Preface

This blog, at "http://williamblakesspiritualjourney.blogspot.com," is a written version of a talk given for the Gnostic Church of Portland, Oregon, in the fall of 2005, and repeated for the Theosophical Society of Portland in February of 2007. The topic is William Blake's spiritual journey, as seen in the artwork of two of his illuminated books, The First Book of Urizen and Jerusalem, Emanation of the Giant Albion.

Initially I was more attracted by Blake's artwork than by the words that accompany them. In April of 2004 my wife and I had occasion to be in Connecticut, and we decided to visit Yale University's Beineke Library, which has originals of both these works. We spent one busy afternoon there, admiring and photographing these treasures.

As I looked at them at home, I wanted to know more about what they meant. So I got David Erdman's book The Illuminated Blake (1974); his understanding of Blake's images formed the basis for my talk at the Gnostic Church. In preparation for my second talk, I have read other interpretations and Blake's own words, which do not always clarify matters. I spent many hours sorting out those that I could actually see in the designs and fit to the text. I also read about his life. What I am presenting here is about 70% Erdman, 15% other interpretations, and 15% my own.

As a whole, the images tell a story, Blake's story of Urizen and Los, their exile from the eternals, their suffering in the fallen world, and their redemption in the New Jerusalem. It is also, as we shall see, the story of Blake's own unfolding awareness, full of despair, of his fallen state, and his overcoming of that state through art.

My own contributions, such as they are, are mainly in interpreting some of Blake's images by reference to alchemical images. I am not saying that Blake saw these images. He easily could have, because the books that contained them went through many editions during the previous century. But more importantly, they give us clues to how various specific images were used symbolically just prior to his time. My specific source for alchemical images is Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and their Royal Art, by Johannis Fabricius (1976).

After I presented the slide show to the Theosophical Society, one of its members, Tamara Gerard, went looking for where these images might be available in print. She found them in William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books, edited by David Bindman. Indeed, the plates of Jerusalem are there in fairly good reproductions, although smaller in size and occasionally a bit greenish compared to the originals. (The ones here, by the same token, I sometimes made over-bright.). The images from Urizen are also good but from a different copy; so there are slight variations.

What disapponted me in Bindman's book were his images of the other illuminated works done around the same time as Urizen. Following the Blake Trust volumes he is drawing on, he uses images from British libraries that sometimes seem to me decidedly inferior artistically to the versions at Yale. For example, I never understood why critics found Blake's ill;ustration of "The Tyger" disappointing until I saw the image in Bindman's book, so anemic-looking compared to the one at Yale. So I decided to add two chapters at the end with the Yale versions that we photographed of this other work: The Book of Thel, America a Prophecy (which in Bindman isn't even colored!), and Songs of Experience. Yale has more, but we didn't photograph them. As I have done for Urizen and Jerusalem, I include enlargements of the illuminations themselves. Songs of Experience is Chapter 9, and the others are at the end of Chapter 8.

I will end this Preface by giving a few tips for navigating this blog. As you read down, those images that are wider than they are tall can be made larger by clicking on them. Then to get back to the text you were reading, use your back browser (the arrow at the top left of your screen). Wait a couple of seconds and the program will reload the text and return you to where you left off.

To read a specific chapter, you can click on the title of the chapter, at the right of this Preface. That will also shorten the reloading time when you want to return from an image to the text, if you are experiencing a delay. Then when you finish the chapter, you can either click on a new chapter title, to the right at the top of the chapter, or on "home" at the end.

Chapter 1: Urizen

Above is Plate 1, the title page of The First Book of Urizen, or in one copy simply The Book of Urizen. It exhibits Blake's protagonist Urizen in a definitive pose. He is writing with both hands, copying on sheets of paper from a book he is scanning with his feet. Urizen is not looking at the book; his eyes are closed, or open but lacking pupils. Perhaps he is blind. Like Blake, he sees with the mind. Behind him are two tombstone-like stone tablets. They suggest the tablets of the law, which in Blake's view are also the tablets of death. Above him the letters of the title curl like a serpent, and the tree behind him ends in whip-like branches.

What are we to make of this picture? In Blake's day, and for a century before his birth, England's artisan class was experiencing a resurgence of dissenting religious ideas, some of which resembled ancient Gnosticism. Closet to Blake's ideas was a group called the Ranters, then the Muggertonians, after one of its proponents Muggerton. Blake's parents may have been part of that movement. Blake himself briefly joined one group, associated with the 18th century mystic Swedenborg.

