Part Two
‘Can it be that the harmony further from the surface, the harmony that hides from all but loving eyes, is, once recognized, proportionally dearer?’
Osbert Burdett:The Two Carlyles, p. 158.
Vala, or, the Four Zoas
Margaret Rudd
Most critics have been offended by the enormous welter of detail that obscures, almost defiantly, the meaning of the prophetic books. Taking into account that Blake did not want to be easy,1 in the following chapters I hope to cut through some of the non-essential padding to lay bare the underlying structure of what appears to me, naïvely perhaps, as primarily a story. It is an enthralling and coherent story when it is seen, as all narrative must be seen, as a dynamically unfolding whole. Oddly enough, or perhaps not so oddly, since the temptation to regard them as an esoteric puzzle is so obvious, the prophetic books have never before been examined as pure and simple narrative.
1 ‘That which can be made explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care,’ he wrote. ‘The wisest of the Ancients considered what is not too explicit as the fittest for Instruction.’
Often those critics who dismiss the prophetic books as poetry, admit that they would like to possess the key to Blake’s mythological labyrinth, for it seems to contain something of extraordinary power and significance. But to find the key seems too great an effort. Other critics, intent on unravelling the puzzle, feel that in tracking down the myriad esoteric sources for Blake’s symbols and names, they have the key to what he is saying. Into this category come Denis Saurat and now Miss Kathleen Raine who goes so far as to say that we can explain Blake wholly by his sources, that he was not inspired by the super-naturals as he said he was, but got all of his ideas and images from traditional lore. This seems to me to carry too far what is admittedly an important aspect of Blake criticism, and I would like to suggest that Blake had in common with many of the esoteric cults his work so resembles, a tapping of that realm we now call archetypal, and that contact with this realm always appears to be a kind of revelation. I would like to maintain that there is a still more important way in which we can understand Blake, and this is to try to understand the new tale that Blake is fashioning out of all the bits of ancient lore and out of what he claims is inspiration.
Although Blake’s impatience with his form is often felt by the reader, one never feels that he is tired of his material which breathtakingly foreshadows so much of what depth psychology has made us aware of, and more, since Blake does not hesitate to ground the mysterious human soul he is holding under merciless examination in the greater Humanity of Christ.
In the following pages my comments are meant solely for clarification of the story Blake is telling in the prophetic books, and I will not follow up any of the tempting opportunities for relating Blake’s ideas to possible outside influences. I would like to make a special plea that the quoted passages be given careful attention, since I wish as far as possible to let Blake tell his own story.
Without further ado, I will start with the first of the prophetic books proper, Vala, or, The Four Zoas,1 which is considered by many to be Blake’s most obscure poem. To me it is the most interesting of the prophetic books because it is the first and most spontaneous statement of Blake’s troubled state of mind. It exists only in manuscript form. Max Plowman believes that this poem is the missing ‘Bible of Hell’ which Blake promised his readers at the end of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and this may well be so. For the breaking apart of the marriage of Albion and Jerusalem is close enough to Blake’s definition of Hell in ‘The Clod and the Pebble’:
2 The first page of the manuscript is illustrated by a drawing of Vala, naked and reclining, right arm behind her head, and an intense far-off staring expression.
Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.
We rarely see the main characters of this first prophetic book from the outside. Rather we see as if from within Albion the battle of his warring faculties, with an occasional over-all glimpse of a man who seems to be in a death-like trance. Jerusalem, too, is rarely seen from the outside in her status of Albion’s wife or emanation, but only as she appears to Albion, which, in his confused state of mind, is usually as the glimmering witch-like Vala. The breaking apart of the marriage relationship, too, is seen almost wholly from Albion’s point of view. It is only in Jerusalem that Albion’s emanation is presented fairly consistently as a whole person even when she lapses from her fullest being.
Until then it is as if Blake forces us to look out from inside Albion at his marriage, and it is an uncomfortable ringside seat that we have purchased. First we find ourselves on one level of consciousness within Albion and then on another, and on each level the process of separation is going on. Each level of consciousness is represented by a male figure within Albion, and the female emanation which is its counterpart within Jerusalem. And this is the history not only of how Albion lost touch with his wife, but of his losing touch with the female principle within himself. This loss does not make him more of a man, but less. In slightly different terms Blake describes this dividing process in A Descriptive Catalogue:
‘The Strong Man represents the human sublime. The Beautiful Man represents the human pathetic, which was in the wars of Eden divided into male and female. The Ugly Man represents the human reason. They were originally one man, who was fourfold. He was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like the Son of God. How he became divided is a subject of great sublimity and pathos. The Artist has written it under inspiration, and will, if God pleases, publish it; it is voluminous, and contains the ancient history of Britain, and the World of Satan and of Adam.’
(Keynes, p. 110.)
Vala, or, The Four Zoas presents the story of this division in schematic terms rather than in the round as in Jerusalem. Milton, the middle prophetic book, advances the story slightly, but is more an interlude during which Blake takes time out to rail against Hayley-Satan and all the forces which work against true art.
It is significant that the process of breakdown begins when Albion cannot reach Jerusalem on the level of actual sensory contact. Tharmas, who is instinct or sensation in Albion, cannot reach Enion, his mate within Jerusalem. Blake tells us why this is so. Enion has fled from Tharmas in fear and disillusionment because:
I have look’d into the secret soul of him I lov’d,
And in the Dark recesses found Sin and cannot return.
It is thought which has separated instinct from its true goal and has made physical love seem sinful not because of its animality which is good and innocent but because of what is in the beloved’s soul. ‘And yet I love thee in my terror,’ she cries piteously, although insisting that ‘All love is lost.’
Blake is not altogether clear about telling us who first saw love as sinful, but the name of Tharmas (Doubting Thomas) may give us a clue as to where the doubts about the goodness of passion originated. If Tharmas is ashamed of his own passion even in his innermost soul, the beloved can sense this and flees from what must now seem lust. This repeats the story of the lyrics I have quoted.
The net result is that, although Blake assures us that Tharmas is ‘holy’ and ‘innocent’, as soon as he begins to wonder about the innocence of sexual love, he appears sinful to Enion and she is afraid of his love. She, in turn, appears to him to be like a harlot. And her reaction really does set in motion the train of events which brings to the scene the father-god, Urizen, who pronounces love truly sinful. But this is to anticipate.
Meanwhile, Tharmas pleads with great dignity, begging Enion not to probe too deeply into this feeling of sin:
Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre of my soul,
Spreading them out before the sun like stalks of flax to dry?
The infant joy is beautiful, but its anatomy
Horrible, Ghast & Deadly; nought shalt thou find in it
But Death, Despair & Everlasting brooding Melancholy.
Thou wilt go mad with horror if thou dost Examine thus
Every moment of my secret hours. Yea, I know
That I have sinn’d, & that my Emanations are become harlots.
I am already distracted at their deeds, & if I look
Upon them more, Despair will bring self-murder on my soul.
O Enion, thou art thyself a root growing in hell,
Tho’ thus heavenly beautiful to draw me to destruction.
Sometimes I think thou art a flower expanding,
Sometimes I think thou art fruit, breaking from its bud
In dreadful dolor & pain; & I am like an atom,
A Nothing, left in darkness; yet I am an identity:
I wish & feel & weep & groan. Ah, terrible! terrible!
This is a most remarkable passage, and one that is fully realized poetry, as well as an extraordinary understanding of the destructiveness of too much self-analysis, which was Blake’s own temptation. Tharmas laments further that because Enion is lost to him, the possibility of Jerusalem is lost to Albion:
Lost! Lost! Lost! are my Emanations! Enion, O Enion,
We are become a Victim to the Living. We hide in secret.
I have hidden Jerusalem in silent Contrition. O Pity Me.
I will build thee a Labyrinth also: O pity me. O Enion,
Why hast thou taken sweet Jerusalem from my inmost Soul?
But Enion, as in the shorter lyrics, will not pity him, and flees from passion that seems to demand her love as a duty of marriage, rather than as love given in freedom. From now on the quest of the sick Albion is to find again Jerusalem whose name is Liberty, while Jerusalem in the guise of Vala, like the goddesses of mythology, seeks for her lost lover. Enion cries:
All love is lost: Terror succeeds, & Hatred instead of Love,
And stern demands of Right & Duty instead of Liberty.
Once thou wast to Me the loveliest son of heaven—But now
Why art thou Terrible?
When Albion and Jerusalem have lost contact on the basic level of touch or sensation, represented by Tharmas and Enion, there is no longer much hope that they can communicate on any level. Their whole relationship is thrown out of harmony.
There are three other couples within Albion and Jerusalem, besides Tharmas and Enion, representing three levels of consciousness. Luvah and his wife, Vala, stand for the passionate emotions. Urizen’s emanation, Ahania, is feminine wisdom, equivalent to the gnostic Sophia. The faculty of imagination is represented by Los and Enitharmon, significantly the only couple that are generated after the Fall, the children of Tharmas and Enion. Their generation seems to be a kind of compensation to make up for the loss of Eternity, but they immediately prove to be irresponsible creatures who defy the parental realm of sensory fact, and poison Albion with fantasies.
Probably the losing touch between Jerusalem and Albion happened on all levels more or less simultaneously. But we must remember that Urizen did not spontaneously move to the place of tyrant over Albion. It was Enion who set in motion the train of events that called him to the scene by her probing of what seemed to be Tharmas’ sin, and their mutual feeling of shame. And shame, Blake tells us elsewhere, is ‘Pride’s cloak’. Enion’s feeling of shame for which she welcomes authority, is verified, not by fact, but by the self-elected authority of ‘reason’. And of course Urizen cannot resist decreeing categorically that yes, passion is ipso facto sinful. Almost with relief the faculties allow Urizen to set up his laws prohibiting love as sinful because the vague feeling of shame has spread through all of them and has become almost intolerable in its undefined oppressiveness. And there is no valid basis at all for the feeling of shame or for Urizen’s tyranny, for Blake tells us clearly that Tharmas is not sinful as he and Enion fear, but ‘holy’ and ‘innocent’.
Tharmas groan’d among his Clouds
Weeping: then bending from his Clouds, he stoop’d his innocent head,
And stretching out his holy hand …
Said: ‘Return, O Wanderer, when the day of Clouds is o’er.’
This shame which is pride’s cloak persuades each of the couples in turn that it is somehow guilty to be human, and to have human needs and loves. They should try to be gods and since reason is the faculty that is farthest away from the level of animal sensation, reason should be given sole authority. This in itself is the most fallacious type of reasoning. In Neurosis and Human Growth (pp. 91–2) Karen Horney writes that ‘the pride in intellect, or rather in the supremacy of mind, is not restricted to those engaged in intellectual pursuits but is a regular occurrence in all neurosis.’
Each pair, discontented and ashamed of the human need for a mate which Reason scorns as weak, lose all closeness, and soon all is bitterness and sexual strife. Blake tells the history of each couple’s coming to grief. The whole drama of the prophetic books is Albion’s ‘fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity’. His fall represents not only his separation from Jerusalem, his wife, but also his separation from the feminine principle in himself. Until he can unite the masculine and feminine sides of his soul—the mother and father within him—and himself be born as a mature person from this union, he is continually trying to unite with his wife, not as a beloved person, but as the other half of himself.1 We remember the lines from The Book of Urizen:
3 Until then, the sick child Orc is born of such a union on the level of imagination to the archetypal parents of fantasy, Los and Enitharmon, who are also brother and sister.
Eternity shudder’d when they saw
Man begetting his likeness
On his own divided image.
This is not to say that love should not have in it at all times something of this element. Human love, as A. P. Rossiter so aptly put it, is partly the marriage of true minds, partly the betrayal of Troilus and Cressida, and partly ‘Mummy possest’. But these must be conscious accepted and controlled desires rather than undirected and unconscious moods or drives that cause inner riots. In Albion they are the latter. Although he does wish for the marriage of minds and is unhappy because his wife cannot follow him into the dazzling realm of eternal truths, he does not know that in conflict with this is his need to unite with the mother in himself at the same time that he wants to reject her as a faithless harlot.
Although Blake sees sensory factual knowledge alone as ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep’, it is significant that the losing touch on the level of physical contact is by far the most calamitous thing that could have happened to the marriage of Albion and Jerusalem. It begins the series of events that leads to total breakdown in the relationship.
For to doubt, as Tharmas does, the value of the sensual side of love, and for Enion to flee like Thel from the experience of the senses, is the betrayal of what can and must be the gateway to eternity in a marriage. To doubt this is to doubt the possibility of Albion’s union with Jerusalem.
Perhaps because Tharmas and Enion themselves doubt the goodness of the realm they represent, that of empirical sensation, their children, Los and Enitharmon, immediately reject the parent level. They, brother and sister who are also husband and wife, represent the faculty of imagination in Albion and Jerusalem, but they become imagination that is irresponsible fantasy when they reject the bed-rock of actual fact. They refuse to be grounded in the doubtful evidence of the senses, and consequently begin to create havoc as soon as they are born. It almost seems as if they were born mature in body and turbulent in spirit. Blake with almost frightening psychological insight gives the smallest of hints in passing that Enion is jealous of her husband’s relationship to their own daughter, so that Tharmas has to protest:
It is not love I bear to Enitharmon. It is Pity.
She hath taken refuge in my bosom & I cannot cast her out.
Enion’s suspicions are those of a mother out of touch with her daughter because out of touch with her husband, and she sits in judgement on both until they are almost forced to take refuge together. Blake gives no indication that Enion’s suspicions have any foundation in fact, even if Enitharmon is irresponsible and mischievous, and Tharmas, Blake tells us, is holy and innocent although he is made to feel guilty.
Thus it is Enion who first creates the Spectre of guilt in Tharmas:
he sunk down into the sea, a pale white corse.
In torment he sunk down & flow’d among her filmy Woof,
His spectre issuing from his feet in flames of fire.
In gnawing pain drawn out by her lov’d fingers. …
Wond’ring she saw her woof begin to animate, & not
As Garments woven subservient to her hands, but having a will
Of its own, perverse & wayward. Enion lov’d & wept …
‘What have I done,’ said Enion, ‘accursed wretch! What deed?
Is this a deed of Love? I know what I have done. I know
Too late now to repent. Love is chang’d to deadly Hate …’
It is interesting to realize that Blake takes this image from his domestic life, possibly at Felpham by the sea, for Hayley tells us that Catherine made almost all of her husband’s clothes.
For the first time we encounter the realm of Beulah, and the mild Daughters of Beulah who are that part of Jerusalem which, even during marital disagreements, watches over the trance-bound Albion with pity and concern, like a Greek chorus of lamenting women, or like guardian angels.
There is from Great Eternity a mild & pleasant rest
Nam’d Beulah, a soft Moony Universe, feminine, lovely,
Pure, mild & Gentle, given in mercy to those who sleep,
Eternally Created by the Lamb of God around,
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 …
They said: ‘The Spectre is in every man insane & most
Deform’d. Thro’ the three heavens descending in fury & fire
We meet it with our songs & loving blandishments, & give
To it a form of vegetation. But this Spectre of Tharmas
Is Eternal Death. What shall we do? O God, pity & help!’
Next comes a passage reminiscent of ‘The Mental Traveller’ in its violent changes in mood and in the swiftly changing roles of dominance and subjection in a love relationship gone wrong. There is rapid alternation of power, as each partner plays in turn the sulky bound child to the other’s tyrannical parent. Never do we find either or both on a mature footing. One is always the perverse and wayward child, the other the condemning parent.
Tharmas’ Spectre starts life as a sullen babe, wholly in Enion’s power because she is for the moment in the false position of judging and condemning her husband as a parent judges a child. But suddenly the Spectre gets out of control, and the babe she has nursed so scornfully swells itself in terrific adult pride and forces her to worship it, at the same time despising her as an unworthy audience:
But standing on the Rocks, her woven shadow glowing bright,
She drew the Spectre forth from Tharmas in her shining loom
Of Vegetation, weeping in wayward infancy & sullen youth.
List’ning to her soft lamentations, soon his tongue began
To lisp out words, & soon, in masculine strength augmenting, he
Rear’d up a form of gold & stood upon the glittering rock
A shadowy human form wing’d, & in his depths
The dazzlings as of gems shone clear; rapturous in fury,
Glorying in his own eyes, Exalted in terrific Pride … repining in the midst of all his glory
That nought but Enion could be found to praise, adore, & love.
