to Self-Annilation look at href="http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/transcription.xq?objectid=milton.d.illbk.46">Plate 40 of Milton. To read this is a difficult assignment, but it abounds in the particular Blake ideas that will help you understand the whole bit.)

For Blake (and before him for Swedenborg) states are the stages or conditions through which we pass in our journey through life. Blake had colorful designations for the various states. For example Satan is the state of Death, Adam, Abraham, and many other biblical figures serve to designate various states we may pass through in time. Jesus was the Divine Humanity, the final and perfect state that we achieve. According to Damon (page 386) "States are stages of error, which the Divine Mercy creates so that the State and not the individual in it shall be blamed." Once you realize that a person is not a state, but in a state, it becomes possible to forgive. Forgiving is the characteristic of the Divine Humanity (Jesus), the one state that is not error. Blake did not consider Adam, Abraham, Moses, etc. to be merely individuals in history. No, they were types of states through which we may pass in our journey upward or downward. Christ is the ultimate state toward which we aspire, a state of forgiveness rather than judgment. The states represent "all that can happen to Man in his pilgrimage of seventy years" (Jer 16:67 E161).

Satan has varying identities in Blake's poems, but href="http://www.pathguy.com/blake/blakemil.txt" target="">Friedlander, describing Blake's Milton indicated Satan was "any person who thinks himself "righteous in his vegetated spectre, holy by following the laws of conventional piety". (Thus he is very close to Jesus and Paul, both of whom considered self-righteous judgment as the Ultimate human evil.) Another word for this is the limit of opacity.

And first he found the Limit of Opacity & namd it Satan In Albions bosom for in every human bosom these limits stand And next he found the Limit of Contraction & namd it Adam While yet those beings were not born nor knew of good or Evil (Four Zoas, Night 4 56:20 Erdman 338)

(From Damon, page 386): "the stars symbolize Reason"; they belong to Urizen; in Eternity they were part of Albion, but with the Fall they fled, and formed the Mundane Shell. Blake also provided a href="primer.htm#stars2" target="">redemptive dimension to stars.

Time and Space are creatures like Adam and Eve. Blake tells us that Los created time and Enitharmon space. The magnificent Arlington Tempera is often called the Sea of Time and Space.

************************************** Water symbolizes matter or the material world. In Genesis God moved over the face of the waters. Here it stands for chaos. Creation was made out of chaos, but in Blake's myth water continuously symbolizes the fall from Eternity into materiality. Narciss fell in love with his watery shadow-- and chose it for his life. Albion did the same in his descent from Eternity into the water of material life.

**************************************************

Notes on Thel: Har is the place of primeval innocence where Thel lived until her unhappy journey into time and space. (Damon p. 174) (Har has an entirely different meaning in the poem, Tiriel.) This figure suggests the Cave of the Nymphs, used by Blake in the Arlington Tempera, a painting portraying man's descent into the Sea of Time and Space (by the "northern bar"). This reference in Thel is an early example of a mythological figure much more extravagantly elaborated at a later date with the painting. (Kathleen Raines' book href="http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/world/modeur/ph-mana.htm">Blake and Tradition gives a good source for interpretation of the Cave of the Nymphs as used by Blake.)

Cave of the Nymphs

The northern and southern gates symbolize the descent of human beings from the Eternal into the material via the northern gate and the return to the Eternal via the southern. The Book of Thel amply demonstrates that where "The eternal gates' terrific Porter lifted the northern bar" and Thel, an eternal being "entered the land of sorrows".

Pity meant to Blake (and perhaps for 18th century English) something entirely different from its general current connotation. It was much closer to compassion than it is in our day. According to the Blake Concordance the word is mentioned 178 times in Blake's Complete Works. But the poem that best defines the meaning that pity had for him is The Divine Image from Songs of Innocence. In Plate 7 of href="http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/transcription.xq?objectid=milton.b.illbk.05">Blake's Milton we read about the "three classes of mortal men": the elect (self-righteous), the redeemed (saved sinners), and the reprobate (prophets harried from place to place).

"Each man is in his Spectre's power until the arrival of that hour when his Humanity awake and cast his Spectre in the lake." (Jerusalem, plate 37 E184)

Ulro: this material world; also called the 'seat of Satan' as in 'the ruler of this present world". Tirzah is one of Blake's bad women; for a short poem where Blake vividly describes his use of the word look at href="http://www.repeatafterus.com/title.php?i=4914" target="">To Tirzah. The word unbelief, used by Blake was much like what Jesus railed about, while using the positive mode. Neither of them meant by unbelief failure to adhere to the intellectual propositions which are supposed to define the Christian faith. For both men belief meant commitment to the reality of a loving God. Ulro This world (in the same sense the term is used in the New Testament); also this vale of tears; also the seat of Satan, and a dread sleep (many such usages in 4Z) Urizen The Zoa who represented Reason. In Blake's thought he became closely related to Nobodaddy, the unforgiving and cruel Old Testament God. In 'Milton' Blake describes the contest between the old god, Urizen and 'Milton' (a surrogate here for Christ). It's a vivid description of the humanizing of God that came to us with the words of Jesus, about the loving heavenly father. Vala The original name of the Four Zoas was Vala. In Blake's mythology she was the consort of Luvah (the god of love). Vala represents woman in general; she is also called Tirzah (purely earthly woman) and Jerusalem (heavenly woman). In Jerusalem, after the Moment of Grace, Blake wrote "The Wheel of Religion". In it he showed once again the difference between false and true Christianity, using almost entirely biblical figures:

    I stood among my valleys of the south,
    And saw a flame of fire, even as a Wheel
    Of fire surrounding all the heavens: it went
    From west to east against the current of
    Creation, and devour'd all things in its loud
    Fury and thundering course round heaven and earth

    By it the Sun was rolled into an orb;
    By it the Moon faded into a globe,
    Travelling thro' the night; for from its dire
    And restless fury Man himself shrunk up
    Into a little root a fathom long.

    And I asked a Watcher and a Holy One
    Its name. He answer'd: "It is the Wheel of Religion."

    I wept and said: "Is this the law of Jesus,
    This terrible devouring sword turning every way?"
    He answer'd: "Jesus died because He strove
    Against the current of this Wheel: its name
    Is Caiaphas, the dark Preacher of Death,
    Of sin, of sorrow, and of punishment,
    Opposing Nature. It is Natural Religion.

    "But Jesus is the bright Preacher of Life,
    Creating Nature from this fiery Law
    By self-denial and Forgiveness of Sin.
    Go, therefore, cast out devils in Christ's name,
    Heal thou the sick of spiritual disease,
    Pity the evil; for thou art not sent
    To smite with terror and with punishments
    Those that are sick, like to the Pharisees,
    Crucifying, and encompassing sea and land,
    For proselytes to tyranny and wrath.

    "But to the Publicans and Harlots go:
    Teach them true happiness, but let no curse
    Go forth out of thy mouth to blight their peace.
    For Hell is open'd to Heaven; thine eyes beheld
    The dungeons burst, and the prisoners set free." 
(Jerusalem, 77)

"Both read the same Bible day and night But you read black where I read white." (from The Everlasting Gospel by William Blake) The Covering Cherub for Blake sums up [indicated] the 27 Christian heavens which shut man out from Eternity (Damon 93) In the Everlasting gospel we read " Was Jesus Born of a Virgin pure..." To appreciate these verses look at The Marriage of Heaven and Earth. Blake developed a vividly graphic image of the priestly cocoon in his major work called Milton (See plate 33). His poetry here is almost invincibly opaque, but the meaning has extreme significance in regard to his pscyhology, his world view, his religious outlook. The Mundane Shell represents fallen man, and particularly the worship of materiality rather than spirit. And more particularly the encrustation of organized religion (and law) over the spirit of humanity. Viewed individually it represents the psyche of a person whose consciousness has not yet evolved form the purely material. Or to look at this from another viewpoint: a child who has lost his innocence.

Science, like everything else fell and then ascended. In the fallen 80% of Blake's myth purely material science, ignoring any spiritual content, was denoted by Bacon, Newton and Locke. However it will be redeemed. In the Last Judgment

Urthona rises from the ruinous walls In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science For intellectual War, the war of swords is departed now, the dark Religions are departed and sweet Science reigns. (Four Zoas Night ix 139:8-10 407)

Thus The Four Zoas end.

In Blake's conception (as in the Bible) we come into the world with innocence, lose it (See 'Songs of Innocence' and hopefully evolve to a higher level of consciousness. Blake and the Bible refer to these two developments as fall and return. The 'mundane shell' and the target="main">'covering cherub' are two ways Blake described the fallen condition, and organized religion has a prominent place in both myths. Two (relatively) contemporary authors deserve mention: Joseph Chilton Pearce's Crack in the Cosmic Egg deserves study. It looks like an elaborate expansion of Blake's ideas here. I haven't recently determined what if any recognition he gave to Blake, although I found the mundane shell mentioned on page xiv of the 1988 edition. Marcus Borg, on page 114 of his The God We Never Knew, speaks of 'the hatching of the heart', i.e. the conversion of the hard heart to the open heart: "If what is within is to live, the egg must hatch, the shell must break, the heart must open." In Blake's long poem, Milton, the older poet, Milton, imitating his friend, Jesus, comes down from Heaven, and cracks the mundane egg on his way to the center.

This last verse quotes href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=50&chapter=2&verse=3&end_verse=5&version=9&context=context" target="-blank">John 2:4 with Jesus speaking as a spiritual rather than a material person. I find it very interesting that at the age of four C.G.Jung is reported to have had a dream in which a gigantic turd fell from the sky and landed on the local cathedral.

For corrections, comment, or inquiry write to

Larry Clayton (lclay3@earthlink.net) 1906 SE 8th St. Ocala FL 34471 ---------------------------------

God

2010-10-11T14:54:00.000-04:00

Thu 08 Oct 2009 04:47:49 PM EDT

HOME

CHAPTER FIVE

God

Thinking as I do that the Creator

of this world is a cruel being, and

being a worshipper of Christ, I have to

say: "the Son! oh how unlike the Father":

First God Almighty comes with a thump on

the head; then J.C. comes with a balm

to heal it.

(Comments on A Vision of the Last Judgment [Erdman 565])
To put it shortly the epigraph says it all. An esoteric alternative Protestantism nurtured Blake as a child. But what he said above aptly expresses the feelings of enormous numbers of people in our society today. "I don't care for the O.T. The N.T. suits me better": there is the understated strong consensus of many today, so extravagantly stated here by William Blake.

We might trace the development of 'God-thought' in the Thinker through the years of his spiritual growth. (For those with time or interest constraints, you may cut to the chase here.)

**************************************************

        The materialistic psychology dominant in Blake's age as well as our own portrays the real and the imaginative as opposites. But in truth there are only images of reality; all reality is mental, that is, mediated into consciousness by the mind. Our immediate experience is a chaos of sense perception from which we all create our own visions of reality. Like Blake "[we] must create our own system or be enslaved by another man's" Jerusalem plate 10, line 21). An authentic person consciously creates his own vision of reality. He chooses to be who he is rather than to borrow his identity from a group or from a charismatic figure.
       Each person's ultimate reality is his God. There is no known objective God (the Russian cosmonauts assured us of that many years ago); there are only images of God. Some of the outstanding images of God that have shaped the life of the world came to us from Moses, Isaiah, Buddha, and Mohammed. Finally we have the vision of Jesus, whom Christians consider to be an incarnation of God. But perhaps equally influential upon the course of history have been the visions of Alexander, Napoleon, and Stalin. Their common vision of the dominion of power is near the opposite pole from that of the gentle Galilean.

       Blake was a total and confirmed visionary, and he evisioned all of the images of God listed above and quite a few others as well. He did this by pursuing his imaginative experience wherever it led. The uncanny freedom with which he followed "the wind where it listeth" led him on a strange and fascinating spiritual journey through some remarkable byways and paths, described in his poetry. At the end of his pilgrimage he came to a definite vision of God as Jesus, the Forgiveness. After almost two centuries it remains one of the highest and best visions of God that Christians have for their inspiration.

       Full understanding of Blake's vision of God depends upon a grasp of his concepts of time and eternity. For Blake the eternal is the realm of the real, while time is the dimension of Plato's mortal cave of phantasmal dreams. Although the eternal is immortal, it does not refer simply to the hereafter; that would be just a phantasmal portion of time stretched out indefinitely. The eternal is the Mental, the Imaginative, the world to which a man may awaken as soon as he realizes that the corporeal, temporal, materialistic framework of reality is an illusion.

       The rationalists of Blake's day with their radical materialism had closed themselves off from the eternal. They had imprisoned themselves in what he called the mundane shell (Milton plate 17 line 16ff). They were exclusively this worldly. Blake perceived that they worshipped the God of this World, no matter what they called him. They had most often called him Jehovah or Jesus. As a young man Blake renamed him Urizen . He spent half a lifetime studying this God of the timebound so he could cast him off and replace him with a more authentic image. Eventually he came to realize that this god's truest name is Satan. He also referred to him as the Selfhood (Jerusalem 5:21-23) and the Spectre.

       Blake tells us that radical materialism with its worship of the God of this World is a state of mind from which a man may awaken at any moment into a realization of the infinite and of his kinship with the Divine Man, Jesus. So these two Gods, the Satan of the World and the Jesus of Eternity remain in continuous opposition in men's minds, and they are best understood in contrast to one another.

       Jesus is the Lord of the Eternal realm, which is imaginative, creative, non-violent, gracious, and above all forgiving and uniting into life. Satan is God of this World, of power, might, law, man against man, separation, finally death. One is Lord of Life, the other the Lord of Death. Satan is actually not a person but a state and will eventually go to his own place, which is a way of saying that Jesus will eventually get him off our backs. This happens at the Last Judgment when all Error is burnt up.

I

The Journey

       We live in a secular age; the reality of God has been largely barred from the consciousness of most people. It is a significant experience for only a minority of the population. Of course many people understand that everyone has a God of some sort--his ultimate concern. But the biblical God, the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is not a live issue in the minds of very many people today. Our foremost modern psychologist, C.G.Jung, quite properly placed God in our unconscious and encouraged us to seek there for him. Jung understood very well Blake's statement that "all deities reside in the human breast" (end of Plate 11 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).

       The secular currents so powerful today were already flowing strongly in the late 18th Century in England. The prevalent deism put God back behind the present scene, a long way behind it. Strictly the Divine Architect, having made the world like a clock, he wound it up and left it to run on its own. He also left the deists to their own devices, and they were happy in this new freedom. They felt that they had learned to control their destinies without divine assistance.

       Blake lived in the midst of these currents, but he opposed them emphatically. Unlike the deists he experienced the immediate presence and pervasive reality of God in his life. He completely filled his poetry and pictures alike with metaphysical images because his mind dwelt almost exclusively upon spiritual themes. The material realm interested him only as a shadow of the eternal. He abhored the materialism by which the deists lived. He might have been happier and more at home in the Middle Ages.

       But he was also a very modern man. He understood better than Jung that an external objective God is an unknown quantity, a projection of unsophisticated minds:

       "Mental things are alone Real....Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the mind of a Fool?" (Vision of the Last Judgment, page 565)

       The only God anyone can know is the image of God projected upon his mind or enclosed in his consciousness. Since time began, men have shared their visions of God with one another. All religions began in this way. The Bible makes most sense as an infinitely fascinating compendium of the visions of God shared by Moses, Isaiah, Paul and the other writers. This unfolding and composite vision has shaped western culture down to the present moment.

       Blake thoroughly surveyed this passing scene, not just the Bible, but every other religious document he could get his hands on, and related them all to his own direct and immediate visions. Over his lifetime he may have taken more liberties with God than any other systematic thinker ever did. He could do this because he so fully realized that all of these visions of God had come forth from human breasts like his own. Moses, Isaiah, and the others were his eternal brothers, and he joyously engaged with them in the eternal war, the intellectual war, which he called the "severe contentions of friendship" (J. 91:17).

i
A Political God
       The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you (Romans 2:24).

       From the beginning Blake realized the close and intimate relationship between a person's image of God and his political views. The authoritarian image in some form finds favor with establishment types, authority figures and all others who perceive their welfare as dependent upon the status quo. These people feel threatened by unrest in the social levels below their own; they look to God, their primary symbol of authority, to control it. They impose this vision of God upon society, and they use their power to control and discourage alternative visions.

       Liberal types in contrast more likely entertain an image of a benevolent God, a God of mercy whose basic activity is not to control the lower classes but to lift them up, nurture the needy, provide for the poor, and protect them from the rapacious powerful.

       Blake found both types of men among the authors of the Bible; they project the two basic images of God side by side. His simplified schema of interpretation assigned to the two types the designations of priest and prophet. The priest upholds the authority of the past, the authority of tradition. The prophet sees a burning bush and hears a new word which judges the authority and tradition of the priest and invokes a new scene, new ideas, new forms, new life.

       Rather obviously Jesus belonged to the prophetic type. He had as a fundamental aim raising our consciousness of the benevolence of God. He incarnated God, and he was supremely benevolent to all but the priestly party. They suppressed him in the flesh, and in his resurrected body they have always attempted to remake him in their image. As he warned, they have used his name to control, suppress, and even exterminate large numbers of people who would not do as they were told. Blake's real mission in life, both before and after his Moment of Grace, was to rescue the world's image of God from the preemption of the priestly party.

       The conventional understanding of God is that he will get you and put you in a dark hot place forever if you don't do exactly as you are told, by his priest of course. In 1741, sixteen years before Blake's birth, a New England divine named Jonathan Edwards wrote and delivered a sermon which he named, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"; historians tell us that it scared literally thousands of people into the Christian church. A similiar vision of God has haunted multitudes before and after Blake even down to the present day. Besides the superstitious fear it has aroused, this understanding of God has contributed to oceans of blood shed by well meaning Christians through the ages.

       Relating this conventional understanding to one of Blake's earliest experiences, his brief career in school yields a distinctive image of God as a Transcendental Schoolmaster. As soon as Blake reached the age of reason, he rejected such a God as radically and uniquivocally as he had rejected the flesh and blood schoolmaster. He saw such an image of God standing at the apex of a pyramid of human unhappiness, of exploitation, oppression, misery and hatred. He saw the divine right of kings and all those who derive their authority from the Crown. He saw their lackey priests extorting tithes from the people, collected by the 18th century equivalent of the IRS, and often giving little in return.

       He saw the emerging divine right of industrialists to work seven year old children fourteen hours a day at hard labor and reward them with a pittance. This image of God was most horrendously embodied in the judges and executioners who disposed of the child criminals. He saw the press gangs with royal authority to capture and drug anyone lacking upper class credentials; their poor victims woke up aboard ship in a state of virtual slavery, and following the brave Roman tradition they learned to fear their officers more than the enemy. Blake felt an intense mystic union with the suffering masses and even the suffering masters: he knew that a prison officer has to be just as sick as the men he guards.

       All these social programs were devised to teach poor devils to do what they were told, and behind them all stood the grim Transcendental Schoolmaster with the god sized birch rod. How could a self respecting person with any human sensitivity be other than an atheist! But Blake was never an atheist. Somehow he had to come to terms with God. If the above were a true representation of God, then he would rebel against God with his last breath. The young Blake identified with Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost: such a God is a sneaking serpent, and Blake would spend his life as the just man raging in the wilds. Schizophrenia might be the normal reaction to certain social conditions.

       The August Schoolmaster exists to enforce good and to prohibit or punish evil. The trouble with good and evil is that in this fallen world they are always defined by the man with the biggest stick. He of course sees himself as the likeness of God, God's earthly representative. So the most oppressive tyrant, the most colossal mass murderer, the most authentic Caesar becomes the Son of Heaven. The list is long and gruesome, and Blake knew his history.

       Although he wouldn't dream of worshipping such a deity, Blake had no hesitancy about calling him God; he simply refused to call him a good God. Wide reading in Oriental, Greek, and Norse mythology had led him to an acquaintance with any number of malevolent gods. In his poetry he used these pagan images to flesh out the God of Wrath whom he found in the Old Testament. For perhaps fifteen years Blake's creative energies were largely expended in a conscious and deliberate overt rebellion against the conventional image of the Old Testament God. During those years he subjected that image to a searching and unique psychological analysis; it fills the pages of the Blake reader.

ii
The Poetic Genius
       When it comes to worship, commitment, ultimate allegiance, a person has basically two choices. He may trust himself to whatever external authority has most forcibly grasped his mind. Or he may put his trust more fundamentally in his own conscience. The first choice, taken by the vast majority of mankind, has been called 'other directed'. "Pastor, tell us what we believe;" that phrase aptly reflects the theological stance of most of the devout. The second choice is largely confined to the prophet, the poet, the creative genius who shapes the thoughts of the rest of us. It's called 'inner directed'. Few men have been more inner directed than Blake. Though he had little impact upon the thoughts of the 18th Century, he may well shape those of the 21st.

       In theology the concept of inner direction bears such names as the Living Word, the protestant principle, the inner light or New Light, and in the mystical tradition the Everlasting Gospel. In his pre-Christian days Blake referred to it as the Poetic Genius. His poetic genius appeared at age four with the face in the window, and more happily with the tree full of angels . Thereafter Blake's poetic genius drew him apart from the general theological views of mankind, dominated as they were by the materialism of the deists and the crass exploitation of the religious establishment. Henceforth he felt a fundamental distrust of convention and a correspondingly intense communion with the inner light.

       The Poetic Genius provides the immediate vision which overthrows or supersedes the existing version of Truth. We have for example the accounts of the burning bush, the "Lord high and lifted up" (Isaiah 6), the fiery chariot with the strange wheels (Ezekiel) We have Stephen's vision of heaven as he was stoned, Paul's experience in the third heaven, John's visions on Patmos. We have the celestial cities of Augustine and Bunyan...and Blake's face in the window. All these immediate visions reformed or recreated or at the least significantly added to man's collective vision of God.

       The poetic genius had little trouble disposing of the king's God. Blake's picture of George sitting in his papal dignity expresses such an immediate and elementary truth that it still does service on dormitory walls where sophomores cope with deans and presidents. The King's God represents the existing version of Truth; Blake's poetic genius will replace it with his own original visions, culminating in the first Vision of Light with Jesus, the Forgiveness.



iii

Early Images of God
       'Songs of Innocence' and 'Thel', both composed shortly before MHH, contain perhaps the most exquisite images of a benevolent God to be found in modern literature. Written by a man of 34, they vividly evoke the faith of a child like mind unsullied by the world. Writing them Blake performed the imaginative feat of a supreme artist able in vision to project his psyche back to the days before the Fall. Actually at this stage of his life Blake already had a keen awareness of the Fall, a mind deeply shadowed by it; but no trace of the shadows appears in these exquisite sacrifices of praise. It's as if with prescience that his art will shortly be submerged in visions of fallen man and a fallen God, he paused for one preliminary glimpse of the Golden Age.

       That pause brought a precious gift to mankind. The faith of the Clod can hardly be improved upon. The God in "The Little Black Boy", not so much in the imagined father as in the spirit of the child, has been a candle in the life of many a hard pressed pilgrim tempted to curse the darkness.