The main idea in common with the Gnostics was that the creator of the world was a lesser god, ignorant if not in some characterizations evil. Without knowing where his ideas were coming from, unable to see their source, he created by copying images unconsciously acquired from above, in the realm of the Eternals. Similarly, Urizen is copying with both hands from a book that he reads with his toes. The side of on his right seems to be letters, the other side seems to be pictures. Urizen is Blake's version of Jehovah, the god of Moses.

Urizen gives the gift of his Law to his creatures. There is "One King, one God, one Law," and he who disobeys will face his wrath. (Chapter II, section 8, line 7; this line is also Plate 4, line 40. Blake's method of etching, which he invented, combines words and pictures on one copper plate. Since some editions give his chapters and verses but not the plates they are on, I will include both.)

The beginning of the word "Urizen" ”in the title curls like a snake, while the end has hellish whips; Urizen the Law-giver for Blake is also Satan, ruler of this world. The poem implies as much when at the beginning of the poem he calls Urizen a "dark power" (I.1.7, or 1:7) and "shadow of horror" (I.1.1, or 1:1). In later works such as Jerusalem Blake tells us that Satan is "the Reasoning Power in Man" (Northrop Frye, Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 302). Hence the name Urizen: "Your-reason."

The writing instruments in Urizen's two hands are different, at least in some versions of the picture.. A black and white photo of the copy in the Library of Congress (Eaves, p. 226) shows Urizen holding a quill pen in his right hand, and an engraving instrument in his left:

Like Blake himself, Urizen both writes and etches, from a pre-existing source. This says something about Blake's method. Blake's illustrations are not illustrations of his written text. Rather, both words and visual images are illustrations of something he sees and hears in his mind's eye and ear. Sometimes the reader will not find a specific passage in the narrative corresponding to a particular picture. He is not illustrating his text--he is illustrating what he perceives through his imagination..

Blake'’s caption to one print of this etching says, "Which is the Way The Right or the Left?" These two ways, I speculate, are the right-hand way of the Divine Word versus the left-hand way of the Image, or perhaps of Nature. Urizen's emphasis, as a caricature of the Biblical Jehovah and his Law, is on the Word. Blake, characteristically, simply holds the opposites.

Later in the text (Chapter VIII, or Plate 23) Urizen bears four sons, emanations that correspond to the ancient belief that the world is composed of four elements, earth water, air, and fire. Blake's etching has the four together, in their associated element (Plate 24).

I bring in this picture now, as opposed to when it occurs in the text, because the four sons are also four aspects of Urizen himself, as he moves through the poem. Moreover, the four elements connect the poem to Renaissance alchemy, which also utilized the four elements. For the alchemists the four elements were four constituents of human nature and four types of human existence.

I have found no record of Blake's having actually consulted alchemical works. However his biographers say he was always looking at old books for ideas. And he certainly looked at Renaissance emblem books, of which the alchemical books were an offshoot. He even did an emblem book himself, The Gates of Paradise, published in 1793. Under four of its first engravings are the names of the four elements.

Let us start with the element of earth. Blake has an etching of Urizen surrounded by it. This stone-faced, immovable figure, squinting out onto the world, could be either Urizen or his son Grodna, corresponding to the element of earth (Plate 9):

Blake says that at his birth Grodna "“rent the deep earth, howling/ Amaz'’d" (VIII.3.8-9, or 23:15-16). At the same time this figure resembles Urizen himself. It corresponds to Urizen'’s own state as he writes the Law; it was "“written in my solitude" ”(II.7.3, or 4:33) while "“hidden, set apart, in my stern counsels" (II.4.3, or 4:8). Those whom he would control by mean of his Law, personifications of the seven deadly sins and the seven planets, then chase him until he hides in the earth: "...a roof vast, petrific around/ On all sides he fram'd, like a womb"” (III.7.1-2, or 5:28); there "“Urizen laid in a stony sleep"” (III.10.1-2, or 6:7).

In alchemy what corresponds is the metals underground, as infants with the earth as their nurse. The Atalanta Fugiens of 1618 shows them as cubs sucking on a she-wolf in a cave.

As in the story of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, a human child is there as well. He bears the sign of Mercury, the catalyst who purifies himself and all the rest.. What corresponds to this condition in Jungian therapy is the so-called "normal" state of humanity, oriented around goals within one's society milieu, conditioned by one's family environment and early experiences.