The tables are now completely turned, and Enion is dominated by the very Spectre she has created in Tharmas.
And, as the Daughters of Beulah said, the ‘Spectre is in every man insane and most deform’d’, because it is trying its best to make the man it hovers over scorn and reject his own humanity in an effort to be something other than human. Such a man, if he submits to his Spectre, punishes human nature, not only in himself, but all around him in the world that might betray him, and especially in those nearest to him. This is what Albion does to his emanation, his own anima as well as his wife, in treating her as a harlot. And when he stops actively flagellating himself and his wife, then he despairs and longs for death because he cannot fulfil Urizen’s laws of puritan perfection: the seductive beauty and innocence of human nature enthrals him just when he is crying out that it is ugly and corrupt. And thus we find Albion stretched out on the sea-coast in a death-like trance, the Spectre over him like a great hovering sea-bird.
We remember the fragmentary poem in Blake’s notebook about the Spectre:
And there to Eternity aspire
The Selfhood in a flame of fire
Till then the Lamb of God …
Each Man is in his Spectre’s power
Until the arrival of that hour,
When his Humanity awake
And cast his own Spectre into the Lake.
Man casts his own Spectre into the Lake when his humanity reasserts itself. The Selfhood is another name for the Spectre, and there is ambiguity in the lines:
And there to Eternity aspire
The Selfhood in a flame of fire
We see the Spectre, as if eternally damned, eternally bewailing the loss of Eternity from the fiery lake. But it is also Blake’s conscious or half-conscious condemnation of his own ever-recurring aspiration for the fourfold vision he calls ‘Eternity’. It is the Spectre, in its fiery pride, that dares to desire the gnosis of Eternity, rather than be content with the Humanity of Christ.
The Spectre that Enion has drawn from Tharmas and which has swelled itself in terrific pride until it dominates Enion completely, speaks to her with comical and pompous righteousness:
Who art thou, Diminutive husk & shell? …
If thou hast sinn’d & art polluted, know that I am pure
And unpolluted, & will bring to rigid strict account
All thy past deeds; hear what I tell thee! mark it well!
She has not even a name as far as he is concerned. She is beneath contempt and hardly worth noticing except to condemn for sins that the Spectre righteously unearths at every possible point. As far as he is concerned sex is synonymous with Sin and with Woman. Enion is completely cowed by the bombast of the Spectre. She apologizes for being born woman and therefore sinful. She recognizes that this state of affairs is a far cry from her initial idea that Tharmas’ love was sinful, and sees that her feeling of guilt has set into motion much more than she had bargained for:
Examining the Sins of Tharmas I soon found my own.
O slay me not! thou art his wrath embodied in Deceit.
I thought Tharmas a sinner & I murder’d his Emanations
His secret loves & Graces. Ah me wretched! What have I done?
For now I find that all these Emanations were my Children’s souls,
And I have murder’d these with Cruelty above atonement …
And thou, the delusive tempter to these deeds, sitt’st before me.
And art thou Tharmas? all thy soft delusive beauty cannot
Tempt me to murder my own soul & wipe my tears & smile
In this thy world, not mine: tho’ dark I feel my world within.
She trembling answer’d: ‘Wherefore was I born, & what am I?
A sorrow & a fear, a living torment, & naked Victim.
I thought to weave a Covering for my Sins from wrath of Tharmas.
And the Spectre answers petulantly accusation for accusation—‘Tis thou who has darken’d all My World, O Woman, lovely bane.’ Enion is coming to seem more and more like a nature goddess to Tharmas, just as Jerusalem is to Albion. Notice the remarkable touches, like records out of Frazer’s Golden Bough, with which Blake achieves this effect: the image of the woman as a naked victim for sacrifice; the idea that the man at conception provides the soul of the child, the woman the body; and, more directly, the strange monster, Nature, of the following passage, which is, however, half the creation of the Spectre:
Thus they contended all the day among the Caves of Tharmas,
Twisting in fearful forms & howling, howling, harsh shrieking,
Howling, harsh shrieking; mingling, their bodies join in burning anguish.
Mingling his brightness with her tender limbs, then high she soar’d
Above the ocean; a bright wonder, Nature,
Half Woman & half Spectre; all his lovely changing colours mix
With her crystal fairness; in her lips & cheeks his poisons rose
In blushes like the morning, & his scaly armour softening,
A monster lovely in the heavens or wandering on the earth,
With spectre voice incessant wailing, in incessant thirst,
Beauty all blushing with desire, mocking her fell despair.
Wandering desolate, a wonder abhorr’d by Gods & Men.
Again we seem to glimpse Albion stretched out along the sea with the strange bird hovering over him, half Spectre and half the idea of Nature created by the Spectre. The passage quoted is curiously ambiguous. It is obviously meant to convey the picture of a monstrous consummation, a union accomplished in fascinated revulsion and guilty despair. But the way in which Blake tries to suggest this, simply by the weak repetition of shrieking and howling, is offensive in its thin imprecision, not by what it is trying to convey. And the passage fails completely in its purpose. The union does not strike the reader as at all monstrous. In fact, what is conveyed is the intense delight in physical union which seems somehow to be a mingling of all the rainbow colours in the painter’s box as well as a mingling of bodies. Blake tries to counter this joyous impression with the wailing spectrous voice, and again fails, and is himself forced to apply to this supposed monster the unlikely adjective of ‘lovely’. An agonized female figure with hair streaming like flames, and snaky forms twisting around her, is Blake’s illustration to this plate.
Out of this union Los and Enitharmon are born, to become the brother and sister who, mated, represent the level of imagination in Albion and Jerusalem. Enion turns away from her husband, Tharmas, who is dominated by his Spectre, and gives all of her love to these children, ‘Rehumanizing from the Spectre in pangs of maternal love’. Here Blake sketches a graceful feminine form, seated against a rock, the children at her breast.
But soon the children wander away from her too possessive love,1 and they become irresponsible and mischievous imagination that causes even more trouble than already exists between the unhappy Albion and Jerusalem. They have tremendous power over time and space and the appearance of the seasons, and can make all appear unreal despite the watchful vigilance of the Daughters of Beulah who know them for ‘the Youthful terrors’ that they are, and are busy making ‘windows into Eden’ in the moments that Los wilfully destroys, and opening the centre of ‘an atom of space’ ‘into Infinitude’ so that Enitharmon cannot wholly confuse appearance. But still Los and Enitharmon pursue their destructive course:
4 A sketch shows the terrible children rejecting Enion who bows much too humbly before them.
Alternate Love & Hate his breast: hers Scorn & Jealousy
In embryon passions; they kiss’d not nor embrac’d for shame & fear.
His head beam’d light & in his vigorous voice was prophecy.
He could control the times & seasons & the days & years:
She could control the spaces, regions, desart, flood & forest,
But had no power to weave the Veil of covering for her sins.
She drave the Females all away from Los,
And Los drave the Males from her away.
Enitharmon really is a terror. She halts in her plans for mistreating their parents—‘for if we grateful prove, they will withhold sweet love, whose food is thorns and bitter roots’—to say to Los: ‘Hear! I will sing a Song of Death! It is a Song of Vala.’
She then sings her song about a dream in which she sees Vala, whose rightful mate is Luvah, fly up to sleep on the pillow of Albion, usurping Jerusalem’s place. This mischievous make-believe on the part of Enitharmon angers Los, and he replies that her song is not true and so cannot kill, and that Albion would not forsake Jerusalem for Vala, but is simply trying to comfort Vala who has lost her lover:
I die not, Enitharmon, tho’ thou singest thy song of Death,
Nor shalt thou me torment; for I behold the Fallen Man
Seeking to comfort Vala: she will not be comforted.
She rises from his throne and seeks the shadows of her garden
Weeping for Luvah lost in bloody beams of your false morning;
Sick’ning lies the Fallen Man, his head sick, his heart faint:
Mighty achievement of your power; Beware the punishment!
Enitharmon’s irresponsible fantasy is, in fact, becoming true although Los tries to believe otherwise. Enitharmon with her misuse of her power has completed the havoc begun by her mother, Enion, when she and Tharmas lost touch. For although Vala is indeed mourning her lost husband, Luvah, the passions within Albion, it is also true that it is Vala rather than all of Jerusalem that Albion is dreaming about. She looms large all out of proportion to him because the Spectre has forbidden the passions which she represents. It seems as if she has indeed taken Jerusalem’s place beside Albion’s pillow. And Vala, thinking to force her lover to return, welcomes Albion’s attentions.
Albion is very sick. We begin to see what this warfare on the different levels of his being has done to him. First, he lost direct contact with his wife because the good of physical love was doubted. Next, Jerusalem’s mischievous imagination, repudiating completely the parent level of sense data, makes up a story that Vala has taken her rightful place in Albion’s affections. Albion’s head is sick and his heart is faint, and ‘Urizen sleeps on the porch’ not functioning in a helpful way at all, but simply dozing there, ready to stake his claim when the time comes. Albion is no longer a man who can function, but the victim of his disorganized faculties which pull him in several directions. He plays dead rather than act, and so fulfils Enitharmon’s prophecy of death.
And ‘scorn & indignation rose upon Enitharmon’ at the sight of this less-than-man who had been so taken in by her fantasy, which might, had Albion and Jerusalem been in sensitive accord, have afforded instead high imaginative play between husband and wife. In scorn and anger and a wanton wish to prove to the full her own fantastical power, Enitharmon then deliberately calls down Urizen to begin his long tyranny over Albion. Until now it has only been the Spectre of guilt that has held Albion prisoner. Now the father-god himself appears on the scene to back up the false dictates of the Spectre with a false authority.
Then Enitharmon, reddn’ing fierce, stretch’d her immortal hands:
‘Descend, O Urizen, descend with horse & chariot …’
Eternity groan’d & was troubled at the Image of Eternal Death.
The Wandering Man bow’d his faint head & Urizen descended,—
And the one must have murder’d the Man if he had not descended—
Indignant, muttering low thunders, Urizen descended,
Gloomy, sounding: ‘Now I am God from Eternity to Eternity.’
Here there is a faint ludicrously crude sketch of Los angry at Enitharmon who seems to ward off a blow. Although ‘Enitharmon brighten’d more & more’ at what she had done, and looked to Urizen for praise, he pays no attention to her, but smiles upon Los and gives Luvah into his keeping, saying ‘Pity not Vala, for she pitied not the Eternal Man.’ This he does, promising Los the passions as servants if he will obey his laws. But Los, imagination, is furious at this and cries to Urizen: ‘One must be master. Try thy Arts. I also will try mine.’
Urizen is startled, but collects himself and thunders for Los to obey him, mocking Christianity as a soft delusion, and proclaiming the Spectre as the only real part of the man. The imagery of the host proclaims him the Miltonic Satan:
‘Obey my voice, young Demon; I am God from Eternity to Eternity.
Art thou a visionary of Jesus, the soft delusion of Eternity?
Lo, I am God, the terrible destroyer, & not the Saviour.
Why should the Divine Vision compell the sons of Eden
To forgo each his own delight, to war against his spectre?
The Spectre is the Man. The rest is only delusion & fancy.’
Thus Urizen spoke, collected in himself in awful pride.
Ten thousand thousand were his hosts of spirits on the wind,
Ten thousand thousand glittering Chariots shining in the sky.
Los had smitten Enitharmon in rage at this her doing, but, repentant, he now effects a reconciliation with her. They celebrate a gloomy marriage feast under the new reign of Urizen, and the bride and bridegroom sit ‘in discontent & scorn’ while a terrible prophecy is sung about a desolate earth and ruined cities. Enion, blind and age-bent, the mother of this rebellious and incestuous pair, hovers near the golden feast, predicting hunger and suffering for all the earth’s creatures. Albion grows very sick indeed: he has reached the point of inner crucifixion:
Now Man was come to the Palm Tree & to the Oak of Weeping
Which stands on the edge of Beulah, & he sunk down
From the supporting arms of the Eternal Saviour who dispos’d
The pale limbs of his Eternal Individuality
Upon the Rock of Ages, Watching over him with Love & Care.
Messengers from Beulah appear before Christ:
Saying, ‘Shiloh is in ruins, our brother is sick: Albion, he
Whom thou lovest is sick; he wanders from his house of Eternity.’
Throughout the plates dealing with the marriage feast, Blake has sketched strange figures: a twisting snake body ending in the head of a sleeping man; three large heads with an identical expression of anguished dream; an impressive sweeping drawing of Urizen; strange floating figures that it is hard to interpret.
Blake’s method of narrative is confusing when the plan is not understood, especially since the text is always accompanied by disturbing illustrations that may or may not have anything to do with the story, or may be enacting it on still another level. But his method in The Four Zoas is really quite simple. Generally we move from inside Albion where we have been watching his interior turmoil on one or more levels, to a brief over-all glimpse of his state of spiritual health or sickness and his relation with his bride. Often we see him stretched out in his death-like sleep. Then we become aware of still another plane of action, that of those watchful presences rather like guardian angels. These presences are always in touch with Christ, no matter how much Albion may stray, and they go to Christ with the simple poignant words—‘He whom thou lovest is sick; he wanders from his house of eternity.’
Seen as Blake intended it to be seen, such a book as The Four Zoas has a simple, almost naïve, coherence which is lost in a too myopic examination of its intricacies. It has something in common with twentieth-century stream of consciousness writing, and certainly with the psychological novel. Such a mode of writing lends itself to those moments of heightened vision where many threads are joined together and an illuminating pattern revealed. Such moments James Joyce calls ‘epiphanies’, and Blake not only makes use of similar moments, but describes them_ the Daughters of Beulah are responsible for these moments of insight:
Then Eno, a daughter of Beulah, took a Moment of Time
And drew it out to seven thousand years with much care & affliction
And many tears, & in every year made windows into Eden.
She also took an atom of space & open’d its centre
Into Infinitude & ornamented it with wondrous art.
Meanwhile, Urizen is trying to strike a shady sort of bargain with Luvah who will have none of it. Secretly Urizen plans to wipe out Luvah, the passions altogether. He wants to provoke Luvah, for he wants ‘the rage of Luvah to pour its fury on himself and on the Eternal Man.’ That is to say, he believes that the passions, given full rein because of Vala’s betrayal, will destroy themselves and leave the wounded Albion completely in his power. The success of this scheme is what produces the final crack-up in Albion. All of his faculties are thrown into dire confusion:
Sudden down they fell all together into an unknown Space,
Deep, horrible, without End, separated from Beulah, far beneath.
The Man’s exteriors are become indefinite, open’d to pain
In a fierce hungry void, & none can visit his regions.
Jerusalem, his Emanation, is become a ruin,
Her little ones are slain on top of every street,
And she herself led captive & scatter’d into the indefinite.
The fearful loneliness and the gnawing but indefinite sensual hunger that is a painful characteristic of breakdown, comes across clearly in this passage, also Albion’s sense of desolation and separation from the watchful guardians of Beulah. Jerusalem, too, is become a ruin. Blake uses the biblical imagery with strong effect to suggest Jerusalem’s sense of unfulfilment and indefiniteness because her unborn children are murdered before they are conceived. The breakdown within Albion and in his marriage relationship has been caused by the warfare to the death between his passions and his intellect, each fighting for sole supremacy over him. And Urizen has won.
With the accession of Urizen begins a period, not of serene intellect-guided clarity of vision, but one of extreme mental illness for Albion. The destructive fantasies of Enitharmon play a major role, and Jerusalem believes that Albion has preferred Vala to her, and she refuses him imaginative sympathy and love because she is hurt. And, following the guide of terrible Enitharmon, she shuts her husband out just when he needs her most. But, unknown to Enitharmon, the Daughters of Beulah prepare a couch where Jerusalem can sink into exhausted sleep while the battle rages in Albion, which is better than having her do active mischief under the direction of Enitharmon:
The Emanation stood before the gates of Enitharmon,
Weeping; the Daughters of Beulah silent in the Porches
Spread her a couch unknown to Enitharmon; here repos’d
Jerusalem in slumbers soft, lull’d into silent rest.
Terrific rag’d the Eternal wheels of intellect, terrific rag’d
The living creatures of the wheels, in Wars of Eternal life.
But perverse roll’d the wheels of Urizen & Luvah, back revers’d
Downwards & outwards, consuming in the wars of Eternal Death.
The Daughters of Beulah beheld the Emanation; they pitied,
They wept before the Inner gates of Enitharmon’s bosom,
And of her fine wrought brain, & of her bowels within her loins.
