URTHONA RISES [139]

We have reached the end once again of the Four Zoas having commented on additional pages from Night IX. Perhaps the final page will strike more chords in the music played by the heavenly orchestra since you have read of the resolution of the Zoas and their Emanations. Perhaps the Bread of Life and the Wine of Eternity will be more available having followed the milling of the grain and the crushing of the grapes. If Blake's words and images have entered deep within your psyche they will remain with you to be retrieved at appropriate times as you travel your Spiritual Journey.

Reposted from August 21, 2015

Blake Archive

Four Zoas

Page 139

Four Zoas, Night IX, Page 139, (E 407)

"The Sun arises from his dewy bed & the fresh airs
Play in his smiling beams giving the seeds of life to grow
And the fresh Earth beams forth ten thousand thousand springs of life
Urthona is arisen in his strength no longer now
Divided from Enitharmon no longer the Spectre Los                
Where is the Spectre of Prophecy where the delusive Phantom
Departed & Urthona rises from the ruinous walls
In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science
For intellectual War The war of swords departed now
The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns           

                  End of The Dream"

The final page of the Four Zoas is a response to early lines in Blake's poem where he declared his intention of giving an account of the Zoa named Urthona: 

"His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity His fall into the Generation of Decay & Death & his Regeneration by the Resurrection from the dead"
 
The Element of Urthona is the Earth which we call our home. Blake begins and ends his poem with the Earth which is the site in which transformation must be revealed. Within the psyche of man, Urthona dwells in the Unconscious to which man turns to touch his Eternal nature. It is through Urthona that man exercises his spiritual perception and discerns vision. Through Urthona man is connected to the Eternal; not by reason, sensation or emotion but by intuition.

The dark religions which have departed are religions which were provided by the Eyes of God so that man may not fall into the abyss. There is not longer need for a religion of human sacrifice, vengeance, moral law, rationalism or a distant God reigning in the sky. Man's awareness of God residing within his own Soul is all the religion he needs. Blake's 'Sweet Science' will reign because man is able to behold everything as holy.  

Four Zoas, Page 3, Night I, (E 301) 
"Los was the fourth immortal starry one, & in the Earth
Of a bright Universe Empery attended day & night                 
Days & nights of revolving joy, Urthona was his name
PAGE 4,       
In Eden; in the Auricular Nerves of Human life
Which is the Earth of Eden, he his Emanations propagated
Fairies of Albion afterwards Gods of the Heathen, Daughter of Beulah Sing
His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity
His fall into the Generation of Decay & Death & his Regeneration by the 

Resurrection from the dead"

Some complain that Blake did not make it clear how the transformation from the fallen world to the unfallen world took place. The change took place in increments and could have been interrupted by a misstep at any point. But the process continued until suddenly mankind had left behind his old self and acquired a new vision, a new power, and a new image of himself and his world.
 
This passage from Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry may clarify the process through which man attains higher consciousness:

Page 259 -260
"Man stands at the level of conscious life: immediately in front of him is the power to visualize the eternal city and garden he is trying to regain; immediately behind him is an unconscious, involuntary and cyclic energy, much of which still goes on inside of his own body. Man is therefore a Luvah or form of life subject to two inpulses, one the prophetic impulse leading him forward to vision, the other the natural impulse which drags him back to unconsciousness and finally to death.
...
The imagination says that man is not chain-bound but muscle-bound; that he is born alive and everywhere dying in sleep; and that when the conscious imagination in man perfects the vision of the world of consciousness, at that point man's eyes will necessarily be open.
...
Every advance of truth forces error to consolidate itself in a more obviously erroneous form, and every advance of freedom has the same effect on tyranny. Thus history exhibits a series of crises in which a sudden flash of imaginative vision (as in the French Revolution) bursts out is counteracted by a more ruthless defense of the status quo, and subsides again. The evolution come in the fact that the opposition grows sharper each time, and will one day present a clear-cut alternative of eternal life or extermination."

Renewed Albion.