Myth in Blake 8

The Spectre of Urthona, a new thing on Blake's imaginative horizon, foreshadowed the Moment of Grace which was to revolutionize his spiritual world. (Chapter One of Ram Horn'd with Gold dealt at length with these dynamics.)

Suffice it here to say that the appearance of the Spectre marks man's (and Blake's) dawning awareness that the evils of the world, which he had so deplored, exist in his own psyche. It marks what Jung referred to as the withdrawal of the projections, which Jung considered vital to the survival of the world. Blake agreed about the seriousness of the process; he stated it with great poetic intensity in the reversed writing found in the illustration to Jerusalem plate 41:

Jerusalem, Plate 41, (E 184)

"Each man is in his Spectre's power 

Until the arrival of that hour 

When his humanity awake 

And cast his Spectre into the Lake."

(Try reading lower left with a mirror!)

Yale Center for British Art
Jerusalem
Plate 41 

But in Night vii Los doesn't cast his Spectre into the lake; he embraces it, which in a manner of speaking is the same thing. In his play, After the Fall, Arthur Miller talked about "kissing the idiot', his way of expressing the same reality.

The reason Los doesn't (yet) cast his Spectre into the lake is because his humanity is not yet fully awake, but only beginning to awaken. As Blake aptly put it the redemptive union "was not to be effected without Cares & Sorrows & Troubles of six thousand years of self denial and of bitter Contition". That beautiful line points to the redemptive dimension of all the fallenness and horror we have been reading about. It was Blake's way of saying what Paul said in Romans: "All things work together for good to them that love God...." Blake and Jung and probably Paul would agree that we begin to love God (and stop trying to be God!) when we recognize and accept out own involvement in the horror around us. That's the moment when the six thousand years of change begins.

The birth of Rahab and the integration of Los lead to an intensification of a drama that has already stretched out for seven nights of excruciating intensity. In Night viii the drama has not only intensified, but it has clarified so that we can no longer fail to understand that the forces of life and of death are in bitter conflict. It has become the old, old story, and Blake leaves no doubt about who represents light and who darkness. Urizen resumes his war for control and out of his ranks of War comes Satan. Rahab conspires to put to death the Saviour who has come down from Heaven and emerged from Jerusalem. The Christian knows that this death is foreordained for final victory, but neither Rahab nor Jerusalem has that awareness, and near the end of Night viii we read these richly evocative words:

Four Zoas, Night VIII, Page 114 [111], (E 385)

"Jerusalem wept over the Sepulcher two thousand years. 

Rahab triumphs over all; she took Jerusalem 

Captive; a Willing Captive, by delusive arts impell'd 

To worship Urizen's Dragon form, to offer her own Children 

Upon the bloody altar. John saw these things revealed in Heaven

on Patmos Isle & heard the Souls cry out to be deliver'd"