These gates within, Glorious & bright, open into Beulah
From Enitharmon’s inward parts; but the bright female terror
Refus’d to open the bright gates; she clos’d & barr’d them fast
Lest Los should enter into Beulah thro’ her beautiful gates.
The four living creatures of the wheels are the four Zoas or the faculties. The emanation stands for Albion’s emotional sexual nature, of course, as well as for his bride. The mysterious Daughters of Beulah are the guardians of peace and love even when Albion and Jerusalem are separated in misunderstanding and strife, and they prepare places for them in Beulah which is the realm of sexual peace and harmony, for in Beulah ‘contrarieties are equally true’.
There is a drawing of a woman who seems to be bound to a rock, a womb-like crevice above her, her head twisted to gaze at the figure of a child descending from above in swirling garments. This ends the first of the nine sections or ‘Nights’ of The Four Zoas.
Night the Second begins with Albion on his sickbed, ‘turning his Eyes outward to Self, losing the Divine Vision’. There is a sketch of Albion’s outstretched and sadly up-gazing figure. His face is the bearded face of Urizen, for Albion has summoned Urizen and made him the ruler of his soul and master over his other faculties. This is, of course, what had already happened on the subterranean levels of Albion’s being causing the illness. Now it has become conscious. Now in the grip of his sickness Albion makes it his deliberate choice, feeling wholly virtuous in his action. He says to his Reason—‘Take thou possession! take this Scepter! go forth in my might, for I am weary and must sleep the dark sleep of Death.’
Even Urizen, exultant in his triumph, is none the less horrified at Albion’s state:
First he beheld the body of Man, pale, cold; the horrors of death
Beneath his feet shot thro’ him as he stood in the Human Brain,
And all its golden porches grew pale with his sickening light,
No more exulting, for he saw Eternal Death beneath …
Terrific Urizen strode above in fear & pale dismay.
He saw the indefinite space beneath & his soul shrunk with horror,
His feet upon the verge of Non Existence.
Upon accession, Urizen sets to work immediately to build the Mundane Shell around Albion, that is, the delusive appearance of a world upon which mind must impose the reality of its abstract laws. There follows one of those long lists that rightly irritate the critical reader because it is full of superfluous, dull, and wilfully eccentric detail that has nothing to do with poetry and little importance in the story. This list to which Blake gives so much space is simply of the workers who build the Mundane Shell and of whom we shall never hear again. The drawings on these plates are faintly obscene in the Hieronymus Bosch manner. We are shown flying creatures with human breasts and pronounced genitals, repulsive furry moth bodies topped by babies’ heads, or headless bodies of children borne on bat wings. This is a nightmare world all out of touch with reality that Urizen is creating, not the clear brilliant light of intellectual gnosis.
The building of the Mundane Shell accomplished, Urizen then throws his deadly enemy, Luvah the passions, into the furnace that had been used in the building project. And Vala, Luvah’s wife who betrayed him and fled to Albion’s pillow although she is ostensibly looking for her lover, is in such a state of delusion that ‘In joy she heard his howlings and forgot he was her Luvah with whom she walk’d in bliss in times of innocence and youth.’ There is poignance in the cry of Luvah from the depths of the furnace, which Vala does not hear, of how he has always tried to protect Vala, but his loving care of her has been in vain:
I brought her thro’ the Wilderness, a dry & thirsty land,
And I commanded springs to rise for her in the black desart,
Till she became a Dragon, winged, bright & poisonous.
I open’d all the floodgates of the heavens to quench her thirst,
And I commanded the Great deep to hide her in his hand
Till she became a little weeping Infant a span long.
I carried her in my bosom as a man carries a lamb,
I loved her, I gave her all my soul & my delight.
Luvah tries in vain to comfort the unhappy Vala, but she does not even recognize him_
… she lamented day & night, compell’d to labour & sorrow.
Luvah in vain her lamentations heard: in vain his love
Brought him in various forms before her, still she knew him not,
Still she despis’d him, calling on his name & knowing him not,
Still hating, still professing love, still labouring in the smoke.
Blake gives us a drawing of a vast amorphous crouching Vala, in front of whom Luvah is standing, smiling sadly, but she will not look.
On the level of imagination, Los and Enitharmon are maliciously enjoying ‘the sorrows of Luvah and the labour of Urizen’. And they concoct a new scheme which is ‘to plant divisions in the soul of Urizen and Ahania’. The beginning of such a division is already there, for in the palace Urizen has built, which is a horrible travesty of the four-square city of Jerusalem, Urizen’s wife, Ahania, ‘His Shadowy Feminine Semblance’, reposes on a white couch in jealousy and discontent:
Two wills they had, two intellects, & not as in times of old.
This Urizen perceiv’d, & silent brooded in dark’ning Clouds.
To him his Labour was but Sorrow & his Kingdom was Repentance.
He drave the Male Spirits all away from Ahania,
And she drave the Females from him away.
But before Los and Enitharmon go on to deepen this discord we are allowed for a moment to have a God’s-eye-view, and we find that, although it looks as if man’s passions, Luvah, have been entirely destroyed by man’s overweening intellect, this is not altogether the case. Christ has intervened, and himself put on the bloody robes of Luvah:
The Divine Lamb, even Jesus, who is the Divine Vision,
Permitted all, lest Man should fall into Eternal Death;
For when Luvah sunk down, himself put on the robes of blood
Lest the state call’d 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
To bind the Body of Man to heaven from falling into the Abyss.
This is a profound commentary on the meaning of the Passion, and Blake’s conclusions are very like those of D. H. Lawrence in The Man Who Died. It is man’s own reason who destroys his passions as sinful, and Christ himself becomes these passions lest human love should be annihilated altogether before man awakes and sees it as holy rather than sinful. We must take careful notice of the activities of Luvah from now on, knowing that it is Christ who is dressed in Luvah’s garments.
Meanwhile all is discord between Albion and Jerusalem on their various levels. Luvah cries: ‘O when will you return, Vala the Wanderer?’ There is a striking drawing that represents the situation of all the faculties and their emanations. A bearded male figure with stern countenance and emaciated body regards his voluptuous emanation to whom he is still joined since their trunks seem to merge. She is straining backwards in wanton provocation and defiance with a laughing grimace of scorn.
Los and Enitharmon are behaving like a pair of mischievous nature sprites, playing magical tricks to amuse themselves:
For Los & Enitharmon walk’d forth on the dewy Earth
Contracting or expanding all their flexible senses
At will to murmur in the flowers small as the honey bee,
At will to stretch across the heavens & step from star to star,
Or standing on the earth erect, or on the stormy waves
Driving the storms before them, or delighting in sunny beams,
While round their heads the Elemental Gods kept harmony.
Yet for all their power they are not happy. Enitharmon cries accusingly to Los: ‘My spirit still pursues thy false love over rocks and valleys’, and he answers:
‘Cold & repining Los
Still dies for Enitharmon, nor a spirit springs from my dead corse;
Then I am dead till thou revivest me with thy sweet song.
Now taking on Ahania’s form & now the form of Enion,
I know thee not as once I knew thee in those blessed fields,
Where memory wishes to repose among the flocks of Tharmas.’
Enitharmon answer’d: ‘Wherefore didst thou throw thine arms around
Ahania’s Image? I deceiv’d thee & will still deceive.
Urizen saw thy sin & hid his beams in dark’ning clouds.
I still keep watch altho’ I tremble & wither across the heavens
In strong vibrations of fierce jealousy; 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.’
She fled, vanishing on the wind, And left a dead corse
In Los’s arms … he languish’d till dead he also fell.
Night passed, & Enitharmon, e’er the dawn, return’d in bliss.
She sang o’er Los reviving him to Life: his groans were terrible.
Enitharmon in this witching magical mood sings a song that is a part of her ‘rapturous delusive trance’, all about
The joy of woman is the death of her most best beloved
Who dies for Love of her
In torments of fierce jealousy & pangs of adoration.
Oddly, her song contains one stanza that is not part of the delusion, but contains the very essence of Blake’s affirmation of life:
Arise, you little glancing wings & sing your infant joy!
Arise & drink your bliss!
For everything that lives is holy; for the source of life
Descends to be a weeping babe;
For the Earthworm renews the moisture of the sandy plain.
And her song contains also such a beautiful cry to the beloved as this:
O I am weary! lay thine hand upon me or I faint,
I faint beneath these beams of thine,
For thou hast touched my five senses & they answer’d thee.
Now I am nothing, & I sink
And on the bed of silence sleep till thou awakest me.
This whole song of Enitharmon’s is ambiguous, but it is an insert and may have really belonged elsewhere.
After this song we return to the plot of these two youthful terrors to separate Urizen and Ahania by planting divisions in their soul. Again, as in the fantasy of Vala flying to Albion’s pillow, the mischief is done by means of a dream vision. They plan to conduct ‘the voice of Enion to Ahania’s midnight pillow’. Enion’s lament does indeed reach Ahania’s pillow, filling her with horror at what her husband, Urizen, has done. It is a very beautiful passage, containing the important lines about the desolate market which were discussed in the first chapter, and I would like here to quote it in full to reveal its psalm-like thought, its exotic phraseology and almost oriental splendour:
It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements,
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter-house moan;
To see a god on every wind & a blessing on every blast;
To hear the sounds of love in the thunder storm that destroys our enemies’ house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, & the sickness that cuts off his children,
While our olive & vine sing & laugh round our door, & our children bring fruits & flowers.
Then the groan & the dolor are quite forgotten, & the slave grinding at the mill,
And the captive in chains, & the poor in the prison, & the soldier in the field
When the shatter’d bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead.
It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:
Thus could I sing & thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.
It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun
And in the vintage & to sing on the waggon loaded with corn.
It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted,
To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,
To listen to the hungry raven’s cry in wintry season.
When the red blood is fill’d with wine & with the marrow of lambs.
What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?
Or Wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.
I have taught the thief a secret path into the house of the just.
I have taught pale artifice to spread his nets upon the morning.
My heavens are brass, my earth is iron, my moon a clod of clay,
My sun a pestilence burning at noon & a vapour of death in night.
I am made to sow the thistle for wheat, the nettle for a nourishing dainty.
I have planted a false oath in the earth: it has brought forth a poison tree.
I have chosen the serpent for a councellor, & the dog
For a schoolmaster to my children.
I have blotted out from light & living the dove & nightingale,
And I have caused the earthworm to beg from door to door.
And this remarkable Night the Second of The Four Zoas ends with Ahania’s reaction to Enion’s lament which was conducted to her pillow by Los and Enitharmon in order to alienate her from Urizen. Jerusalem’s mind and senses seek each other.
Ahania heard the Lamentation, & a swift Vibration
Spread thro’ her Golden frame. She rose up e’er the dawn of day
When Urizen slept on his couch: drawn thro’ unbounded space
On the margin of Non Entity the bright Female came.
Then she beheld the Spectrous form of Enion in the Void,
And never from that moment could she rest upon her pillow.
The drawing of Ahania descending, clutching her head, is a far cry from the previous drawing, a lovely family group of rejoicing figures tilling a fruitful earth in illustration to Enion’s song.
Night the Third opens with the attempt of Ahania to persuade Urizen to give up the false tyranny that is producing so much misery. And Blake draws her bowing low before his feet. She is in fact pleading with Lucifer to redress his sin of pride:
O Prince, the Eternal One has set thee leader of his hosts,
Raise then thy radiant eyes to him, raise thy obedient hands,
And comforts shall descend from heaven into thy dark’ning clouds.
Leave all futurity to him. Resume thy fields of Light.
Ahania is full of foreboding about the future now that she realizes what her husband has done. In telling her version of Albion’s downfall, she relates how he was ‘smitten by Urizen’s power, and how, instead of his wife, Jerusalem, Vala ‘walk’d with him in dreams of soft deluding slumber’. Jerusalem as a whole person could have warned Albion against seizing this false power, but instead he consulted Vala, who, as sexual woman, was bound only to admire any display of power on the male’s part. Ahania tells next how ‘a Shadow rose from his weary intellect’ and how Albion prostrated himself before it, to the momentary sincere consternation of herself and Urizen who had not until then dreamt of being in such a position of power, and did not originally want to be put on a throne that was not theirs. But Urizen soon took his own superiority for granted, and Ahania remembers how Urizen and Luvah fought for possession of the body of Albion, and that head won over heart, because it was Albion himself who chose, and ‘put forth Luvah from his presence’, even though Luvah is Christ. And Ahania cries in Cassandra-like despair:
I can no longer hide
The dismal vision of mine eyes. O love & life & light!
Prophetic dreads urge me to speak; futurity is before me,
Life a dark lamp. Eternal death haunts all my expectation.
Rent from Eternal Brotherhood we die & are no more.
On these pages of the M.S. are partially erased drawings, one of a woman who has thrown herself on to the lifeless body of a man, another of two children gazing at the figure of a prostrate man, and a third showing a group of crouching figures with a boy in the background chasing a bat-like creature.
Urizen simply detests having his wife draw his attention to all the havoc that is resulting from his rule. But Ahania, who was once feminine wisdom, now that she has allowed the evidence of the senses and fact speak to her in the form of Enion, feels compelled to speak to her husband and try to make him see ‘reason’! She tells him how Jerusalem, who has lost Christ just as Albion has, is actually turning into Vala, sexual woman seeking her lover like some terrible nature goddess bent on a union that will consume her beloved.
Vala shrunk in like the dark sea that leaves its slimy banks,
And from her bosom Luvah fell far as the east & west
And the vast form of Nature, like a serpent, roll’d between.
Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon we know not.
All is Confusion. All is tumult, & we alone are escaped.
She cries: ‘O Urizen, why art thou pale at the vision of Ahania?’ but she ends her prophecies hastily, ‘for his wrathful throne burst forth the black hail storm’. Not only has Urizen been inattentive to her description of the confusion he has caused, but he interrupts her with blustering and threatening insistence that he is sole god, and he brings all the traditional machinery of godship with him to prove it: thunders and lightnings, clouds and ice and violence:
‘Am I not God’ said Urizen. ‘Who is Equal to me?’ …
He spoke, mustering his heavy clouds around him, black, opake.
Then thunders roll’d around & lightnings darted to & fro;
His visage chang’d to darkness, & his strong right hand came forth
To cast Ahania to the Earth; he seiz’d her by the hair
And threw her from the steps of ice that froze around his throne,
Saying, ‘Art thou also become like Vala? thus I cast thee out!
Shall the feminine indolent bliss, the indulgent self of weariness,
The passive idle sleep, the enormous night & darkness of Death
Set herself up to give her laws to the active masculine virtue?’
There is rueful humour in Blake’s portrayal of Urizen’s noisy bluster, and his lack of subtlety in the way he simply produces the signs and symbols of his power to prove that he has it. He is diminished not only by this, but by the way he takes up Ahania’s tragic story of how Jerusalem is becoming Vala, only to turn it against his wife and say that she, too, is behaving like Vala. This is far from the case at this moment, as Ahania is in dead earnest offering him his last chance to join forces once more with his feminine counterpart, intuitive wisdom. But Urizen deliberately refuses this last chance to redeem his rule.
So loud in thunders spoke the king, folded in dark despair,
And threw Ahania from his bosom obdurate. She fell like lightning …
A crash ran through the immense. The bounds of Destiny were broken.
The bounds of Destiny crash’d direful, & the swelling sea
Burst from its bonds in whirlpools fierce, roaring with Human voice,
Triumphing even to the stars at bright Ahania’s fall.
Urizen has cast out the feminine side of wisdom which is one side of himself, and by this perverts what had been destiny, the basic bond of male and female. And he unlooses thereby the dark waters of the unconscious sea that surge and cry with human voice and triumph perversely in their own despair. For Urizen does it deliberately, he separates himself from Ahania knowing full well that despair lies therein, but stubbornly he maintains the weak argument that it is ‘intellectual suicide’ to the manly active virtues of intellect to accept wisdom that is based upon fact and intuition rather than on abstract rational ideas and proofs.
It is significant that Ahania is the only woman of the four emanations within Jerusalem who is not in the position of Eve, tempting her husband. Rather, she tries in vain to wean Urizen from his overwhelming pride. The guilt she sees in him is real and precise, not vague and imaginary such as that which Enion accused Tharmas of. In this she is Sophia, Wisdom, but Urizen casts her out, calling her Vala without the slightest excuse to do so except that he wants to get rid of her embarrassing insight into what he has done.