       After 'Songs of Innocence' begin the curses. It may be worthwhile to curse the darkness if thereby we make someone aware of it. This was Blake's aim, like that of most social prophets. Dickens rubs our noses in the darkness over and over, and we're better men for having read him. Like Dicken's novels Blake's poems are full of darkness. From 1790 to 1800 he directed our thoughts to the fallen God whom we worship, who promotes the darkness and calls it light.

       Few or no specimens of humanity would stoop so low as to consign a fellow man to everlasting torment; any Being imagined to do such a thing must be at best subhuman. The worship of such a being is devil worship. In a poem on the French Revolution Blake descended to the crudest vulgarity in trying to put such a theological notion in its rightful place:

            The King awoke on his couch of gold
            As soon as he heard these tidings told
            ...
            Then he swore a great and solemn Oath:
            "To kill the people I am loth,
            "But if they rebel, they must go to hell:
            "They shall have a Priest and a passing bell."
            Then old Nobodaddy aloft
            Farted and belch'd and cough'd,
            And said, "I love hanging and drawing and quartering
            "Every bit as well as war and slaughtering.
            "Damn praying and singing
            "Unless they will bring in
            "The blood of ten thousand by fighting or swinging."

iv
Urizen
       With the conception of Urizen Blake began the most serious stage of his war with the conventional God. In fact his battle with God provided the creative energy for the development of his entire mythology, particularly the series of poems known as the Lambeth books and the first major attempt at an epic, 'The Four Zoas'. 'Milton' and 'Jerusalem' were written after the battle was won.

       The 'Book of Urizen' is at one level a brutal burlesque of the Creation story found in Genesis. More properly it offers an alternative to the biblical story, based upon Neo-platonic metaphysics. Blake took the Gnostic demiurge, something much less than the Supreme Being, and merged it with the Old Testament God into a diabolic parody.

       Tremendous meaning may doubtless be found in this book, the Genesis of Blake's Bible of Hell. Some knowledgeable interpreters see in it a superwise man offering supersubtle insight to the devotees and adepts who have pursued his truth. But a plain man's view suggests that B.U. comes from the pen of an angry young man. Most of us have shut out youthful anger. We pass our days having closed off our consciousness from the horror of life that surrounds us. In that way we can sleep at night and forget that we live in a filthy world, a place where ten year old children hang for trivial crimes and five year olds learn to climb the insides of tall back chimneys. Comparable things are happening in our town today, but we simply don't dwell on those sorts of things; we learn to be positive thinkers.

       But men like Blake and Vincent van Gogh couldn't shut those images out. Van Gogh died in an insane asylum. Blake had a more creative solution; he wrote the 'Book of Urizen'. Someone is finally and ultimately responsible for the horror of the world. He blamed God or rather the image of God projected by his fellow men. Anyone gifted with a real relationship with God has had similar feelings.

       At the deepest level B.U. comes through as a cry of pain: the God who made this black world in which we live in chains has to be a monster. And Blake offers some very imaginative ideas as to how he got that way. He fell from Eternity; he fell before Creation; and then he created an awful mess. Then he gave us laws to live by that shrink us up more and more from what we might be. William Blake is noted for the Divine Vision. But B.U. is the diabolic vision, the Bible of Hell. Before ecstasy there is agony. In B.U. Blake poignantly articulates the darkness before the dawn.

       The really exciting thing about 'The Four Zoas' is the long incubation and eventual birth of Blake's new, positive image of God concurrent with the thorough and definite laying to rest of the old one. These realities become vivid once the reader gains sufficient familiarity with the material to see the underlying currents of spiritual movement. If you like poetry, 4Z contains many beautiful lines interspersed throughout the nine Nights amidst long, bleak desert passages describing fallenness. The beautiful passages mark stirrings of the Spirit. (It has great similarity in fact to the style of Isaiah, who wrote the most beautiful parts of the O.T. surrounded by unrelieved darkness.)

       Follow the speeches of Enion, the primeval mother of Los and Enitharmon. In Night i her children's increasing depravity and her maternal love lead her down into the abyss of Non-entity, in her case an abyss of consciousness. She becomes a disembodied voice sounding a note of reality over the general fallenness as it progressively develops. Her comments throughout the action preserve the feeling of human oneness that will break forth at the darkest hour. In Enion Blake found a new voice expressing a passionate love that laments but doesn't excoriate, and a faith, evolved through suffering, that the Divine Image will come to redeem. These of course are the most creative themes of the Old Testament, slowly evolving out of its generally primitive theology. Enion's speeches at the conclusion of Nights i, ii, and viii are too long to quote here, but they contain some of the most sublime poetry Blake wrote and portend the emergence of the new God of compassion.

       In 4Z Blake elaborated and analyzed the God, Urizen, in the fullest detail; this version contains less heat and more light than we found in B.U. Urizen symbolizes man's thinking faculty; in the primary myth of the Fall he became estranged from his feelings. This story is told at least six times in 4Z. Blake devoted Night ii to Urizen's creation of a rocky, hard, opaque world of mathematical certainty and calculation. Anyone who has spent time on a college campus has met people highly developed intellectually and infantile emotionally. They lack the capacity to express any value more intense than "very interesting". Many of course have denied that value has any meaning. Imagine what kind of world they create, what spiritual climate they live in; there you have Urizen.

       He is a God devoid of true feeling; he has feelings, but they're all false. He continually weeps, like the Old Testament God who wept as he punished people. He builds a world of law, devoid of feeling, devoid of compassion, devoid of humanity. His world is based upon fear of the future, and he attempts to secure himself against it at all costs. Fear defines his character and his actions until the very end of the fallen world. In Night viii Urizen is still fighting life and light. He sets out

...to pervert all the faculties of sense Into their own destruction, if perhaps he might avert His own despair even at the cost of everything that breathes.

       There you find a preview of the God of the superpowers. Their fear has become the guiding principle leading them toward the destruction of "everything that breathes".

       Urizen's initial downfall comes in Night iii. His emanation (in this case wife), Ahania, has followed Enion, the Earth Mother, into the abyss of consciousness. She tries to share with Urizen a level of truth that he finds so unpleasant that he casts her out, and promptly falls himself like Humpty Dumpty. In Ahania's vision we have a psychologically acute and penetrating description of the incipience of a false God. It ranks with the Bible's eloquent pre-psychological denunciations of idolatry, as found for example in Isaiah 40. Blake re-used this passage in 'Jerusalem', attesting its authenticity even on the illumined side of the Divine Vision:

       "Then Man ascended mourning into the splendors of his palace,

Above him rose a Shadow from his wearied intellect

Of living gold, pure, perfect, holy; in white linen he hover'd,

A sweet entrancing self delusion, a wat'ry vision of Man

Soft exulting in existence, all the Man absorbing.

       Man fell upon his face prostrate before the wat'ry shadow,

Saying, "O Lord, whence is this change? thou knowest I am nothing." ...

Idolatrous to his own Shadow, words of Eternity uttering:

"O I am nothing when I enter in judgment with thee.

"If thou withdraw thy breath I die and vanish into Hades;

"If thou dost lay thine hand upon me, behold I am silent;

"If thou withhold thine hand I perish like a fallen leaf.

"O I am nothing, and to nothing must return again.

"If thou withdraw thy breath, behold I am oblivion."

       In this parody of the Psalmist Blake shows us a fundamental truth about man's image of the transcendental God. He doesn't deny the reality of a transcendental God as some of his interpreters have concluded. He denies the truth of man's image of the transcendental God, an entirely different matter.

       He opposes the ascribing of qualities to the Wholly Other. According to Blake when that is done the result is something less than man. Worshipping this sub-human God the worshipper becomes something less than man himself. He represses a portion of his humanity, which Blake here calls Luvah, and that repressed portion falls upon him and afflicts him with boils from head to toe. The penalty for idolatry is brokenness and suffering, consciousness of sin, guilt, division, finitude, envy, the torments of love and jealousy, the whole bit of man's unfortunate fallen circumstances. It's all caused by the false God that man has chosen. Isaiah understood a part of this; he recognized some of the idols of others but not his own. Thomas Altizer, in his book on Blake, rightly took this passage as a critical revelation of the "death of God".

       Man worships a shadow of his wearied intellect. No higher God is possible without the wholeness that Christ brings. Worship of a shadow of our wearied intellect leads to all the false and fatal evils that we visit upon one another from simple vanity to war.



V
Humanism
       With idols no longer possible what's left to worship? The answer depends upon your experience. With all the idols gone the true God remains, for those who can meet him. For others the highest possible is the Human Form, and here Blake settled before he came to see Jesus as God. He began by worshipping the Human Form, the Highest and Best Imaginable, and in 1800 he recognized this Highest and Best in Jesus. In terms of conventional theology Blake was a humanist before he became a commited Christian. In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' he loudly proclaimed his humanism: "God only Acts and Is, in existing beings or Men". And a few pages later:

       The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best: those who envy or calumniate great men hate God; for there is no other God.1

      According to Kathleen Raine it was "the central doctrine of the Swedenborgian New Church that God can only be known in human form". Blake illustrated this with his quatrain at the end of "Auguries of Innocence":

       God Appears and God is Light

       To those poor Souls who dwell in Night,

       But does a Human Form Display

       To those who Dwell in Realms of day.

       Finally in his "Annotations to Berkeley's Siris", which he read about 1820, he wrote "God is Man and exists in us and we in him". He was still a humanist, but his humanism had gained a strong Christian dimension. Blake's argument against the conventional images of God, from beginning to end, hinged upon their sub-human nature. The biblical writers frequently ascribed to their God attitudes and behaviour beneath the moral level of any self respecting human. God cannot be less than man; therefore the appropriate response to such an image is derision, especially in the face of the common credulous awe.

       The spiritually open person, free of the common credulous awe and capable of a clear eyed gaze at the Bible, no longer finds it possible to view all the biblical images as portraying a God worthy of worship. Furthermore when one looks freely at the actions of political and religious leaders of Christendom of the past 2000 years, it becomes clear that they were often worshipping something other than the true God. Finally the actions and attitudes of our contemporaries and even our own point to domination by a vision that is something less than the Highest and Best. In his poetry Blake documents these three observations with voluminous detail. They led to his ultimate evaluation of the universal false God. The name he settled upon is refreshingly biblical and authentic:


        To the Accuser, who is
        The God of this World
        ...
        Tho' thou art Worship'd by the Names Divine
        Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
        The Son of Morn1 in weary Night's decline,
        The Lost Traveller's1 Dream under the Hill.

       Jesus had said it a long time before: "Why call ye me Lord, Lord...."

vi
God of this World
       Who is the God of this World? He is the God of those whose life is based upon the physical senses and centered in material existence, in this world. They provide for themselves now because there is no Other. They use law and power for their own advantage at the expense of others and consider that to be the nature of reality. These are the worshippers of the God of this World. In the end nothing could be more authentically biblical.

       Once he began to focus upon the God of this World, Blake found in the Bible much positive information: he masquerades as an angel of light; he tempts; he accuses. "We do not find anywhere that Satan is accused of sin. He is only accused of Unbelief and thereby drawing man into sin that he may accuse him." Satan is particularly attached to the rulers of the world--economic, political, and ecclesiastical--and they to him. He is "Worshipped as God by the Mighty Ones of the Earth" (Jerusalem 29:18). They naturally regard him as God because their faithfulness to his values and methods has led them to great prosperity.

       But in Satan's kingdom more basic than oppressive power is fear and timidity. Northrup Frye explains: "The morally good man tries to obey an external God instead of bringing out the God in himself. The external God [is] only the shadow of Caesar." Tyranny is only possible because men are willing victims. That's why the flaming rebel has such an important place in the renewal of life .

       Interpreters have greatly misunderstood the role of Satan in Blake's structure of thought because he used the image of the devil to represent two different things. The Satan of 'Paradise Lost' was a flaming rebel against a ridiculous God, and in MHH Blake ironically identified himself with this devil and even claimed that Milton belonged to the devil's party without knowing it.

       But the God of this World is an altogether sinister image. The devils of MHH represent fiery creativity. The God of this World opposes creativity of every sort in favor of rigid obedience to the powers that be. They are his powers. A lineal descendant of Urizen, he claims everything he can touch for Eternal Death.

       Blake's reversal of symbols is admittedly confusing. But then everyone has or should take the freedom to change his values and symbols as he goes through life. Actually in the course of his development as a poet and thinker Blake used 'Satan' with a variety of meanings. The God of this World is a less ambiguous term. It connotes Deceiver, Tempter, Perverter, Accuser, Killer. The God of this World is the God of Eternal Death.

       The third temptation of Jesus in the wilderness was to fall down and worship the God of this World. Had he succumbed, the Jews would have had their political messiah, and the spiritual history of the world would have been different. The story of this temptation is a critical element in Blake's system of thought. He doesn't apply it to the historical Jesus so much; he applies it to the members of Christ.

       When a pilgrim sets out to pursue the narrow path, his primary problem remains the temptation to worship the God of this World. With great interest Blake watched the careers of his fellow men as they met and responded to that moment. 'The Four Zoas', as its biblical superscription suggests, is largely devoted to wrestling against the rulers of the darkness of this world. In CHAPTER ONE we saw how Blake's life may be interpreted in terms of this fundamental psychic and spiritual event.

       The Felpham Moment represented the ultimate level of the problem posed to him. Blake knew that Hayley was his friend and wished him well. But at Felpham he came to realize that life offers us two kinds of friends. "Corporeal friends are spiritual enemies." A corporeal friend may offer you the world and take your soul. Hayley was Blake's corporeal friend; he wanted for him the best that he knew; he wanted to help him make his way in the world!

       Hayley was a worldling; he knew nothing of the Realms of day. His corporeal friendship was eternally dangerous to his protege. As a matter of fact he had sponsored Godwin, before that spiritually oriented poet went crazy. It took Blake a while to work all this out, but when he did, the whole problem of God became clear. The God of this World was clarified, named, cast into the lake, and soon thereafter the Divine Vision came to him with power. We have already quoted Blake's eloquent poetic description of the event:

                   Each man is in his Spectre's power
                   Until the arrival of that Hour
                   When his Humanity awake
                   And cast his Spectre into the lake.

       In the circumstances of the Felpham visit Hayley incarnated to Blake the Spectre, the God of this World--not Hayley the man, but Hayley the spiritual principle who had acted upon Blake at his point of weakness to take his soul. Hayley the man was simply a fellow sufferer whom Blake continued to encourage through the years ahead, but what he had represented in Blake's mind, the smiling worldling, no longer had influence upon Blake's life. The Spectre was cast into the lake.

       The Spectre is the individual internal form of Satan or the God of this World. Another name for him is the Selfhood. He is the internal egocentric principle that causes a man to see himself over against the rest of humanity. In his poem, 'Milton', Blake makes this identity clear with the words of Milton at the conclusion of the "Bard's Song", which has been devoted to an elaborate description of how Satan arises and acts in human life: "I in my Selfhood am that Satan: I am that Evil One!/ He is my Spectre!"

       The Job series shows more eloquently than any words could how the conventional idea of God, a part of a man's psyche, eventually proves to be satanic. Job, a ruler of the world, comes to recognize that his God is satanic, passes through a spiritual death, and is reborn with a clarified vision. That's Job's story and Blake's story and everyman's story.

       The gospel truth reveals that the satanic God of this World, our Spectre, our Selfhood, will die, and the Divine Image in us will rise to meet the true God in the Realms of day. The theology here is a composite of Job and Revelation. Blake's life and work both attest that the way in which the satanic God dies is through our becoming aware of him. Blake strove to do this consciously as an artist through what he called "building Golgonooza", but the Moment of Grace for him as always was not something that he did, but something that happened to him when he had made himself ready.

vii
The Divine Vision
       Throughout this chapter we have followed Blake as he encountered, faced, studied, named, and denounced the false God in the many guises in which he appears to man. This enterprise occupied the first half of his adult life. But during this time he was always aware of something real behind the shadow. As a child he had loved the Lamb:

                 Little Lamb, who made thee?
                 Dost thou know who made thee?
                 Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
                 By the stream and o'er the mead;

                 Gave thee clothing of delight,
                 Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
                 Gave thee such a tender voice
                 Making all the vales rejoice?
                 Little Lamb, who made thee?
                 Dost thou know who made thee?

                 Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
                 Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
                 He is called by thy name,
                 For he calls himself a Lamb.
                 He is meek, and he is mild;
                 He became a little child.
                 I a child, and thou a lamb,
                 We are called by his name.
                 Little Lamb, God bless thee!
                 Little Lamb, God bless thee!

       As a youth Blake's mind came to be overshadowed by the Tyger. Some interpreters believe that at a certain point he began to see Jesus as misguided: in the 'Song of Los' he wrote that Jesus "received a Gospel from wretched Theotormon". Theotormon symbolizes the legalistic repression of impulse. If Blake did turn away from Jesus, it was by no means an uncommon stage of life for a young man.

       Blake always put an ultimate trust in the imaginative power that gave him visions of infinite joy. But at the age of 24 through a failure of consciousness he had chosen a measure of satanic power with a consequent loss of spiritual perception; the Divine Vision faded. There followed the years of struggle with the God of this World, and as we have seen, his experience at Felpham (his "first Vision of Light") led to his definite rejection of the Tempter. In 1803 he returned to London, having prepared himself for an additional grace which shortly fell upon him. In a letter to Hayley dated Oct. 23, 1804 he gave an account of an awesome change that had come into his life:

       "Suddenly on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters."

       It's doubtful that he expected Hayley to understand this fully, but we are eternally indebted to both of them for passing it down to us. It marks in a most objective way the return of the Divine Vision, who had been overshadowed by Blake's preoccupation with the God of this World.

       The progression of Blake's poetry shows the eclipse of Christ through the long struggle of the nineties. Now he proceeded to introduce the Lamb into 4Z with a group of additional lines at strategic places. These images means relatively little to the secular reader, but cause great joy to the Christian.

II

The Destination
       The healing of Los, described in Night vii of The Four Zoas, prepares the way for Christ's coming into history. Night viii tells the story of Jesus: the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection of the spiritual body. It's important to remember that in Blake's mental world and in his poetry these are psychic rather than historical events.1

       Blake had always worshipped the Divine Vision. In his twenty years in the wilderness the Divine Vision dimmed and lost the immediacy which had informed the beautiful poems of Innocence. Kathleen Raine points to a few lines that describe with peculiar luminosity this dimming of the Divine Vision:

And as their eye and ear shrunk,

the heavens shrunk away:

The Divine Vision became

First a burning flame (Moses),

then a column Of fire [the Exodus],

then an awful fiery wheel surrounding

earth and heaven [Ezekiel],

And then a globe of blood wandering distant

in an unknown night [false Christianity].

(Jerusalem 66:40)

       This describes Blake's personal experience and that of Mankind. But at or after Felpham he recovered the Divine Vision and realized that his name is Jesus.

       He spent the rest of his life celebrating the momentous event and the Name and proclaiming its reality in a hundred ways. It had happened to him, and it would happen to the world.

       With the ensuing works of art Blake gives us a portrait of Jesus in many ways original. It may prove to be the most vital portrait of Jesus for the present age.

       The quest for the historical Jesus long ago became a vain enterprise. Every worshipper has endowed the Divine Man with his own highest values, and Blake was no exception. His mature or final portrait of Jesus has four salient features. Three of them expressed convictions that he had held for a lifetime and repeatedly expressed poetically and pictorially. The fourth was a new experience, the touch of grace; it irradiated the first three with glory.

i

Perhaps the most basic feature of Blake's Jesus is the Oneness that he embodied. It's also the most orthodox. Blake was in many ways an unorthodox thinker and theologian, as the preceding pages have shown, but the Oneness of Jesus comes straight out of the New Testament. A wealth of texts demonstrate this; those of the Bible and those of Blake show a profound simultaneity of intention:
The Evangelist John quotes Jesus in his starkest statement of his identity: "I and my Father are One" John 10:30. And later he recorded Jesus' great prayer of intercession for us,

"That they all may be one, as thou Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one is us."

If any one verse in the Bible most clearly expresses Blake's fundamental faith, that's it. Look at Blake's first mention of Jesus in 4Z:

     Then those in Great Eternity met in the Council of God
     ...
     As One Man all the Universal family; and that One Man
     They call Jesus the Christ, and they in him and he in them
     Live in Perfect harmony, in Eden the land of life.
     (The Four Zoas [Nt 1], 21.1-6; E310)

In the total structure of his theological vision Blake has imaginatively answered thoroughly and completely the prayer of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. According to his vision Jesus, the One, comprises the true nature of you and me when we are healed and whole. Once again nothing could be more biblical.
Long before his encounter with Jesus Blake's myth was thoroughly grounded in the Oneness of Man. Albion was One, the Universe. His division was the Fall, and his return to unity the ultimate good. Thus Blake describes Albion, the Universal Man at the very beginning of 4Z:

            Daughter of Beulah, Sing,
        His fall into Division and his Resurrection to Unity:
        His fall into the Generation of decay and death, and his
        Regeneration by the Resurrection from the dead.

That was the shape of the original myth. After Felpham Jesus became the One and Albion became one of his members--and so did Blake. 'Jerusalem' begins with a plate headed by the stark phrase in Greek, "Jesus only", and Blake reports hearing these words from the Saviour:

    I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
    Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
    Lo! we are One, forgiving all Evil, Not seeking recompense.
    Ye are my members....

And near the end of 'Jerusalem':

    He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children,
    One first, in friendship and love, then a Divine Family, and in
         midst
    Jesus will appear....
    But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars, and every
    Particular is a Man, a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus.

Jesus claimed to be one with God and prayed that we might join him in the oneness. Blake's pilgrimage, with his successive visions of God, those he hated as well as those he loved, provides a fascinating example of how a man becomes one with God. To love the true God is to hate all false Gods.

ii

The philosophic garment with which Blake clothed Jesus was his Neo-platonic idealism. The Eternal Jesus whom Blake envisioned and worshipped is radically separated from the Hebrew peasant who lived in the first century. Blake understood that the worship of the historical Jesus had become an insidious form of idolatry, an advanced form of Satanism.
       The priest claims the historical Jesus as his exclusive possession and as the ultimate sanction of his particular form of religious tyranny. He uses the figure first to cow and then to exploit his credulous followers. In this way he denies the indwelling Spirit in himself as well as in his flock. Blake's Jesus, in contrast to the priests', exists not in history but in heaven, which is not a far off never, never land, but a psychic reality.

       The never, never land is a materialistic illusion. The reality of Jesus is eternal rather than material; preoccupation with the material Blake saw clearly as a rejection or refusal of the eternal. In 4Z Jerusalem, the embodiment of the church, responds materialistically to the death of Jesus: "let us build a Sepulcher and worship Death in fear while yet we live." What a powerful commentary on the response of the Church to the Christ event!

