PSYCHIC ENERGY

PE [Psychic Energy] typically refers to the dynamics that empower human motivation and vitality. It also implies a direction-oriented force that fuels the pursuit and achievement of life goals and plans (Lewin, 1951; Wright, 1987; Baumeister, 2002).

British Museum

Illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts

Blake's use of the sandal as a symbol was influenced by passage in the books of Mark and Acts in the New Testament. Two dramatic stories emphasize the putting on of sandals as emblematic of significant transitions in the abilities of the individuals who wore them. In Mark, Jesus send the disciples out by twos wearing sandals and without necessities to sustain themselves. What Jesus provided them with was power over unclean spirits. Mark reports that on their journey the disciples were able to cast out Devils and restore the sick to health. Before this time Jesus' disciples were not reported to have been capable of ministering in this way.

Following the account of the disciples going out by twos is another account of a change in Jesus' ministry when John the Baptist was beheaded at Herod's command. The chapter in Mark continues with the feeding of the masses, Jesus walking on the sea, the calming the waves, and making whole those who were ill. The power of Jesus underwent a pronounced alteration after he sent the disciples forth with the capacity to heal and saw them return reporting outstanding success. The atrocity against John the Baptist compounded the feeling that the time had come to make known the mission for which Jesus was sent into the world.

In the Book of Acts we read of Peter binding on his sandals before escaping from prison under the protection of an angel. Herod's execution order was thwarted, which allowed Peter to continue his ministry which was essential to the survival and growth of the young church. 

Mark 6 

[7] And he called unto him the twelve, and began to send them forth by two and two; and gave them power over unclean spirits;
[8] And commanded them that they should take nothing for their journey, save a staff only; no scrip, no bread, no money in their purse:
[9] But be shod with sandals; and not put on two coats.
[10] And he said unto them, In what place soever ye enter into an house, there abide till ye depart from that place.
[11] And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.
[12] And they went out, and preached that men should repent.
[13] And they cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them.

...[22] And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee.
[23] And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom.
[24] And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist.

Acts 12

[5] Peter therefore was kept in prison: but prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him.
[6] And when Herod would have brought him forth, the same night Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains: and the keepers before the door kept the prison.
[7] And, behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined in the prison: and he smote Peter on the side, and raised him up, saying, Arise up quickly. And his chains fell off from his hands.
[8] And the angel said unto him, Gird thyself, and bind on thy sandals. And so he did. And he saith unto him, Cast thy garment about thee, and follow me.
[9] And he went out, and followed him; and wist not that it was true which was done by the angel; but thought he saw a vision.

In the same way Blake used the sandal as a symbol signifying a transition between states of consciousness. In Plate 8 of Milton, Satan had introduced a chaotic state by exchanging labors with Palamabron. The removal of Los' left sandal indicated the inception of a period of mourning over the loss of the fine balance among the states of wrath, pity and error.

On Milton Plate 21 binding on the sandal suggests that Blake himself was undergoing a stage of development. To 'walk forward thro' Eternity' he bound upon his foot the natural world as though a sandal. 

Plate 22 of Milton reveals Blake becoming one with Los in order to continue his journey through Udan-Adan. The strength that Blake needed he received when Los 'stoop'd down And bound my sandals on.'

Golden Sandals are mentioned on Plate 83 of Jerusalem. Los wears them on his watch as he patrols Golgonooza to protect it from the Spectre lest the work of the furnaces be destroyed.  

Milton, Plate 8, (E 101)

"Los beheld
The servants of the Mills drunken with wine and dancing wild
With shouts and Palamabrons songs, rending the forests green
With ecchoing confusion, tho' the Sun was risen on high.       