Night the Third ends with Ahania’s fall ‘far into Non Entity’, which means, of course, non-integration. Urizen, too, falls into this state when, too late, he rushes after her, possibly regretting what he has done. On this plate there is a finished pen drawing of Urizen holding a scroll covered with Hebrew lettering. Urizen falls precipitately into the abyss where Tharmas already wanders. Here there is a pencil sketch, full of fantastic humour, of Tharmas on the sea-shore, berating one of his own sea ‘monsters Who sit mocking upon the little pebbles of the tide In all my rivers & on dried shells that the fish have quite forsaken.’
Tharmas, who is extremely myopic as befits the faculty of blind touch or instinct, sees Ahania’s fall as the fall of his wife Enion. He strikes out at her, really in self-hatred and despair, until:
no more remain’d of Enion in the dismal air,
Only a voice eternal wailing in the elements.
There is a drawing of his terrible hoary figure threatening a shrinking female form under what looks like a cave. The words that are given to the lonely voice in the elements are some of the most tender in the poem_
These are the words of Enion, heard from the cold waves of despair:
‘O Tharmas, I had lost thee, & when I hoped I had found thee,
O Tharmas, do not destroy me quite, but let
A little shadow, but a little showery form of Enion
Be near thee, loved Terror; let me still remain, & then do thou
Thy righteous doom upon me; only let me hear thy voice …
Make me not like the things forgotten as they had not been.
Make me not the thing that loveth thee a tear wiped away.’
Night the Fourth relates the struggle of Los, imagination, with his own father, Tharmas or instinct, for supremacy over Albion now that Urizen is no longer god. It is prefaced by a finished drawing of Albion, looking suspiciously like Blake, gazing beseechingly at the sun-chariot of imagination. His emanation reclines against him, and to the side, a large sunflower springs exotically towards the sun, and a feminine figure within it raises her arms to the bright rays. Behind them, as always, lies the sea. Los cries in triumph:
We have drunk up the Eternal Man by our unbounded power …
And Los remains God over all.
There is ironic play on the name of Los here, for loss is truly all that remains of Albion after the warfare of his faculties for supremacy, and he gazes forlornly at the chariot of imagination, not knowing whether to follow it or to turn back to the instinctual life that leans heavily against him and springs glowing in its own right from the earth like a flower. But often, too, the instinctual life represented by the emanation, like Thel, flower-like turns away from him, cold and shuddering at the warmth and intensity of passion.
Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done:
Where the Youth pined away with desire
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
Once again, as with the ‘Sick Rose’, and the ‘Tyger’, we find that in the prophetic books Blake is simply expanding all that he had once been able to contain in the condensed implication of one incomparable image. And, as always, the lyric, less didactic in its explanation or implication, says much more.
Los challenged Tharmas, but Tharmas is not sure that he wants to fight his own son, who was once Urthona, creative imagination. Nor is he sure that he wants to be god.
Doubting stood Tharmas in the solemn darkness …
Now he resolv’d to destroy Los, & now his tears flowed down.
Finally Tharmas steels himself to fight Los for the kingship. Once he has made up his mind, taking pleasure in the idea that the laws of empirical fact will now succeed Urizen’s rational supremacy, he swells himself in pride and simply ignores Los. And so the power comes automatically into his hands:
Now all comes into the power of Tharmas, Urizen is fall’n,
And Luvah hidden in the Elemental forms of Life & Death.
Urthona is my son. O Los, thou art Urthona, & Tharmas
Is God, the Eternal Man is seal’d, never to be deliver’d.
And yet Tharmas knows that he is miserable as sole god. He misses Enion terribly:
Yet tho’ I rage God over all, A portion of my Life
That in Eternal fields in comfort wander’d with my flocks
At noon & laid her head upon my wearied bosom at night,
She is divided. She is vanish’d, even like Luvah & Vala.
O why did foul ambition seize thee, Urizen, Prince of Light?
And thee, O Luvah, Prince of Love, till Tharmas was divided?
And I, what can I now behold but an Eternal Death
Before my Eyes, & an Eternal weary work to strive
Against the monstrous forms that breed among my silent waves?
Is this to be a God? far rather would I be a Man.
Tharmas,1 blundering and clown-like as he is, never loses sight altogether of the truth. He knows that he and Enion love one another and should be together, and he doesn’t like being god. He departs into the unknown to look for Enion. Los remains, and, looking into the abyss, ‘terrified, Los beheld the ruins of Urizen beneath’. In order to bind Urizen, Los sets about rebuilding the ruined furnaces that had built up the Mundane Shell. And as he works, Los blasphemes against Tharmas who is the present God:
5 It is interesting that Ahania (intellect) in Jerusalem, and Tharmas instinct) in Albion, keep sight of the truth, while their opposites, Vala passion) in Jerusalem and Urizen (Reason) in Albion, fight for supremacy and distortion. The first two hold the fort and the balance, as it were, no matter how they are rejected.
And thus began the binding of Urizen; day & night in fear
Circling round the dark Demon, with howlings, dismay & Sharp blightings,
The Prophet of Eternity beat on his iron links & links of brass;
And as he beat round the hurtling Demon, terrified at the shapes
Enslav’d humanity put on, he became what he beheld.
Raging against Tharmas his God, & uttering
Ambiguous words, blasphemous, fill’d with envy, firm resolv’d
On hate Eternal, in his vast disdain he labour’d beating
The Links of fate, link after link, an endless chain of sorrows.
The Eternal Mind, bounded, began to roll eddies of wrath ceaseless …
Forgetfulness, dumbness, necessity, in chains of the mind lock’d up.
In such manner begin the ages of torment for Urizen, which we first witnessed in Blake’s Book of Urizen. Paradoxically, the fine intellect of man is bound and cannot know Eternity just because it assumes and claims its own power to do so, to be ‘unbounded’. Paradoxically, too, when Reason tries to be supreme ruler of man, the intellect is not clear and beautifully comprehending of eternal truths: it is rather, as Blake has shown us, full of obscene creatures and murk. It is also forgetful and vague, bound, but lacking ‘the wirey bounding line’ that makes things clear. Had Reason remained in a working relation of equality to the other faculties in Albion, it would have encompassed infinity in Christ, who would have ruled from the centre of Albion’s soul. But because of Urizen’s excessive pride Albion is sick, near to death.
And yet, even when Albion is in such a pitiful state, he is watched over with love by divine presences. His sickness is somehow identical with the crucifixion of Christ in his soul:
The Council of God on high watching over the body
Of Man cloth’d in Luvah’s robes of blood, saw & wept.
The Daughters of Beulah see this Divine Vision and ‘were comforted’. For the moment they are identified with the sisters of Lazarus, one of whom is Mary Magdalene:
Lord Saviour, if thou hadst been here our brother had not died,
And now we know that whatsoever thou wilt ask of God
He will give it thee; for we are weak women & dare not lift
Our eyes to the Divine pavilions; therefore in mercy thou
Appearest cloth’d in Luvah’s garments that we may behold thee
And live. Behold Eternal Death is in Beulah. Behold
We perish & shall not be found unless thou grant a place
In which we may be hidden under the shadow of wings.
For if we, who are but for a time & who pass away in winter,
Behold these wonders of Eternity, we shall consume.
Again we have the theme of Eternity being too rigorous for the weak female. But none the less, it is Jerusalem—for Blake says specifically that the Daughters of Beulah who appear here as the sisters of Lazarus, ‘a double female form, loveliness & perfection of beauty’, are the ‘Feminine Emanation’—who calls Eternity down to heal the sick Albion.
The Saviour mild & gentle bent over the corse of Death,
Saying, ‘If ye will Believe, your Brother shall rise again …’
Then wondrously the Starry Wheels felt the divine hand. Limit
Was put to Eternal Death.
There is a drawing that Blake places elsewhere on a blank page of the MS. which is probably meant to illustrate this scene. It shows Christ in flowing robes bending down to touch the heart of the naked Albion.1
6 There is another drawing, a man and a boy (father and son?) having a friendly tug of war. The man pulls the boy to him. A finished pen drawing shows a serene Christ to whom parents are bringing their children.
Night the Fifth is a strange and most important book.2 It is the story of what is happening in Albion’s imagination while he is in this state of death-like trance. For although we have been inside Albion watching the four faculties fighting for supremacy—his intellect, his imagination, his passions, and instinct—the realm of imagination contains a whole and vitally important world within it with key images of great significance. It is this archetypal world of Albion’s imagination that we enter in Night the Fifth.
7 This section is prefaced by a full-page drawing of a demon and a bristly dog watching gleefully as a smooth dog leaps at the throat of a naked man.
The archetypal history of Albion’s illness that we have already seen in terms of war among the faculties, is an astonishing feat of insight and ordering of unconscious material on Blake’s part. It begins with the birth of ‘a terrible child’ named Orc to Los and Enitharmon who conceived him in a moment of almost mad terror at the threatened return of Christ to Albion’s soul. And so we have Orc, not Christ, born within Albion. At Orc’s birth, which should have been the birth of Christ,
The Enormous Demons woke & howl’d around the new born King,
Crying, ‘Luvah, King of Love, thou art the King of rage & death.’
A drawing of Christ, pierced by nails and crowned with thorns, emerges from flames with a look of profound pity.
The trouble begins with Orc’s embrace of his mother, Enitharmon, which, although innocent, is immediately condemned by his jealous father, Los. There are two pictures illustrating the text in the MS. of Night the Fifth that are tremendously significant. On one side of the page is a loving family group, the mother and father obviously doting on the joyful naked boy, smaller than his father’s hand-span, which measures him in the cradle. On the other side of the page, the adolescent boy is lying naked on a rock, his sexual maturity very apparent, and his mother hugs herself with an expression of horror, and the father turns away in anger and dismay.
when fourteen summers & winters had revolved over
Their solemn habitation, Los beheld the ruddy boy
Embracing his bright mother, & beheld malignant fires
In his young eyes, discerning plain that Orc plotted his death.
Grief rose upon his ruddy brows; a tightning girdle grew
Around his bosom like a bloody cord; in secret sobs
He burst it, but next morn another girdle succeeds
Around his bosom. Every day he view’d the fiery youth
With silent fear, & his immortal cheeks grew deadly pale.1
8 There is a drawing of a naked woman reclining, her head in her hands. A boy watches her thoughtfully.
Enitharmon calls Los’s fear and pain ‘the chain of Jealousy’ and is heart-broken when Los binds the boy upon a mountain-top with the ‘accursed chain’. Los forces Enitharmon to come away from the mountain to which her son is chained,
Giving the Spectre sternest charge over the howling fiend,
Concenter’d into Love of Parent, Storgous Appetite, Craving.
There is another profound sketch. To the boy it must have appeared that his mother needed no urging to leave him, and that his father had won out in her love. For the pencil sketch shows us the bound boy watching his parents move away, entwined arm in arm closely and oblivious of his pain, gazing into each other’s eyes with the engrossed eyes of love and whispering together.
Los and Enitharmon return home, and suddenly, Blake tells us with a certain irony:
Felt all the sorrow Parents feel, they wept toward one another
And Los repented that he had chain’d Orc upon the mountain.
And Enitharmon’s tears prevail’d; parental love return’d,
Tho’ terrible his dread of that infernal chain. They rose
At midnight hasting to their much beloved care.
But they are too late. Blake observes with startling clarity of vision that irreparable harm has already been done to the boy. Orc has grown roots from the chain of jealousy and is rooted into the rock:
Los, taking Enitharmon by the hand, led her along
The dismal vales & up to the iron mountain’s top where Orc
Howl’d in the furious wind; he thought to give to Enitharmon
Her son in tenfold joy, & to compensate for her tears
Even if his own death resulted, so much pity him pain’d.
But when they came to the dark rock & to the spectrous cave,
Lo, the young limbs had strucken root into the rock, & strong
Fibres had from the Chain of Jealousy inwove themselves
In a swift vegetation round the rock & round the Cave
And over the immortal limbs of the terrible fiery boy.
In vain they strove now to unchain, in vain with bitter tears
To melt the chain of Jealousy; not Enitharmon’s death,
Nor the Consummation of Los could ever melt the chain
Nor unroot the infernal fibres from their rocky bed.
This sorry tale has, of course, a startling resemblance to the genesis of what today’s psychologists call the Oedipus Complex. However, Blake slants it a little differently. The sense of guilt is produced wholly by the attitude of the father. A boy does not start life with a ‘mother fixation’. He embraces his mother in all innocence at the time of puberty, as he did as a child. It is the father who sees evil where there is none. Seeing the boy’s growing body, he distorts the boy’s natural affection for his mother into something unnatural and horrible. He is jealous of the boy’s approaching young manhood just when he himself is losing the vigour of youth. The consequences of the father’s jealousy do irrevocable damage to the boy. By the time that the parents regret chaining the boy to the mountain, it is too late. The boy’s very outlook is chained and distorted and rooted in anger. He has been forced into the pattern of an Oedipus relationship with his mother, and indeed with any woman that he may try to love. Neither the death of his actual mother will eradicate this effect, nor identification with his father and recognition of the sexual relationship between his parents. The damage that has been done under the name of parental love cannot be undone.
Blake is profound in placing the parental contribution to Albion’s breakdown wholly on the level of distorted imagination or fantasy. We know nothing about Albion’s actual parents or his relationship with them. Instead, we are given the history of Orc, who is Albion as he appears to himself in his sick fantasies, and his relation to his archetypal parents, Los and Enitharmon. That Blake was astonishingly aware of what we now call archetypes cannot be doubted. If he is not talking about those forces in the following passage from A Descriptive Catalogue, I do not know what he is talking about:
‘Chaucer’s characters are a description of the eternal principles that exist in all ages … visions of these eternal principles or characters of human life appear to poets, in all ages … These gods (of the Greeks) are visions of the eternal attributes, or divine names, which, when erected into gods, become destructive to humanity. They ought to be the servants, and not the masters of man, or of Society. They ought to be made to sacrifice to Man, and not man compelled to sacrifice to them; for when separated from man or humanity, who is Jesus the Saviour, the vine of Eternity, they are thieves and rebels, they are destroyers. Keynes, Nonesuch, vol. III, p. 101.
Quite literally, we get the inside story of what Albion at his sickest believed his parents to have done to him, whatever they may have done or not done in actual fact. To be able to blame his archetypal parents for his sorry plight is, of course, one way Albion has of lifting the burden of guilt from his own shoulders concerning his failure in relationship with his wife.
This permanent chaining of Orc within Albion has dire effects on Jerusalem as well, and on Enitharmon, Orc’s mother, within Jerusalem. In Enitharmon as in Jerusalem ‘Vala began to reanimate in bursting sobs’. And soon Vala will join forces with Urizen to do further damage. But at the moment we find Urizen alone in a short-lived state of repentance, listening to the howls of Orc. He remembers his peaceful existence before his pride made him take advantage of Christ’s mildness:
I will arise, Explore these dens, & find that deep pulsation
That shakes my cavern with strong shudders; perhaps this is the night
Of Prophecy, & Luvah hath burst his way from Enitharmon.
When Thought is clos’d in Caves Then Love shall shew its root in deepest Hell.
I went not forth: I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath;
I call’d the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark;
The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away.
We fell …
I well remember, for I heard the mild & holy voice
Saying, ‘O light, spring up & shine,’ & I sprang up from the deep.
He gave me a silver sceptre, & crown’d me with a golden crown,
And said, ‘Go forth & guide my Son who wanders on the ocean.’
O Fool! to think that I could hide from his all piercing eyes
The gold & silver & costly stones, his holy workmanship!
O Fool! could I forget the light that filled my bright spheres
Was a reflection of his face who call’d me from the deep!
The last line, with its platonic image of the cave, is curiously like Kant’s conclusion that thought without content is empty, just as emotion or empirical fact without thought is blind. The passage about the stars throwing down their spears casts light on the lyric that Blake called ‘The Tyger’. We realize that it is Urizen’s fall and tyranny which was the mysterious and beautiful evil that stalked the forests of the night: the Tyger is the terrible beauty of thought separated from Love:
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Night the Fifth ends with Urizen’s realization that thought without love is nothing, and love without thought is hell.