       As long as our minds are centered in that particular century, Christ is dead for us. Preoccupied with the corporeal, we fail to discern the (spiritual) body. A few pages later we read that "Jerusalem wept over the Sepulcher two thousand years". Blake means that we Christians have done this under the influence of the established Church, dominated by the materialistic spirit of the age. While Jerusalem weeps over the corporeal body, like Mary Magdalen at the empty tomb, Jesus in his spiritual body stands beside her waiting to be recognized, but this won't happen until we (Jerusalem) awaken from our obsession with the material:

  And Los and Enitharmon builded Jerusalem, weeping
  Over the Sepulcher and over the Crucified body
  Which, to their Phantom Eyes, appear'd still in the Sepulcher;
  But Jesus stood beside them in the spirit....
  (FZ9-117.1-4;   E386|)

The Eternal Man, both First and Second Adam, had God (Spirit) for father and Earth (Clay, Matter) for mother. Blake's profound allegiance to this traditional symbolism led to what many have perceived as a savage attack on Jesus' mother. The attack was savage, but the object of Blake's savagery was not Mary herself but the veneration of Mary, which he could only see as a reversion to Nature Worship and the fertility cults. He understood the veneration of Mary as an alternative to the Living Christ, a direct rival in fact of true Christianity.
This background helps one to understand the psychic meaning of the "Visions of Elohim Jehovah" concerning Joseph and Mary found on Plate 61 of 'Jerusalem'. Too lengthy to quote here, it gives the clearest picture of Blake's feelings about the corporeal ancestry of Christ. A brief but cogent statement of the same thing appears in 'The Everlasting Gospel':

iiia

As soon as people attempt to frame Christianity within rules and fit it into a prescribed law and order, it stops being Christianity. There is a general failure to understand that Christians are handed over to the Holy Ghost.... Where God's Spirit is, there freedom must be; there Moses must keep silent, all laws withdraw, and let no one be so bold as to prescribe law, rules, order, goals, and measures to the Holy Ghost, nor attempt to reach, govern, and lead those who belong to him.
All his life Blake had an implacable hatred of law, which he equated with coercion or hindering of others; to him that was the only sin. Consequently Blake's Jesus was a thorough going antinomian. Perhaps his most extreme expression of this occurs in MHH, written before his conversion:

   If Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to
   love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has
   given his sanction to the law of the ten
   commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so
   mock the sabbath's God? murder those who were
   murder'd because of him? turn away the law from the
   woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others
   to support him?  bear false witness when he omitted
   making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray'd
   for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off
   the dust of their feet against such as refused to
   lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without
   breaking these ten commandments.  Jesus was all
   virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.

That's the proud, tongue in cheek, announcement of a young man not yet marked by the suffering of life. As he matured, his language became more moderate, but his attitude remained substantially the same. Blake hates the law, and his Jesus forgives the lawbreaker. The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
       Law is an expression of authority. Life presents to us two kinds of authority: spiritual authority or God and political authority, his worldly shadow. Blake consumed his early years in rebellion against the shadow. Then at age 43 he met God and was able to submit to and affirm the true authority.

       Some means of coercion characterizes all forms of political authority; ecclesiastical authority is no exception. Blake temperamentally renounced all forms of political authority; he felt that they were satanic, based on coercion and fear and earthly power. Political authority is the authority of this world, and he had no use for it.

       In contrast spiritual authority as Blake experienced it is the exercise of the purest form of love with an absence of any sort of constraint. The release from constraint by the active good will calls forth the Divine Image from the dark sepulcher or cave of corporeal life. Blake had uniquely experienced this spiritual authority as a child; he rediscovered it in the experience which he understood as Self-annihilation or Forgiveness.

       Henceforth for him this was the basic and intimate character and quality of Jesus. This was the good news. In 'Milton' the old antinomian made his commitment to the law of self giving love, referring to it as the "Universal Dictate". A free Blakean translation of John 3.16 with a touch of Philippians 2 added might read: God so forgave the world that he annihilated his transcendent Deity and united himself through a corporeal sepulcher with sinful, materialistic man to lift us up to Eternity. Here is the ultimate of spiritual authority, and those who meet Jesus begin to exercise it in the way that he did.

       Although Blake did not often use the conventional Christian symbolism of the cross, after his conversion he did believe from the depths that by dying for one another we live eternally:

   Jesus said: "Wouldest thou love one who never died
   For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee?
   And if God dieth not for Man and giveth not himself
   Eternally for Man, Man could not exist; for Man is Love
   As God is Love; every kindness to another is a little Death
   In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood.
   (Jerusalem, 96.23ff; E256)

Freedom from materialism and from the law are the philosophic and moral coloring which Blake gave to his portrait of Jesus the One. In this way he accomodated his new vision of God to his existing value structure.

iv

But the fourth feature of Jesus came into Blake's consciousness as a new experience. It came from Beyond. That is to say it was not an inward expression of Blake's psyche; it came like the Son of God who had joined the three friends in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace. It wasn't something he thought of; it was something that happened to him.
       It was the experience of forgiveness and self-annihilation, which are two sides of the same coin. No one forgives until he has found the grace to annihilate at least momentarily the law bound accusing spectre which is his Selfhood. And this is only possible as an act of the Imagination, which is eternal, which is Christ. Whenever you successfully annihilate your old self to the point of truly forgiving another, the eternal Christ is alive and at work in your soul. In fact it is he who does it. He is in you, and you are in him; that's eternal life.

       Reduced to its barest essential that's what Jesus finally came to mean for Blake. The only unique thing about the man of Nazareth was that he taught forgiveness of one's enemies. In this sense he incarnated God. God is love, is forgiveness. "If Morality was Christianity, Socrates was the Saviour." Unlike Socrates Jesus was a man in whom God dwelt through his vision and his acts of forgiveness.

       The significance of the resurrection lies in the coming to life of Forgiveness, Jesus, in you and me. In this way we defeat death.

  There is not one Moral Virtue that Jesus Inculcated but Plato
  and Cicero did Inculcate before him; what then did Christ
  Inculcate?  Forgiveness of Sins.  This alone is the Gospel,
  and this is the Life and Immortality brought to light by Jesus,
  Even the Covenant of Jehovah, which is This:  If you forgive
  one another your Trespasses, so shall Jehovah forgive you,
  That he himself may dwell among you; but if you Avenge, you
  Murder the Divine Image, and he cannot dwell among you; because
  you Murder him he arises again, and you deny that he is Arisen,
  and are blind to Spirit.
  (Textual note for EG; E875)

       It's quite a trick (or gift) to go from time to eternity.



       **************************************************

Notes
Realms of Day:

God appears, and God is light

To those poor souls who dwell in night,

But does a human form display

To those who dwell in realms of day.

        (End of Auguries of Innocence)

       The Divine Vision represented the radiance of the spiritual realm in its ascendance over the material. In the Christian world its primary appearance of course is Jesus.

       The term appears 48 times in Blake's major poems (The Four Zoas and Jerusalem) according to the Blake concordance. Here is one instance: "For the Divine Lamb Even Jesus who is the Divine Vision.." (Four Zoas [Nt 2], 33.11; E321.

Blake used the word divine in many other senses:

the Divine Image, another name for Christ:

"For the Divine Lamb Even Jesus who is the Divine Vision" (FZ night ii 33:11).

the Divine Family for the communion of saints, the bride of Christ; close in they are a multitude; from afar they are One, Christ. (For this idea he leaned heavily on John 17.) line

       In Blake's 'Milton' the poet, Milton, "goes to Eternal Death" from his home in heaven, like Jesus had done or Buddha, to rescue "the nations" from the toils of the God of this World (Milton Plate 14:14).

       I find it very interesting that at the age of four C.G.Jung is reported to have had a dream in which a gigantic turd fell from the sky and landed on the local cathedral.

In 1800 at the invitation of the famous poet William Hayley, the Blakes moved to Felpham in Sussex, near the sea. By 1803 they were back in London.

Blake used "the God of this world" 7 times according to the Blake concordance. Two of them occur near the end of The Everlasting Gospel (page 523)

More blood has been shed in the name of Christ than almost any other source.

Urizen was one of the four zoas:

        Broadly speaking the four zoas were

     Tharmas- the body.

      Urizen- the mind.

      Los- the imagination

      Luvah- the feelings

       The Selfhood is one of many super complex metaphors that fill Blake's works. We can see three different levels in which he used it:

       1. At the moral level it represents the egocentricity, the term Blake gave for the fallen man, He also calls it the Spectre and Satan. In modern psychological parlance it has the meaning of the egocentric self as opposed to the Self, which Jung equated with Christ- the Divine Image.

       2. The blindness to the spiritual (Eternal) shown by the person (or culture) who depends exclusively upon the material, the life that one lives in the Sea of Time and Space.

       3. A necessity to act in the material world. This led to Blake's understanding of the necessity to continually annihilate and continually regenerate the Selfhood. The Selfhood acts in the light of good and evil, chooses good to adhere to and evil to abhor or confront. In Eternity this is no longer necessary, but in this vale of tears there's no other way to interact.

       Christ gives the Christian work to do, and it must be done in the realm of materiality. Mortal life means materiality (among other things of course).

       (For an introduction to Self-Annilation look at Plate 40 of Milton. To read this is a difficult assignment, but it abounds in the particular Blake ideas that will help you understand the whole bit.)

"Each man is in his Spectre's power

until the arrival of that hour

when his Humanity awake

and cast his Spectre in the lake." (Jerusalem)

chap9

2010-10-09T16:25:00.000-04:00

Tue 23 Mar 2010 10:10:20 AM EDT

CHAPTER Nine

Myth

(HOME)

p>

Blake was a highly symbolic poet (and painter); to understand
much of his thought requires acquaintance with a
body of symbols that go back to the dawn of
civilization, and up to the 19th century. In an age
when only the material seemed to matter Blake was (and
continues to be) highly opaque to the pure materialist. Such a
person will find most of Blake's ideas meaningless.



But at the deepest level his ideas are the veritable
stuff of life: love and hate, good and evil, life and
death, and many ideas with urgent meaning. A high
proportion of people prefer to turn aside from these
questions, but you can be sure that their unconscious
is full of them.

       Above all
Blake is about matter and spirit, at the great dividing
line: do you see yourself primarily as a body or as spirit?


Begin with the conclusion, to be supported by
an overwhelming body of evidence stretching from
Heraclitus in the 6th century
BC to the present:


Our mortal life is a vale of tears to which we have
lapsed from Eternity and from which we will (may?)
eventually escape back into the Higher Realm. This
myth conforms very closely to the Gnostics, the Platonists,
and of course most of Eastern Religion. In the
Christian tradition one can find vestiges of it in many
of the mystics, notably Meister Eckhart, in Mexican
folk culture and in fact universally.


The western mind revolts from this "never-never land"
at least on the conscious level, but Freud, Jung, and
many other psychologists find strong evidence for
it in the unconscious. At this point many readers may
dismiss Blake's myth as not worth their attention.



The select few who remain may rightfully expect an
entirely new world of grace and enchantment to open
before their minds. The biblically oriented may
perceive that all Blake's poetic and artistic work fits
into a scheme of cosmic/psychic meaning; closely
following the Bible it describes the pattern of
Paradise, the Fall, a gradual redemption, and the final
Rapture.


Understanding Blake's myth can be expedited by the
study of Blake's women.

A most significant key to Blake's symbolism came to
light only in 1947 when
Arlington Court was bequeathed to the

British National Trust. Among the furnishings there
was
a large tempera by Blake, called alternatively The Sea
of Time and Space or The Cave of the Nymphs. This
treasure had been hidden from public eyes for a century.


(Most of us are unlikely to see the original, but
Blake and Antiquity by
Kathleen Raine offers several glimpses of the picture
with a detailed account of the symbols it contains.
There is no better way to begin an understanding of
Blake at the deeper level than to read carefully and
study this small and accessible book.)


The picture contains the essential symbolism of Blake's
myth; the theme goes back to
Homer, then to Plato and Porphyry. (To
understand Blake's myth one would be well advised to
study this link with care--at least the first part of
Taylor's article.)


Blake and Taylor were approximately the same age and
as young men close friends. Many people think that Taylor
introduced Blake to the Platonic and Neoplatonic
traditions. It seems certain that Taylor's
On the Homeric Cave of the Nymphs deeply
influenced the painting of the Arlington Tempera. It
also introduced a great number of
the most common symbols used in Blake's myth;
they were used over and over
throughout Blake's work.


Another good introduction to Blake's myth is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It comes from an
angry young man pouring his scorn on the conventions that
cripple us; the language is pungent, the words are pointed,
provocative, and outrageous.


A conventional person will find this whole work offensive
and repulsive, but the young person at the stage of life
where he's ready to kick over the traces, is quickly
attracted-- if he has enough wit to understand irony and
not take everything at face value.

       We might call it an ironic satire.
In 1789 Blake was 32, at the height of his physical
(though perhaps not mental) powers. He had experienced
the Divine Vision.


He knew it was meant for mankind, but so far limited to
Jesus and a few others. But with the advent of the
French Revolution he foresaw its spread throughout the
world. (Of course in that he was soon doomed to
disappointment-- with the appearance of Madame
Guillotine.) Nevertheless with a peak of spiritual
exuberance he proceeded to announce the coming New Age:

The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell. For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.... If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. (Plate 14)

       For this gem Blake drew upon Genesis and Plato.
       Blake knew that the Divine Vision depended upon your ability to avert your eyes and attention from the material and to focus upon the Spiritual, the Eternal, which can only dwell in the Imagination (for Blake the Imagination was everything!). The society of Blake's day uniformly failed to do that, as does ours! Blake desperately, emphatically, and continuously endeavoured to awaken us to a spiritual consciousness, to break the 'mind forg'd manacles.
       Pursuant to this aim:

How do you know but every bird that cuts the air Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five? (Plate 7; E35)

And look at Plate 13:

I then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he answered. the desire of raising other men into a perception of the Infinite. (E39|

Back in 1788 with There is No Natural Religion he had disposed of a sense-based consciousness as any kind of arbiter of the meaning of life:

Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception. He percieves more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover.

       Look at Section VII of NNR. Reason or the ratio are his terms for comfining one's mental activity to the senses. And he thought less and less of it as he grew older. In notes on Vision of the Last Judgment he wrote:        "I assert for myself that I do not behold the Outward Creation and that to me it is hindrance and not Action it is as the Dirt upon my feet No part of Me.        "What it will be Question'd When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty."
       On MHH (Plate 16 Blake tells us about the prolific (prophetic types, creative people who grasp the Eternal) and the devouring (those who worship the created good). Of course he counted himself among the prolific. Middleton Murry has pointed out that in this moment of the everlasting 'good-and-evil' in which we live Blake may have projected the 'evil' upon the public who had uniformly ignored him. Murry suggested that it was a necessary "moment in his life".
       If that be true, we have the record of the moment when Blake "came to himself" to the point where he confessed that his Selfhood continued to dominate him. He eventually came to realize that one cannot operate in the Sea of Time and Space without the Selfhood; thus he faced the necessity to continually annihilate and regenerate it with his alternation between Heaven and this vale of tears in which we live. (As Christians understand, the selfhood is brought into subjection and becomes the servant of the Self (Christ)).
       In Plate 24 he promised to the world the Bible of Hell. John Middleton Murry described it as follows:
The first book of these, The Book of Urizen , is to a large degree a parody of Genesis. The Book of Ahania corresponds precisely to Exodus. The third book is The Book of Los (1795).
       MHH was prior to Blake's myth proper, like a preamble or preface. It defines ideas and terms that are to be understood as the myth evolves, a special language you have to learn to get into the major works (The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. (A detailed treatment of Jerusalem concludes Chapter Eight.)

**************************************************
       Many people have called William Blake unique among English poets as the creator of a complete mythology. In a standard dictionary "without foundation in fact" appears as the fifth meaning of 'mythical', but this is probably what the term conveys in common parlance. Therefore we must begin our study of Blake's myth by raising our consciousness of the word. 'Logos', 'myth', 'epic'--these three words have a common root. In literary and theological language myths are statements about the non-material ultimate. Some people of course avoid the non-material, considering it to be "without foundation in fact"; it's doubtful that any such reader has endured to this point of our study.
       Blake considered the non-material to be the real; his art centered around the endeavour to express the reality of the non-material. The meaning of his entire artistic enterprise we may call his myth. His object was to fit all of experience into a total framework of meaning that will inform life and "to raise other people to a perception of the Infinite". Our object is to grasp that total framework; once we do that, we have a myth of meaning.
       With his story of the Prodigal Son Jesus gave us a personal paradigm of the history of the Chosen People and of the Human Race. A striking modern analogy, although not Blakean per se, is provided by the career of alcoholism: progressive deterioration until the sufferer hits bottom, followed by recovery. Blake did use as a recurring motif the story of Lazarus found in the Gospel of John. But the primary paradigm of this myth is the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ. However Blake did not express this, probably did not fully realize it, until 1800.
       Chapter Nine illustrates the application of this fundamental myth in Blake's major poetic works. The development of Blake's epic will be traced through the various stages of his spiritual journey. In essence it's the same journey we all take; you could call it the history of Man. Blake called it the Circle of Destiny in Night 1 of The Four Zoas.

If you want to skip ahead go to: The Minor Prophetic Works or the Major Prophecies The Four Zoas Milton Jerusalem

i

The Book of Urizen

       We find the earliest organized statement of Blake's myth in a medium sized poem written in 1794. The Book of Urizen served as a prototype for 'The Four Zoas', which was to follow. It contains among other things a parody of Genesis. Blake found the orthodox doctrine of creation unsatisfying, as many people have to this day, so he set out to present an alternative. He followed 'Paradise Lost' and the Gnostics in placing the Fall before Creation.
       In his myth the Fall of Man involved a fall in part of the divine nature and led to the creation of a fallen world. Such a Creation Story represents a sophistication of the elemental biblical one. P.L. is an obvious recreation of the Bible story, and B.U. is a recreation of P.L., beginning as a simple inversion.
       The doctrine of contraries, which we found in MHH, appears in B.U. in the form of two Eternals, Urizen and Los. The poem develops their careers in nine chapters. Following closely some of the Gnostic texts Urizen separates from the other Eternals, writes the Book of Brass, and declares himself God, whereupon he is shut out of Eternity and Los appointed his watchman (Chapters 1-3). Los confines Urizen with the limits of time and space and in "seven ages of dismal woe" binds him down into the five shriveled senses of the human body (Chapter 4).
       This frightful condition leads Los to pity, which divides his soul and results in the separation of his emanation, Enitharmon. Eternity shudders at this further breakup of Man into the sexual contraries. Even more shocking to the Eternals, Los begets his likeness on his own divided image. The Eternals shut out this fallenness from Eden, and Los becomes blind to Eternity (Chapter 6)Section 10. Los binds his son, Orc, with the Chain of Jealousy. Urizen explores his dens, discovers that no one can obey or keep his iron laws for one minute and that life lives upon death.
       There in barest outline is 'The Book of Urizen'. Volumes have been written to interpret it. At this point we note that Urizen, Orc (also called Luvah in later works), and Los emerge as the three principles of the psyche. In Jungian terms we would call them Reason, Feeling, and Intuition. With the addition of Tharmas, the body or Instinct, they make up the four Zoas of the complete myth. B.U. is the earliest sketch of their relationships, which form the primary subject matter of Blake's evolving myth until the critical moment when Jesus became All and Jerusalem his Bride.
       Keep in mind that here, as in later writings, Blake's poetry has many levels. We are especially interested in the cosmic and psychological levels, and the most compelling dimension of the psychological is the autobiographical. In B.U. as in all the prophecies Blake tells us a great deal about himself. He lived intensely in the spiritual realm; this means that visions, motifs, attitudes come and go with great rapidity. The poetry reveals to us the course of his life. At the same time sober reflection on his biography casts light on the dynamic evolution of the myth. The student might spend time with B.U. before tackling 4Z, for it gives in outline form much of the action of the larger poem. However Urizen is hard to understand, written before the complete vision o Blake's myth had crystallized in his mind; one might question the value to spending much time on this early work.

ii

The Four Zoas

Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity Cannot exist but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden The Universal Man: To Whom be Glory Evermore Amen.

(For the simplest description of the four zoas together with some other elementary definitions go to the Tate Museum Blake Fact File.)
       Blake writes about himself, about us, about the world- all of one piece.

       (If you want to go straight to the mature myth, you might pass up this work also for the time being, unless, that is, you're prepared to give Blake a major intellectual effort over a period of time. The Four Zoas is a sort of notebook or rough draft of the large finished works that Blake produced in his mature years: Milton and Jerusalem. Perhaps the best excuse to spend time on 4Z must be for someone who has become well acquainted with them; such a person will likely be interested in how they came about. You may wish to proceed to the next section. )
       If you ever read the Book of Isaiah, you find pages and pages of indictments, excoriations, judgments on Israel as default in every moral virtue and almost surely headed for dire punishment.
       But interspersed in the midst of all this gloom you will discover a page here and there of the most ethereal beauty, warmth, love and promise. (This is most apt to appear in the midst of one of God's dire punishments, as comfort for a downtrodden and suffering people. (comfort ye, comfort ye my people for example.)
       Such is The Four Zoas of William Blake, the prophet, interminably cataloging the misteps, the failures, the fallenness of Albion (the universal man) and his various separated parts, but always with the golden chain of progress.

I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven's gate Built in Jerusalem's wall. Lest the state calld Luvah should cease, the Divine Vision Walked in robes of blood till he who slept should awake. Thus were the stars of heaven created like a golden chain.

