DEADLY SLEEP

British Museum
Large Book of Designs

excerpted from "Visions of the Daughters of Albion"
 THE PROPHETIC BOOKS OF WILLIAM BLAKE 
JERUSALEM 
EDITED BY E. R. D. MACLAGAN AND A. G. B. RUSSELL 
1904

Introduction
"Man is at once the stage and the protagonist in the drama 
with which Blake is concerned, the Fourfold Man, called sym- 
bolically by the name of Albion, " our ancestor, in whose sleep or 
Chaos creation began,"; and his state depends on the union and 
agreement of the four elements that are met in him. Beside the 
Humanity, or central personality of the individual, stand the Spectre, 
the reasoning power, and the Emanation (a word sometimes abridged 
into Eon,) the emotional and imaginative life, with the Shadow, 
which seems to be desire, restrained and become passive, " till it is 
only the shadow of desire." When these are united, and especially 
when the Spectre and the Emanation, contraries in whose inter- 
action all other contraries are involved, are balanced and at peace, 
Man is in the state of salvation, which Boehme called temperature ; 
when Spectre and Emanation have parted, Man is in a fallen state, 
and can only be redeemed by their reconciliation. This fall into 
divison, and resurrection into unity, is the main subject of "Jeru- 
salem " and indeed of most of the Prophetical books ; for the part- 

ix 

ing of Reason and Imagination is the great tragedy, through which 
the Spectre becomes cold and the Emanation weak, the Shadow 
turns cruel, and the Humanity is overcome by deadly sleep (15, 6). 
A sleep, too, full of dreams, in which Man wavers between evil 
and good, drawn alternately by the male Spectre and the female 
Emanation, and so called by Blake hermaphroditic: a sleep from 
which only Christ, the Divine Imagination, can save the fallen 
Man, by reuniting him with Jerusalem, his Emanation, and saving 
him from the dominion of his Spectre, the great selfhood, called 
Satan." 

Four Zoas, Night I, Page 11, (E 825)

[deleted lines]  

"Refusing to behold the Divine image which all behold
          And live thereby. he is sunk down into a deadly sleep
          But we immortal in our own strength survive by stern debate
          Till we have drawn the Lamb of God into a mortal form
          And that he must be born is certain for One must be All

          And comprehend within himself all things both small & great
          We therefore for whose sake all things aspire to be & live
          Will so recieve the Divine Image that amongst the Reprobate
          He may be devoted to Destruction from his mothers womb"