Night the Sixth opens with Urizen gathering himself to explore his den. He ‘arose, & leaning on his spear explor’d his dens.’ He comes upon three mysterious women who are later revealed as his daughters, Eleth, Uveth, and Ona, who were the Moral Virtues in the Everlasting Gospel, and probably the Fates. The whole scene is certainly reminiscent of Lear. Miss Kathleen Raine maintained in a lecture1 that the early crude poem, Tiriel, is one of Blake’s ‘major works’, and a profound criticism of King Lear. Be this as it may, I cannot remember whether she mentioned the startling resemblance of this scene in The Four Zoas to Lear.
9 At Girton, 1954.
Urizen does not at first recognize his daughters:
They rear’d up a wall of rocks, & Urizen rais’d his spear.
They gave a scream, they knew their father. Urizen knew his daughters.
They shrunk into their channels, dry the rocky strand beneath his feet,
Hiding themselves in rocky forms from the Eyes of Urizen.
‘Who art thou, Eldest Woman, sitting in thy clouds? …
Answerest thou not?’ said Urizen, ‘Then thou maist answer me,
Thou terrible woman, clad in blue, whose strong attractive power
Draws all into a fountain at the rock of thy attraction;
With frowning brow thou sittest, mistress of these mighty waters.’
She answer’d not, but stretched her arms & threw her limbs abroad.
‘Or wilt thou answer, youngest Woman, clad in shining green?
With labour & care thou dost divide the current into four.
Queen of these dreadful rivers, speak, & let me hear thy voice.’
Urizen weeps in sorrow and fury that after all he has given them, they chose Tharmas as their God. That he has done so much for them we must take on faith, for we have not heard of the daughters before now except in The Everlasting Gospel:
Am I not Lucifer the Great,
And you my daughters in great state
The fruit of my Mysterious Tree …
The Moral Virtues in Great fear
Formed the Cross & Nails & Spear.
And in the lyric ‘A Little Girl Lost’, the daughter who has loved, and confronts her stern father is named Ona. Urizen curses his ungrateful daughters like Lear, and Tharmas comes at their scream_
Crying: ‘What & Who art thou, Cold Demon? art thou Urizen?
Art thou, like me, risen again from death? or art thou deathless?
If thou art he, my desperate purpose hear, & give me death,
For death to me is better far than life, death my desire
That I in vain in various paths have sought, but still I live.
The Body of Man is given to me. I seek in vain to destroy.’
Tharmas, longing for death, proposes that they should destroy one another and so end the misery of their fallen state. Tharmas says to Urizen:
Withhold thy light from me for ever, & I will withhold
From thee thy food; so shall we cease to be, & all our sorrows
End, & the Eternal Man no more renew beneath our power.
In Albion in his fallen state the wish for death is dominant, at least on the level of instinct. But Urizen does not answer Tharmas’ proposal of a death-pact, and makes his way through caverns which can only be the caves of the mind in mental sickness:
For Urizen beheld the terrors of the Abyss wandering among
The ruin’d Spirits, once his children & the children of Luvah.
Scar’d at the sound of their own sigh that seems to shake the immense
They wander Moping, in their heart a sun, a dreary moon,
A Universe of fiery constellations in their brain,
An earth of wintry woe beneath their feet, & round their loins
Waters or winds or clouds or brooding lightnings & pestilential plagues.
Beyond the bounds of their own self their senses cannot penetrate:
As the tree knows not what is outside of its leaves & bark
And yet it drinks the summer joy & fears the winter sorrow,
So, in the regions of the grave, none knows his dark compeer
Tho’ he partakes of his dire woes & mutual returns the pang,
The throb, the dolor, the convulsion, in soul-sickening woes.
Urizen finds that matters are much worse within the caverns of Albion’s mind than he alone had power to make them_
Here he had time enough to repent of his rashly threaten’d curse.
He saw them curs’d beyond his Curse: his soul melted with fear.
He could not take their fetters off, for they grew from the soul,
Nor could he quench the fires, for they flam’d out from the heart,
Nor could he calm the Elements, because himself was subject.
Urizen throws himself into the void in despair at what he sees, and he falls even further into the abyss he is already in. And once again, we get a sudden shift from this whirling chaos inside of Albion, to the dizzying heights of divine guidance. Christ sees Urizen’s despair:
The ever pitying one who seeth all things, saw his fall,
And in the dark vacuity created a bosom of clay …
Endless had been his travel, but the Divine hand him led.
Urizen recognizes the tragedy he has caused in its full horror:
O, thou poor ruin’d world!
Thou horrible ruin! Once like me thou wast all glorious,
And now like me partaking desolate thy master’s lot.
Art thou, O ruin, the once glorious heaven? are these thy rocks
Where joy sang on the trees & pleasure sported in the rivers,
And laughter sat beneath the Oaks, & innocence sported round
Upon the green plains, & sweet friendship met in palaces,
And books & instruments of song & pictures of delight? …
I am regenerated, to fall or rise at will …
In an effort to rise again and to make some sense of the ruined world, Urizen invents the sciences to explain and control nature:
So he began to form of gold, silver & iron
And brass, vast instruments to measure out the immense & fix
The whole into another world better suited to obey
His will, where none should dare oppose his will, himself being King,
Of All, & all futurity be bound in his vast chain.
And the Sciences were fix’d & the Vortexes began to operate
On all the sons of men, & every human soul terrified
At the living wheels of heaven shrunk away inward, with’ring away.
Urizen is up to his old tricks again. His moment of repentance fades easily into new schemes for power. Tharmas tries his best to kill Urizen by refusing him nourishment from his own domain of nature and empirical fact, but Urizen goes inexorably on, imposing an abstract tyranny of scientific law on that body of experience which, Tharmas feels, should be learnt only through the senses. This has a horrible effect on the world of imagination, and, ‘All these around the world of Los cast forth their monstrous births.’
Night the Seventh begins with Urizen banishing Tharmas. It then takes us back to the story of Orc. This is both the most difficult and the most important and subtle section of The Four Zoas. It relates how Orc, after his Oedipus-like experience, inevitably becomes entangled in Urizen’s false religion.
Urizen descends to the cave where Orc is bound, and finds the boy worshipping at the shrine of his own mother, Enitharmon:
Howling & rending his dark caves the awful Demon lay:
Pulse after pulse beat on his fetters, pulse after pulse his spirit
Darted & darted higher & higher to the shrine of Enitharmon.
This is the ‘deep pulsation that shakes my cavern with strong shudders’ which Urizen had previously felt and feared might be the birth of Luvah who is Christ. But it is only Orc born in Albion’s soul where Christ should be. And it is an Orc ripe for and already conditioned for Urizen’s father-god religion of ‘Thou Shalt Not’. Orc is already worshipping the mother image who is seen as holy and unattainable, and at the same time as the terrible harlot, Nature or Vala, who lures him towards destruction. For within Enitharmon in her pride at being worshipped by her son, ‘Vala began to reanimate’. Orc is feeding himself ‘with visions of sweet bliss far other than this burning clime’. That is to say, he does not want any human love, but is thirsting for the unattainable romantic ideal of woman-hood that the mother represents. But, should this image seem accessible, she is immediately condemned as a harlot.
Urizen sits down to watch this interesting phenomenon. But, since he is the self-appointed father-god, he soon finds himself feeling half jealous of Orc’s worship of the mother image. He finds himself aching to replace Orc’s actual father, who is Los, and himself be worshipped together with the mother. Blake indicates with brilliant subtlety how Orc’s sick relation to his parents merges almost unnoticed into his sick religion on the level of Albion’s warped imagination.
It is a short step from Orc’s fear and hatred of his own father, Los, to confusing this father with a tyrannical god. And a god has the unquestionable authority to condemn as guilty a love that has already been made to seem guilty by the less potent authority of a father.
The actual replacement of Los, the real father of Orc, by Urizen, the father-god, in Albion’s sick imagination, is brilliantly suggested. It is significant that after this replacement occurs, Orc seems to himself less like the innocent sinner, Oedipus, and more like Prometheus who deliberately stole fire from the god: ‘I stole thy light and it became fire consuming’ cries Orc in Promethean imagery, confessing to a deliberate crime he did not commit. He is no longer simply the wronged son who has been accused and chained although innocent. He has become the chained creative imagination itself become deliberately evil in the service of a false god. He now intends to worship at the shrine of the mother whether the father-god is jealous or not. Orc is a raging and terrified child, but he is also a demon. He hides Christ, true imagination and love in Albion, in whom the Father is implicit. Orc separates off from the father and both hates and worships him as larger than life.
By now Orc is entangled not only in the simple worship and fear of his own father, but in all the intricate branches of the tree of mystery religion which Urizen brings with him when he almost magically replaces Los. The fibres that grew from the original chain of jealousy with which Los chained Orc to the mountain, rooting Orc to sickness, have become irrevocably entwined with the roots of the tree of mystery.
This tree of mystery is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which divides life up into the opposites of good and bad on rational grounds. Blake suggests that this is a development that springs almost involuntarily from Albion’s fallen state almost despite Urizen. Urizen simply sat down to watch Orc worshipping the mother, and is almost as surprised as anyone to find his mild wish to replace Los magically become fact:
Urizen approach’d not near but took his seat on a rock
And rang’d his books around him, brooding Envious over Orc …
Los felt the Envy in his limbs like to a blighted tree,
For Urizen fix’d in envy sat brooding … til underneath his heel a deadly root
Struck thro’ the rock, the root of Mystery accursed shooting up
Branches into the heaven of Los: they, pipe form’d, bending down
Take root again wherever they touch, again branching forth
In intricate labyrinths o’erspreading many a grizly deep.
The various gradations of tree imagery, from Los’ feeling of Urizen’s envy in his limbs like ‘to a blighted tree’ to the full branching of the tree of Mystery, hold together this incredible scene of illusions and replacements in Albion’s sick fantasy.
Urizen, in his opaque understanding of his own motivation, is amazed to find himself confused with and already taking the place of Orc’s father, Los:
Amaz’d started Urizen when he found himself compass’d round
And high rooted over with trees; he arose, but the stems
Stood so thick he with difficulty & great pain brought
His books out of the dismal shade, all but the book of iron.
Urizen, concerned only in rescuing his precious books from the encroaching undergrowth, is altogether surprised at finding himself in his new role. But he soon gets used to it, and persuades himself that it was a deliberate act of altruism that moved him to come. He tells Orc:
Pity for thee mov’d me to break my dark & long repose,
And to reveal myself before thee in a form of wisdom.
This is pure pompous nonsense. Urizen, fallen into the abyss, had out of sheer boredom and restlessness been exploring the caves of his prison. No profound repose has been disturbed by his coming. But none the less he sententiously holds forth in the manner of the bookish great man, acclaimed, assured, and generous with advice: it is a very funny parody of a type of man that Blake knew well:
Read my books, explore my Constellations,
Enquire of my Sons & they shall teach thee how to War.
Urizen says kindly to young Orc, who languishes consumed with the bothersome fires of youth.
Urizen decides to get rid of Los altogether and himself become the substitute father, forestalling rivalry from the real father who may make trouble as he is bewildered by what is happening. Urizen sits
On a rock of iron frowning over the foaming fires of Orc.
And Urizen hung over Orc & view’d his terrible wrath.
For Orc’s wrath against his father is now given free rein within the mystery religion. Finally Urizen tells his three daughters, the Moral Virtues,
To bring the Shadow of Enitharmon beneath our wondrous tree,
That Los may evaporate like smoke & be no more.
And so, under protection of the Moral Virtues, the mother image is safely conveyed into her place in the religion of Mystery, and Orc’s actual father, Los, is replaced once and for all by Urizen. Los disappears ‘like smoke’ in Orc’s mind.
Blake shows us the bewilderment of Los who does not know at all what is happening. For he has no way of guessing that Orc has in imagination annihilated him, and now quite safely can worship the mother image under the authority of Urizen, who is also the supreme avenger should Orc dare to unite with the mother goddess.
All that Los is able to see is that his wife, Enitharmon, has withdrawn from him in spirit, and seems to find joy and nourishment in some invisible source. She is radiant, and goes through strange emotional crises that he cannot understand because he cannot see what is causing them_
Silent he stood over Enitharmon watching her pale face … nor could his eyes perceive …
The cause of her dire anguish, for she lay the image of death … Now she was pale as snow
When the mountains & hills are cover’d over & the paths of Men shut up,
But when her spirit return’d as ruddy as a morning when
The ripe fruit blushes into joy in heaven’s eternal halls,
She secret joy’d to see; she fed herself on his Despair.
She said, ‘I am reveng’d for all my sufferings of old.’
Of course, this separation between Los and Enitharmon began long before Orc was born. From their own childhood days this pair was wayward and perverse, and Christ played no part in their union. The birth of Orc should have been the birth of Christ, had they not been so terrified at anything resembling true love. Their separation was effectively completed when Enitharmon interceded in vain for her son against Los’s jealousy and anger. Now in retaliation for Los’s cruelty, she becomes with a vengeance the mother goddess in Urizen’s religion, content with the worship of her son because she no longer loves her husband. She does not pause for a moment to consider that she is destroying all chance that Orc may someday find his own female counterpart, by keeping him in this position of unsatisfied suppliant at her shrine.
This instalment of the mother in Urizen’s religion completes the picture of Orc’s illness, which is Albion’s. From now on he is cut off from actual life, living in this world of looming parent images, for ever worshipping and desiring the mother, but forbidden to unite with her by the father god. It is really the two sides of himself, the opposites of father and mother within his own being that Urizen has forbidden Orc to unite. He has thus condemned Orc to impotent inaction. For it is only when we can manage by some imaginative re-creation to play out that part of our earthly existence of which we have no remembrance—the union of our parents and our conception and birth—that we wed together consciously the two sides of ourselves and are consciously brought to birth as a functioning human entity. Until then guilt makes the whole process of birth a monstrous thing and, like Albion, we die from day to day, which is one way of looking at life.
The successful setting up of Urizen’s religion has completed Albion’s division off from that half of himself which he feels is evil and taboo. The mother image becomes the desired and forbidden unattainable which he will project on to any woman who may attract him, and it is really his own feared emotional nature. This image, because of Urizen’s false laws which surround it, seems at one and the same time, impossibly ‘good’, a terrible travesty of the Virgin Mary, and also a looming temptress, a belle dame sans merci who lures him to destruction like a harlot. Until he can unite with this image within his own imagination, he can have no real relationship with a woman, for he is seeking the unattainable mother to intercede for him with the angry father, not an equal partner in a marriage relationship.
Enitharmon as she is, is a horrible caricature of the Virgin Mary. Urizen fears that she will give birth to Christ, but he needn’t have worried, for she can only give birth to Orc and new forms of Urizen in endless cycle. Urizen’s spectre prepares her for this event, coming like some dark angel of annunciation:
The Spectre … saw the Shadow of Enitharmon
Beneath the Tree of Mystery … the demon strong prepar’d the poison of sweet Love …
‘Loveliest delight of Men! Enitharmon … the next joy of thine shall be in sweet delusion
And its birth in fainting & sleep & sweet delusions of Vala.
Los, Enitharmon’s husband, by this time realizes that his wife partakes no longer of Jerusalem, but wholly of Vala, Nature, and is worshipped as the mother goddess in Urizen’s religion. He laments her departure into the realm of Mystery and the unattainable, knowing that for himself as well as for Orc, she must from now on be the luring belle dame sans merci with all of her powers of temptation that never intend to satisfy:
Why can I not Enjoy thy beauty, lovely Enitharmon?
When I return from clouds of Grief in the wand’ring Elements
Where thou in thrilling joy, in beaming summer loveliness,
Delectable reposest, ruddy in my absence, flaming with beauty,
Cold pale in sorrow at my approach, trembling at my terrific
Forehead & eyes, thy lips decay like roses in the spring.
How thou art shrunk!…
Thus Los lamented in the night, unheard by Enitharmon.
For the Shadow of Enitharmon descended down the Tree of Mystery.’
Orc very rightly suspects that this ‘benevolent’ move on Urizen’s part, gratifying his desire by bringing the mother image into his religion and making her ever worshipful but mysteriously unattainable, is making his illness worse instead of better. It is a granting of desire that means further tyranny. He has a momentary conviction that his god, Urizen, is really Lucifer:
Then Orc cried: ‘Curse thy Cold hypocrisy! already round thy Tree
In scales that shine with gold & rubies, thou beginnest to weaken
My divided Spirit. Like a worm I rise in peace, unbound
From wrath. Now when I rage my fetters bind me more …
Give me example of thy mildness. King of furious hailstorms,
Art thou the cold attractive power that holds me in this chain? … Thou know’st me now, O Urizen, Prince of Light,
And I know thee.’