       Many a musical masterwork on its initial performance has met a cold reception. In the same way the taste for many foods grows with experience; young children often reject what their parents keenly enjoy; in due course they may develop a taste for what they at first found exotic and repulsive.
       4Z is a very exotic masterpiece and most definitely an acquired taste. The reader initially encounters an appalling mass of strange ideas and much that appears to be sheer gibberish. But with perseverance the strange ideas become familiar bit by bit, and the gibberish clarifies into some of the most exalted thought forms of the human mind. To the seasoned reader 4Z is a treasure house of imaginative delights. Or call it a mine that releases its gold to the pertinacious. The same could be said of the Bible.
       Blake wrote the poem over a period of years while his mind and spirit were rapidly developing and changing. It began as the story of Vala, the incarnation of the Female Will. Later it became an account of cosmic and psychic history written in terms of the four Giant Forms--their breakup and struggle for dominion. At Blake's spiritual crisis this seed bed gave birth to Jesus and Jerusalem, his bride. Blake then made an attempt to rewrite 4Z to reflect his new spiritual orientation, but after a while he gave up. 4Z was aborted because Blake's world had fundamentally changed, and he was ready to start over. After many years of looking for the New Age he had become a New Man. The new man wrote Milton and Jerusalem using 4Z as a quarry. 4Z is fascinating in its own right, although unfinished, but most significant as a platform from which to rise to the ethereal glory of the mature poems.
       Focusing on The Four Zoas Milton Percival, who wrote William Blake's Circle of Destiny, tells us that ten characters make up his myth: Two Albions (man), the Eternal One and the One who fell asleep down here in this vale of tears; Four Zoas (Urizen, Luvah, Los, and Tharmas) and their feminine parts (Ahania, Vala, Enitharman, and Enion)

Albion

       The first four nights of this aborted masterpiece recount the fall of each of the four Zoas: Tharmas, the body; Luvah, the feelings; Urizen, the mind; and finally Urthona (Los), the imagination or spirit. These four steps in the fall of Man contain a wealth of rich detail, but one central event Blake described repeatedly in the words of various characters: Urizen and Luvah (Mind and Feeling) struggle for dominion over the sleeping man, Albion. Luvah seizes Urizen's steeds of light and mounts into the sky. Urizen retreats into the north, the rightful place of Urthona, the imagination. These mistakes lead to a long series of cataclysmic disasters that condemn mankind to his fallen condition. For six nights we read an almost unrelieved account of the Fall; we read about falling, about fallenness, described in voluminous detail in a hundred ways. Blake felt intensely that we have come a long, long way from the Garden, and he explored with exceeding minuteness every step of the dismal journey, down and out. (You might notice that as extensive as this negative mood is, it closely resembles the Old Testament, a great deal of which consists of flagellations of Israel by the prophets.)
       To begin our orientation to the poem look closely at the central event of the Fall. Blake put it in the mouths of several characters and each one has his or her own particular slant. The reader has to decide for himself whose account to believe. This may depend upon the reader as much as it does upon Blake.
       The earliest description of the central event comes in the words of Enitharmon, a notoriously untrustworthy character at this point; we may call her the queen of fallen space. In a conversation with her consort, Los, the prophetic boy, she gives her interpretation of the Fall:

Hear! I will sing a Song of Death! it is a Song of Vala! The Fallen Man takes his repose, Urizen sleeps in the porch, Luvah and Vala wake and fly up from the Human Heart Into the brain from thence; upon the pillow Vala slumber'd, And Luvah siez'd the Horses of Light and rose into the Chariot of Day. Sweet laughter siez'd me in my sleep....

       Always fiercely eclectic, Blake has gathered his symbols here from a number of sources into a new creation: sleeping man equals fallen man living in darkness; this most general symbol fills the New Testament. For example, "Awake thou that sleepest, and Christ shall give thee light". We live by the light of reason (not always Christ's light!). Urizen, the Sun God, must be asleep to allow Luvah, like the Greek adolescent, Phaethon, to seize his Horses of Light and rise into the Chariot of Day. Zeus struck Phaethon down with a thunderbolt. In Night ii we find Urizen casting Luvah into the furnaces of affliction, where there is much heat but no light. What was once eternal delight has become unmitigated hell.
       Luvah and Vala personify the masculine and feminine dimensions of feeling, and separated from Luvah Vala becomes the goddess of fallen nature. Luvah's seizure of the sun and Vala's dalliance on the pillow express in different ways the same event. The Prince of Love is bound to get his wings scorched, and the sleeping Albion is rather foolish to allow this to happen; he has lost his head over a part of himself.
       Blake used this double event to say many things to us at many levels. Fundamentally Blake is saying that Man has lost his heavenly wholeness (which he calls the Divine Image) and begun to worship the material, a relatively insignificant part of himself. In his dream of Vala he turns his back upon the Divine Vision. The former is Eternal Death and the latter Eternal Life. The dalliance of Albion with Vala leads to the Eternal Death (fallenness) that we read about in the first six nights. Blake described it symbolically in many ways, for example, "to converse in the wilds of Newton and Locke". We find here Blake's primary dialectic, between eternal vision and fallen materialism.
       Other accounts of this decisive event occur at various places throughout the poem. The most definitive is that of Ahania. Her dream relates the central event, the primary fall, to an idolatrous worship; just so Blake evaluated organized religion (See CHAPTER SEVEN). Albion's worship of his shadow has two immediate consequences: he breaks out with the boils of Job, a biblical symbol of the Fall of Mankind, and he exiles Luvah and Vala from their rightful place in the psychic economy.
       This central event of the Fall gives the key to the meaning of 'The Four Zoas'. Before we proceed with the outline of the poem, we need to look at one other central fact: the identity of Los, the fourth Zoa (in Eternity called Urthona). Whereas the central event gives the key to six thousand years of fallenness, the identity of Los gives the key to redemption. This becomes clear in the end when we read about Jesus, the Imagination, but from the beginning we should be aware that Los is the fourth who makes Man whole. Blake derived the first three Zoas in part from Daniel's three friends who were cast into the fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar. Los was the fourth, whom the king saw walking in the furnace "like the Son of God". Like the other Zoas Los has a chequered career, but he is always moving toward this ultimately revealed identity. Near the end of 'Jerusalem' Blake put the finishing touches on Los's Eternal identity with these words:

Therefore the Sons of Eden praise Urthona's Spectre in songs, Because he kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble. (Jerusalem, 95.19; E255)

And on the following plate:

Then Jesus appeared.... And the Divine Appearance was the likeness and similitude of Los.

The clue to this identity appears at the very beginning of 4Z where the poet states his theme:

Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity Cannot Exist but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden, The Universal Man, to Whom be Glory Evermore. Amen. .... Los was the fourth immortal starry one, and in the Earth Of a bright Universe, Empery attended day and night, Days and nights of revolving joy. Urthona was his name In Eden.... Daughters of Beulah, Sing His fall into Division and his Resurrection to Unity: His fall into the Generation of decay and death, and his Regeneration by the Resurrection from the dead. (FZ1-3.9; E301|

       Here Blake has made the antecedent of 'his' deliberately ambiguous: Albion, the Ancient Man, of course, but also Los. It is Los's career that we follow most intently. Blake deeply identified with Los, and so do we if we read the poem with imagination.
       But "Begin with Tharmas, Parent power dark'ning in the West". Tharmas represents the body, or in the psychic realm the instinct, and in Eternity he's a glorious shepherd. But "darkening in the West" beneath the jealous attack of his emanation, Enion, he sets in motion the Circle of Destiny (The Four Zoas [Nt 1], 5.) and sinks into the sea where he becomes an insane old man. From his "corse" arises the ravening spectre, a most gruesome embodiment of pure egocentricity. A loveless embrace of Enion leads to the birth of Los and Enitharmon, the divided earthly form of Urthona. (Note that all this happens after the 'central event', although in the poem we read about it first.)
       This first earthly family displays the ubiquitous dialectic of Blake (and of universal experience): the angelic and demonic processes go on side by side. Enion's intense mother love turns her daughter, Enitharmon, into a teasing and heartless bitch and drives Enion to the abyss where she becomes a disembodied voice of pure consciousness. We hear her voice at the end of Nights i, ii, and viii sounding the purest prophetic judgment on what has transpired. In a real sense Enion is Blake. (For more on Enion see Chapter Four and Chapter Five.
       When Enitharmon signs her Song of Death (quoted a few pages back), Los strkes her down and then gives his own, more prophetic account of the Fall. Enitharmon retaliates by calling down Urizen. This precipitates the first encounter between these two adversaries in one of the relationships that dominates the poem--and Blake's life as well (See CHAPTER ONE). In this initial confrontation Los weakens through his pity or remorse over Enitharmon and joins the Nuptial Feast of fallenness ( FZ1-12.44; ff E307| . In the New Testament the marriage of the Lamb inaugurates the Kingdom of Heaven; this demonic parody of it announces the Kingdom of Satan. Enion responds with her first stirring prophetic utterance, concluding the first night in the earlier draft.
       At this point Blake, in a later revision of 4Z, made his first obvious attempt to Christianize his myth. The Daughters of Beulah in their "Wars of Eternal Death" give what is probably the most straightforward, impartial account of the Fall.
       As Night ii begins, the Fallen Man, on the point of falling asleep, commissions Urizen as his regent. Urizen soars with pride but immediately falls into the fearful fantasies of the future which dominate all of his attempts at creation. He casts Luvah into the furnaces of affliction and proceeds to build the Mundane Shell, giving Blake a chance to expatiate at great length on how wrongly the world is made.
       Tharmas and Luvah are now thoroughly fallen and estranged from their emanations, and Urizen's turn comes in Night iii. Ahania, Urizen's emanation, reacts to his fearful aggressions with her own vision of the Fall, and the infuriated Urizen casts her out and promptly falls himself like Humpty Dumpty, an eloquent comment on the fate of all the 'strong' who in fear cast out the 'weak'. With the fall of Reason Tharmas rises to power from the depths of the sea, although he is mentally incompetent in the extreme. He commissions Los to create endlessly and futilly: "Renew these ruin'd souls of Men thro' Earth, Sea, Air & Fire,/To waste in endless corruption, renew thou, I will destroy."
       Los proceeds to bind Urizen with the chains of time and space in the parody of Creation which we have already studied from B.U ., but "terrified at the shapes enslav'd humanity put on, he became what he beheld". ( The second extended Christian interpolation occurs in the midst of this story.)
       Los begins Night v with a sort of St. Vitus Dance to "put on the shape of enslaved humanity", a convulsion which Enitharmon shares, leading to the birth of Orc, a manifestation of Luvah, who at this point represents fallen human feeling. Immediately, "The Enormous Demons woke and howl'd around the new born King,/Crying 'Luvah, King of Love, thou art the King of rage & death'".
       As in B.U. Orc is bound in the Chain of Jealousy, but his tormented cries awaken Urizen, who concludes Night v with the "Woes of Urizen". His suffering has brought him to a point of self-recognition; he has come to himself in a way reminiscent of the Prodigal Son's moment of truth: "I will arise", which Blake took directly from the story in Luke. Urizen thus shows himself to be human. Unfortunately it's only a temporary lapse, for in Night vi he explores his dens, faces all the brokenness and horror of a ruined universe and as his solution comes up with the "Net of Religion ". Since pure political tyranny won't work, he turns to a form of religious control.
       We come to the climax of this epic in Night vii when Urizen has approached Orc's prison and induced him to climb the "Tree of Mystery ", turning into a serpent. This sets the stage for the Genesis account of the Fall, which Blake sees as the beginning of the Return. Enitharmon, attracted by the cries of her son, Orc, comes down to the "Tree of Mystery", where she meets the Spectre of Urthona (FZ7a-82.23; E358|). The Spectre closely corresponds to Jung's 'shadow', and like a skilled analyst Blake brings about the reconciliation of shadow and anima on the way to wholeness).
       From the union of Spectre and Enitharmon two things ensue. The good news is that Los begins to get himself together with his Spectre and his Emanation. From this integration comes forth Jerusalem and from Jerusalem will proceed the Lamb. The bad news is the immediate birth of Rahab, the most sinister female of Blake's pantheon. She personifies all the evils of deceit, treachery, and hateful female pride that most appalled Blake about life. Blake's Rahab is the same character whom John of Patmos called "Mystery, the Whore of Babylon"; Blake eventually gives her these names--and several others as well.
       The Spectre of Urthona, a new idea on Blake's imaginative horizon, foreshadowed the Moment of Grace which was to revolutionize his spiritual world. CHAPTER ONE dealt with these dynamics. Suffice it here to say that the appearance of the Spectre marks Man's (and Blake's) dawning awareness that the evils of the world, which he had so deplored, exist in his own psyche. It marks what Jung referred to as the withdrawal of the projections, which Jung considered vital to the survival of the world. Blake agreed about the seriousness of the process; he stated it with great poetic intensity in the reversed writing found in the illustration to 'Jerusalem', plate 41:

Each man is in his Spectre's power Until the arrival of that hour When his humanity awake And cast his Spectre into the Lake.

But in Night vii Los doesn't cast his Spectre into the lake; he embraces it, which in a manner of speaking is the same thing. Los doesn't (yet) cast his Spectre into the lake because his humanity is not yet fully awake, but only beginning to awaken. As Blake aptly put, it complete redemption "was not to be effected without Cares & Sorrows & Troubles of six thousand years of self denial and of bitter Contrition". That beautiful line points to the redemptive dimension of all the fallenness and horror we have been reading about. It was Blake's way of saying what Paul said in Romans: "All things work together for good to them that love God...." Blake and Jung and probably Paul would agree that we begin to love God (and stop trying to be God!) when we recognize and accept our own involvement in the horror around us. That's the moment when the six thousand years of change begins.
The birth of Rahab and the integration of Los lead to an intensification of a drama that has already stretched out for seven nights of excruciating intensity. In Night viii the drama has not only intensified, but it has clarified so that we can no longer fail to understand that the forces of life and of death are in bitter conflict. It has become the old, old story, and Blake leaves no doubt about who represents light and who darkness. Urizen resumes his war for control and out of his ranks of War comes Satan. Rahab conspires to put to death the Saviour who has come down from Heaven and emerged from Jerusalem. The Christian knows that this death is foreordained for final victory, but neither Rahab nor Jerusalem has that awareness, and near the end of Night viii we read these richly evocative words:

Jerusalem wept over the Sepulcher two thousand years. Rahab trimphs over all; she took Jerusalem Captive, a Willing Captive, by delusive arts impell'd To worship Urizen's Dragon form, to offer her own Children Upon the bloody Altar. John saw these things Revealed....

Blake never forgot the involvement of the Christian Church in two thousand years of bloodshed, but here, under the influence of grace, he has a more understanding view of it than he has expressed elsewhere.
In the last Night Blake let all of his feelings out in a magnificent vision of apocalypse that bears comparison with the one John wrote:

Los his vegetable hands Outstretch'd; his right hand, branching out in fibrous strength, Siez'd the Sun; His left hand, like dark roots, cover'd the Moon, And tore them down, cracking the heavens across from immense to immense. Then fell the fires of Eternity with loud and shrill Sound of Loud Trumpet....

       And on and on it goes, much too imposing to describe in this short review. But two things will be said:
       First, Blake draws on John's Apocalypse as he already has in Night viii. The strangest book in the Bible, utterly incomprehensible to the literal mind, has much to offer to the trained imagination. To read the end of 4Z with complete attention gives one a purchase on Blake's great source; Revelation begins to come alive in an exciting new way.
       Second, as great as it is, Blake simply wasn't able to 'Christianize' his apocalypse as he had done the two previous Nights. Perhaps it was already too deeply stamped with his pre-Christian mind. Forgiveness is the soul, virtually the alpha and omega of Blake's Christ, but Night ix shows little or no evidence of this new spirit. Only in 'Jerusalem', in its last plates, do we find a thoroughly Christian apocalypse. Neither Revelation nor Night ix has much of forgiveness; what they do have is vengeance and retribution. Both writers had suffered much at the hands of the ungodly, and both looked with anticipation to the Day of Vengeance. So we must say that Night ix is a modern redoing of John's Apocalypse, while the end of 'Jerusalem' is a Christian recreation of it.
       Blake's epic ends with the eternal man awake, his four Zoas back in union, each carrying out his appointed function in the harmonious consummation of the Age. In the last harvest Urizen reaps, Tharmas threshes, Luvah tramples out the vineyard and Urthona bakes the bread.
       Night ix contains much magnificent poetry. A few lines near the end will provide an appropriate end to this all too inadequate description of Blake's great poem:

The Sun has left his blackness and has found a fresher morning, And the mild moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night, And Man walks forth from the midst of the fires: the evil is all consum'd. ... He walks upon the Eternal Mountains, raising his heavenly voice, Conversing with the Animal forms of wisdom night and day, ... They raise their faces from the Earth, conversing with the Man: "How is it we have walk'd thro' fires and yet are not consum'd? "How is it that all things are chang'd, even as in ancient times?" The Sun arises from his dewey bed, and the fresh airs Play in his smiling beams giving the seeds of life to grow, And the fresh Earth beams forth ten thousand thousand springs of life.

For a more organized description of The Four Zoas go to Characters.

iii

The Mature Works

       'Milton', Blake's first overtly Christian work, is his testimony of faith. It's also his way of rehabilitating his childhood hero, John Milton. Finally it's a difficult poem; it contains unfathomable depths. This review can do no more than introduce the reader to the poem and call attention to some of the new elements in the mature development of Blake's myth.
       Milton is a very autobiographical work. Blake used many of the characters that his readers might be familiar with from earlier works, but in this very personal poem they often assume other (although related) identities. Particularly we understand that Blake was Los; Hayley was Satan (he had suborned Blake from his true work to hack work, from Eternity to Ulro.)
       John Milton, the author of 'Paradise Lost', had been a major force in Blake's life; he had been many things to Blake through the years. In Blake's day Milton enjoyed enormous spiritual stature among the English people. Even today the general understanding of Heaven, Hell, God and Satan (among people interested in those concepts) tends to be more often miltonic than biblical. In the first half of his life Blake felt very much under the shadow of Milton, the great epic poet of the English people. All subsequent English poets lived and wrote in Milton's shadow, and the greatest ones aspired to achieve an epic comparable to 'Paradise Lost'.
       Although Blake had much in common with the puritan poet, he disagreed with Milton about a number of things. For example, as a young man he despised the God of 'Paradise Lost' and admired Milton's Devil. Blake made that clear in 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' and tried to put Milton in his place by saying that he was of the Devil's party without knowing it. Ten years later the experience of grace empowered Blake to deal with Milton in a better way. He called him back to earth to straighten out his theology, and he identified with him and his spiritual power in a radical way. He recreated Milton as Milton had recreated the Bible.
       As Blake's poem begins, Milton has been in Heaven for a hundred years, obedient although not very happy there. The 'Bard's Song' (which takes up the first third of the poem) recreates the war in Heaven of 'Paradise Lost'. The other Eternals find the Bard's song appalling, but Milton embraces the Bard and his song. In a thrilling imaginative triumph he announces his intention of leaving Heaven to complete the work on earth that he had left undone. Although Blake doesn't say this, any Christian should recognize that Milton thus follows in the footsteps of Christ as described in the famous Kenosis passage in Philippians 2:

Eternal Death!

selfhood

Selfhood

       Anyone familiar with the gospel story will see many allusions and biblical references here.
       Milton's journey back to earth should appeal to the spiritually oriented Science Fiction fan. Blake used it to clarify his cosmology, although the reader need not expect instant enlightenment at this point; he may need several readings and, optimally, recourse to several commentaries, especially the mechanically inclined ones.
       In Blake's cottage he sees Milton's shadow, a horrible vision:

Milton Plate 37, line 07: Miltons Shadow heard & condensing all his Fibres 08 Into a strength impregnable of majesty & beauty infinite 09 I saw he was the Covering Cherub & within him Satan 10 And Rahah, in an outside which is fallacious! within 11 Beyond the outline of Identity, in the Selfhood deadly 12 And he appeard the Wicker Man of Scandinavia in whom 13 Jerusalems children consume in flames among the Stars 14 Descending down into my Garden, a Human Wonder of God 15 Reaching from heaven to earth a Cloud & Human Form 16 I beheld Milton with astonishment & in him beheld 17 The Monstrous Churches of Beulah, the Gods of Ulro dark 18 Twelve monstrous dishumanizd terrors Synagogues of Satan. 19 A Double Twelve & Thrice Nine: such their divisions. 20 And these their Names & their Places within the Mundane Shell 21 In Tyre & Sidon I saw Baal & Ashtaroth. In Moab Chemosh 22 In Ammon, Molech: loud his Furnaces rage among the Wheels 23 Of Og, & pealing loud the cries of the Victims of Fire: 24 And pale his Priestesses infolded in Veils of Pestilence. border'd 25 With War: Woven in Looms of Tyre & Sidon by beautiful Ashtaroth. 26 In Palestine Dagon, Sea Monster! worshipd o'er the Sea. 27 Thammuz in Lebanon & Rimmon in Damascus curtaind 28 Osiris: Isis: Orus: in Egypt: dark their Tabernacles on Nile 29 Floating with solemn songs, & on the Lakes of Egypt nightly 30 With pomp, even till morning break & Osiris appear in the sky 31 But Belial of Sodom & Gomorrha, obscure Demon of Bribes 32 And secret Assasinations, not worshipd nor adord; but 33 With the finger on the lips & the back turnd to the light 34 And Saturn Jove & Rhea of the Isles of the Sea remote 35 These Twelve Gods, are the Twelve Spectre Sons of the Druid Albion 36 And these the Names of the Twenty-seven Heavens & their Churches 37 Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch. 38 Methuselah, Lamech: these are Giants mighty Hermaphroditic 39 Noah, Shem, Arphaxad, Cainan the second, Salah, Heber, 40 Peleg. Reu, Serug, Nahor, Terah, these are the Female-Males 41 A Male within a Female hid as in an Ark & Curtains. 42 Abraham, Moses, Solomon, Paul. Constantine. Charlemaine 43 Luther, these seven are the Male-Females, the Dragon Forms 44 Religion hid in War, a Dragon red & hidden Harlot 45 All these are seen in Miltons Shadow who is the Covering Cherub 46 The Spectre of Albion

An attempt to translate this visionary poetry into "common sense" might suggest that in Milton's shadow Blake suddenly became immediately aware of all the fallen nature of the world (and his mind) that had consumed most of his poetry to that point. Now he became aware of all these things, but in the light of a person now full of light.
Back on earth Milton encounters many of the characters whom we met in 'The Four Zoas'. Tirzah and Rahab tempt him; his contest with Urizen has special interest as a record of the resolution of Blake's life long struggle with the things that Urizen represented to him:

Urizen

       A Bible dictionary, or even better, Damon's Blake Dictionary, will help to clarify the associations with biblical locations. Here we see the old Urizen still trying to freeze the poet's brain, but instead he finds himself being humanized by an emissary from Heaven. Blake is vividly depicting the battle between the forces of positivism and spirit.
       Milton meets other obstacles and temptations on his journey, a journey that begins to bear increasing resemblance to that of Bunyan's Pilgrim or even of Jesus himself. He unites with Los and with Blake. He finally meets Satan, confronts him and overcomes him as Jesus had done. These dramatic events give Blake ample opportunity to describe in detail the eternal and satanic dimensions of life, the conflict betwen the two and the inevitable victory of the eternal. For the first and perhaps the only time Blake is writing a traditional morality story.
       This material is autobiographical and written in the honeymoon phase of his new spiritual life. Blake's full meanings yield only to intensive study, but from the beginning there are thrilling lines to delight and inspire the reader. In his esoteric language Blake describes for us what has happened to him, and nothing could be more engrossing for the reader interested in the life of the spirit and in Blake. The relationship of this story to the myth described above should be obvious. But 'Milton' is more real than the previous material because Blake has lived it and writes (and sketches) with spiritual senses enlarged and tuned by his recent experience of grace.
       A digression occurs in the second half of Book One of 'Milton', a detailed description of the "World of Los"; it contains much of Blake's most delightful poetry. The reader will remember that in 4Z Los had passed through several stages of development. Beginning as the primitive prophetic boy, he became first disciple and later adversary of Urizen. He bound Urizen into fallen forms of life, then "became what he beheld". But in Night vii we recall that he embraced his Spectre, actually the Urizen within, and thereupon became the hero of the epic.
       Blake's real hero is Jesus; Los prepares the way for him. Los, the imagination, organizes the forms of fallen life into a palace of art; Blake called this 'building Golgonooza'. The imagination of the artist carries man's only hope of rising above what Frye referred to as "life on its natural plane of conventional stupidity". For five plates in 'Milton' Blake extols the World of Los, the sum total of imaginative creation, the art, the culture, the decency that has raised mankind at times, if only momentarily, above the satanic level of a universe groaning in travail.
       Kierkegaard placed the aesthetic phase immediately prior to the spiritual, and Blake's "World of Los" bears witness to that truth. But Blake, with the deepr insight of his own spiritual experience, knew that art is the stuff of life. Art without Christ is vanity; the presence of Christ glorifies it into life eternal. In these plates (25-29) of 'Milton', describing the "World of Los", Blake returns to the radiant lyricism of the 'Songs of Innocence', but this is an organized innocence, an innocence beyond experience. These are the rhapsodic songs of praise of one who has met the Ultimate Artist:

Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance and sport in summer Upon the sunny brooks and meadows: every one the dance Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave: Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance, To touch each other and recede, to cross and change and return: These are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on mountains, The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro' the darksom sky, Uttering prophecies and speaking instructive words to the sons Of men: These are the Sons of Los: These the Visions of Eternity, But we see only as it were the hem of their garments When with our vegetable eyes we view these wondrous Visions. (Plate 26)

       This brief description of 'Milton' has only touched on a few of the most essential meanings of a poem that contains a thousand facets. But one other thing needs to be said. Among all the hidden riches to be sought out there emerges the realization that 'Milton' also represents a beginning of Blake's reconciliation with the Church that had suffered his violent enmity through the years.
       Blake had held the Church in low regard for two reasons: First, it had too much blood on its hands; Second, he had always understood how far the Church had failed to be what it was called to. John Milton had also refused to affiliate with worldly (in Blake's terminology 'satanic') organizations which called themselves the Church.
       Still as spiritual leader of the English people Milton represented the best of the English Church. Reconciliation with him was for Blake (among other things) a symbolic first step in forgiving "God's people" for failing to be that in the truest sense. So he joined Milton in confession, in self annihilation, in the forgiveness which had become his new and only abiding concept of the meaning of God. Like Milton he remained outside the established Church, but he chose to be buried with the Anglican order of worship!
       For a more thorough, detailed, and better description of this poem go to William Blake's Milton:Meaning and Madness

Jerusalem

With 'Jerusalem', Blake's last great poem, we come to a dense forest of obscure wisdom. Its fourfold structure will be clear to the reader who has the myth well in mind. Each of the four chapters makes a dialectical presentation of one of the successive movements of the myth. Chapter One announces the Fall, interposing against it the efforts of Los to create artistic meaning out of the natural chaos of fallen life. Chapter Two sets in opposition the Law and the biblical recreation of meaning, what we might call the Bible as Art. Chapter Three concerns the Advent of Christ and the deistical reaction. Chapter Four follows Night viii of 4Z in its intensification of the satanic powers and Night ix in their consummation at the Apocalypse when Man awakens and becomes fully alive.
In this apocalypse Blake did what he had been unable to do in Night ix of 4Z. He fully Christianized his myth. Instead of judgment we meet grace; instead of vengeance, forgiveness. In the fullness of time Albion awakens, and with exquisite artistic and spiritual sensitivity Blake assigns the wrath of God to Albion's awakening impulse:

Time was finished! The Breath Divine Breathed over Albion... .... The Breath Divine went forth over he morning hills. Albion rose In anger, the wrath of od breaking, bright flaming on all sides around His wful limbs.... Jerusalem Plates 94 and 95)

But "Then Jesus appeared" (Plate 96, line 3) and Albion confessed the turpitude of his Selfhood. And what follows is far too beautiful to attempt to describe and the purest statement of the gospel and of the true meaning of Christianity that has ever been made. So ends the mythical journey of Albion where it began--in the heart of God.
A more detailed outline of Jerusalem appears in Chapter Eight

NOTES A fascinating study of Blake's myth appears to have come from the studies of a Va Tech student named Justin Scott Van Kleeck.
For corrections, comment, or inquiry write to

Larry Clayton (lclay3@earthlink.net) 1906 SE 8th St. Ocala FL 34471 ---------------------------------

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chap8

2010-10-09T16:24:00.001-04:00

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CHAPTER EIGHT

(Revised 2-12-10)

Sex

Following his target="">Fundamental Presuppositions Blake, like
virtually every mystic and esoteric perceived sex as
the primary created duality. href="primer.htm#paracelsus" target="">Paracelsus
may have best described his point; Percival quoted at
length a summary in this respect of his viewpoint:

The divine man (the angel) is male and female in one;
such Adam was before the woman became separated from
him. He is like the sun; the woman as such resembles
the moon, receiving her light from the sun, and man
without woman (in him) is a consuming fire in want of
fuel.

(This from
target="">
Franz Hartman, quoted by Percival on page 91.)

This means that Blake (and Paracelsus) in their use of
sex have a primarily metaphysical rather than a physical
connotation. Nevertheless Blake began working with a
sexual hangup of some sort; however he satisfactorily
worked it through with some 40 years of happy marriage.

In the Christian faith marriage is a sacrament, and for
many of us the primary sacrament. However living the
sacrament was no more common in Blake's day than in
ours. 18th and 19th century England seemed largely to
view marriage more as a commercial transaction.

Such a view led Blake to condemn the target="-blank">marriage hearse. He also condemned
jealousy.

***********************

Many people have deeply misunderstood Blake's doctrine

of sex. It has complex roots and abounds in parodoxes that defy

casual acquaintance. But like most things the subject yields to

close and careful study. If we can separate the conflicting

strands of thought and resolve the parodoxes, we may achieve a

better understanding of Blake, the man and the thinker, than is

enjoyed by most even among his interpreters.

In this chapter we start from the platform of his known

personal experiences. Then we explore his early statements about

sex in the light of what we know of his life. We examine the biblical and heterodox traditions and the symbology of sex and finally look at the ways in which the mature Christian poet dealt

with sex in his art. In the light of all this we may
begin to perceive in Blake's poetry a journal of his
spiritual progress; this is especially true of href="http://www.english.uga.edu/nhilton/Blake/blaketxt1/the_four_zoas.html" target="-blank">The Four Zoas, where the triangle
of Blake, his wife, and the target="-blank">Spectre bring about a
reconciliation and level of understanding at the
spiritual level where love finds its apogee.

(Look especially at the last quatrain. Note
that in this poem 'love' has a very special meaning,
nothing like the use we've made of the word here.)

**************************************************

If you want to skip ahead:

Visions of the Daughters of Albion
target="-blank">Sex as Symbol
Generation
The Woman
The Two Women
Jerusalem
Summary
**************************************************

A review of Blake's early life suggests the most normal

and ordinary psychosexual development,

to which the biographers testify. Through his refusal of formal

education (See

CHAPTER ONE
) Blake appears to have escaped many of

the common pathologies of sex that afflicted his age as ours. In

fact he systematically held some of them up to ridicule.

Blake

never tired of painting the human form, and he usually refused to

hide it with clothes. Virtually his only models were his wife and

himself. We read that a friend once found them naked in the garden of their home. In all probability they were planning poses

and postures for his illustrations of 'Paradise Lost'.

In his early twenties Blake formed an
emotional attachment to a young woman named Polly Wood.
Unfortunately Polly had

other interests, and when he showed jealousy, she asked him if he

were a fool. The experience seems to have cured him of jealousy;

in fact the foolishness of jealousy became a life long motif; his

false God received the name (among others) of

"Father of Jealousy".

On the rebound he met a beautiful girl named Catherine

Boucher, a gardener's daughter. He told Catherine his mournful

story, and when she pitied him, he promptly transfered his affection to her. A year later they were married, a relationship

that according to all the evidence seems to have been made in

heaven.

Illiterate at her marriage, Catherine Blake must have

been a gifted and rare person; she had a great deal to

do with Blake's enormous creativity. Her high and continuous

level of affirmation released Blake from the drain of domestic

preoccupations. She affirmed and encouraged his gift of vision

even when it meant long hours of wakefulness while he communed

with heaven. She provided the appreciative audience that the

world in general denied Blake and made him a happy creative artist in the same way that J.S.Bach was happy.

One important influence on Blake's ideology of sex came

from certain left wing religious dissenters. The antinomians

deeply affected Blake's world of thought.

They considered marriage a part of the law which they wanted to

abolish. They claimed the right, living above the law, to cohabitate with whomever, whenever and wherever they felt led. We

find evidence of similar excesses among fringe groups both in the

New Testament and in the 20th Century:

Blake found these ideas attractive as a young man, but

no one believes that he carried them very far in practice. Libertines and hedonists have at times made Blake their hero, but

they simply don't know their man. All the evidence suggests that

Blake lived as a faithful and loving husband for some forty five

years--and a happy one as well (This is spite of a recent fanciful
'biography' of Catherine Blake).

What Blake hated was not monogamy but jealousy and the

idea of a lover or spouse as a possession:

target="-blank">Several Questions Answered

We have a story to the effect that early in his marriage

Blake proposed to bring home a concubine (sneaking around was futhest from his thoughts!) His young wife cried at the idea, and

he dropped it(see note). In all likelihood the concubine notion came from

Blake's friend, Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the earliest of liberated
women.

Blake had illustrated two of this lady's works shortly before she
wrote a sensational essay called

"Vindication of the Rights of Women".

Mary Wollstonecraft advocated the radical

equality of the sexes, which Blake endorsed. She tried to live

in the freedom generally reserved for men (and claimed by few

even of them!) Blake was among those who supported her in this

endeavor. She lived an adventurous and tragic life and died

giving birth to another Mary, who became the wife of the poet,

Shelley.

Blake had a very complex psyche one could discuss to exhaustion his
various sexual attitude and points of view. According to Damon, who
wrote A Blake Dictionary, Blake believed that "the domination of woman
is one of the greatest forces corrupting society" (page
447); he quote as
follows:

i

Visions of the Daughters of Albion

(See
also target="-blank">Purdues web page for the graphic dimension).

Blake may have written his short poem,

"Mary", with

Wollstonecraft in mind; however he wrote an earlier and larger work reflecting her philosophy of sex:

About the time he completed 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'

Blake produced a large illuminated poem called

'Visions of the Daughters of Albion'.

Like all of his creations VDA addresses

metaphysical and political concerns. The reader unfamiliar with

Blake's thought forms and symbology will find much of it enigmatic, but a number of passages transparently reveal his thoughts

and feelings about the relations between man and woman:

Oothoon, href="notes.htm#oothoon">the soft soul of America, like an earlier

maiden named Proserpine, plucks a flower and pays the price.

Proserpine, you may remember, was rapt away into the underworld

to be the bride of Pluto. In Oothoon's case the price began when,

on her way with delight to her lover, Theotormon, she is raped by

Bromion, a most rigid representative of the law, in fact a law

abiding the slave trade.

Thereafter Oothoon and Bromion are bound

back to back in Theotormon's cave with what is commonly known as

a ball and chain. The poem largely consists of a colloquy among

these three: Oothoon, the idealist; Bromion, the materialist;

and Theotormon, a timid soul who can't make up his mind. As his

name suggests, this young man is tormented by God given taboos

about damaged goods. The God in this vision is named Urizen and

also called the Father of Jealousy.

Typically Blake lays sexual oppression at the door of
false religion. In the midst of Oothoon's lament,
after a long series of Job-like questions, we read:

A loveless marriage is a profanation of the greatest

gift of life; nothing could arouse Blake to a whiter heat of indignation. Wollstonecraft had called it legal prostitution. In

the lines that follow Oothoon href="http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/Blake.htm"
target="-blank">names and radically disaffirms (go to VDA Plate 6, to
the passage beginning "Take thy bliss, 0 Man!") the

sick social attitudes that make sex a hidden and forbidden secret

pleasure, and that degrade the highest sacrament, marriage, into

a life sentence at hard labor:

Theotormon's jealousy casts Oothoon out
and darkens her into "a solitary shadow wailing on the margin of
non-entity". Blake developed this theme at the beginning of 'The
Four Zoas'. There he ascribed the jealousy to
Enion; it precipitated the Circle of Destiny (The Four Zoas [Nt 1], 5.)(all our sorrow!), sank Tharmas into
the sea and condemned Enion to the very "margin of non-entity" of
which Oothoon had spoken.

To perceive a lover or spouse as a possession (a thing)
is a fatal act that brings about the deterioration of life. In
fact the nature of fallenness is to degrade the person (the real)
to the material (the illusory). The one tormented by jealousy
loses the capability of creative life; in biblical language he
covers his soul with a thick layer of miry clay, not to mention
what he does to others! The profound theological
corollary suggested by VDA. is that if we weren't
jealous people, we wouldn't have a jealous God.
Obviously the Old Testament symbol of a jealous God has
other meanings, but rightly or wrongly that is what it
seems to have meant to Blake.

Long before Freud's day Blake understood and described
the close relationship, in fact the identity, between
sexuality and creativity. He considered sexual
fulfilment the primary means of artistic achievement.
The picture in 'Milton' plate 42 portrays the post
coital moment with the eagle of inspiration hovering
above.

On the other hand all the evils of life Blake related
to frustrated or sick sex. War in particular is
perverted sexuality. The worship of the Queen of
Heaven induces chastity with war as a substitute
fulfilment. Blake's warrior cries, "I am drunk with
unsatiated love, I must rush again to War, for the
Virgin has frowned and refused."

Blake's mind was fourfold, which means that most of
what he wrote is susceptible to more than one
meaning. David Erdman in Prophet
Against Empire saw VDA as political
oratory at the service of the anti-slavery lobby.

Oothoon is the type of the slave (of either sex); (in
slave times the owner often claimed prenuptial
privileges with the body of his slave). Bromion is the
type of the merciless slave trader, and Theotormon of
the wishy-washy conformist who can't quite bring
himself to express his opposition to slavery (much as
the many good Christians in America who couldn't quite
bring themselves to condemn the war).

href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learning/worksinfocus/blake/imagin/cast_06.html">Here
is an interesting file on Oothoon and her
two men.

ii

Sex as Symbol

Blake used the female as the basic symbol for the
material and for the materialistic viewpoint. The history of this
concept goes as far back as the beginning of time. The Sun represents
a masculine God, the Moon, a Goddess, such as
Diana, the great goddess of Ephesus, whose priests raised a riot
against the apostle Paul, reported at Acts 19.

Long
after MHH he wrote 'Jerusalem' where
the "female will" approaches identity with Satan. Both
terms connote a preoccupation with the material, putting it first
and only. Thus when we read a passage like


The Human is but a Worm, and thou, 0 Male! Thou art
Thyself Female, a Male, a breeder of Seed, a Son & Husband; & Lo
The Human Divine is Woman's Shadow, a Vapor in the summer's heat.
Go assume Papal dignity, thou Spectre, thou Male Harlot! Arthur,
Divide into the Kings of Europe in times remote, 0 Woman-born
and Woman-nourish'd and Woman-educated & Woman-scorned!
(Jerusalem, 64.12; E215)

spoken by Vala, the personification of the "female will", we understand that Blake is not talking about what we know as the sex
economy, but rather making a hard nosed statement of the nature
of fallenness: the dominance of the material over the spiritual,
a dominance all too evident in his age as in ours. This sad situation was always Blake's major concern, and the basic symbol
with which he expressed it was that of sex. When we remember to
translate male/female into spiritual/material or eternal/temporal,
we make a great gain in our understanding of Blake.

Milton's theory of sex influenced Blake as much as any
other literary source. 'Paradise Lost' provides a definitive
model for much of the sexual imagery that Blake used. Professor
Frye calls our attention to a line in Book iv of P
. L. describing Adam and
Eve: "Hee for God only, shee for God in him" Frye reminds us

that this applies only to the unfallen pair; it assigns to Adam
a purely spiritual authority. The male dominance of material
history Frye calls a "fallen analogy" of that spiritual relationship.

All this enriches our understanding of the meaning of
Astarte in her many forms and of the priests' reactions to her
which color virtually every word of the Old Testament and its literary
descendants: God is male, the Creator. Nature is female, the
Creation. The soul (of man and woman) is female in relation to
her Creator. Christ is the bridegroom; in union with him we a11
(of both sexes) become part of the bride. The modern man can
accept this only as an imperfect metaphor for spiritual reality

iii

Generation

According to Blake's myth sexes begin in the moony
night of Beulah
where the Etemals came to rest from the arduous
wars of intellect that have filled their sunny days in Eden:

 
      There is from Great Eternity a mild and  pleasant rest
      Named Beulah, a Soft Moony Universe, feminine, lovely,
      Pure, mild and Gentle, given in Mercy to those who sleep..
(The Four Zoas [Nt 1], 5.29; E303)

Beulah, one of Blake's most ambiguous images, is a way
station between Eden and Ulro. The Eternal, sleeping in Beulah,
may rise from his sexual dreams and return to the activity of
Eden, or he may fall further into Death Eternal, which is exactly
what happened to Albion. Unable to find his way back to Heaven
he lapsed into a deeper form of sleep where the female develops
a will of her own and lures the male into the "torments of love
and Jealousy". Late in 'Jerusalem' the warrior, speaking for
Albion, gives a glimpse of his true (fallen) situation and laments"

 
Once Man was occupied in intellectual pleasures and Energies,
But now my Soul is harrow'd with grief and fear & love & desire,
And now I hate, & now I love, and Intellect is no more.
There is no time for any thing but the torments of love and desire.
(Jerusalem, 68.65; E222)

       (
There are four worlds in Blake's psychic universe:

       Eternity

       Beulah

       Generation

       Ulro)

Generation or the 'sexual' symbolizes for Blake this unfortunate materialization of spirit manifested in the Fall and in
a fallen Creation. He also used the term 'vegetable'.

Man in
Eternity is androgynous. In Beulah, which means Married, the
sexes are divided into loving and restful contraries. With the
Fall the Female Will becomes dominant; the Human Form deteriorates
to the sexual in which male and female, spirit and matter, exist in a
state of constant warfare. Man has fallen into the fourth world of href="notes.htm#ulro" target="-blank">Ulro. But whatever falls may rise again.

The third world,

Generation, is the world of Los, fallen man's imaginative faculty.
Los generates or brings forth artistic creations, structures of
thought, myths of meaning, much as a woman brings forth children.
These creations always turn bad (or perhaps just moldy) and are broken up and cast into
Los's furnace for renewal. The process of generation and destruction would go on indefinitely, like the cycle of Nature,
but the

Moment of Grace
breaks in upon it. Los learns to forgive. His emanation, Enitharmon, now joins him as an instrument
of a regeneration offering redemptive promise. Blake proclaims,
"0 holy generation, image of regeneration".

The change in Los and Enitharmon, who together make up
fallen man's imaginative faculty, prepares the ground for the
generation of Jesus. The Sons of Eden announce this event in
Night viii of 4Z with a paean of praise. Careful study of the
entire song will cast more light on the meaning of Blake's symbolism of sex and generation; here are the final seven lines:


we now behold the Ends of Beulah, and we now behold
Where death Eternal is put off Eternally.
Assume the dark Satanic body in the Virgin's womb,
0 Lamb Divine! it cannot thee annoy. 0 pitying one,
Thy pity is from the foundation of the world, & thy Redemption
Begun already in Eternity. Come then, 0 Lamb of God,
Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.

What Blake reports next should be a welcome change for
the by now outraged feminist. With his usual consistency he follows the divine annunciation with the appearance of Satan, and
the worst thing he can say about Satan is to call him a "male
without a female":

 
The war roar'd round Jerusalem's Gates; it took a hideous form
Seen in the aggregate, a Vast Hermaphroditic form
Heav'd like an Earthquake lab'ring with convulsive groans
Intolerable; at length an awful wonder burst
From the Hermaphroditic bosom.  Satan he was nam'd,
Son of Perdition, terrible his form, dishumaniz'd, monstrous,
A male without a female counterpart, a howling fiend
Forlorn of Eden, repugnant to the forms of life,
Yet hiding the shadowy female Vala as in an ark & Curtains,
Abhorr'd, accursed, ever dying an Eternal death,
Being multitudes of tyrant Men in union blasphemous
Against the Divine Image, Congregated assemblies of wicked men.
(The Four Zoas [Nt 8], 104[2nd].30; E378)

iv

The Woman

A little poem which Blake attached to the end of 'Songs
of Experience' casts light on his metaphysics as it relates to
Mother Nature:

  
		To Tirzah
      Whate'er is Born of Mortal Birth
      Must be consumed with the Earth
      To rise from Generation free:
      Then what have I to do with thee? (note)


      The Sexes sprung from Shame & Pride,
      Blow'd in the room; in evening died;
      But Mercy chang'd Death into Sleep;
      The Sexes rose to work & weep.
      Thou, Mother of my Mortal part,
      With cruelty didst mould my Heart,
      And with false self-deceiving tears
      Didst bind my Nostrils, Eyes and Ears:
      Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay,
      And me to Mortal Life betray.
      The Death of Jesus set me free:
      Then what have I to do with thee?

"What have I to do with thee?" Here Blake quotes the
words which Jesus spoke to his mother at the Wedding of Cana,
which indicates the symbolic signification which Mary had for
him, "Thou, Mother of my Mortal part"--my material part, my temporal part! Like Paul Blake wants us to know that the "things
which are seen" are passing. He goes further than Paul in suggesting that the "things which are seen" are also cruel and oppressive.

In Blake's prophecies after VDA the female comes to
symbolize the temporal. She is associated with the fallen Sea of Time and Space. The first earthly female, Enitharroon, has her
origin in a ghastly parody of the story of Adam and Eve: After
Los chained Urizen into the fallen forms of creation, he sickened
and "became what he beheld", and Enitharmon materialized as a
Globe of Blood from his bosom.

In "The Four Zoas" Enitharmon has a different origin;
she and Los are born from the union of Enion and the Spectre of
Tharmas. She is an altogether sinister female until the target="-blank">
Moment
of Grace. When Los comments on the burdens of their parents, she
replies:

 
      To make us happy let them weary their immortal powers
      While we draw in their sweet delights, while we return them scorn
      On scorn to feed our discontent; for if we grateful prove
      They will withhold sweet love, whose food is thorns and  bitter roots.
(The Four Zoas [Nt 1], 10.3; E305)

and proceeds to sing him the

"Song of Death".
A thoroughgoing materialist, she has only

the love of the Pebble;
she sees the love of the Clod of Clay simply as a
weakness to exploit. Enitharmon leads Los to the "Feast of Envy" (The
Four Zoas [Nt 2], 23.10; E313),
one of Blake's first and greatest epiphanies of Evil.

At the end of Night ii we find Enitharmon at her worst,
using her sex appeal to tease and frustrate, luring Los on only
to withdraw, determined to possess him and give nothing:

 
					for thou art mine,
	Created for my will, my slave, tho' strong, tho' I am weak.
	Farewell, the God calls me away.  I depart in my sweet bliss,
(The Four Zoas [Nt 2], 34.46; E323)

and a few lines further:


	The joy of woman is the death of her most best beloved
	Who dies for Love of her
	In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration.