Then Los took off his left sandal placing it on his head,
Signal of solemn mourning: when the servants of the Mills
Beheld the signal they in silence stood, tho' drunk with wine.
Los wept! But Rintrah also came, and Enitharmon on
His arm lean'd tremblingly observing all these things          

And Los said. Ye Genii of the Mills! the Sun is on high
Your labours call you! Palamabron is also in sad dilemma;
His horses are mad! his Harrow confounded! his companions enrag'd.
Mine is the fault! I should have remember'd that pity divides the soul
And man, unmans: follow with me my Plow. this mournful day    
Must be a blank in Nature: follow with me, and tomorrow again
Resume your labours, & this day shall be a mournful day"

Milton, Plate 21 [23], (E 115) 

"But I knew not that it was Milton, for man cannot know
What passes in his members till periods of Space & Time
Reveal the secrets of Eternity: for more extensive               
Than any other earthly things, are Mans earthly lineaments.

And all this Vegetable World appeard on my left Foot,
As a bright sandal formd immortal of precious stones & gold:
I stooped down & bound it on to walk forward thro' Eternity. 

Milton, Plate 22 [24], (E 116)
"Tho driven away with the Seven Starry Ones into the Ulro
Yet the Divine Vision remains Every-where For-ever. Amen.
And Ololon lamented for Milton with a great lamentation.

While Los heard indistinct in fear, what time I bound my sandals
On; to walk forward thro' Eternity, Los descended to me:         
And Los behind me stood; a terrible flaming Sun: just close

Behind my back; I turned round in terror, and behold.
Los stood in that fierce glowing fire; & he also  stoop'd down
And bound my sandals on in Udan-Adan; trembling I stood
Exceedingly with fear & terror, standing in the Vale             
Of Lambeth: but he kissed me and wishd me health.
And I became One  Man  with  him  arising in my strength:"

Jerusalem, Plate 83, (E 242) 

"While Los arose upon his Watch, and down from Golgonooza 
Putting on his golden sandals to walk from mountain to mountain,
He takes his way, girding himself with gold & in his hand
Holding his iron mace: The Spectre remains attentive
Alternate they watch in night: alternate labour in day
Before the Furnaces labouring, while Los all night watches  
The stars rising & setting, & the meteors & terrors of night!" 

Wikimedia
Jerusalem
Frontispiece, Copy b

WHOLENESS

First Posted Aug 2009 

A quote from Edward F Edinger a Jungian psychologist :
THE ETERNAL DRAMA: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology

 

"Nothing new can emerge unless one is willing to dip into chaos and pull it out. 

Once it is out it promptly splits in two, into earth and sky in terms of the myth. This is something we see whenever something is coming into awareness: the very process of achieving consciousness involves a split into opposites. Things can remain in their state of oneness only as long as they are unconscious. When they reach consciousness, they must divide into opposites and then we have the experience of conflict." Page 10

From Encounter with the Self, by Edward F Edinger:  

"At first, the encounter with the Self is indeed a defeat of the ego; but with perseverance, /Deo volente,/ light is born from the darkness. One meets the "Immortal One" who wounds and heals, who casts down and raises up, who makes small and makes large - in a word the one who makes one whole." 

Page 9

Blake is willing to dip into that chaos and endure the splitting. He follows the process through its inner and outer manifestations and describes the unification process on the other side at a higher level of consciousness.

In plate 96 of JERUSALEM Blake writes:

"Then Jesus appeared standing by Albion as the Good Shepherd
By the lost Sheep that he hath found & Albion knew that it
Was the Lord the Universal Humanity, & Albion saw his Form
A Man. & they conversed as Man with Man, in Ages of Eternity
And the Divine Appearance was the likeness & similitude of Los"

This passage is symbolically dense. Practically every word in it is pregnant with meaning. Focus on any word within its context and it leads toward the transcending of divisions which is about to be achieved. From the undifferentation of unconsciousness, through recognition, awareness, sifting, and integration the Divine Appearance (unification) is being activated.

Yale Center for British Art

Jerusalem

Plate 96

Think of Jesus on the mount of transfiguration: fourfold in humanity encountering the Eternal.

MUNDANE SHELL

New York Public Library 

Milton

Plate 32

The Mundane Shell represents the skull which encloses the brain in which consciousness resides. It provides a field for interaction between exterior data and the processing through which the brain makes use of the data. Blake realized that the individual requires experience to evolve into an integrated being capable of discerning truth from falsehood, spirit from matter, eternity from time.  