Urizen is terrified by this moment of insight and rebellion on Orc’s part. In a panic, Urizen is convinced that Orc has suddenly become his old enemy, Luvah, who is Christ. There is something both comical and profound in Blake’s portrayal of the archetypal tyrannical father, tottering in his power at the first moment of insight on the part of the sick Orc. Urizen is afraid that he and Enitharmon have inadvertently given birth to Christ: ‘Terrified Urizen heard Orc, now certain that he was Luvah.’
Urizen needn’t have feared. Orc has not become Christ, but a sick caricature of Christ at the centre of Albion’s soul. He is impotence that passes for holiness, inhibition that passes for morality, shame that is ‘Pride’s cloak’ and passes for goodness. In the same way, the mother image is a sick caricature of the Virgin Mary within Jerusalem. She is become the sick rose and Orc is the invisible worm who destroys her with his dark love in the strange nightmare fantasy of Urizen’s howling storms. We have now in the religion of Mystery, a false father-god in Urizen, a false Son in Orc, a false Holy Ghost in the Spectre and a false virgin-mother in Enitharmon. In contrast to true Christianity, Orc’s dualistic religion is that which Blake criticized in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, saying:1
10 Blake has drawn a swiftly running male figure, almost horizontal, holding a circlet of stars before him as he runs. Many of the drawings in the MS., like this one, have nothing to do with the immediate text.
‘All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz. a Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body; and that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of the Soul discern’d by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound, or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.’
The nightmare repeats itself in various forms, each time adding some new horror to the basic conception of Orc’s illness, which is, we must always remember, simply the core of Albion’s sickness. Love, energy, power, inhibited, turn poisonous.
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 seiz’d
All heaven; they saw him dark; they built a golden wall
Round Beulah. There he revel’d in delight among the Flowers.
Vala was pregnant & brought forth Urizen, Prince of Light,
First born of Generation. Then behold a wonder to the Eyes
Of the now fallen Man; a double form Vala appear’d, a Male
And female; shudd’ring pale the Fallen Man recoil’d
From the Enormity & call’d them Luvah & Vala, turning down
The vales to find his way back into Heaven, but found none.1
11 Behind the text is a huge winged Hecate-like figure and in the river that runs by her feet float all sorts of heads—a child’s head, a strong woman swimmer’s, despairing heads, praying hands. A pale grave woman paces along the bank.
All this Enitharmon tells to the Spectre, asking him naïvely:
Art thou, terrible Shade,
Set over this sweet boy of mine to guard him lest he rend
His mother to the winds of heaven?
And she ends piously:
But thou, Spectre dark,
Maist find a way to punish Vala in thy fiery south,
To bring her down subjected to the rage of my fierce boy.
Enitharmon has no conception of what she is doing to her ‘sweet’ and ‘fierce’ boy. Even as she tells the story of his wandering in the delusive Beulah and succumbing to the Lilith-like Vala, she has no idea that Vala has divided into two, and that her son is now in the state where he could conceivably be lured by a masculine Vala, Luvah, who is no longer in him but appears as an outside entity, even though as yet he recoils from such a monstrous aberration. Urizen is born again, and his laws equate abstention from passion with piety. Thus the stage is set for some perversion of the passions.
Urizen himself does not realize the far-reaching effect that his own confusing of the impotently ascetic Orc with Christ will have. Orc, forced into ‘a pale lecherous virginity’ by his own difficulties with his archetypal parents, is far from the Christ-like figure he is mistaken for. But we find Albion at his sickest when he has entirely rejected Christ from his soul, looking in his passive withdrawn state of impotence, exactly like the popular idea of Christ. His bound inhibitions appear on the surface like pious and holy restraint, when in actual fact beneath the surface he is raging like a demon and full of hatred, and perverted desires.
It is a confusion that many have made, Christians and non-Christians alike. For Blake tells us that Orc is the monk, and that monkish asceticism based on impotence rather than holiness is the serpent that eats at the heart of Christianity. It postulates a life-hatred and feeble dividedness of the human being in the place of the energetic and joyful involvement in life that is the only health, and the only holiness: ‘for everything that lives is holy’. The whole history of Orc has been building up to this view of him as the monk who is really the serpent. The bisexual nature of the serpent-monk appears later on.
Our realization that Orc is a monk and also the evil serpent dawns slowly. But when the shock comes, we realize, too, that the imagery has paved the way carefully. More than once the sick and ascetic Orc calls himself ‘A Worm compell’d’. He bores away, causing further division in the divided heart of Albion, and soon, grown fat on this diet, he swells to serpent strength:
Orc began to organize a Serpent body …
A self consuming devourer rising into the heavens …
Urizen envious brooding … made Orc,
In serpent form compell’d, stretch up & out the mysterious tree.
He suffer’d him to climb that he might draw all human forms
Into submission to his will, nor knew the dread result.
Finally, this serpent is seen to be the priest, wearing a cowl. And more than this he is the perpetrator of war and of all conflicts. War and asceticism are the two sides of the same penny:
The Prester Serpent runs
Along the ranks, crying, ‘Listen to the Priest of God, ye warriors;
This Cowl upon my head he plac’d in times of Everlasting.’1
12 At the end of Night the Seventh is a drawing of a snake ending in the weak head of Orc.
Blake’s story of how the ascetic was born is impressive, although it leaves no room for any true form of asceticism within Christianity. All forms of monasticism, he would claim, are a kind of illness and impotence rather than piety. This claim he made in earlier poems, too, in gnomic form, namely that the life of abstinence and denial which is commonly thought of as Christianity, has nothing whatever to do with what Christ taught, which can be summed up in two phrases: ‘Thy own Humanity learn to adore’ and ‘Everything that lives is holy’. The ascetic, Blake argues, is simply the man who, possibly through no fault of his own originally, has been so warped by experience that he has turned into a life-hater. He has cast life and humanity from his soul with Christ, substituting his own Reason and its flesh-subduing Mystery religion.
Blake has shown us very carefully the steps by which Albion sickened into Orc, the monk. This man who might delude us into thinking him a holy man is as near to spiritual death as he can get. His state is near despair. ‘If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.’ He has not only cast Christ from him, but also his own emotional nature and the capacity for love of any sort. Blake sees the love between man and woman as the most vital part of Christianity, without which there can be no wholeness. His rehabilitation of woman from her position of Eve, the temptress, is as difficult as getting Albion well. But both of these things must be accomplished before Christ can return, and with Christ, energy.
Now that Orc is seen as the priest, Blake underscores the pagan anti-Christian nature of the mysteries he celebrates. Under guise of conflict with Vala, he unites over and over with the mother. As an individual he goes up in smoke, and only the abstraction of priesthood remains, masquerading as Christianity:
No more remain’d of Orc but the serpent round the tree of Mystery.
The form of Orc was gone.
The imagery with which Blake surrounds Orc is complex, richer and more consistent in its variety than the symbols associated with any other character in the prophetic books. He has been Oedipus and Prometheus, and the image of Promethean fire remains with him throughout. He had been the ‘Worm compell’d’, and has grown to the serpent who is the cowled monk. He is a demon as his name implies. Above all, he is ‘the invisible worm’ that destroys the beauty of the rose into which it burrows with its angry impotent lust, making the rose seem more like a harlot on her crimson bed than like Mary, who is traditionally associated with the rose.
Orc is a frightened bound child who cannot grow up and free himself from parental bondage. But he is also the grown man, raging impotently against his chains, streaming with fire. The rage of the man is the adult expression of the child’s fear, and the man in him rages against the father-god’s tyranny, while the worm remains compelled: power strains against passivity.
The Man shall rage, bound with this chain, the worm in silence creep …
I rage in the deep …
This seething rage, the other side of compulsive asceticism, explodes into conflict and war. Excess violence, like too great withdrawal, reveals bound immaturity. Both waste powerful life energies.
If Albion is ever to get well, he must grow up, against Orc’s fierce resistance, that part of him that Orc stands for and which is still bound to archetypal parents. Orc is not the sensitive imaginative child of the Songs of Innocence, trusting the world and loving Christ. He is, rather, wizened and old, jealous, sullen, and hostile, a demon who fills Albion’s ‘troubled head with terrible visages & flaming hair’. Orc glories in self-pity. He is deceitful and selfish. He never gives love, but only clamours endlessly for that love and sympathy which was denied to him as a child, and which he cannot trust himself to deserve as an adult man. And he takes out his discontent on his wife, forcing her into the position of mother-virgin, and harlot, demanding love that he would have no need to beg for were he fourfold and adult.
One might, upon first glance, argue that the existence of the monkish child, Orc, within Albion is a carrying out of Christ’s warning—‘Except ye turn again and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven’. But this is not so. Albion has never grown up, and until he has, he cannot ‘turn again’. It is a case of first having to grow mature in order to become young for the first time, of having to become disillusioned in order to become wise, and of having to accept one’s participation in error and guilt in order to become innocent.
Like the child having a tantrum, Orc is trying to appear very babyish, but his eyes glitter with ancient malice and he looks old and wizened. He is trying to appear impossibly ‘good’ to show that he has been terribly misjudged and misused, but his ascetic piety is only destructive inhibition. He is full of his own tragedy, but he has never taken a really calm look at the worst, and at his own part in creating it, and so has not emerged with that tranquil wisdom which Blake calls ‘organized’ or ‘reorganized’ innocence.
Unorganiz’d Innocence: An Impossibility.
Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance.
Although Orc’s original chaining to the mountain was indeed a tragedy in which he was the innocent victim, he now banks upon it too much to win him sympathy no matter how obnoxious he may be, and he counts on it to relieve him of all responsibility no matter what mischief he does to spite the world. A very hollow and false note is often struck by Orc in his howlings. And he often strikes the reader as irresistibly comic in his cosmic rages, appearing Thurberesque just when he is be-wailing most passionately the wrongs that were done to him. He has none of the ‘mirthful serenity’ which comes when the worst has been faced and accepted, nor the accompanying almost light-hearted sense of still being a functioning and somehow less encumbered entity. Orc carries the whole dreary baggage of his miserable past with him wherever he goes.
Orc could, at a moment’s notice, give way to Christ, should the moment of Albion’s healing arrive. He, the monk, the life-hater and serpent, can disappear and reveal Christ in love’s garments, as Urizen feared had already happened. ‘Satan is the Spectre of Orc, & Orc is the generate Luvah.’ Orc is the disguise that hides Christ and love, and his asceticism is only a compulsive chastity and inability to love stemming from emotional immaturity. The obverse side of his chastity is the fact that in imagination he pursues many women, or rather the mother image in them, which makes Jerusalem jealous. At the same time he sees her provocation as harlotry. He is chaste in fact because he is compelled to be, but he is promiscuous in imagination.
In The Four Zoas Blake gives a remarkable account of the genesis of asceticism within Christianity as a hangover of fear of the vengeful father-god of the old dispensation. It is born of a feeling that we must still scourge the flesh in order to pay for our original sin, when Christ came to forgive and to command ‘Thy own Humanity learn to adore’. But we, with unconscious irony, make vengeful father-gods out of our own intellects rather than fulfil the law of love which is too difficult, having within it nothing to rebel against.
A glance at the views which Blake stated first in The Everlasting Gospel should help to clarify these observations:
If Moral Virtue was Christianity
Christ’s pretensions were all vanity …
For what is Antichrist but those
Who against Sinners Heaven close
With Iron bars, in Virtuous State …
The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision’s greatest Enemy …
Was Jesus Chaste? or did he
Give any Lessons of Chastity? …
Thou Angel of the Presence Divine
That didst create this Body of Mine,
Wherefore hast thou writ these laws
And created Hell’s dark jaws?
To continue examining Night the Seventh: we find Enitharmon being persuaded by the sly Spectre that to become the mother-goddess in Urizen’s religion is the best way to bring back Albion-Orc’s health. This is a flashback, as it were, to show how Enitharmon was deluded into accepting the role of goddess that we have seen her playing to such devastating effect. The Spectre is persuading Enitharmon to become the mother goddess, and this is a delusion. He does, however, paint a true picture and a nostalgic one of the days before Albion’s faculties fell into confusion.
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 … I sunk along
The goary tide even to the place of seed, & there dividing
I was divided in darkness & oblivion; thou an infant woe,
And I an infant terror in the womb of Enion.
My masculine spirit scorning the frail body, issued forth
From Enion’s brain …’
The Spectre said: ‘Thou lovely Vision, this delightful Tree
Is given us for a Shelter from the tempests of Void & Solid,
Till once again the morn of ages shall renew upon us,
To reunite in those mild fields of happy Eternity
Where thou & I in undivided essence walk’d about
Imbodied, thou my garden of delight & I the spirit in the garden;
Mutual there we dwelt in one another’s joy, revolving
Days of Eternity, with Tharmas mild & Luvah sweet melodious
Upon our waters. This thou well rememberest; listen, I will tell
What thou forgettest. They in us & we in them alternate Liv’d,
Drinking the joys of Universal Manhood. One dread morn …
Notice particularly in the last lines of this passage, how the too looming passions combined with the spectrous intellect, keep Albion from getting himself born psychologically. The Spectre prevents the inner marriage of the ‘maternal’ passions and the ‘masculine’ intellect that would make Albion an integrated functioning entity, by carrying his sense of guilt and dividedness ‘even to the place of seed’. Any attempts to reconstruct and so accept his own conception and birth must be abortive because his so-called ‘masculine’ intellect cannot bear to incarnate or be born through the earthy flesh of the mother, while the ‘feminine’ emotions try to scorn the intellect altogether and be pure earthly ‘motherness’. That is to say, Albion cannot accept being both male and female, both intellect and emotions, both father and mother. Yet his trying to be all masculine intellect does not make him more male, but, paradoxically, less: ‘In terror of losing the male in the female it had in fact lost both.’1 This ‘difficulty in allowing the internal male and female to interact’2 is Albion’s whole trouble, and why there is breakdown in his relation with himself, his wife, and his universe. He does not realize that, in the words of Lao-Tze: ‘He who, being a man, remains a woman, will become a universal channel.’3
13 A Life of One’s Own, Joanna Field, Pelican Books, 1952, p. 215.14 Ibid., p. 217.15 Ibid., p. 213.
The Spectre knows his own horrible nature, and, in one sense, truly wants Albion to be whole again, but he goes about it the wrong way. He thinks that he can unite with Enitharmon who is now almost one with Vala, the nature goddess. He is right in seeking union, but it is of the wrong things. It is of the false delusive appearance of Albion and Jerusalem, rather than of two real lovers.
… but listen thou my vision.
I view futurity in thee. I will bring down soft Vala
To the embraces of this terror, & I will destroy
That body I created; then shall we unite again in bliss;
For til these terrors planted round the Gates of Eternal life
Are driven away & annihilated, we never can repass the Gates.
Thou knowest that the Spectre is in every Man, insane, brutish,
Deform’d, that I am thus a ravening devouring lust continually
Craving & devouring.
Enitharmon in false hope does embrace the Spectre of Los, but as they are both only delusive shadows, her resulting pregnancy brings to birth only a ‘wonder horrible’, a shadowy rebirth of Orc. And in sympathy,
Many of the Dead burst forth from the bottoms of their tombs
In male forms without female counterparts or Emanations.
Los, pitying, is reconciled with his own Spectre who has thus tried in lust alone to unite with Enitharmon:
Los embrac’d the Spectre, first as a brother,
Then as another Self, astonish’d, humanizing & in tears,
In Self abasement Giving up his Domineering lust.
The Spectre, unassimilated, is the ghostly messenger of Urizen, the brutish, guilt-ridden puritan conscience who condemns lust and yet is lustful in direct proportion to his condemnations. But when Los unites with his own Spectre, then it becomes the delicately tuned conscience that responds to good and evil as truly as a weathervane. The Spectre knows this and speaks to Los:
Thou canst never embrace sweet Enitharmon, terrible Demon, Till
Thou art united with thy Spectre … & by Self annihilation back returning
To Life Eternal; be assur’d I am thy real self,
Tho’ thus divided from thee & the slave of Every passion
Of thy fierce Soul …
If we unite in one, another better world will be
Open’d within your heart & loins & wondrous brain,
Threefold, as it was in Eternity, & this, the fourth Universe,
Will be renew’d by the three & consummated in Mental fires;
But if thou dost refuse, Another body will be prepar’d
For me, & thou, annihilate, evaporate & be no more.