These lines perhaps led some to postulate sexual deprivation in Blake's marriage. They certainly reveal first hand experience with a teasing bitch of the worst sort. But in my opinion Catherine could not possibly have been such a woman. However any who have seen materialistic lovers know that it rings
true.

With the fall of Urizen Enitharoon loses her vicious
side and becomes simply a clinging, dependent woman. She gives
birth to Orc and centers her affection upon him until the target="-blank">
Moment
of Grace. At that point she begins to cooperate with Los in the
building of Golgonooza.

A much more sinister female is Vala. In Night vii, at the critical hinge of
Blake's myth, the Spectre of Urthona and the Shadow of Enitharmon
meet beneath the Tree of Mystery and compare notes. Each gives
his version of the Fateful Fall, and they agree that the cause
was a female. Here is the Shadow's version:

 
      Among the Flowers of Beulah walk'd the Eternal Man & saw
      Vala, the lilly of the desart melting in high noon;
      Upon her bosom in sweet bliss he fainted.  Wonder siez'd
      All heaven; they saw him dark;

And the Spectre's version:

 
      One dread morn of gory blood
      The manhood was divided, for the gentle passions, making way
      Thro' the infinite labyrinths of the heart & thro' the nostrils
      issuing
      In odorous stupefaction, stood before the Eyes of Man
      A female bright.

Ahania's vision
in Night iii makes the same point. (Bear in mind that in Blake's
primary mythology the female represents materiality.) Again the reader should note that in all three of these
accounts of the Fall the blame attaches, not to sensual enjoyment,
but to the preoccupation with the material which it symbolizes.
Blake uses these most vivid concrete images to arouse his reader
to the consciousness that Man has turned his back upon the eternal.
This becomes clearer as you read further, especially in the first
of the three examples given above.

Vala, called the goddess of Nature, generally stands
for preoccupation with the material. 'Bacon, Newton, Locke',
the Unholy Trinity of Materialism, and Satan, the God of this
World, serve as alternative symbols for the same misfortune, but
again and again Blake returns to the Female Will. He names her
Vala in his early works. In the fully matured myth the concept
broadens to include other female characters: target="-blank">Rahab, Tirzah, and
the Daughters of Albion, but all these females represent various
facets of Vala.

v

The Two Women

When Blake began to work on his epic myth, he intended
to focus upon the wicked career of Vala, but as time went by, he
became more interested in the Zoas, which no doubt helped to relieve the anti-feminine bent of his metaphysics. Vala temporarily sank to the level of a minor character, and Blake laid most
of the guilt for man's sorry state upon Urizen.
Moment of Grace
brought another significant change: Vala fumed into two
females, Rahab and Jerusalem, both of whom issue from Enitharmon.

When Blake gave Rahab the alternate name of Babylon, he came into conformance with the basic symbology of the Bible. Throughout
the scripture we read about these two women/cities. Jerusalem is
at least potentially the city of God, while Babylon always represents the seat of the God of this World. In his last epic Blake's
Vala has become virtually interchangeable with Babylon.

We have already noted the biblical sources of Blake's
two symbolic women in the 12th and 17th chapters ot Revelation. In the first of these John sees a woman
"clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet". In the second

he described "the great whore that sitteth upon many waters".
These two women in the Bible aptly prefigure Blake's Jerusalem
and Vala, and a careful study of the two chapters will help the
reader to shape in his own mind the identity of Blake's two characters.

John and Blake both drew their paired women from earlier
sources. Frye calls them "royal metaphors" for the twin totalities of good and evil, of redemption and damnation that fill the
pages of the Bible. The Tower of Babel, the first city of sin,
led to the confusion of tongues. Following God's command Abraham,
the father of the Hebrews, left Ur, a few miles from Babylon and
eventually settled in the Promised Land. The first Captivity occured in Egypt, which later biblical literature often treats as
synonymous with Babylon. The second Captivity took place at
Babylon. A later captivity was to Rome, which John the Apocalyptist called Babylon: in Revelation he celebrated the burning of
the Whore of Babylon.

Meanwhile Melchizidek, King of Salem and priest of the
Most High God, had blessed Abraham. Some centuries later David
established Jerusalem as his capital. The Song of Solomon is a
poem and love song about a king and his bride. This theme became
a primary symbol of the relation between Jerusalem, representing

the Chosen People, and God. The prophets constantly referred to
Jerusalem as a woman, married to God, but too often faithless,
whoring after other gods. Hosea's stories about the love of the
betrayed husband for his faithless wife, Gomer, poetically express the highest level of the Hebrew consciousness of God. On
occasion the prophets became so enraged that they identified Jerusalem with Babylon. For example John spoke of "the great city
which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord
was crucified".

This biblical background prepares us to cope with the
woman found in Blake's poem, 'Jerusalem' . As we have seen, in
the poetry of the first half of Blake's life the woman is sinister.
She represents the material; the material is unworthy, reprehensible, satanic. This is the typical Gnostic position and to a
lesser extent the Neo-platonic position. Blake stated it very
explicitly and with his usual hyperbole in href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/nph-1965/blake/erdman/erd/@Generic__BookTextView/59949;pt=61315"
target="-blank">'Visions of the Last Judgment' (See also the href="http://www.apocalyptic-theories.com/gallery/lastjudge/blake.html" target="-blank">image): "I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward
Creation & that to me it is hindrance and not Action; it is as the
Dirt upon my feet. No part of Me."

He wrote that as late as 1810.
Nevertheless after the
Moment of Grace Blake's perspective on
matter (and Woman!) softened. At first there had been only the
sinister woman, but now the Woman of Grace appeared as well.

In the poem, Jerusalem,
we find a discourse and a conflict between these two women. Vala speaks for the kingdom of

Satan, and Jerusalem speaks for the kingdom of Heaven. Their
interaction dominates the poem and must fascinate anyone interested in those two subjects. The epic is a straightforward conflict between light and darkness as Blake understood those two
realities. Vala wins most of the battles, but we always know who
must win the war.

Blake describes reality imaginatively and dramatically
in terms of ultimate value; this is basically an expression of
faith. If one believes in the higher values: in spirit, in truth,
in justice and love, then one imagines these things ultimately
victorious. Blake did, and he concluded the passage from VLJ
quoted above: "What, it will be Question'd, 'When the Sun rises,
do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?' 0
no, no, 1 see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying
'Holy, holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.'" In Blake's final
epic Vala represents the guinea sun and Jerusalem the "innumerable company of the Heavenly host". Needless to say those who
see only the guinea sun will not be attracted to the poem.

vi

'Jerusalem'

At the very beginning of Blakes' poem,
Jerusalem, he makes us

fully aware that the new woman represents something entirely
other than the disreputable matter of earlier writing. She is
just the opposite; she is Spirit or rather the manifestation of
Spirit in this world. The Saviour confronts the sleeping Albion
and identifies his disease, "where hast thou hidden thy Emanation, lovely Jerusalem". But the "perturbed Man" denies Christ
and denies Jerusalem: "Jerusalem is not! her daughters are indefinite: By demonstration man alone can live, and not by faith.
A few lines further the poet announces that

 
Jerusalem is scatter'd abroad like a cloud of smoke thro' nonentity.
Moab & Ammon & Amalek & Canaan & Egypt & Aram
Receive her little ones for sacrifices and the delights of
cruelty.

The place names represent the six heathen nations or
the powers of evil that surround the Chosen People. The import
of all this in another biblical phrase is that "He who departs
from evil makes himself a prey".

Very shortly we meet the Daughters of Albion; they represent the feminine dimension of the materialistic impulses of
Man: "Names anciently remember'd, but now contemn'd as fictions.
Although in every bosom they controll our Vegetative powers".
Eventually a redemptive moment occurs when, Los having subdued
and integrated his Spectre, his Sons and Daughters "come forth

from the Furnaces". Erin, like America a symbol of redemption,
addresses Jerusalem:

 
Vala is but thy Shadow, 0 thou loveliest among women!
A shadow animated by thy tears, 0 mournful Jerusalem!
Why wilt thou give to her a Body whose life is but a Shade?
Her joy and love, a shade, a shade of sweet repose:
But animated and vegetated she is a devouring Worm.
What shall we do for thee, 0 lovely mild Jerusalem?

The fallen Sons of Albion express the opposite viewpoint. In Plate 18, in a prophetic statement worthy of Isaiah in
its irony, the twelve Sons of Albion describe explicitly and in
detail their relationship to Jerusalem and to Vala:

 Cast, Cast ye Jerusalem forth! The Shadow of delusions!
The Harlot daughter! Mother of pity and dishonourable forgiveness!
Our Father Albion's sin and shame! But father now no more,
Nor sons, nor hateful peace & love, nor soft complacencies,
With transgressors meeting in brotherhood around the table
Or in the porch or garden.  No more the sinful delights
Of age and youth, and boy and girl, and animal and herb,
And river and mountain, and city & village, and house and family,
Beneath the Oak and Palm, beneath the Vine and fig tree,
In Self-denial!--But War and deadly contention Between
Father and Son, and light and love!  All bold asperities
Of Haters met in deadly strife, rending the house & garden
The unforgiving porches, the tables of enmity, and beds
And chambers of trembling & suspicion, hatreds of age & youth,
And boy & girl, & animal & herb, & river & mountain,
And city & village, and house & family, That the Perfect
May live in glory, redeem'd by Sacrifice of the Lamb
And of his children before sinful Jerusalem.  To build
Babylon the City of Vala, the Goddess Virgin-Mother.
She is our Mother!  Nature!  Jerusalem is our Harlot-Sister
Return'd with Children of pollution to defile our House
 With Sin and Shame.  Cast, Cast her into the Potter's field!
Her little ones She must slay upon our Altars, and her aged
Parents must be carried into captivity: to redeem her Soul,
To be for a Shame & a Curse, and to be our Slaves for ever.

In an extended passage too long to quote here Blake
gives a colloquy with the fainting, confused Albion and the two
females competing for his heart. It's actually a recreation of
the earlier colloquy in VDA, and infinitely richer and fuller. Albion wavers exactly like Theotormon; Vala, like
Bromion, is implacably blind, and Jerusalem has the eloquence of
the earlier heroine. In this scene, like the earlier one, Blake
describes the eternal battle between faith and worldliness.

Look also at the passage on Plates 32-34 and remember
that Albion, Vala and Los each speaks from his own viewpoint. To
understand Blake's vision the reader must imaginatively enter the
psychic state of each of the three characters. Los most often
speaks from the poet's true standpoint, and the following lines
put his position about as plainly as it can be put:

What may Man be? who can tell! but what may Woman be
To have power over Man from Cradle to corruptible Grave?
There is a Throne in every Man, it is the Throne of God:
This, Woman has claim'd as her own, and Man is no more!
Albion is the Tabernacle of Vala and her Temple,
And not the Tabernacle and Temple of the Most High.
0 Albion, why wilt thou Create a Female Will?

A few lines along he adds further meaning to his term:

 
Is this the Female Will, 0 ye lovely Daughters of Albion, To
Converse concerning Weight & Distance in the Wilds of Newton
& Locke?

As the epic progresses, Blake continues to define the
two women:

 
Man is adjoin'd to Man by his Emanative portion
Who is Jerusalem in every individual Man, and her
Shadow is Vala, builded by the Reasoning power in Man.

The idea of building Jerusalem gains prominence in
Blake's poetry after the
Moment of Grace. Jerusalem, "a city,
yet a woman", is builded in the heart of every man by acts of
love and kindness, and this is the work of the imagination.

As the third chapter of 'Jerusalem' begins, Blake
describes Jerusalem for us once more:

In Great Eternity every particular Form gives forth or Emanates
Its own peculiar Light, and the Form is the Divine Vision
And the Light is his Garment. This is Jerusalem in every Man,
A Tent & Tabernacle of Mutual Forgiveness, Male and Female Clothings.
And Jerusalem is called Liberty among the Children of Albion.

Blake's ethics of sexual love, his symbolism, and his

Christian faith all fit together and reach a climax in a sketch
virtually guaranteed to astound and provoke the reader (and no
doubt dismay and disgust some). This passage, Plates 61 and 62,
is called "Visions of Elohim Jehovah". Here once again forgiveness is the key, and to Blake forgiveness was everything. Vala,
the soul of materialism, knows nothing of forgiveness. Jerusalem's liberty is expressed most fully in forgiveness. In this
passage Mary, the mother of Jesus, merges with the other Mary,
who was forgiven because "she loved much".

"Visions of Elohim Jehovah" could only have been written by a poet who despised the social value placed upon virginity.
In an earlier work he had called it "pale religious letchery that
wishes but acts not". Blake hated the ideal of chastity, which
meant to him a virtuous withholding of woman's body as an exercise
of power over the deprived male, and he struck directly at the
archetype of the chaste woman. "Visions of Elohim Jehovah" is
not a theological statement, but an imaginative vision about
meaning and value. The love of Blake will always be confined
to people who discriminate between those two things and whose
theological perspective is neither glassy eyed nor otherwise rigid.

Blake's Mary has perfect trust in the forgiveness of
sin, and her relationship with Joseph becomes a type for the relationship of Jerusalem with Jesus:

Jerusalem fainted over the Cross and Sepulcher.  She heard the
voice:
"Wilt thou make Rome thy Patriarch Druid & the Kings of Europe
his
"horsemen?  Man in the Resurrection changes his Sexual Garments
at will.
"Every harlot was once a Virgin: every Criminal an Infant Love.
"Repose on me till the Morning of the Grave.  I am thy Life."
Jerusalem replied: "I am an outcast: Albion is dead:
"I am left to the trampling foot is. the spurning heel:
"A Harlot I am call'd: I am sold from street to street:
"1 am defaced with blows in with the dirt of the Prison,
"And wilt thou become my Husband, 0 my Lord & Saviour?"

As Jerusalem progressively gains our sympathy, Vala moves
farther and farther in the opposite direction:

Then All the Daughters of Albion became One before Los, even
Vala
And she put forth her hand upon the Looms in dreadful howlings
Till she vegetated into a hungry Stomach in a devouring Tongue.
Her Hand is a Court of Justice: her Feet two Armies in Battle:
Storms & Pestilence in her Locks, and in her Loins Earthquake
And Fire & the Ruin of Cities & Nations and Families and Tongues.

The allegoric drama of good and evil in terms of the two
females continues and intensifies throughout the epic poem until
the final awakening of Albion, when sexes disappear. The first
indication of this conies in the dialogue of Los and Enitharmon:

Enitharmon answer'd in great terror in Lambeth's Vale:
"The Poet's Song draws to its period, and Enitharmon is no more;
For if he be that Albion, I can never weave him in my Looms,
But when he touches the first fibrous thread, like filmy dew
My Looms will be no more and I annihilate vanish for ever.

Then thou wilt Create another Female according to thy Will."
Los answer"d swift as the shuttle of gold: "Sexes must vanish &
cease
To be when Albion arises from his dread repose, 0 lovely Enitharmon:
When all their Crimes, their Punishments, their Accusations of Sin,
Ail their Jealousies, Revenges, Murders, hidings of Cruelty in Deceit
Appear only in the Outward Spheres of Visionary Space and Time,
In the shadows of Possibility, by Mutual Forgiveness for evermore,
And in the Vision and in the Prophecy, that we may Foresee & Avoid
The terrors of Creation & Redemption & Judgment....

Soon comes the last mention of the woman of the world. She
is connected with her sexual counterpart and described in the very
specific terms which John used in Revelation 17:

If Bacon, Newton, Locke
Deny a Conscience in Man & the Communion of Saints & Angels,
Contemning the Divine Vision & Fruition, Worshiping the Deus
Of the Heathen, the God of This World, & the Goddess Nature,
Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Druid Dragon 61 hidden Harlot,
Is it not that Signal of the Morning which was told us in the
Beginning?

Now Blake attempts to visualize the true place of sex
in Eternity:

Awake, Awake, Jerusalem! 0 lovely Emanation of Albion,
Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time;
For lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day
Appears upon our Hills. Awake, Jerusalem and come away!
...Then Albion stretch'd his hand into Infinitude
And took his Bow....
And the bow is a Male and Female, and the Quiver of the Arrows of
Love
And the Children of this Bow, a bow of Mercy & Loving-kindness
laying
Open the hidden Heart in Wars of mutual Benevolence, Wars of
Love;
And the Hand of Man grasps firm between the Male and Female Loves.
And he Clothed himself in Bow and Arrows, in awful state, Fourfold ....

And after the final chorus of the multiple aspects of Man,
Blake tells us that he "heard the Name of their Emanation: they
are named Jerusalem." And so ends 'Jerusalem'.

**************************************************name="summary">

Summary

After all this detail We can begin our summary of Blake's
theory of sex with Jesus' reply to the Sadducee's mocking question
about the woman married to seven husbands: "for when they shall
rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage,
but are as the angels which are in heaven."

Blake begins here,
with the assumption that sexual division relates to this world,
but not to Eternity. Sex appears in Beulah, a moony rest from
the arduous creative activity of Eden. The "Female Will" condemns
Man to the loss of Eternity, which Blake calls "the Sleep of Ulro".

Sex signifies fallenness, and the jealous and proudly chaste female symbolizes the active principle of evil, also identified
with a materialistic viewpoint whose values are coercion and
love of power.

Blake's vision of Jesus humanized his theory of sex. He
began to use the biblical image of Jerusalem as the bride of
Christ, named his last and greatest epic 'Jerusalem', and ultimately was able to rationalize the heterodox doctrine of sex
with the glorified female as the emanation of the Eternal Man.
Blake's female thus joined all the rest of his personal images
in traveling the Circle of Destiny, materializing in the Fall
and etherealizing in the Return.

Through all his journey Blake had a characteristically
liberal and enlightened view of womankind, an entirely different
matter from the sexual symbolism that filled his pages. His true
and abiding feelings about the relation between men and women appear early in his works in his "Annotations to Lavater": "Let
the men do their duty and the women will be such wonders; the female life lives from the light of the male: see a man's female
dependants, you know the man." Admittedly short of the high
standards of present day feminism, Blake's vision of womanhood
considerably surpassed that of most of his contemporaries-- and
perhaps most of ours.

End of Chapter

chap8

2010-10-09T16:23:00.003-04:00

HOME

CHAPTER EIGHT

(Revised 2-12-10)

Sex

(This from
target="">
Franz Hartman, quoted by Percival on page 91.)

Such a view led Blake to condemn the target="-blank">marriage hearse. He also condemned
jealousy.

***********************

**************************************************

If you want to skip ahead:

Visions of the Daughters of Albion
target="-blank">Sex as Symbol
Generation
The Woman
The Two Women
Jerusalem
Summary
**************************************************

What Blake hated was not monogamy but jealousy and the

idea of a lover or spouse as a possession:

target="-blank">Several Questions Answered

i

Visions of the Daughters of Albion

(See
also target="-blank">Purdues web page for the graphic dimension).

Typically Blake lays sexual oppression at the door of
false religion. In the midst of Oothoon's lament,
after a long series of Job-like questions, we read:

href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learning/worksinfocus/blake/imagin/cast_06.html">Here
is an interesting file on Oothoon and her
two men.

ii

Sex as Symbol


The Human is but a Worm, and thou, 0 Male! Thou art
Thyself Female, a Male, a breeder of Seed, a Son & Husband; & Lo
The Human Divine is Woman's Shadow, a Vapor in the summer's heat.
Go assume Papal dignity, thou Spectre, thou Male Harlot! Arthur,
Divide into the Kings of Europe in times remote, 0 Woman-born
and Woman-nourish'd and Woman-educated & Woman-scorned!
(Jerusalem, 64.12; E215)

iii

Generation

According to Blake's myth sexes begin in the moony
night of Beulah
where the Etemals came to rest from the arduous
wars of intellect that have filled their sunny days in Eden:

 
      There is from Great Eternity a mild and  pleasant rest
      Named Beulah, a Soft Moony Universe, feminine, lovely,
      Pure, mild and Gentle, given in Mercy to those who sleep..
(The Four Zoas [Nt 1], 5.29; E303)

 
Once Man was occupied in intellectual pleasures and Energies,
But now my Soul is harrow'd with grief and fear & love & desire,
And now I hate, & now I love, and Intellect is no more.
There is no time for any thing but the torments of love and desire.
(Jerusalem, 68.65; E222)

       (
There are four worlds in Blake's psychic universe:

       Eternity

       Beulah

       Generation

       Ulro)

Generation or the 'sexual' symbolizes for Blake this unfortunate materialization of spirit manifested in the Fall and in
a fallen Creation. He also used the term 'vegetable'.


we now behold the Ends of Beulah, and we now behold
Where death Eternal is put off Eternally.
Assume the dark Satanic body in the Virgin's womb,
0 Lamb Divine! it cannot thee annoy. 0 pitying one,
Thy pity is from the foundation of the world, & thy Redemption
Begun already in Eternity. Come then, 0 Lamb of God,
Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.

 
The war roar'd round Jerusalem's Gates; it took a hideous form
Seen in the aggregate, a Vast Hermaphroditic form
Heav'd like an Earthquake lab'ring with convulsive groans
Intolerable; at length an awful wonder burst
From the Hermaphroditic bosom.  Satan he was nam'd,
Son of Perdition, terrible his form, dishumaniz'd, monstrous,
A male without a female counterpart, a howling fiend
Forlorn of Eden, repugnant to the forms of life,
Yet hiding the shadowy female Vala as in an ark & Curtains,
Abhorr'd, accursed, ever dying an Eternal death,
Being multitudes of tyrant Men in union blasphemous
Against the Divine Image, Congregated assemblies of wicked men.
(The Four Zoas [Nt 8], 104[2nd].30; E378)

iv

The Woman

A little poem which Blake attached to the end of 'Songs
of Experience' casts light on his metaphysics as it relates to
Mother Nature:

  
		To Tirzah
      Whate'er is Born of Mortal Birth
      Must be consumed with the Earth
      To rise from Generation free:
      Then what have I to do with thee? (note)


      The Sexes sprung from Shame & Pride,
      Blow'd in the room; in evening died;
      But Mercy chang'd Death into Sleep;
      The Sexes rose to work & weep.
      Thou, Mother of my Mortal part,
      With cruelty didst mould my Heart,
      And with false self-deceiving tears
      Didst bind my Nostrils, Eyes and Ears:
      Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay,
      And me to Mortal Life betray.
      The Death of Jesus set me free:
      Then what have I to do with thee?

 
      To make us happy let them weary their immortal powers
      While we draw in their sweet delights, while we return them scorn
      On scorn to feed our discontent; for if we grateful prove
      They will withhold sweet love, whose food is thorns and  bitter roots.
(The Four Zoas [Nt 1], 10.3; E305)

At the end of Night ii we find Enitharmon at her worst,
using her sex appeal to tease and frustrate, luring Los on only
to withdraw, determined to possess him and give nothing:

 
					for thou art mine,
	Created for my will, my slave, tho' strong, tho' I am weak.
	Farewell, the God calls me away.  I depart in my sweet bliss,
(The Four Zoas [Nt 2], 34.46; E323)

and a few lines further:


	The joy of woman is the death of her most best beloved
	Who dies for Love of her
	In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration.