Within the brain Blake discerned the Four Zoas, four ways which the brain had devised to make use of information it received. He was aware that his own brain was inclined to react to various input in any of these four ways.  

Blake saw Experience to be the tool provided for synthesizing four competing methods into a single cooperating unity. Each of Blake's Zoas travels a convoluted path because he is unable to discern the ways of thinking which are automatic to the other Zoas. Blake's solution is in 'offering of Self for Another': through 'forgiveness,' 'brotherhood' and 'every kindness.' Every part of ourselves must learn to give oneself for every other.

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3, (E 34) 

" Without Contraries is no progression.  Attraction and
Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to
Human existence."

Songs of Innocence, Plate 9, (E 9) 

"And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face      
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove." 

Jerusalem, Plate 96, (E 255)

"Jesus replied Fear not Albion unless I die thou canst not live
But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me            
This is Friendship & Brotherhood without it Man Is Not

So Jesus spoke! the Covering Cherub coming on in darkness
Overshadowd them & Jesus said Thus do Men in Eternity
One for another to put off by forgiveness, every sin

Albion replyd. Cannot Man exist without Mysterious          
Offering of Self for Another, is this Friendship & Brotherhood
I see thee in the likeness & similitude of Los my Friend

Jesus said. Wouldest thou love one who never died
For thee or ever die for one who had not died for thee
And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself           
Eternally for Man Man could not exist. for Man is Love:
As God is Love: every kindness to another is a little Death
In the Divine Image nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood"

Quote from Livewired, by David Eagleman, Page 20-21:

"[F]or humans at birth, the brain is remarkably unfinished, and interaction with the world is necessary to complete it... 

The flexibility of your brain allows the events of your life to stitch themselves directly into the neural fabric. Its a great trick on the part of Mother Nature...all from the seeds of a small collection of genes. Our DNA is not a blueprint: it is merely the first domino which kicks off the show.

[N]euronal networks require interaction with the world for their proper development."

Milton, Plate 17 [19], (E 110) 

"But Miltons Human Shadow continu'd journeying above
The rocky masses of The Mundane Shell; in the Lands
Of Edom & Aram & Moab & Midian & Amalek.                         

The Mundane Shell, is a vast Concave Earth: an immense
Hardend shadow of all things upon our Vegetated Earth
Enlarg'd into dimension & deform'd into indefinite space,
In Twenty-seven Heavens and all their Hells; with Chaos
And Ancient Night; & Purgatory. It is a cavernous Earth          
Of labyrinthine intricacy, twenty-seven folds of opakeness
And finishes where the lark mounts; here Milton journeyed
In that Region calld Midian among the Rocks of Horeb
For travellers from Eternity. pass outward to Satans seat,
But travellers to Eternity. pass inward to Golgonooza.           

Milton, Plate 34 [38], (E 134) 

"Around this Polypus Los continual builds the Mundane Shell

Four Universes round the Universe of Los remain Chaotic
Four intersecting Globes, & the Egg form'd World of Los
In midst; stretching from Zenith to Nadir, in midst of Chaos.
One of these Ruind Universes is to the North named Urthona       
One to the South this was the glorious World of Urizen
One to the East, of Luvah: One to the West; of Tharmas.
But when Luvah assumed the World of Urizen in the South
All fell towards the Center sinking downward in dire Ruin

Here in these Chaoses the Sons of Ololon took their abode"        

A Blake Dictionary by S Foster Damon states: "Los creates the mundane egg as a protection."

 Milton, Plate 25, (E 122)

"For in every Nation & every Family the Three Classes are born    
And in every Species of Earth, Metal, Tree, Fish, Bird & Beast.
We form the Mundane Egg, that Spectres coming by fury or amity
All is the same, & every one remains in his own energy"

Milton, Plate 2, (E 96) 

"Come into my hand    
By your mild power; descending down the Nerves of my right arm
From out the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministry
The Eternal Great Humanity Divine. planted his Paradise,
And in it caus'd the Spectres of the Dead to take sweet forms
In likeness of himself."