For thou art but a form & organ of life, & of thyself
Art nothing, being Created Continually by Mercy & Love divine.
Los is convinced that he can be reunited with his wife, if only he can be really one with his Spectre, although he knows that he is still ‘furious, controllable by Reason’s power’. Enitharmon has been lost to him ever since she became the mother goddess in Urizen’s mystery religion, worshipped by their son, Orc. Hopefully Los answers the Spectre:
So spoke Los & Embracing Enitharmon & the Spectre,
Clouds would have folded round in Extacy & Love uniting,
But Enitharmon trembling, fled & hid beneath Urizen’s tree …1
16 Here there is a graceful female figure, kneeling, holding her breasts.
‘… Spectre horrible, thy words astound my Ear
With irresistible conviction … Even I already feel a World within
Opening its gates, & in it all the real substances
Of which these in the outward World are shadows which pass away.
Come then into my Bosom, & in thy shadowy arms bring with thee
My lovely Enitharmon. I will quell my fury & teach
Peace to the soul of dark revenge, & repentance to Cruelty.’
And so fades the momentary hope that on the level of imagination, at least, Albion and Jerusalem could reunite in love and understanding when Los and Enitharmon embraced. Just as this is about to take place, Enitharmon panics. She is not ready to take back her husband in terms of comparatively un-glamorous marriage, with all of its concrete demands. Within the sick Albion she has been in the position of mother goddess in Urizen’s mystery religion, and she cannot all in a moment get free of its illusions and taboos. Nor is she altogether sure she wants to give up the status and the mysterious power that she has possessed in her role of the unattainable mother. It is almost a magical power that she has wielded, and it seems very tame to become an ordinary wife again. She prefers living in an atmosphere of danger and abstraction and witch-like powers.
And so she flees back to the tree of Mystery, and, to gain time, she claims that she is afraid of death as punishment for her sin, and that Los must fetch her some assurance that this is not so. ‘Give me proof of life Eternal or I die,’ she cries. Los would have succumbed to this temptation to seek forbidden knowledge, had the Spectre not intervened: she is only confusing the issue.
Then Los plucked the fruit & Eat & sat down in Despair,
And must have given himself to death Eternal. But
Urthona’s spectre in part mingling with him, comforted him,
Being a medium between him & Enitharmon. But this Union
Was not to be Effected without Cares & Sorrows & Troubles
Of Six thousand Years of self denial & of bitter Contrition.
Although Blake is vehement about denouncing anything that looks like a deliberate asceticism and scourging of the sinful flesh, he does recognize that when mistakes have been made in a relationship there is usually a long and difficult period of sorrow and self-denial before things can be made right again. This phase of experience is what Los and Enitharmon must now face before their union is possible.
Despite Enitharmon’s retreat back to the mystery religion, Los and his Spectre are reunited at any rate. And Los: ‘wondering beheld the Centre open’d; by Divine Mercy inspir’d … was open’d new heavens & a new earth beneath & within, Threefold, within the brain, within the heart, within the loins … but yet having a limit.’
The Spectre recognizes that it was he who began the division within Albion, and he repents bitterly, saying:
I am the cause
That this dire state commences. I began the dreadful state
Of Separation, & on my dark head the curse & punishment
Must fall unless a way be found to Ransom & Redeem.
The Spectre who, following Urizen, did everything to make Albion scorn the body and the flesh, sees now that ‘without a created body the Spectre is Eternal Death.’
Los, in his new state of wholeness, comforts Enitharmon who is still fearful. He tells her that Christ will come in the guise of Luvah to redeem the passions:
Turn inwardly thine Eyes & there behold the Lamb of God
Cloth’d in Luvah’s robes of blood descending to redeem …
O Enitharmon!
Couldst thou but cease from terror & trembling & affright
When I appear before thee in forgiveness of ancient injuries,
Why shouldst thou remember & be afraid? I surely have died in pain
Often enough to convince thy jealousy & fear & terror.
Come hither; be patient; let us converse together, because
I also tremble at myself & at all my former life.
But Enitharmon is unable to free herself from the fear of revenge. She is afraid that Christ will come to punish her like the father god, Urizen. She is full of abstract fears that prevent concrete reunion.
Enitharmon answer’d: ‘I behold the Lamb of God descending
To meet these Spectres of the Dead. I therefore fear that he
Will give us to Eternal Death, fit punishment for such
Hideous offenders: uttermost extinction in eternal pain:
An ever dying life of stifling & obstruction: shut out
Of existence to be a sign & terror to all who behold,
Lest any in futurity do as we have done in heaven.
Such is our state; nor will the Son of God redeem us, but destroy.’
So Enitharmon spoke trembling & in torrents of tears.
Enitharmon, refusing to be comforted, none the less has a feminine afterthought. She thinks she just might manage to free herself from Urizen’s religion if Los cares enough for her to labour in creating ‘bodies’ or images for the poor disembodied spectres of the dead ‘to assimilate themselves into’. And with Los’s ready compliance we are given a rather charming domestic scene that must have been a familiar one in Blake’s own home. For we know that Blake with infinite patience not only taught his wife to colour his drawings, but also to see visions. And here we find Los, who is imagination, busily drawing while Enitharmon colours what he produces:
And first he drew a line upon the walls of shining heaven,
And Enitharmon tinctur’d it with beams of blushing love.
It remain’d permanent, a lovely form, inspir’d, divinely human
Dividing into just proportions. Los unwearied labour’d
The immortal lines upon the heavens.
Just as before, when Albion was at his sickest, imagination as irresponsible fantasy created destructive monstrous images, so now that there is hope of his recovery, imagination labours with good will to create images that correspond to actual fact.
These attempts to create healing images are wholly successful. ‘Orc was comforted in the deeps; his soul reviv’d.’ The father god fades from Orc’s mind as he recognizes his real father in Los. Urizen becomes Rintrah, the mild reason which, applied to particular situations, is a valid guide, working in harmony with the evidence produced by the other faculties rather than issuing general laws that have little bearing on fact. And though Orc is still bound, there are healing factors at work, for:
Los loved …
And Enitharmon’s smiles & tears prevail’d over self protection.
They rather chose to meet Eternal Death than to destroy
The offspring of their Care & Pity.
The first part of Night the Seventh ends on this hopeful note:
Startled was Los; he found his enemy Urizen now
In his hands; he wonder’d that he felt love & not hate.
His whole soul lov’d him; he beheld him an infant
Lovely, breath’d from Enitharmon; he trembled within himself.
There is a second part to Night the Seventh, and it shows in more detail the last throes of Urizen’s tyranny over Albion. In an effort to maintain his hold on the Universal Man, Urizen, as we have seen:
Builded a temple in the image of the human heart … hid in chambers dark the nightly harlot
Plays in Disguise in whispered hymn & mumbling prayer: The Priests
He ordain’d & Priestesses, cloth’d in disguises bestial …
The day for war, the night for secret religion in his temple.
We saw earlier on that while one side of Orc’s subjugation to Urizen manifested itself in an ascetic religion, the other side erupted in rage and war. Now it becomes apparent that Urizen deliberately built his temple in the human heart for the exercising of these two activities. In the daytime war rages, and it is war against the bestial harlot, Vala. In the night the same Vala is worshipped as the mother goddess, Nature. But Urizen’s scheme for maintaining this perpetual doubleness is defeated by itself. For as Orc wars against Vala in an effort to destroy her, in actual fact he mingles with her and is himself destroyed.
This means that, although Albion is still very weak, the way is clear for Christ to return to his soul and heal him, for Orc has been purged from it. The necessary destructive and forbidden union with the mother has taken place as in a pagan ritual and Orc disappears, even though the consummation took place in fear and rage and jealousy where it could have been effected in understanding love had Jerusalem herself been integrated enough to comprehend what was necessary.
Vala does not immediately realize what has happened. She does not understand that Orc is no more, and the warfare ended. ‘All day she riots in Excess,’ Blake tells us, and he comments sadly, ‘the Battle rages still round thy tender limbs, O Vala.’ And Vala plays to the full her role of rampaging mother goddess.
When he wished to use it, Blake could command a novelist’s power of characterization. It is a gift that is largely wasted on mythological figures, but occasionally it manifests itself, as, for instance, in the meeting between Tharmas and Vala. The forces of regeneration are at work within Albion, bringing about the necessary destruction of Orc, as well as the reunion of Los and Enitharmon.
Now another important step towards Albion’s recovery is taken when Vala, who is the terrible shadowy female that the sick Albion sees instead of his wife, suddenly makes friends with Tharmas, who is the blind and lost fact of Albion’s instinctual love for Jerusalem. The disappearance of the impotent Orc allows this meeting to take place. Instead of rampaging in hurt and angry pride and a mood of ‘If that’s what he wants, I’ll show him’, Vala within Jerusalem, that is, the passions, drops into good-humoured helpfulness when she realizes that in actual fact Albion’s instinct is seeking, with innocent and myopic and despairing persistence, the wife he has lost and wants again.
The encounter with Tharmas takes place just when Vala, engaged in the warfare of Urizen’s temple, is noisily rushing about, going all out to play her part, and rather enjoying and wallowing in her own outrageous power:
The Shadowy Female Varied in the War in her delight,
Howling in discontent, black & heavy, uttering brute sounds,
Wading thro’ fires among the slimy weeds, making Lamentations
To deceive …
She is nonplussed when Tharmas, old and naïve with watery short-sighted eyes, blunders on to the scene and mistakes her for his mild wife, Enion. ‘Art thou bright Enion? is the shadow of hope return’d?’ he wistfully asks this melodramatic harlot. And she, taken aback and interested, makes an abrupt descent into good-natured and honest helpfulness. She becomes the novelist’s harlot with the heart of gold. Dimly Jerusalem comprehends that whatever Albion has turned her into on the level of his sick imagination, in actual fact on the instinctual level he is longing for the return of his true wife, as Tharmas longs for Enion’s return.
Vala is touched that Tharmas should mistake her for Enion, and she replies helpfully:
Tharmas, I am Vala, bless thy innocent face!
Doth Enion avoid the sight of thy blue wat’ry eyes?
Be not perswaded that the air knows this, or the falling dew.
Tharmas immediately settles down trustfully and tells Vala all of his troubles from the very beginning, and she listens patiently:
Tharmas repli’d: ‘O Vala, once I liv’d in a garden of delight;
I waken’d Enion in the morning & she turn’d away
Among the apple trees, & all the garden of delight
Swam like a dream before my eyes. I went to seek the steps
Of Enion in the gardens, & the shadows compass’d me
And clos’d me in a watery world of woe when Enion stood
Trembling before me like a shadow, like a mist, like air.
And she is gone, & here alone I war with darkness & death …
And life appear & vanish, mocking me with shadows of false hope.’
This is a moving description of the unreality which overtook Tharmas from the moment that he doubted the goodness and validity of sensory experience. When Enion fled from him, there was set into motion all the shadowy machinery of breakdown within Albion.
This getting together of Tharmas and Vala is a great step towards Albion’s healing. Jerusalem sees that she must stop being Vala alone, and must become fourfold, allowing Tharmas to find Enion within her before all the other faculties can be reunited. In a kind of apology she tells Tharmas why she became altogether Vala. She was trying to force her lover (Luvah) to return to her, frightened that he was hidden by the ascetic, Orc, who calls her sinful:
Lo, him whom I love
Is hidden from me, & I never in all Eternity
Shall see him. Enitharmon …
Hid him in that outrageous form of Orc, which torments me for Sin.
What Jerusalem should have done, and knows she should have done, was to remain fourfold and Christ-centred even if Albion was no longer her lover, rather than becoming all Vala in order to provoke his waning passion. The reason that she did not remain strongly and firmly herself was because she had not consciously effected her own inner marriage of passion and intellect, mother and father. Although she has not so many difficulties as has Albion before this union can be achieved, she is none the less unsure of herself and what she feels about sex and her husband, and this causes her reactions to be uncertain and confusing just when she should be very sure of what she is and feels in order to help Albion. As it is, she is sometimes Thel and sometimes Vala which only makes Albion more confused.
Her inability to achieve the interior marriage is a kind of immature vacillation rather than a real chaining such as has bound Orc within Albion. She must reach the point where she knows consciously, all the time, that she is Jerusalem, Albion’s wife, rather than Vala, the mother goddess and femme fatale, although this is a very attractive part of her personality which she must not, on the other hand, fear and hide altogether. ‘And I heard the Name of their Emanations, they are named Jerusalem’ is the quiet ending of the final prophetic book, The Song of Jerusalem. And these words are accompanied by the lovely engraving of Jerusalem being gathered to the bosom of God the Father. It is only when this happens that Albion is really healed, but this is to anticipate. Already in The Four Zoas we see the beginnings of Albion’s recovery, and Orc does not appear again which means that the central core of the diseased personality which governed Albion like a demon is destroyed. The healing process continues throughout Milton and Jerusalem, although at times Albion is still pictured as very weak indeed.
Night the Eighth of The Four Zoas tells of the awakening of Albion from the sleep of death as his faculties feebly begin to work in harmony once more:
Then All in Great Eternity Met in the Council of God
As one Man, even Jesus … to create the Fallen Man.
The Fallen Man stretch’d like a corse upon the oozy Rock,
Wash’d with the tides, pale, overgrown with weeds
That mov’d with horrible dreams.
All Beulah watches over him with Christ. And the realm of Beulah which is the realm of art and marital harmony appears like two guardian angels:
hovering high over his head
Two winged immortal shapes, one standing at his feet
Toward the East, one standing at his head toward the west,
Their wings join’d in the Zenith over head; but other wings
They had which cloth’d their bodies like a garment of soft down,
Silvery white, shining upon the dark blue sky in silver.
Their wings touch’d the heavens; their fair feet hover’d above
The swelling tides; they bent over the dead corse like an arch,
Pointed at top in highest heavens, of precious stones & pearl.
Such is a Vision of All Beulah hov’ring over the Sleeper.
Albion wakens from the sleep of death, sneezing seven times. ‘He repos’d in the Saviour’s arms, in the arms of tender mercy & loving kindness.’
Imagination, that is, Los and Enitharmon, after their long distortion, see with wonder the astonishing simplicity and rightness of divine mercy:
Then Los said: ‘I behold the Divine Vision thro’ the broken Gates
Of thy poor broken heart, astonish’d, melted into Compassion & Love.’
And Enitharmon said: ‘I see the Lamb of God upon Mount Zion.’
Wondering with love & Awe they felt the divine hand upon them.
Through Enitharmon’s broken and compassionate heart, no longer filled with pride at being the mother goddess in the mystery religion, the guardian angels are able to enter Urizen’s temple in the human heart. And Los once more is allowed to see the secret heart of his wife.
Los could enter into Enitharmon’s bosom & explore
Its intricate Labyrinths now the Obdurate heart was broken …
The Divine Hand was upon him
And upon Enitharmon, & the Divine Countenance shone …
Looking down, the Daughters of Beulah saw
With joy the bright Light, & in it a Human form,
And knew he was the Saviour, Even Jesus; & they worshipped.
Astonish’d, comforted, Delighted, in notes of Rapturous Extacy
All Beulah stood astonish’d, looking down to Eternal Death.
They saw the Saviour beyond the Pit of death & destruction;
For whether they look’d upward they saw the Divine Vision,
Or whether they look’d downward they still saw the Divine Vision
Surrounding them on all sides beyond sin & death & hell.
Next comes a very significant passage. We remember that when Orc was first born in Albion’s soul, Urizen was terribly afraid that it was really Christ being born. Now that Albion is getting well, Christ does appear quite openly as Luvah, love, in the place formerly occupied by Orc. Urizen is totally confused:
When Urizen saw the Lamb of God cloth’d in Luvah’s robes
Perplex’d & terrifi’d he stood, tho’ well he knew that Orc
Was Luvah. But now he beheld a new Luvah, or Orc
Who assum’d Luvah’s form & stood before him opposite.
Blake gives the reader an aside piece of advice while Urizen stands perplexed, trying to take in what has happened:
learn distinct to know …
The difference between States & Individuals of those states.
That state call’d Satan never can be redeem’d in all Eternity;
But when Luvah in Orc became a serpent, he descended into
That state call’d Satan.
