[ Anytus Melitus & Lycon thought Socrates a
Very Pernicious Man So Caiphas thought Jesus]
Enitharmon heard. She raisd her head like the mild Moon
O Rintrah! O Palamabron! What are your dire & awful purposes
Enitharmons name is nothing before you: you forget all my Love!
The Mothers love of obedience is forgotten & you seek a Love
Of the pride of dominion, that will Divorce Ocalythron &
Elynittria
Upon East Moor in Derbyshire & along the Valleys of Cheviot
Could you Love me Rintrah, if you Pride not in my Love
As Reuben found Mandrakes in the field & gave them to his Mother
Pride meets with Pride upon the Mountains in the stormy day
In that terrible Day of Rintrahs Plow & of Satans driving the
Team.
Ah! then I heard my little ones weeping along the Valley!
Ah! then I saw my beloved ones fleeing from my Tent
Merlin was like thee Rintrah among the Giants of Albion
Judah was like Palamabron: O Simeon! O Levi! ye fled away
How can I hear my little ones weeping along the Valley
Or how upon the distant Hills see my beloveds Tents.
Then Los again took up his speech as Enitharmon ceast
Fear not my Sons this Waking Death. he is become One with me
Behold him here! We shall not Die! we shall be united in Jesus.
Will you suffer this Satan this Body of Doubt that Seems but Is
Not
To occupy the very threshold of Eternal Life. if Bacon, Newton,
Locke,
Deny a Conscience in Man & the Communion of Saints & Angels
Contemning the Divine Vision & Fruition, Worshiping the Deus
Of the Heathen, The God of This World, & the Goddess Nature
Mystery Babylon the Great, The Druid Dragon & hidden Harlot
Is it not that Signal of the Morning which was told us in the
Beginning
Thus they converse upon Mam-Tor.
the Graves thunder under their feet
Notes:
(Los and Enitharmon are the parents of the sons discussed here.)
In a long paragraph we read Enitharmon’s extended reverie about the end of time.
(You may remember that in the last plate Enitharmon expressed her fear that ‘emanations will cease to be’.)
Enitharmon fears that the childish (innocent) love of her children had been replaced by pride:
O Rintrah! O Palamabron:
This pair of Sons of Albion are best explained in The Bard’s Song, found in the first part of Milton. Like all Blake’s characters they are contraries of ‘good and bad’.
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| Plate 93 |
Judah was like Palamabron: O Simeon! O Levi! ye fled away: the children of Israel had fled from Jehovah worshipping pagan gods. But Blake had already said the same thing re the ‘children of England’. (For Blake England and Palestine were virtually the ‘same’.)
Then Los again took up his speech as Enitharmon ceast:
His prophecy is more hopeful. In the end Satan (“that Seems but Is Not”) is replaced by ‘our Eternal destiny’, but includes his usual harsh judgment of Bacon, Newton, Locke.
This Picture is fascinating":
The top part embraces what you may find at the beginning of the plate.
The three accusers are running and pointing their fingers at what they discern as Sin.
At the bottom a placid and resigned Enitharmon sits in water or in a red furnace waiting to be with Los at the end. (Erdman Illustrated Blake, page 372)
So the two images together illustrate the doleful effects of (material) Sin. Blake denied Sin and called it Error to be overcome by Truth at the Last Judgment.
2 comments:
In this matter of Emanations, your posts have reawakened in me a memory - approximately 1965.
I was seeing Theodore Faithfull for psychoanalysis. You can look him up on Google. He was the grandfather of the singer Marianne Faithfull, a veterinary surgeon by profession, who had been the headmaster of a "free school" in the twenties and thirties, one of those boarding schools where the children don't have to attend classes and have democractic rights, and become notorious in the local press for 'incidents'.
He was a sexologist and author as well as a psychoanalyst. In the late Sixties he wrote articles in the magazine Rolling Stone. When I started to see him in 1964 he was already in his eighties.
Anyhow, he was seriously into Blake, and constantly talking about man's fourfold nature; though I couldn't reel off to you what that four-fold nature was, only that it derived from Blake.
Coming back to the emanations, I recall that during the time I went to see him, I was travelling daily from Nottingham to Northampton for a work contract, a journey of more than an hour by train. I recall him advising me that if a woman was sitting nearby in the same compartment of the carriage, I could bathe in her emanation, and benefit from it: that you did not need sexual intercourse for mutual experience of this interchange.
I feel certain he used the word 'emanation', and ascribed the idea of it to Blake.
I need only add that even in the Sixties, he was deeply suspect amongst respectable people including fellow members of the psychoanalytical profession. Justifiably so, when you consider that by virtue of his status as a veterinary surgeon, he was able to prescribe benzedrine tablets for me, to give me confidence in my working life. (I remember giving a presentation under the influence of this drug, in front of prospective clients. It seems I was a bit over-relaxed and weird.)
Great comment, Vincent; you're opened a new field of study. These posts concern 'emanations': http://ramhornd.blogspot.com/search/label/Emanations
but much work can be profitably done.
I researched Theodor Faithfull, but found mainly the books he had published. BTW our youngest son is a psychotherapist, trained largely in Freudian therapy.
Blake had a long course of psycho-sexual development. In his myth woman served largely for the dark, moony facet we all carry; he referred to it as an emanation.
I love to know how Faithfull's advice to you about women on the train struck you and whether you found it fruitful.
Sex is essentially mixed in men and women; at twenty for a man and maybe thirty for a woman it is a raging torrent. In one's last years it may have largely abated.
The sex drive may have become minimal, but the allure of the 'women' remains. Attractive women are still heart warming.
Since your confident was very old, his advice seems more and more pertinent as one goes older.
He may have given an interesting suggestion about part of what Blake meant by emanation.
Re Faithfull's suspect reputation in more conventional circles: individualists in general are frowned on by conventional people.
I am and perhaps you may be also.
Thanks again for your comment.
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