Milton, Plate 28 [30], (E 126) 

"Antamon takes them into his beautiful flexible hands,
As the Sower takes the seed, or as the Artist his clay
Or fine wax, to mould artful a model for golden ornaments,      
The soft hands of Antamon draw the indelible line:
Form immortal with golden pen; such as the Spectre admiring
Puts on the sweet form; then smiles Antamon bright thro his windows
The Daughters of beauty look up from their Loom & prepare.
The integument soft for its clothing with joy & delight."  Jerusalem, Plate 58, (E 208) 

Jerusalem, Plate 59, (E 208) 

"This Los formed into the Gates & mighty Wall, between the Oak    
Of Weeping & the Palm of Suffering beneath Albions Tomb,
Thus in process of time it became the beautiful Mundane Shell,
The Habitation of the Spectres of the Dead & the Place
Of Redemption & of awaking again into Eternity

For Four Universes round the Mundane Egg remain Chaotic          
One to the North; Urthona: One to the South; Urizen:
One to the East: Luvah: One to the West, Tharmas;
They are the Four Zoas that stood around the Throne Divine" 

10 QUOTES NINTH

Wikipedia Commons

Illustrations to Paradise Lost

Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve

*

It is better to prevent misery, than to release from misery
It is better to prevent error, than to  forgive the criminal:  

*

Demonstration Similitude & Harmony are Objects of Reasoning 
Invention Identity & Melody are Objects of Intuition 

*

For not one sparrow can suffer, & the whole Universe not suffer also, 

In all its Regions, & its Father & Saviour not pity and weep. 

 

*

Not for ourselves but for the Eternal family we live
Man liveth not by Self alone but in his brothers face            
Each shall behold the Eternal Father & love & joy abound

* 

The man
who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds
reptiles of the mind.

*

When the voices of children are heard on the green  
And laughing is heard on the hill,    
My heart is at rest within my breast
And every thing else is still

*

He doth give his joy to all. 

He becomes an infant small. 

He becomes a man of woe 

He doth feel the sorrow too. 

*

Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? 

He replied. All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination 

this firm perswasion removed mountains; 

but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing. 

* 
I in my Selfhood am that Satan: I am that Evil One!              
He is my Spectre! in my obedience to loose him from my Hells
To claim the Hells, my Furnaces, I go to Eternal Death.

* 

Jesus was all virtue,
and acted from impulse: not from rules.

* 

JAMES JOYCE

Princeton University Library

Book of Urizen

Plate 4

"Eternally I Labor On"

To my surprise I learned that James Joyce had his imagination stimulated by the poetic imagery of William Blake. An exhibition at the Tate Gallery had this quote by Joyce attached to the introduction.  

Tate Exhibition

“Blake sang of the ideal world, of the truth of the intellect, and of the divinity of the imagination. … The only writer to have written songs for children with the soul of a child … he holds, in my view, a unique position because he unites intellectual sharpness with mystic sentiment.” Joyce

A lecture on William Blake, in Italian, was given March 1912 at the Università Popolare Triestina by James Joyce. The twenty page manuscript is in the Yale University Library. 

The following passages are translations from Joyce's Lecture:

"It is a sad irony to think that this poet of childish innocence, the only writer who has written songs for children with the soul of a child, and who has illuminated the phenomenon of gestation with a light so tender and mystical in his [218] strange poem The Chrystal Cabinet, was destined never to see the sight of a real human child at his fireside. To him who had such great pity for everything that lives and suffers and rejoices in the illusions of the vegetable world, for the fly, the hare, the little chimney sweep, the robin, even for the flea, was denied any other fatherhood than the spiritual fatherhood, intensely natural though it is, that still lives in the lines of Proverbs: [11]

'He who mocks the Infant’s Faith
Shall be mock’d in Age & Death.
He who shall teach the Child to Doubt
The rotting Grave shall ne’er get out.
He who respects the Infant’s faith
Triumphs over Hell & Death.'"