 
      Among the Flowers of Beulah walk'd the Eternal Man & saw
      Vala, the lilly of the desart melting in high noon;
      Upon her bosom in sweet bliss he fainted.  Wonder siez'd
      All heaven; they saw him dark;

And the Spectre's version:

 
      One dread morn of gory blood
      The manhood was divided, for the gentle passions, making way
      Thro' the infinite labyrinths of the heart & thro' the nostrils
      issuing
      In odorous stupefaction, stood before the Eyes of Man
      A female bright.

v

The Two Women

vi

'Jerusalem'

 
Jerusalem is scatter'd abroad like a cloud of smoke thro' nonentity.
Moab & Ammon & Amalek & Canaan & Egypt & Aram
Receive her little ones for sacrifices and the delights of
cruelty.

 
Vala is but thy Shadow, 0 thou loveliest among women!
A shadow animated by thy tears, 0 mournful Jerusalem!
Why wilt thou give to her a Body whose life is but a Shade?
Her joy and love, a shade, a shade of sweet repose:
But animated and vegetated she is a devouring Worm.
What shall we do for thee, 0 lovely mild Jerusalem?

 Cast, Cast ye Jerusalem forth! The Shadow of delusions!
The Harlot daughter! Mother of pity and dishonourable forgiveness!
Our Father Albion's sin and shame! But father now no more,
Nor sons, nor hateful peace & love, nor soft complacencies,
With transgressors meeting in brotherhood around the table
Or in the porch or garden.  No more the sinful delights
Of age and youth, and boy and girl, and animal and herb,
And river and mountain, and city & village, and house and family,
Beneath the Oak and Palm, beneath the Vine and fig tree,
In Self-denial!--But War and deadly contention Between
Father and Son, and light and love!  All bold asperities
Of Haters met in deadly strife, rending the house & garden
The unforgiving porches, the tables of enmity, and beds
And chambers of trembling & suspicion, hatreds of age & youth,
And boy & girl, & animal & herb, & river & mountain,
And city & village, and house & family, That the Perfect
May live in glory, redeem'd by Sacrifice of the Lamb
And of his children before sinful Jerusalem.  To build
Babylon the City of Vala, the Goddess Virgin-Mother.
She is our Mother!  Nature!  Jerusalem is our Harlot-Sister
Return'd with Children of pollution to defile our House
 With Sin and Shame.  Cast, Cast her into the Potter's field!
Her little ones She must slay upon our Altars, and her aged
Parents must be carried into captivity: to redeem her Soul,
To be for a Shame & a Curse, and to be our Slaves for ever.

What may Man be? who can tell! but what may Woman be
To have power over Man from Cradle to corruptible Grave?
There is a Throne in every Man, it is the Throne of God:
This, Woman has claim'd as her own, and Man is no more!
Albion is the Tabernacle of Vala and her Temple,
And not the Tabernacle and Temple of the Most High.
0 Albion, why wilt thou Create a Female Will?

A few lines along he adds further meaning to his term:

 
Is this the Female Will, 0 ye lovely Daughters of Albion, To
Converse concerning Weight & Distance in the Wilds of Newton
& Locke?

As the epic progresses, Blake continues to define the
two women:

 
Man is adjoin'd to Man by his Emanative portion
Who is Jerusalem in every individual Man, and her
Shadow is Vala, builded by the Reasoning power in Man.

As the third chapter of 'Jerusalem' begins, Blake
describes Jerusalem for us once more:

In Great Eternity every particular Form gives forth or Emanates
Its own peculiar Light, and the Form is the Divine Vision
And the Light is his Garment. This is Jerusalem in every Man,
A Tent & Tabernacle of Mutual Forgiveness, Male and Female Clothings.
And Jerusalem is called Liberty among the Children of Albion.

Blake's Mary has perfect trust in the forgiveness of
sin, and her relationship with Joseph becomes a type for the relationship of Jerusalem with Jesus:

Jerusalem fainted over the Cross and Sepulcher.  She heard the
voice:
"Wilt thou make Rome thy Patriarch Druid & the Kings of Europe
his
"horsemen?  Man in the Resurrection changes his Sexual Garments
at will.
"Every harlot was once a Virgin: every Criminal an Infant Love.
"Repose on me till the Morning of the Grave.  I am thy Life."
Jerusalem replied: "I am an outcast: Albion is dead:
"I am left to the trampling foot is. the spurning heel:
"A Harlot I am call'd: I am sold from street to street:
"1 am defaced with blows in with the dirt of the Prison,
"And wilt thou become my Husband, 0 my Lord & Saviour?"

As Jerusalem progressively gains our sympathy, Vala moves
farther and farther in the opposite direction:

Then All the Daughters of Albion became One before Los, even
Vala
And she put forth her hand upon the Looms in dreadful howlings
Till she vegetated into a hungry Stomach in a devouring Tongue.
Her Hand is a Court of Justice: her Feet two Armies in Battle:
Storms & Pestilence in her Locks, and in her Loins Earthquake
And Fire & the Ruin of Cities & Nations and Families and Tongues.

Enitharmon answer'd in great terror in Lambeth's Vale:
"The Poet's Song draws to its period, and Enitharmon is no more;
For if he be that Albion, I can never weave him in my Looms,
But when he touches the first fibrous thread, like filmy dew
My Looms will be no more and I annihilate vanish for ever.

Then thou wilt Create another Female according to thy Will."
Los answer"d swift as the shuttle of gold: "Sexes must vanish &
cease
To be when Albion arises from his dread repose, 0 lovely Enitharmon:
When all their Crimes, their Punishments, their Accusations of Sin,
Ail their Jealousies, Revenges, Murders, hidings of Cruelty in Deceit
Appear only in the Outward Spheres of Visionary Space and Time,
In the shadows of Possibility, by Mutual Forgiveness for evermore,
And in the Vision and in the Prophecy, that we may Foresee & Avoid
The terrors of Creation & Redemption & Judgment....

Soon comes the last mention of the woman of the world. She
is connected with her sexual counterpart and described in the very
specific terms which John used in Revelation 17:

If Bacon, Newton, Locke
Deny a Conscience in Man & the Communion of Saints & Angels,
Contemning the Divine Vision & Fruition, Worshiping the Deus
Of the Heathen, the God of This World, & the Goddess Nature,
Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Druid Dragon 61 hidden Harlot,
Is it not that Signal of the Morning which was told us in the
Beginning?

Now Blake attempts to visualize the true place of sex
in Eternity:

Awake, Awake, Jerusalem! 0 lovely Emanation of Albion,
Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time;
For lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day
Appears upon our Hills. Awake, Jerusalem and come away!
...Then Albion stretch'd his hand into Infinitude
And took his Bow....
And the bow is a Male and Female, and the Quiver of the Arrows of
Love
And the Children of this Bow, a bow of Mercy & Loving-kindness
laying
Open the hidden Heart in Wars of mutual Benevolence, Wars of
Love;
And the Hand of Man grasps firm between the Male and Female Loves.
And he Clothed himself in Bow and Arrows, in awful state, Fourfold ....

And after the final chorus of the multiple aspects of Man,
Blake tells us that he "heard the Name of their Emanation: they
are named Jerusalem." And so ends 'Jerusalem'.

**************************************************name="summary">

Summary

End of Chapter

chap6

2010-10-09T16:23:00.001-04:00

Tue 10 Nov 2009 11:27:03 AM EST

HOME

CHAPTER SIX

Bible

Here is an href="http://ramhornd.blogspot.com/2006/09/blake-and-bible.html">Introductory
post on this subject.

What we know today as the Bible crystallized into the

sacred book of Christianity in the fourth century. At that time

the bishops set the canon and closed it. In the ages that followed

it was carefully guarded, copied, studied and used by those who

controlled the destiny of the Christian Church; it remained largely

unavaliable to non-professionals.

The development of vernacular languages and the invention

of printing put the Bible for the first time in the hands of ordinary laymen. The Protestant Reformation increased the availability

of scripture to all believers. The resulting proliferation of

interpretations dismayed Luther and Calvin as well as the old

Church authorities.

The reaction of the religious establishment to the wide

use and diverse interpretations of the Bible caused a century of

turmoil and violence (See CHAPTER SEVEN)

In England this instability reached its crisis in the l7th Century Civil War with the

beheading of Charles I and the establishment of a commonwealth

under non-Conformist direction. For a few brief years government

censorship of printing stopped, which led to an explosion of

spiritual creativity, largely inspired by non-Conformist biblical

interpretations.

The fascinating story of the radical groups active in

the years l640-50 is vividly and ably recounted by Christopher

Hill in
A World Turned Upside Down.

His title is apt; the radical

social, political, and spiritual ideas of the various religious

groups shook the fabric of English society much as the New Testament
church had turned the Roman world upside down.

Look at three of these radical ideas:

1. The Levellers and Diggers took the Hebrew
doctrine of the Jubilee as biblical guidance for
breaking up the land enclosures which had disinherited
and made homeless thousands of English yeomen; Isaiah
had also condemned the immoral amassing of real
property to control wealth.

The New Light Quakers
emphasized the direct creative relationship between man
and God without intermediaries; all the Lord's people
were prophets

href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=4&chapter=11&verse=29&version=9&context=verse"
target="-blank">as Moses had wished.

The href="http://www.exlibris.org/nonconform/engdis/ranters.html"
target=""> Ranters understood Paul's doctrine of justification by faith to signal the end of all laws.

They gave a radical freedom to the believer to follow
his conscience in every particular of conduct; their
spiritual descendants are the modern anarchists
A.L.Morton in The Everlasting Gospel claimed that Blake
was the last and best of the Ranters.

People have called Blake many things;

Northrup Frye called him a "Bible soaked Protestant". He

descended from the line of English non-Conformists who refused to

read the Bible in the establishment way and insisted on attaching

their own interpretation to it.

(A good example of Blake's commentary on the Bible comes at the
beginning of the little href="http://www.english.uga.edu/nhilton/Blake/blaketxt1/book_of_thel.html"
target="-blank">book of Thel:

Where might the golden bowl come from? Look href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev%205:8;&version=31;"
target="-blank">here. What is Blake saying here? Can you find love
in a golden bowl? To grasp this lesson you have to understand that
Revelations is poetry and Thel is poetry, which means the Lord may
give us a great variety of meanings of Revelations 5 and of Thel, and
of how they relate to one another. Think about it. If you get an
idea, a new vision, share
it. That's the way we learn Blake-- and the Bible.

Continuing on a few lines we come to The Lilly of the valley?
Well who might that be? Look at an old hymn :

Look again at the context:
"and gentle hear the voice
Of him that walketh in the garden in the evening time:
The Lilly of the valley". Without question Blake speaks of the
saviour, talking to our heroine and opening the spiritual and material
realms to her.

Blake has shared with us his vision of Christ-- one of many that came
to him through his long life. Does he enrich our understanding of
Christ? Yes, yes, I say.

______________________________________________________________

With the Restoration in 1660 the contest in England

over the biblical meaning of the Christian faith slowed to a

virtual halt. Society came to attach less and less importance to

such matters. In the century that followed the shapers of opinion

fell increasingly under the influence of the materialism of Newton

and Locke--faith in the five senses rather than in the metaphysical

visions of the past.

href="http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/b/bacon/francis/preparative/"
target="-blank">Francis Bacon
had written of a second scripture to

which men might more fruitfully address their attention. Paine

called it the Bible of Nature; writing his

Age of Reason in the

language of the common man he demolished the Hebrew Bible as a

tissue of fabrications, which it certainly is to a reason confined

to the five senses.

Since that time the Bible has remained a best seller,

but used more often as an item of household furniture than as a

book. In our day it has become unfashionable even for that purpose. But for Blake the Bible was the primary and continuous

fountain for the ideas contained in his art.

______________________________________________________________

To anyone truly interested in the Bible one of the big

issues concerns the canon--did God close it? When he finished

with John of Patmos, did he stop speaking? Did he assume that

men would thereafter hear his voice and experience his presence

only through the mediation of the sacred page? The orthodox,

explicitly or tacitly, answer these questions in the affirmative;

Blake and his dissenter friends gave a resounding no.

On the authority of the New Light Blake believed that

his visions had the same sort of authenticity as those of Isaiah

and Ezekiel. Some believers may see such effrontery as a sacrilegious depreciation of the Bible, but the many who worship the

Bible without reading it depreciate it more than Blake did.

Blake denied to the Bible any exclusive form of authority; he saw

that as the urizenic monstrosity, the

Book of Brass:

Compell the poor to live upon a Crust of bread by soft mild arts

Smile when they frown frown when they smile & when a man looks pale

With labour & abstinence say he looks healthy & happy

And when his children Sicken let them die there are enough

Born even too many & our Earth will be overrun

Without these arts If you would make the poor live with temper

With pomp give every crust of bread you give with gracious cunning

Magnify small gifts reduce the man to want a gift & then give with pomp

Say he smiles if you hear him sigh If pale say he is ruddy

Preach temperance say he is overgorgd & drowns his wit

In strong drink tho you know that bread & water are all

He can afford Flatter his wife pity his children till we can

Reduce all to our will as spaniels are taught with art.

(Four Zoas 7a-80:2-21; Erdman 355)

But all his

life Blake read the Bible, loved it, and engaged in dialogue with its

immortal authors. Virtually every line of his poetry and every

picture he painted had direct reference to some biblical idea

that Blake had meditated upon.

In vivid contrast many of the

orthodox don't read the Bible at all; they just wave it! Little

wonder they dislike Blake. His early ironic description of his

work as the Bible of Hell certainly helped to confirm their

prejudice.

i

"Thou read'st black where I read white."
( Everlasting Gospel.

There are essentially two ways to read the Bible; Blake

referred to them as black and white. What did he mean? We

might look at Urizen's
Book of Brass

as the black book. It's a

book of rules, a book of law. It tells people what to do, and

more poignantly, what not to do.

Even today ordinary people see

the Bible in this way, which helps to explain why hardly anyone

reads it today. The few who do read it dutifully and dully.

Such a reading constrains consciousness; it makes the reader

obedient and unimaginative. The faithful few who feel that they

should read their Bible often approach it in a child like way

bordering on the childish. Reading the black book inhibits the

imagination, deadens the mind and prevents spiritual development.

At its worst it has led to many instances of religious persecution

and mass murder.

But Blake read it white. The white book is not a book

of rules, but a book of visions, a book of wonders. It provokes

thought, causes the imagination to soar. Blake must have learned

to read at about the age of four, when he had his first vision--

the frightful face at the window. Perhaps we've all been

frightened by the Bible in one way or another; most people have

had a sufficiently negative experience to leave it strictly alone.

But little William overcame his fright and kept reading, and the

next vision we hear of was more positive--a tree full of angels.

All the evidence suggests that for the next sixty five years

Blake's Bible reading and his visions went hand in hand; his art

is the record of it all.

Whoever becomes really interested in Blake's visions

will find himself reading the Bible because that's where most of

them begin. In spite of this his secular critics have looked

all over the world for his sources.

One of the greatest things

that Blake has to offer the reader is that he makes you see and

read the Bible in a new and better way. Not for nothing did the

youthful circle of admirers of Blake's last years refer to him

as the Interpreter.

The black book has most often been read as law, as

history, in a restricted, literal interpretation. If the priest

can get people to see it this way, and only this way, then he has

secure control over his flock of sheep. In contrast Blake suggests that it's symbolic. Although written in categories of time

and space, the temporal dimension is only instrumental; it points

to the Beyond, the Eternal, the Real.

Too often people reading 'black' concern themselves

with foolish questions such as "Did it really happen? Was Jonah

really swallowed by the whale, or rather by the big fish?" But

in Blake's vision that isn't the important thing. The important

thing is "What does it mean?" The reader of the black book gets

himself tied up in knots about the veracity or historicity of

Jonah and his aquatic friend.

Blake shows you the Jonah in your

psyche and helps you get some grasp of what the turbulent sea

means to you personally. It's experiential, exciting! it puts

you in touch with reality!

Literal or symbolic is black or white, and probably the

two minds will never meet. At this point I simply urge you to

join Blake and read white:

Blake ascribes this
imaginative faculty to his hero, Los;

Like Los Blake walks up and down the biblical scene

from Adam to John of Patmos. He takes what best serves his

purpose, or rather the biblical symbols rearrange themselves

kaleidoscopically into his visions of eternity. These together

add up to a cogent and provocative commentary on the Bible and on

its child, the Christian faith.

Out of this intuitive unconscious

process arose the great themes of his faith, embodied in his

art: the universal man, fallen and fractured, struggling, redeemed

and returning in the fullness of time into the blessed unity from

which he came. This is the essential story of the Bible for one

who reads it whole and without the constraints and blinders of

what I have called the black book.

It should be said however that Blake found inspiration

for his myth from many other sources beside the Bible; the

secular critics have pointed them out in great detail. He drew

impartially on everything in his experience, but found the Bible

his richest fountain. The other sources were secondary and for

the most part commentaries on or elaborations of the biblical

truths.

Much as he loved the Bible, Blake ascribed paramount

authority to his visions. The true man of God has visions which

refine, bring up to date, and correct the earlier visions of the

earlier prophets. This is where Blake departed from the orthodox

attitude to the Bible, which he called reading it black. This is

where he acted on the heritage of English dissent. This is how

he saw the New Light and became a man of the New Age.

ii

Redemption History

One formative idea that Blake owed to Greek rather than

to Hebrew thought was the cyclic view of history. Plato's doctrine

of the
Great Year

and the eternal recurrence of archetypal events

strongly colors Blake's poetry, where it exists in continuous

tension with the linear view of history expressed in the Bible.

       In addition Blake like other students before and after him found

cycles in the biblical history. In fact the cycles he found

helped him (and us) to move from the temporal to the eternal

level of consciousness.

The primary event of the Old Testament is the exodus,

the return from Captivity to the Promised Land. Actually it's

the central figure in a constellation of events:

       the primeval

(innocent) possession of the Promised Land by Abraham,


the fall

into captivity in Egypt for 400 years,


the deliverance from Egypt,


the struggle in the wilderness and

       conquest after forty years of

the Promised Land.

Right there, in what theologians call redemption history, lies the biblical basis of Blake's myth.

Blake and many other students of the Bible perceived

that this cycle had happened not once but several times. When

they got to the Promised Land, the children of Israel didn't enjoy it; they continued to behave like the rest of fallen mankind:

they alternately fought wars of conquest and cringed before the

weight of mightier conquerors. They "went whoring" after the

local gods. Solomon married a daughter of every foreign god he

could find and turned the temple of Jehovah into a pantheon.

So

the children of Israel fell again, this time into Babylon. After

sixty years Cyrus delivered them, and there was another return

through the wilderness to the Promised Land, but soon they suffered

another fall--to Greece and then to Rome.

Even some readers of the black book understand that

Jesus reenacted this redemption history: Moses' birth was accompanied by Pharaoh's slaughter of the innocents, Jesus' birth

by Herod's slaughter of the innocents. Jesus as a baby was taken

to Egypt; he spent forty days in the wilderness; he suffered at

the hands of Pontius Pilate a

captivity to death

from which he

returned after three days and established the Church
(For a discussion of Luke's verse look at this target="">note).

The black

book ends here, but the white book continues:

The Church fell into captivity to
a Caesar named Constantine

and 400 years later to
another named Charlemayne.

Then

came Luther, and Blake at his worst moments feared that the whole

thing would go back to the beginning with Adam. (In one of his

visions he must have seen Nuke!)

Virtually all of the sixty six books of the Bible center

their attention in one way or another upon this series of events.

The Pentateuch describes the original cycle; the Psalms celebrate

its various facets; each prophet interprets his own day in its

terms; the evangelists understand and describe Jesus strictly as

the fulfilment of this redemption history.

The whole biblical process represents a taking up of

temporal material into an eternal consciousness. Blake perceived

not only that the same story was unfolding in 18th Century England

and Europe, but that it describes timelessly the destiny of the

human psyche. Put the two things together and extrapolate in

both directions, and you have the macrocosm/microcosm:

On one end

is the One Man, and on the other "A World in a Grain of Sand'".

Time and space loosen their grip on the mind; the doors of perception are cleansed; Man walks out of the cave into the light

of eternity. That was Blake's myth; it was the structure of

reality as he understood it. And it was the shape of his faith

until his Moment of Grace.

As can be said of the Bible, Blake's art basically

consists of telling this story in a thousand different ways. In

the early prophecies he applied it to the political events of his

day. In 'America' he portrayed the American Revolution as a

breaking free from Egypt/ Babylon/Rome. The French Revolution

was much more so. 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' celebrated

the dawn of the New Age. In these works he robustly translated

the temporal events of his day into the eternal categories using

the biblical symbols.

Of course he shared with the other liberals

of his time in the growing disillusionment with these political

movements. Napoleon turned into a reincarnation of Pharoah/Nebuchadnezzar/Caesar--a severe blow to Blake's faith in human redemption. As the political scene deteriorated, his art became less

vital, wearier. He was approaching what St. John of the Cross

called the dark night of the soul.

Blake's myth closely follows the biblical story as

described above: fall, struggle, redemption, and return. But about
the psychodynamics of the process he

had other things to say

than did the Bible. In Genesis the Fall occurs after the Creation

of Man. Blake, following 'Paradise Lost', placed the original

Fall in Eternity prior to Creation. Adam and Satan came along

after the division and fall of the four giant forms of Man; they

appeared in 'The Four Zoas' near the end of Night iv immediately

following the binding of Urizen, and their advent served as a

preliminary step of redemption:

In the Bible the episode of the apple is generally

understood as the primary event of the Fall. In contrast Blake

gives it an ambiguous moral significance stressing its redemptive

dimension as 'peccata felice'. Whereas Milton ascribed Adam's

participation in this wrongdoing to idolatrous love of Eve, Blake

described it as an act of love and solidarity, akin to and evocative of Christ's kenosis:

iii

Jehovah and Astarte

After the Biblical Fall the Old Testament drama unfolds

as a protracted struggle between two Gods. In every age the

majority of Mankind have worshipped Mother Earth, Matter or the

recurring cycle of vegetative life. She has many names; in the

Bible one of the most common is Astarte. In our day "Astarte"

exacts an acceptance of things as they are, an attempt to flow

with the stream of Nature. The Bible called this "whoring after

other gods".

Blake called it Natural Religion or Druidism. He

meant by Natural Religion the worship of the principle of fallen

life; those most conformed and faithful to it become the rulers

of this world.

Natural Religion involves choosing to remain at the

level of the material, which Blake called vegetative life.

The

believer in Natural Religion closes his mind to the reality of spiritual development; he turns his back upon the

Spirit. Unable to endure the tension of struggling and waiting

for spiritual evolution he erects a golden calf. He either acquiesces in or actively contributes to the brutishness and horror

of a life that "lives upon death".