That is, although the satanic state that Albion was in emotionally when he was Orc instead of Christ-centred, is unredeemable, the individual can be redeemed when he emerges from the state of mind he had descended into. And Christ as Luvah descends into this hellish state of mind to redeem the individual. Urizen cannot take all of this in. In his mind’s eye he still sees Orc within Albion,
Orc a serpent form augmenting time on times
In the fierce battle … Stretching to serpent length
His human bulk, while the dark shadowy female, brooding over,
Measur’d his food morning & evening in cups & baskets of iron …
Gath’ering the food of that mysterious tree, circling its root
She spread herself thro’ all the branches in the power of Orc.
This should have warned Urizen of what was about to follow. For even in his mind’s eye the serpent has become bisexual, and Vala, the brooding mother-goddess inhabits the serpent form of Orc as well as the impotent ascetic himself. But ‘Urizen in self deceit his warlike preparations fabricated’; that is, even when Albion is getting back his power of love, Urizen still causes the passion between men and women to seem sinful. Only one thing can result, a perverting of the newly released love in Albion away from its proper object which is his wife:
Terrified & astonish’d Urizen beheld the battle take a form
Which he intended not: a Shadowy hermaphrodite, black & opake.
The soldiers nam’d it Satan, but he was yet unform’d & vast.
Hermaphroditic it at length became, hiding the Male
Within as in a Tabernacle, Abominable, Deadly.
Long before the subject could be openly discussed, Blake pursues ruthlessly to its inevitable homosexual conclusions the tyranny of Urizen’s rule, within the individual soul as within religion based on a hatred of natural sexual love between male and female.
Blake, with an enormously modern insight, realizes that the two tendencies, a compulsive asceticism and homosexuality, can easily follow one another in the strange logic of breakdown, and that both are a result of Urizen’s terrible perfectionism, even though Urizen does not foresee or want the perversion of the natural love he terms sinful. Such a perversion takes place, not at the very worst period of Albion’s illness which is completely dominated by the impotent monk, Orc, but, paradoxically, just when there is every chance for Albion’s recovery because Orc has disappeared and the passions are released from bondage. The stage was set for the reunion of Albion and his bride, Jerusalem. But Urizen, with blind muddle-headedness, is bent on continuing the warfare between intellect and the passions, and so he creates the new fear within Albion, whose passions, directed towards reunion with his wife, now swerve aside into homosexual channels just when this reunion should have taken place.
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, dishumanis’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.
Urizen goes altogether mad, wholeheartedly furthering this perversion which will end all life, rather than risk his own downfall in the return of love and Christ: he tries 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.
Vala tries to stop this mad Urizen who has gone completely off the rails in a final attempt to destroy rather than be destroyed. In the phrasing of her plea there is a rich depth of suggestion reminiscent of the many earth-goddesses of myth and legend who have gone seeking the lost lover, who is also the dying god:
Where hast thou hid him whom I love; in what remote Abyss
Resides that God of my delight? O might my eyes behold
My Luvah, then could I deliver all the sons of God
From Bondage of these terrors …
The Eternal Man is seal’d by thee, never to be deliver’d.
We are all servants to thy will. O King of light, relent
Thy furious power; to be our father & our loved King.
But if my Luvah is no more, If thou hast smitten him
And laid him in the Sepulcher … Silent I bow with dread.
But happiness can never (come) to thee.
Urizen realizes that he has been caught in the web of falsehood that he himself has spun when Vala, the mother goddess in his own religion, turns against him_
Sitting within his temple, furious, felt the numbing stupor,
Himself tangled in his own net, in sorrow, lust, repentance.
Meanwhile, imagination has been busy creating anew Jerusalem who has been hidden in the guise of Vala:
And Enitharmon nam’d the Female, Jerusalem the holy.
Wond’ring she saw the Lamb of God within Jerusalem’s Veil;
The Divine Vision seen within the inmost deep recess
Of fair Jerusalem’s bosom in a gently beaming fire.
Once Jerusalem is again herself, Christ can be born through her and through her resurrect the fallen Albion. Once more she partakes of the nature of Mary who has control of the Eve-Vala within her:
Pitying, the Lamb of God descended thro’ Jerusalem’s Gates
To put off Mystery time after time; & as a Man
Is born on Earth, so he was born of Fair Jerusalem
In mystery’s woven mantle, & in the Robes of Luvah.
He stood in fair Jerusalem to awake up into Eden
The fallen Man.
But Urizen will not yet admit defeat. He brings about the crucifixion of Christ within Albion.
Urizen call’d together the Synagogue of Satan …
To judge the Lamb of God to Death as a murderer & robber.
And by means of ‘devilish arts, abominable, unlawful, unutterable’, Urizen forces Vala to appear in his religion again as the harlot writ large, Babylon, the Church of Mystery:
A False Feminine Counterpart, of Lovely Delusive Beauty
Dividing & Uniting at will in the cruelties of Holiness,
Vala, drawn down into a Vegetated body, now triumphant.
The Synagogue of Satan Clothed her with Scarlet robes & Gems,
And on her forehead was her name written in blood, ‘Mystery’.
And so the crucifixion of Christ is accomplished:
Thus was the Lamb of God condemn’d to Death.
They nail’d him upon the tree of Mystery, weeping over him
And then mocking & then worshipping, calling him Lord & King.
Sometimes as twelve daughters lovely, sometimes as five
They stood in beaming beauty, & sometimes as one, even Rahab
Who is Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots.
The rest of Night the Eighth is a confused panorama of the historical growth of Urizen’s power after the crucifixion, and of the bondage of Jerusalem. We are given a lurid picture of the awful pride of the mother goddess who must be redeemed ‘time after time by the Divine Lamb’ re-entering Jerusalem.
With dire foreboding, Ahania, Urizen’s true wife whom he has long since cast into the abyss, sees her husband’s increasing preoccupation with Babylon. She cries out in Cassandra-like despair, for she had predicted this catastrophic state of affairs from the beginning, but Urizen had not listened. Enion, the wife of Tharmas, is more hopeful, and looks towards the Second Coming.
And Los & Enitharmon took the Body of the Lamb
Down from the Cross & plac’d it in a sepulcher … trembling & in despair
Jerusalem wept over the Sepulcher two thousand years.
Rahab triumphs over all; she took Jerusalem
Captive, a Willian Captive; by delusive arts impell’d
To worship Urizen’s Dragon form …
The Ashes of Mystery began to animate; they call’d it Deism
And Natural Religion; as of old, so now anew began
Babylon again in Infancy, call’d Natural Religion.1
17 Then is a drawing all by itself, a sketch, full of life, of a marital fight. He with pity holds her lightly as she tears her hair in rage.
The final section of The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth, is called ‘The Last Judgement’.2 It contains much chaotic and confusing description which Blake undoubtedly felt was necessary to convey the atmosphere proper to this occasion. Since it is of little relevance to the progression of the story, I will skip over most of it. There are, however, fine bits of isolated description such as the following lines which tell of two spectres,
18 A rather lovely sketch shows Christ pushing aside the walls of the tomb.
their bodies lost, they stood
Trembling & weak, a faint embrace, a fierce desire, as when
Two shadows mingle on a wall.
And all the while the trumpet is sounding for the Last Judgement, and ‘the tree of Mystery went up in folding flames’ and ‘All Tyranny was cut off from the face of the Earth.’ To all eyes Albion still lies stretched out in death:
Beyond this Universal Confusion … there stands
A Horrible rock far in the South …
On this rock lay the faded head of the Eternal Man
Enwrapped round with weeds of death, pale cold in sorrow & woe.
He lifts the blue lamps of his Eyes & cries with heavenly voice:
Bowing his head over the consuming Universe, he cried:
‘O weakness & O weariness! O war within my members! …
My birds are silent on my hills, flocks die beneath my branches.’
As we have seen, although Albion still seems very ill, regeneration has actually been taking place within him on several levels. But because Albion has not consciously and in so many words repudiated Urizen’s tyranny within him, he is still more in the power of death than of life. There is in Albion a creative power and energy in direct proportion to the power of his inhibiting fear and fantasy which, if it can be released, will make his life a tremendous thing. But until he can consciously put Urizen, the father god, into his proper place, his energy cannot be released to the life of Christ, the Son. Albion feels and half sees the way out of his sickness. He must affirm his own life positively, consciously excluding the forces of life-hatred. Until he can do this he will remain listless and indolent, all of his creative powers unused, even though he is no longer torn by interior warfare.
When shall the Man of future times become as in the days of old?
O weary life! Why sit I here & give up all my powers
To indolence, to the night of death, when indolence & mourning
Sit hovering over my dark threshold? tho’ I arise, look out
And scorn the war within my members, yet my heart is weak
And my head faint. Yet will I look again into the morning.
The simple and touching willingness of Albion to ‘look again into the morning’ gives him just that minimum of strength needed to take a positive stand. He summons Urizen in order to reduce him to his proper status:
The Eternal Man sat on the Rocks & cried with awful voice:
‘O Prince of Light, where art thou? I behold thee not as once
In those Eternal fields, in clouds of morning stepping forth
With harps & songs when bright Ahania sang before thy face …
See you not all this wracking furious confusion?
Come forth from slumbers of thy cold abstraction! Come forth,
Arise to Eternal births! Shake off thy cold repose,
Schoolmaster of souls, great opposer of change, arise!
That the Eternal worlds may see thy face in peace & joy.’
Urizen refuses to answer or appear. Albion gets very angry and threatens to throw him out of the fourfold harmony altogether unless he repents and returns to his original place of equality with the other faculties. This is, of course, a threat that Albion uses only for effect:
O how couldst thou deform those beautiful proportions
Of life & person; for as the Person, so is his life proportion’d …
But if thou darest obstinate refuse my stern behest,
Thy crown & scepter I will seize … cast thee out into the indefinite
Where nothing lives … I will steel my heart
Against thee to Eternity … thy religion,
The first author of this war & the distracting of honest minds
Into confused perturbation & strife & horror & pride,
Is a deceit so detestable that I will cast thee out
If thou repentest not, & leave thee as a rotten branch to be burn’d
With Mystery the Harlot & with Satan for Ever & Ever.
The mock threat works. Urizen weeps, ‘anxious his scaly form to reassume the human’. He repents of his tyrannical ways and gives up his power, admitting that he has had no joy of it.1 Immediately he is reborn,
19 Albion is pictured on his couch, angels swooping down.
he shook the snows from off his shoulders & arose
As on a Pyramid of mist … glorious, bright, Exulting in his joy
He sounding rose into the heavens in naked majesty,
In radiant Youth.
Ahania, his wife, rushes to meet him, but drops dead in excess of pure joy. Albion warns Urizen that it is not good to have the accomplishment of a truth follow immediately upon its perception, and that a period of labour and purgation is necessary first, else the burden of truth is too great to be borne. Such a period must elapse before Urizen can be reunited with Ahania or Albion with Jerusalem.
And the Eternal Man said: ‘Hear my words, O Prince of Light.
Behold Jerusalem in whose bosom the Lamb of God
Is seen: tho’ slain before her Gates, he self-renew’d remains
Eternal, & I thro’ him awake from death’s dark vale.
The times revolve; the time is coming when all these delights
Shall be renew’d, & all these Elements that now consume
Shall reflourish. Then bright Ahania shall awake from death,
A glorious Vision to thine Eyes, a self-renewing Vision:
The spring, the summer, to be thine …
The winter thou shalt plow & lay thine stores into thy barns
Expecting to receive Ahania in the spring with joy.’
It is interesting that in The Four Zoas Blake uses the future tense about the reunion of Albion and Jerusalem. It has not yet taken place, but he is certain that it will happen.
Because the Lamb of God creates himself a bride & wife
That we his children evermore may live in Jerusalem
Which now descendeth out of heaven, a City, yet a Woman,
Mother of myriads redeem’d & born in her spiritual palaces,
By a New Spiritual birth Regenerated from Death.
Jerusalem is both the bride of God and, partaking of Mary, the mother of Christ, both a city and Albion’s wife.
Once Albion has reduced Urizen to his station in the fourfold harmony, then wonderful things begin to happen. Albion sees clearly the possibility of being whole and well again, but both he and Urizen know that they cannot be reunited with their emanations until the period of labour is past:
And the Fall’n Man Who was arisen upon the Rock of Ages
Beheld the Vision of God, & he arose up from the Rock,
And Urizen arose up with him, walking thro’ the flames
To meet the Lord coming to Judgment; but the flames repell’d them
Still to the Rock; in vain they strove to Enter the Consummation
Together, for the Redeem’d Man could not enter the Consummation.
Albion and Urizen work with a good will, and when they rest, ‘in joy they view the human harvest springing up’. Ahania arises from the dead in the spring as was promised and joyfully takes her place beside Urizen. Albion, participating in this, is tempted once more to feel that intellectual union with the beloved is all that matters, but he is not allowed to lapse into a belittling of the body: he is driven back to the state of marital union.
The Eternal Man sat down …
Sorrowful that he could not put off his new risen body
In Mental flames: the flames refus’d, they drove him back to Beulah.
His body was redeem’d to be permanent thro’ Mercy Divine.
But Orc, within Albion, is allowed to enter the flames and consume away:
And now fierce Orc had quite consum’d himself in Mental flames,
Expending all his energy against the fuel of fire.
Next, Albion summons Luvah and Vala, the passions, and sends them to their rightful place in the fourfold harmony:
Luvah & Vala, henceforth you are Servants; obey & live.
You shall forget your former state; return, & Love in peace,
Into your place, the place of seed, not in the brain or heart …
Servants to the infinite & Eternal of the Human form.
That is, the passions are at one and the same time the most and the least important part of the marriage. They are the attractive power and are concerned with making eternal the human form in children, but they are not to be elevated into the brain as an idealistic romantic love, nor are they to be confused within the heart with tenderness for the whole person.
And so Albion and Jerusalem are reunited not only on the levels of imagination and of intellect, but also on the level of passionate love. This is a most lyrical reunion. Now all that remains is that Tharmas should find his lost Enion, that is, that Albion should find Jerusalem again on the level of actual sensory touch. Vala, the passions within Jerusalem, is the instrument of this reunion, which is, of course, the function of her place within the fourfold personality, to pave the way for physical union instead of fleeing it. Luvah cries to her:
‘Come forth, O Vala, from the grass & from the silent dew,
Rise from the dews of death, for the Eternal Man is Risen’ …
She answer’d thus: ‘Whose voice is this? …
Where dost thou dwell? for it is thee I seek, & but for thee
I must have slept Eternally, nor have felt the dew of thy morning.
Going back to her conversation with Tharmas, Vala works to bring Tharmas and Enion together again in the same garden where they lost each other:
Why weep’st thou, Tharmas … in the bright house of joy?
Doth Enion avoid the sight of thy blue heavenly Eyes?
She urges him to go to Enion, but Tharmas replies:
O Vala, I am sick, & all this garden of Pleasure
Swims like a dream before my eyes … I fade, even as a water lilly
In the sun’s heat, till in the night on the couch of Enion
I drink new life & feel the breath of sleeping Enion.
But in the morning she arises to avoid my Eyes,
Then my loins fade & in the house I sit me down & weep.
On the level of sexual union there is still this pathetic barrier between Albion and Jerusalem, a psychological hangover of sexual shame from Urizen’s religion of taboos, even though on every other level they are now reunited. Enion, too, is still mistrustful, but says:
Soon renew’d, a Golden Moth,
I shall cast off my death clothes & Embrace Tharmas again.
For Lo, the winter melted away upon the distant hills,
And all the black mould sings.
And soon this lovely renewal does indeed come to pass, and Tharmas, her husband, understands that this is so:
Joy thrill’d thro’ all the Furious forms of Tharmas harmonizing.
Mild he Embrac’d her whom he sought; he rais’d her thro’ the heavens,
Sounding his trumpet to awake the dead …
The Eternal Man arose. He welcom’d them to the Feast.
There follows a magnificent feast to celebrate the reunion of Albion and his bride. All of the faculties and their emanations are the guests. They get wonderfully drunk and voice eternal truths somewhat pompously:
‘Attempting to be more than Man We become less,’ said Luvah
As he arose from the bright feast, drunk with the wine of ages.
And as the Eternal Man finally walks forth from the fires of his marriage consummation, in wonder all the creatures of the earth ask him why it is that they have not perished in the fire of love, but are instead transformed:
How is it we have walk’d thro’ fires & yet are not consum’d?
How is it that all things are chang’d, even as in ancient times?
The answer is possibly what Blake wrote on the margin of the MS. of this poem_
Unorganiz’d Innocence: an Impossibility.
Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance.
The last plate is illustrated with a joyous figure dancing over the top of the world.