***********

"One must be, in the first place, well-disposed to mysticism, and in the second place, endowed with the patience of a saint in order to get an idea of what Paracelsus and Behmen mean by their cosmic exposition of the involution and evolution of mercury, salt, sulphur, body, soul and spirit. Blake naturally belongs to another category, that of the artists, and in this category he occupies, in my opinion, a unique position, because he unites keenness of intellect with mystical feeling. This first quality is almost completely lacking in mystical art. St. John of the Cross, for example, one of the few idealist artists worthy to stand with Blake, never reveals either an innate sense of form or a coordinating force of the intellect in his book The Dark Night of the Soul, that cries and faints with such an ecstatic passion." 

*************

"Michelangelo’s influence is felt in all of Blake’s work, and especially in some passages of prose collected in the fragments, in which he always insists on the importance of the pure, clean line that evokes and creates the figure on the background of the uncreated void."

*************

"Armed with this two-edged sword, the art of Michelangelo and the revelations of Swedenborg, Blake killed the dragon of experience and natural wisdom, and, by minimizing space and time and denying the existence of memory and the senses, he tried to paint his works on the void of the divine bosom."

*************

"The mental process by which Blake arrives at the threshold of the infinite is a similar process. Flying from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from a drop of blood to the universe of stars, his soul is consumed by the rapidity of flight, and finds itself renewed and winged and immortal on the edge of the dark ocean of God. And although he based his art on such idealist premises, convinced that eternity was in love with the products of time, the sons of God with the sons of […]" 

Milton, Plate 24 [26], (E 121)

"Los is by mortals nam'd Time Enitharmon is nam'd Space
But they depict him bald & aged who is in eternal youth
All powerful and his locks flourish like the brows of morning    
He is the Spirit of Prophecy the ever apparent Elias
Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Times swiftness
Which is the swiftest of all things: all were eternal torment:
All the Gods of the Kingdoms of Earth labour in Los's Halls.
Every one is a fallen Son of the Spirit of Prophecy             
He is the Fourth Zoa, that stood arou[n]d the Throne Divine."

The kinship which Joyce felt for Blake is evident in these few words:

"That language was the same in which tonight I try, by your leave, in so far as I can, to recall his spirit from the twilight of the universal mind, to detain it for a minute and question it. He began to study Italian in order to read the Divina Commedia in the original and to illustrate Dante’s vision with mystical drawings," Joyce 

TRACING BLAKE'S VISIONARY PROCESS IN JOYCE'S
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
By HYE-YOUNG KIM 

Images of Grace

British Museum

Jerusalem

Plate 76

CHAPTER SIX

Bible

Images of Grace

For the Christian of course Blake's happiest use of the Bible occurs with his statements of the gospel; these came after his Moment of Grace in 1800. 'The Four Zoas' had been an attempt to organize experience into a pattern of meaning. In the years before grace Blake's concept of redemption rested upon the efforts of Los, the Imagination, to create meaning out of the chaos of fallen life.

This process begins in Night iv and goes on to the end of the poem. Blake called it "building Golgonooza", an adaptation of the biblical drama of rebuilding fallen Jerusalem. Blake took this from the book of Ezra , one of his earliest companions. At the beginning of Night ix, written after the Moment of Grace , Los and Enitharmon are no longer building Golgonooza; now they are building Jerusalem!

In the earlier years salvation for Blake lay in art, as it has for so many sensitive souls before and after his day. Once he met grace, Jesus became for Blake the One and the All. Jesus subsumed Blake's art and redeemed it. He tells us that Jesus appeared to him in "the likeness and similitude of Los".

Kierkegaard spoke of the aesthetic phase. Some aesthetes among Blake's critics, valuing art more highly than Christ, have experienced the change as a deterioration of Blake's art. Christians in contrast see the new work like Blake saw it, as a glorified art, sublimated and fulfilled:

• Prayer is the Study of Art.

• Praise is the Practise of Art.

• Fasting &c., all relate to Art. br ....

• Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists.

• ....

• The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.

• Art is the Tree of Life.