The Bible and Blake's poetry alike are filled with gory

images of this ultimate horror, which comes from identifying life

with the merely natural. T.S.Eliot said in
The Sacred Wood that Blake's poetry is

unpleasant, as all great poetry is unpleasant.

It is "unpleasant" basically because Blake, like the Bible,

insists on calling a spade a spade. Nowhere is Blake closer to

the Bible than in his constant reiteration of the ultimate horror

of unredeemed life, celebrated in page after page of minute
particulars.

Blake and the Bible both insistently remind us that
Nature is fallen

, and that one flows with this fallen Nature to

one's destruction.

Abraham and Moses knew a higher God: he was above Nature; he was Spirit. He called men to rise above the natural

and to become sons of a God opposed to everything Astarte stood

for, to live by the laws, not of earth, but of heaven.

The

children of Abraham tried to put this God first, but rarely with

notable success. Instead at every opportunity they turned away

from Jehovah "under every green tree", back to Nature.
This inevitably led back to Captivity in the

iron furnaces of Egypt/Babylon/Rome, etc. The biblical cycle discussed above thus

relates to the alternating dominance of Jehovah and Astarte.

Blake's myth recreates this biblical story, but with

one vital difference.

Vala and her fellow females--Tirzah, Rahab,

the Daughters of Albion--represent the various forms of Astarte,

the Earth Goddess. Urizen represents Jehovah, the Sky God. But

in 'The Four Zoas' both are fallen. Blake claims that the Hebrew

consciousness of God is flawed at best.

Secular materialists had reached this conclusion long before,

but it was a startling and revolutionary idea for a man like

Blake, embedded in the biblical faith and firmly attached to the

life of the Spirit.

Blake had made as serious a commitment to the

eternal as anyone could, and now at the mid point of his life he

saw an eternal without a God worthy of worship. It was a dark

night of the soul indeed!

This honest and painful confrontation with what was for

Blake an existential reality has made him into the pariah of the

orthodox. The black book has no place for any criticism of the

Hebrew consciousness of God; he is perfect from first to last,

and everything the Bible says about him is perfect (inerrant!) as

well. The superstitious awe which has been called bibliolatry

forbids any questions of Abraham's God or Moses' God.

Although

when we read without blinders, we can see their consciousness of

God changing before our eyes. Note Abraham bargaining with God

for the survival of his nephew in Sodom and Moses
simply defying God

if he

refuses to forgive the worshippers of the golden calf. In the

spirit of these two revealing passages Blake in his own recreation

of the biblical story dramatically portrayed an evolving God consciousness, which the black book simply cannot permit. It was

Blake's willingness to let the old die that made him notably

ready for the new birth. The dark night of the soul had intensified until it became the
Sickness unto Death.
.

iv

Images of Grace

For the Christian of course Blake's happiest use of the

Bible occurs with his statements of the gospel; these came after

his

Moment of Grace in 1800. 'The Four Zoas' had been an attempt

to organize experience into a pattern of meaning. In the years

before grace Blake's concept of redemption rested upon the efforts

of Los, the Imagination, to create meaning out of the chaos of

fallen life.

This process begins in Night iv and goes on to the

end of the poem. Blake called it "building Golgonooza", an adaptation of the biblical drama of rebuilding fallen Jerusalem.

Blake took this from the
book of Ezra

, one of his earliest

companions. At the beginning of Night ix, written after the
Moment of Grace

, Los and Enitharmon are no longer building Golgonooza; now they are building Jerusalem!

In the earlier years salvation for Blake lay in art, as

it has for so many sensitive souls before and after his day.

Once he met grace, Jesus became for Blake the One and the All.

Jesus subsumed Blake's art and redeemed it. He tells us that

Jesus appeared to him in "the likeness and similitude of Los".

Kierkegaard spoke of
the aesthetic phase.
Some aesthetes among Blake's critics, valuing art more highly

than Christ, have experienced the change as a deterioration of

Blake's art. Christians in contrast see the new work like Blake

saw it, as a glorified art, sublimated and fulfilled:

The
Laocoon

These are certainly provocative words! We should know

that the Bible is art in its highest form, but never art for art's

sake, always art for God's sake. In the
Laocoon' inscriptions
(quoted above) Blake made a frontal attack upon the "aesthetic"
orientation by pointing out the identity between true art and
true godlinesss, the "Tree of Life", which was God's original
intention for man before the serpent snarled up his plans.

It became a special joy and a labor of love for Blake

after his conversion to go back and recolor his biblically inspired

myth with those previously discounted parts of the Bible which

now burned in his consciousness. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

tell the story of the Lord of Love, adored by thousands who know

little or nothing about the rest of the Bible. Blake now puts

Jesus at the center, or rather the apex, of his myth of meaning.

The 17th chapter of John is probably the central passage

of scripture for Blake's myth, both before and after the Moment

of Grace. In it Jesus prays to the Holy Father:


   that they may be one, as we are one....That
   they all may be one: as thou, Father, art in me
   and I in thee, that they also may be one is
   us...  that they may be one, even as we are
   one: I in them and thou in me, that they may be
   made perfect in one;

Blake's visionary experience from his earliest days had

centered on this image of oneness. All of his reading in the

heterodox tradition had reinforced it as the basic shape of reality. The Gnostics, the Neo-platonists, the alchemists, the

cabbalists, the Christian mystics, all had emphasized the supernal

oneness of God and Man and life. Blake had seen all trouble and

sorrow and brokenness in terms of the fracture and separation or

division from the primeval oneness. This was the basic idea of

his myth:

And now on the sands of Felpham he had met the One,

been folded into his bosom and heard himself affectionately named

by the One ("Thou Ram Horn'd with Gold"). Turning to scripture

with new eyes, irradiated with his

First Vision of
Light he

finds the Saviour praying that we might be one as he is one with

the Father.

In the eternal realm the sequence is reversed: the

divine prayer had in earliest childhood fallen into the deepest

levels of Blake's being. Like the veritable mustard seed it lay

there exerting an unconscious force, guiding him to the Gnostics

(who knew more about oneness than did the Church Fathers), the

Neoplatonists, and the others. And when the soil of Blake's

psyche was fully prepared, the seed burst out in the full embodiment of the vision of Light, when for Blake the One became flesh.

This is the center of the Christian faith: that we are

one, that we are all Christ's members. Those who deny to Blake

the name of Christian on the basis of his 'white' reading of the

Bible thereby betray their own off centeredness. Certainly he

was no orthodox Christian; orthodox Christianity in its many

forms has been way off center. When Blake dreamed of the One and

met the One and sang of the One, he imaginatively incarnated the

answer to the divine prayer. Is there any better way to be a

Christian?

v

Ezekiel

If a poll were taken to choose the most obscure of the

major books of the Bible, Ezekiel in the Old Testament and Revelation in the New might win by a wide margin. Strangely enough

these very books seemed to mean the most to Blake. Their

meanings are largely symbolic; Blake adopted their symbols and

strenuously commented upon their meanings.

In his

major work, 'Jerusalem', Blake took a great deal from Ezekiel:

the structural format, the oratorical style, the dialectic of

judgment and grace. But he used Ezekiel's style and material to

refute Ezekiel's vision of a jealous and punishing God.

The first chapter of Ezekiel contains his definitive

epiphany, the encounter with God that initiated and sustained his

prophetic activity. The vision of the four living creatures, the

wheels, the fiery chariot, all are the trappings of the Shekinah,

the Glory of God. This vision originally empowered Ezekiel to

prophesy; it recurred throughout his prophetic life.

In a climactic scene shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem the

prophet saw it hovering over the Temple and departing (read Ezekiel 10
with special attention to verse 18). Years

later he saw it returning to Jerusalem

as the liberated pilgrims

arrived from Babylon.

Blake took
Ezekiel's living creatures

(zoas in Greek) as the

subject of his epic poem, 'The Four Zoas'. He humanized the Zoas

and enacted through them the destructive tendencies of the human

psyche which have led to the fracture and fall of Mankind. With

their fall Blake's Zoas became the "rulers of the darkness of this

world". As you study 4Z, keeping always in mind the biblical

source, you become aware that it all relates to Ezekiel's vision

of God.

The striving found
in 4Z was interrupted by the
Moment of Grace. This led to a radical reorientation of Blake's theology.

He didn't change his mind about Ezekiel's God, but he met a new

and more loving God in the person of Jesus. In 'Jerusalem' he

gave the most overt and candid evaluation of the relationship

between these two visions. The Negro spiritual has it that Ezekiel saw the wheel. Here, in the language of Old Testament prophecy, Blake tells us what the Wheel has meant to Mankind:

Plate 77 of Jerusalem might
well be considered Blake's valedictory: he tell us pretty plainly the
meaning of true religion. Here is a passage, but you should read it
wherever you can get your hands on it:

Here Blake with unparalleled eloquence has set forth

the opposition between the God of Wrath and the God of Mercy, the

dark Preacher of Death and the bright Preacher of Life. Mankind

in every age has turned Ezekiel's wheel into a juggernaut to enforce a worldly solidarity under the banner of priest and king.

And every age has had its dissenters who strove against it and

were all too often crushed.

vi

Revelation

To understand the last book of the Bible the reader

must have achieved a certain level of consciousness. He must

have at least a rudimentary grasp of the eternal and a certain

feel for symbols, especially those metaphors of time and space

that point to eternal truth. Without this equipment the Apocalypse

is commonly read either as a grotesque phantasmagoria or as a

convenient coatrack upon which to hang a fabric of theological

inanity.

John of Patmos, the writer of the Apocalypse, had been

a bishop of the Church, a man of authority, a man of action, a

man who had commited himself with a whole heart to actualizing

the ideals of Jesus of Nazareth. John had seen his religious

program overwhelmed by a heartless political structure, his congregation scattered, and himself exiled to a small island where

he had little to do but reflect upon the past and gaze into the

future.

In his reflections John was informed by an intimate

knowledge of scripture. The vivid images of the Hebrew writers

ignited his imagination. They took the place of the people and

events which had formerly filled his mind. The seven eyes of

God, the plagues, the beasts from the sea and from the land, the

harlot, the Lamb, the bride, the new heaven and the new earth--

all these and many more of John's images originate in various

books of the Old Testament.

Northrup Frye referred to Revelation

as "a dense mosaic of allusions and quotations" from the Bible.

The Apocalypse is an imaginative recreation of the entire Hebrew religious consciousness in an epic that carries us

to the end of time and the return of man to the golden age.

Blake attempted to do the same thing with the English religious

consciousness, which explains why Revelation meant so much to

him. His epic can just as rightly be called a "dense mosaic of

allusions and quotations" from the Bible. In particular he seized

upon John's images and combined them into the stuff of his prophetic poems.

When Christ ascended into Heaven, he left his disciples

with the expectation that he would soon return (See
John 21.22).

The writer of Revelation had lived through the years when this

hope was increasingly deferred. It became more and more apparent

that the return of Jesus was not within the time frame of their

original expectations. John outlived his associates, and he differed from the other New Testament writers in that he was forced

to look beyond the immediate events and their immediately expected
outcome.

He was forced to look into a more complex future. The rigor of this necessity freed him from the limited

time frame that characterizes most of the New Testament. He knew

the Old Testament truth that "a thousand years in thy sight are

but as yesterday". He of all the writers of the New Testament

had been most significantly disappointed in his temporal hopes

and forced to lift his mind from time to the eternal. That's why

his is the most symbolic book, and that's why it most appealed

to Blake.

Blake used all of the symbols we have just noted and

many others as well. He had brooded over these images for a life

time, and they were fraught with meaning to him. They conveyed

to him not only John's meanings but the original meanings of the

O.T. writers from whom John had borrowed them, plus untold accretions of additional meanings acquired in the two millenia

since.

It's doubtful that John's images mean to anyone today

exactly what they meant to him. That's the nature of the symbols

of eternity: their temporal meanings change with the times. Our

religious consciousness changes with the times; even our images

of God change with the times--not just in the historical frame but

in the personal frame of a man's lifetime.

Blake took the images of Revelation--and of the rest of

the Bible as well--and recreated them so as to express the evolving

spiritual consciousness of his day, and ours.

The images link us

to our heritage, the consciousness evolves, the Spirit is timeless.

Two of the primary
images of Revelation are the
"woman clothed with the sun"

and the
"great whore that sitteth upon many waters".

Much of the interest of John's epic lies in the conflict between these two women; they respectively represent spiritual Jerusalem and spiritual Rome. The first woman is driven into

the wilderness by the Great Red Dragon; the Whore sits upon his

back. But in due time the Whore is burned (much to the satisfaction of the faithful) while the other woman becomes the Bride of

the Lamb.

A minimal knowledge of this symbolism prepares one to

appreciate Blake's use of the same images to tell the same images

to tell the same story. 'The Four Zoas' was first called 'Vala':

she is the woman with whom Blake began, and she originally included both of John's women. But the Moment of Grace released in

Blake the vision of Jerusalem, and the long poem bearing her

name recounts her suffering at the hands of the other, who gradually
evolves into the Whore.

Like John's woman clothed with the

sun Jerusalem is driven into the wilderness and continually oppressed and afflicted by the forces of the Beast and the Whore.

Vala, eventually manifested as Rahab, is finally burned; the

scene in
4Z

at the end of Night viii, contains one of Blake's

most explicit and extended quotations from Revelation.

Here as in all of Blake's work he takes the biblical

material, and while remaining largely faithful to its accidents,

shows us new essence. Part of the final essence of Jerusalem is

that her name is Liberty (Jerusalem plate 26), another manifestation of Blake's most

vital lesson for us.

vii

Job and Jerusalem

If Ezekiel and Revelation are the most symbolic books of

the Bible, Job is the most poetic and indirect. It's significance

lies not in its theological statements, but in the questions it

raises. The primary question is how or why does a good and all

powerful God permit untold suffering to his most faithful servant.

The gospel of course provides the definitive answer, but an answer

grasped and accepted only by those commited to it as final truth.

The modern prophet,
C.G.Jung, in his

Answer to Job (click on the next article if you want to read further),

made some comments about God (the Hebrew God consciousness) very

reminiscent of those which fill Blake's earlier prophecies. By the time Blake got around to his recreation of Job

he had less interest in commenting on God than in retelling the

old, old story. Job, the most indirect book of the Bible, proved

an ideal vehicle for this, Blake's last and plainest statement of

the truth of his life.

The biblical Job is presented as a good man whom God

allows the devil to torment. Blake presents him as a moral but

self-centered and self-righteous man. He prays for his children,

but what about other people's children? Is he praying for God to

favor his children over others? In no uncertain terms, writing

in another work, Blake let us know what he thought of that kind

of goodness:

The point is that it's okay to pray for your children,

but be careful how you pray for them. If your prayer for them to

be first amounts to a curse on their fellows--to be second or

last--that curse will fall upon your children's heads, just as

it did upon Job's.

Job's self-centered prayers and his left handed charity

(See
Plate 5

of the Job series) won him no reward but in fact

delivered him into the hands of his
Selfhood (Satan).

Good

Christians take warning: Blake's Job is the same rich man Jesus

spoke about, and he fills the pews (and too often the pulpit) of

our churches. Here once again, in the twilight of his life, we

find Blake dissenting from conventional religion, but now, unlike

some of his youthful protests, his dissent completely agrees with

the earlier dissent of the Prophet of Galilee: "Many that are

first shall be last."

So much of our goodness is rotten; let's

face it.

The image of the boil ridden man haunted Blake and

appears frequently in his prophecies. In his hands it became a

vivid symbol of the general fallenness of man. Job's boils

represent the physical misery of the fallen state of nature.

Blake's Job, like the O.T. Job, represents Man. His adventures

are a paradigm of the destiny of Man: he falls, but he is redeemed.

The importance of Job for the biblical writer as well as for our

poet is to make us poignantly aware once again that we're not

okay until we have experienced grace. Job's goodness got him

nowhere, but his faith opened him to redemption.

Now look at Job's God; he resembles Job. Once again

Blake reminds us that man's God is an image, a construct of his

mind. In the begining Job saw God as a solid moralist like

himself. In the dark night his God turned bad (
See Plate 11),

but in the end gave way to a new and better image. The whole

thing foreshadows Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.

If we could learn that our experience of God comes only through

our image of him, then we would be less prone to attempt (wickedly) to impose our God on others. Then we might experience a

loving rather than a coercive God, and the others, not feeling

compelled, might be attracted, like Job's friends are in the end.

Blake's Job is a beautiful series of pictures, a perfect wedding

of exquisite art and lofty faith, Blake at his plainest and

best.

In 'Jerusalem', his most mature poem, Blake's basic

technique is to superimpose bodily the biblical scene, the biblical

story, the biblical truth upon the history and geography of England, and of the rest of the world as well. Understood in its

literal sense 'Jerusalem', like the book of Revelation, is

grotesque in the extreme. The reader will turn away in despair

or derision unless he succeeds in going beyond the literal

meaning and learns to see through rather than with the eye.

In reality the biblical truth is just as relevant to

18th Century England as it is to first century (or any century)

Palestine. The same spiritual events continue to unfold today

that Ezekiel, John and the others saw and described in their

day. The same choices are to be made by 18th Century Britons

(or 20th Century Americans!) as were made by first (or any) century Palestinians, and these choices have the same consequences.

Truth is spiritual and timeless; the passing scene is only a

shadow of the eternal reality.

Blake's grotesque juxtaposition of Canaan with England

may conceivably shock the reader into an understanding of these

profound truths. When this happens, the Bible suddenly takes on

new and gripping significance. It's no longer about all those

events way back in the past; it's about the stories unfolded in

this morning's newspaper. Blake's ability to live in the eternal,

his visionary capability enabled him to see with vivid clarity

the immediate relevance of scripture--personally, socially, and

politically.

His young friends called him Interpreter because he

taught them to see it also. If we read his work with aroused and

concentrated attention, we, too, may see how scripture relates to

us--with immeasureable enrichment to our spirits.

viii

The Recreation of the Word

Having said all this how can we summarize Blake's

relationship to the Bible? First we recall that he didn't read

it literally but symbolically, not historically, but poetically.

Then we remember that he read it often enough and intensively

enough to see it as a whole. That's a rare view nowadays. The

Book has been almost universally blackened by simple ignorance

(the failure to read it) and by preconceived theological notions

that color and predetermine all of its meanings.

Few people have

the happy faculty of looking at what's there without preconceptions

of one kind or another. Blake's freedom from the conditioning of

formal education gave him a most singular ability to do this. His

powerful and energetic reading of the Bible therefore offers us

the priceless gift of a new beginning, of getting behind our preconceptions and seeing the bedrock of western life in a new way.

This new way is not really a new way, but a very old

way; it's a way that was lost when two things happened inaugurating

the modern age. First, Bacon, Newton and Locke convinced the

intellectual world that spirit doesn't really matter; all that

matters is matter. Second, knowledge exploded in such an expansion

that it became inconceivable to encompass it.

Blake's new way is

a medieval way, but it's a lost way that we desperately need today, for failing an organized unity of spiritual direction, we all

sink together into the abyss.

The Bible according to Blake provides that direction.

If you can make a commitment to the Bible like his, intensive

enough to read it thoroughly, if you can put away the black book,

if you can learn to read it imaginatively instead of binding it

down to literal-historical categories of time and space (which

Blake called "single vision"), if you can do all of these things,

what emerges is a myth of meaning, a way of understanding life--

the Hebrews' life and your life.

You find this myth of meaning most explicitly stated in

the earliest adventures of the children of Israel: they fall into

Egypt, at the Exodus are delivered, wander in the wilderness and

eventually occupy the Promised Land--but faithlessly. You see

this story recreated by every writer of the Bible and applied one

by one to a series of local scenes occuring over a period of about

a thousand years. You see a man named Jesus who deliberately sets

out to live this myth, and to live it in full, to do completely

what the successive preceding generations had always failed to do.

You see his death and resurrection and promise to come again to

achieve for us all what he had achieved as an individual (he in

us and we in him).

Finally you see John on Patmos still waiting

for the Return and recreating the whole thing one more time in

terms of the struggle between the Beast of Rome and the New Jerusalem.

But is that the end of the story? For Blake it went

on. In the City of God Augustine recreated it for the fourth

century. There was Dante's recreation in the 13th, Milton's in

the 17th, Blake's in the 18th--and yours and mine today! It's

our myth of meaning; it's the way we get from time to eternity.

Otherwise we stick with Locke, we decide there is no eternity,

and we rot--or burn!

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Reflections of a Happy Old Man

Balance

What's Your Attitude

Ageing

Notes

Daughters of Beulah

Death

Oothoon

**************************************************

Cave of the Nymphs

God

**************************************************

I

The Journey

To the Accuser, who is The God of this World ... Tho' thou art Worship'd by the Names Divine Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still The Son of Morn1 in weary Night's decline, The Lost Traveller's1 Dream under the Hill.

II

i

ii

chap9

CHAPTER Nine

Myth

************************************************** If you want to skip ahead go to: The Minor Prophetic Works or the Major Prophecies The Four Zoas Milton Jerusalem **************************************************

i

The Book of Urizen

ii

The Four Zoas

Albion

iii

The Mature Works

Jerusalem

chap8

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sex

***********************

If you want to skip ahead: Visions of the Daughters of Albiontarget="-blank">Sex as SymbolGenerationThe WomanThe Two Women Jerusalem Summary **************************************************

i

Visions of the Daughters of Albion

ii

Sex as Symbol

iii

Generation

iv

The Woman

v The Two Women

vi

'Jerusalem'

Summary

End of Chapter

chap8

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sex

***********************

If you want to skip ahead: Visions of the Daughters of Albiontarget="-blank">Sex as SymbolGenerationThe WomanThe Two Women Jerusalem Summary **************************************************

i

Visions of the Daughters of Albion

ii

Sex as Symbol

iii

Generation

iv

The Woman

v The Two Women

vi

'Jerusalem'

Summary

End of Chapter

chap6

CHAPTER SIX

Bible

i

ii

Redemption History

iii

Jehovah and Astarte

iv

Images of Grace

that they may be one, as we are one....That they all may be one: as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one is us... that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one;

v

Ezekiel

vi

To the Accuser, who is
The God of this World
...
Tho' thou art Worship'd by the Names Divine
Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
The Son of Morn1 in weary Night's decline,
The Lost Traveller's1 Dream under the Hill.

If you want to skip ahead go to: The Minor Prophetic Works or the Major Prophecies The Four Zoas Milton Jerusalem

If you want to skip ahead:

Visions of the Daughters of Albion
target="-blank">Sex as Symbol
Generation
The Woman
The Two Women
Jerusalem
Summary
**************************************************

v

The Two Women

If you want to skip ahead:

Visions of the Daughters of Albion
target="-blank">Sex as Symbol
Generation
The Woman
The Two Women
Jerusalem
Summary
**************************************************

v

The Two Women

that they may be one, as we are one....That
they all may be one: as thou, Father, art in me
and I in thee, that they also may be one is
us... that they may be one, even as we are
one: I in them and thou in me, that they may be
made perfect in one;