• (Selected Passages from The Laocoon)

These are certainly provocative words! We should know that the Bible is art in its highest form, but never art for art's sake, always art for God's sake. In the Laocoon inscriptions (quoted above) Blake made a frontal attack upon the "aesthetic" orientation by pointing out the identity between true art and true godlinesss, the "Tree of Life", which was God's original intention for man before the serpent snarled up his plans.

It became a special joy and a labor of love for Blake after his conversion to go back and recolor his Biblically inspired myth with those previously discounted parts of the Bible which now burned in his consciousness. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John tell the story of the Lord of Love, adored by thousands who know little or nothing about the rest of the Bible. Blake now puts Jesus at the center, or rather the apex, of his myth of meaning.

The 17th chapter of John is probably the central passage of scripture for Blake's myth, both before and after the Moment of Grace. In it Jesus prays to the Holy Father:

[21] That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
[22] And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
[23] I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; 

Blake's visionary experience from his earliest days had centered on this image of oneness. All of his reading in the heterodox tradition had reinforced it as the basic shape of reality. The Gnostics, the Neo-platonists, the alchemists, the Cabbalists, the Christian mystics, all had emphasized the supernal oneness of God and Man and life. Blake had seen all trouble and sorrow and brokenness in terms of the fracture and separation or division from the primeval oneness. This was the basic idea of his myth:

"Daughters of Beulah, Sing His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity." Four Zoas, Page 4, (E 301)

And now on the sands of Felpham he had met the One, been folded into his bosom and heard himself affectionately named by the One ("Thou Ram Horn'd with Gold"). Turning to scripture with new eyes, irradiated with his First Vision of Light he finds the Saviour praying that we might be one as he is one with the Father.

In the eternal realm the sequence is reversed: the divine prayer had in earliest childhood fallen into the deepest levels of Blake's being. Like the veritable mustard seed it lay there exerting an unconscious force, guiding him to the Gnostics (who knew more about oneness than did the Church Fathers), the Neoplatonists, and the others. And when the soil of Blake's psyche was fully prepared, the seed burst out in the full embodiment of the vision of Light, when for Blake the One became flesh.

This is the center of the Christian faith: that we are one, that we are all Christ's members. Those who deny to Blake the name of Christian on the basis of his 'white' reading of the Bible thereby betray their own off centeredness. Certainly he was no orthodox Christian; orthodox Christianity in its many forms has been way off center. When Blake dreamed of the One and met the One and sang of the One, he imaginatively incarnated the answer to the divine prayer. Is there any better way to be a Christian?

Read more about Blake's Moment of Grace and it's implications.

Jehovah and Astarte

Yale Center for British Art

Jerusalem

Plate 53

CHAPTER SIX

Bible

 Jehovah and Astarte

After the Biblical Fall the Old Testament drama unfolds as a protracted struggle between two Gods. In every age the majority of Mankind have worshiped Mother Earth, Matter or the recurring cycle of vegetative life. She has many names; in the Bible one of the most common is Astarte. In our day "Astarte" exacts an acceptance of things as they are, an attempt to flow with the stream of Nature. The Bible called this "whoring after other gods".

Blake called it Natural Religion or Druidism. He meant by Natural Religion the worship of the principle of fallen life; those most conformed and faithful to it become the rulers of this world. Natural Religion involves choosing to remain at the level of the material, which Blake called vegetative life.

The believer in Natural Religion closes his mind to the reality of spiritual development; he turns his back upon the Spirit. Unable to endure the tension of struggling and waiting for spiritual evolution he erects a golden calf. He either acquiesces in or actively contributes to the brutishness and horror of a life that "lives upon death".

The Bible and Blake's poetry alike are filled with gory images of this ultimate horror, which comes from identifying life with the merely natural. T.S.Eliot said in The Sacred Wood that Blake's poetry is unpleasant, as all great poetry is unpleasant. It is "unpleasant" basically because Blake, like the Bible, insists on calling a spade a spade. Nowhere is Blake closer to the Bible than in his constant reiteration of the ultimate horror of unredeemed life, celebrated in page after page of minute particulars.

Blake and the Bible both insistently remind us that Nature is fallen , and that one flows with this fallen Nature to one's destruction. Abraham and Moses knew a higher God: he was above Nature; he was Spirit. He called men to rise above the natural and to become sons of a God opposed to everything Astarte stood for, to live by the laws, not of earth, but of heaven.

The children of Abraham tried to put this God first, but rarely with notable success. Instead at every opportunity they turned away from Jehovah "under every green tree", back to Nature. This inevitably led back to Captivity in the iron furnaces of Egypt/Babylon/Rome, etc. The biblical cycle discussed above thus relates to the alternating dominance of Jehovah and Astarte. Blake's myth recreates this biblical story, but with one vital difference.

Vala and her fellow females--Tirzah, Rahab, the Daughters of Albion--represent the various forms of Astarte, the Earth Goddess. Urizen represents Jehovah, the Sky God. But in 'The Four Zoas' both are fallen. Blake claims that the Hebrew consciousness of God is flawed at best. Secular materialists had reached this conclusion long before, but it was a startling and revolutionary idea for a man like Blake, embedded in the biblical faith and firmly attached to the life of the Spirit.

Blake had made as serious a commitment to the eternal as anyone could, and now at the mid point of his life he saw an eternal without a God worthy of worship. It was a dark night of the soul indeed!

This honest and painful confrontation with what was for Blake an existential reality has made him into the pariah of the orthodox. The black book has no place for any criticism of the Hebrew consciousness of God; he is perfect from first to last, and everything the Bible says about him is perfect (inerrant!) as well. The superstitious awe which has been called bibliolatry forbids any questions of Abraham's God or Moses' God.

Although when we read without blinders, we can see their consciousness of God changing before our eyes. Note Abraham bargaining with God for the survival of his nephew in Sodom and Moses simply defying God if he refuses to forgive the worshippers of the golden calf. In the spirit of these two revealing passages Blake in his own recreation of the biblical story dramatically portrayed an evolving God consciousness, which the black book simply cannot permit. It was Blake's willingness to let the old die that made him notably ready for the new birth. The dark night of the soul had intensified until it became the Sickness unto Death. .

Milton, Plate 36 [40], (E 137)

"For when Los joind with me he took me in his firy whirlwind
My Vegetated portion was hurried from Lambeths shades
He set me down in Felphams Vale & prepard a beautiful
Cottage for me that in three years I might write all these
     Visions
To display Natures cruel holiness: the deceits of Natural
     Religion."

Jerusalem, Plate 52, (E 200) 

"He never can be a Friend to the Human Race who is the Preacher
of Natural Morality or Natural Religion. he is a flatterer who
means to betray, to perpetuate Tyrant Pride & the Laws of that
Babylon which he foresees shall shortly be destroyed, with the
Spiritual and not the Natural Sword: He is in the State named
Rahab: which State must be put off before he can be the Friend of
Man.

Jerusalem, Plate 52, (E 201) 

"Your Religion O Deists: Deism, is the Worship of the God
of this World by the means of what you call Natural Religion and
Natural Philosophy, and of Natural Morality or
Self-Righteousness, the Selfish Virtues of the Natural Heart. 
This was the Religion of the Pharisees who murderd Jesus.  Deism
is the same & ends in the same. 

In Biblical times the Goddess Nature went by many names. 

"The Phoenician city of Baalbek (in modern-day Lebanon) was his cult center where he was worshipped with his consort Astarte, goddess of love, sexuality, and war (associated with the goddess Inanna/Ishtar, among others). Even so, Astarte was the most popular deity at Sidon, even eclipsing Baal in the number of temples dedicated to her, and is equally well represented at Baalbek."

First Samuel 7

[3] And Samuel spake unto all the house of Israel, saying, If ye do return unto the LORD with all your hearts, then put away the strange gods and Ashtaroth from among you, and prepare your hearts unto the LORD, and serve him only: and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.

[4] Then the children of Israel did put away Baalim and Ashtaroth, and served the LORD only.