Blake also gives us an Urizen-like figure in Water (Plate 12):

The figure seems barely conscious. The son is Utha, who "from the waters emerging, laments"” (VIII.3.7, or 23:14). Blake's figure seems to drift more than swim. For Urizen, what corresponds is his "“hiding in surgeing Sulphureous fluid his phantasies"” (Urizen IVb.2.3-4, or 10:13-14) after Los, another eternal, confines him with his nets of iron. Urizen's mind

...began to roll
Eddies of wrath ceaseless round & round,
And the sulphureous foam, surgeing thick,
Settled, a lake, bright & shining clear...(IVb.3.1-5, or 10:19-24)

For this stage of water alchemy usually has two figures, male and female, entwined in each other, later to become the hermaphrodite. However here is one that shows a male alone, from the 1618 Atalanta Fugiens: .

The psychological state here is one of helplessness and terror, longing for a firm foundation. It at this point that people often make the decision to enter therapy.

Another figure in Blake corresponds to Air (Plate 14):

Erdmann sees this figure floating in the sky, bouncing against either clouds or rocks. It could be Urizen'’s son Thuriel, who appears "“Astonished at his own existence,/ Like a man from a cloud born"” (VIII.3.5-6, or 23:12-13).

In Urizen'’s story, the airy state corresponds to his condition at the beginning, when he is still in the void but "“searching for a solid without fluctuation"” (II.4.6, or 4:11). Urizen also seems to take the Thuriel persona at the end of the poem, after his sons and daughters populate the earth and fail to follow his commandments. Blake says, "Cold he wandered on high, over their cities/ In weeping & pain & woe" (VIII. 6.1-2, or 25:5-6). But Urizen never has the playfulness that seems evident in Blake's figure of Plate 14.

The pose in Blake's image is similar to that of the "Hanged Man" in tarot, signifying reversal, things turning upside down. For Urizen, things have turned upside down, out of his control. The alchemists associated this "Hanged Man" pose with the element of air, specifically to vaporization out of water (Wellcome Institute Library, London (ms. 29, Fol. 40)):

Again, the dominant emotion is that of reversal--what was formerly heavy is now light, requiring a container to keep it from dissipating and poisoning whatever it touches. In Jungian therapy, the corresponding stage is the fantasies that the patient brings to the analyst, in dream-narratives or art-works, as well as untypical behavior that may cause alarm to himself or others. Typically these are strikingly at variance to one's previous existence.

Last born of Urizen's sons is fire, springing from the loins of Urizen. This bearded figure is of Urizen'’s son Fuzon, who, Blake says, "flamed out, first begotten, last born"” (VIII.3.9, or 23:18; Plate 16):

Again, the figure could also be Urizen himself early on, emerging from the chaos.

An etching further on shows Urizen in fire shows him in shackles (Plate 22):

These shackles were formed by Los, the divine blacksmitht whom we will meet later on. Here Urizen's torment turns him red-hot. The caption reads, "“Frozen doors to mock The World/ while they within torments uplock." ” In the poem Blake describes Urizen'’s agony:

Restless turn'’d the Immortal inchain'’d,
With hurtlings & clashings groans
The Immortal endur'd his chains,
Tho' bound in a deadly sleep. (V.1.6-8, or 13:25-27)

In the picture, the red, fiery glow emanating from Urizen's head expresses the torment of an enchained will. Erdmann observes that the chains are forged by his own mind to mock the world; they lock him into his own torments. Similarly, the patient's superego, or perhaps its representatives in the outer world, chastise him for his horrible fantasies. Failing that, the analyst gently advises that the patient hold off from any major life-decisions and let the passion do its transforming power in a safe container of art, dreams, and analysis.

Here, from the 1622 Philosophia Reformata, are earth and fire together, like Urizen in shackles:

The eagle and the lion, lords of air and earth, fight it out on the back of the salamander, the image for the alchemists of that which persists through the heat of the fire.The first letters of its name are the same as those of the word "sal," Latin for salt.

Finally, let me present an alchemical illustration with all four elements, a watercolor from the 16th century. This one picture contains within it the outline of an entire creative lifetime, one that can serve to structure our look at Blake's life. To make it easier to read, I have divided the picture in half, the top half as the top image here and the bottom half the bottom image:


I see this design as a progression from the bottom up and then the top down. At the bottom are two fire signs, Leo and Ares, next to the alchemist and his wife, also known as the soror. This is the pre-alchemical state of human existence. It corresponds to Blake and the feminine figures in his life, real and imaginal, and most notably his wife Catherine, Notice also the sun and the moon, images that we will see in Blake as well. Between these two, perhaps even from their interpersonal conflicts, they generate the heat that dissolves the alchemist's body--actually, the prima materia, or prime matter, of the work, separating it into its earth and its water. This is the state of floating, helplessly except where there is union with the contra-sexual figure, in which case the state approximates divine bliss, With continued fire, the liquid becomes a gas, where as spirit it connects with its twin angel. This is the state in which an artist such as Blake gets his inspiration, as though from another world, although one may also deny such influx, as Urizen does. Another fire sign, the archer, keeps the purified substance, now a king, between worlds and looking disdainfully down at mere mortals below. But the archer shoots an arrow into the king's heart. a mortal wound that bursts his bubble, so to speak. Now the movement reverses. In decline his spirit is even more closely connected to the other world, aided by his twin, or simply sinks into stagnation, while his body slowly decomposes. This slow work releases the life-substance in a form that gives the ego and those who come after a new taste of immortality by means of the elixeers that pour out of him. In what follows we shall see how Blake's life and that of his alter ego Urizen follow this structure in the course of Blake's life and work.

Chapter 2: Los and Enitharmon

As Urizen goes about his business, creating a dismal world and experiencing the limitations and joys of each realm, the Eternals look down from above (Plate 15, above). Here they are alarmed at what they see and are making a "Tent" (V.11.1, or Plate 10, Line 2) to separate Urizen's world off from their own. Erdman identifies the figure in the middle as Los, who will become Urizen's antagonist. The name "Los" is "Sol," the sun, spelled backwards, He is another Blake alter ego, the spirit of boundless imagination, in touch with both Eternity and suffering.

In the eternal realm, there are no limitations, and Los, or some other Eternal, knows the joy to be found in such a state (Plate 3):


Yet Urizen must be contained, the Eternals decide. It falls Los's lot to descend below "to confine /The obscure separation alone" (III.8.2-3, or 5:39-40; Plate 6):

This image, I think, is related to two predecessors. Most familiarly, one thinks of Christ flanked by the two thieves at Calvary. Equally important, I think, is the famous Hellenistic sculpture of the mythical Laocoon and his two sons beset by serpents winding around them (I get this one from a website on the internet):

The original was in the Vatican, but the Royal Academy, where Blake studied drawing, had a clay copy

Later, in 1815, Blake made a drawing of the sculpture, which he turned into an engraving. Then he wrote some aphorisms around the sides (reproduced from Hamilyn and Phillips, William Blake (Abrams 2000):

The predicament of Laocoon and his sons was seen traditionally as a metaphor for the soul's imprisonment within a material body. A similar image comes from the very start of Blake's career, when he apprenticed in the workshop of James Basire. Blake worked on illustrations for an influential book on mythology, Jacob Bryant's A New System, or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology, published in 1774. (This information is in the Introduction to the Garland reprint of Bryant, 1979). One of the images (Vol. II, Plate IV, opposite p. 140) is that of the Ovum Mundanum, the World Egg, with the Ophis, Greek for serpent, wrapped around it .

Again it is the soul trapped within the limitations of matter. This is what happens to Los. He becomes a part of the world he has fallen into.

An interesting development of the “Mundane Egg” is emblem 6 of Blake’s Gates of Paradise (1794).

A winged cherub steps out of an eggshell. The preceding 5 emblems in Gates of Paradise have covered the theme of the four elements, represented as different mental torments similar to the what we have seen here. Hence what the 6th one shows is the human spirit breaking free of its mental shackles. If the snake is matter, and the shell is mind, then the cherub is spirit.

I think it is significant that spirit here is a child. The release of spirit through imagination is only a beginning. Spirit in the fallen world still suffers from the limits of that world. Los, although a redeemer figure, is himself in need of redemption. Imagination must be constantly transcending itself through the clash of contraries, until it is ready to receive its own redeemer. Los and his tribulations will preoccupy Blake for the next 25 years.

In one copy of Urizen, Blake changed the figure bursting forth from Urizen, which we saw in the previous chapter as his son Fuzon, into the clean-shaven Los, flaming red. He is either falling into matter or separating from Urizen, as sky from earth, and imagination from reason (Plate 16B), even while a part of Urizen's world:


When Los sees what world he has entered into, he is "afrighted" (III.14.1, or 7:8; Plate 7):


Fallen irrevocably into matter, Los weeps. The rain, or liquid blackness, is a suitable image for the despair that grips him. The figure here is usually identified as Urizen; but Urizen is not despairing in the text here, which is about Urizen repelling "torrents" that "fall & fall" (II.4.15-16, or 4:20-21). The figure looks to me like Los (Plate 4), with his characteristic red hair:

The situation here actually fits either Los or Urizen, in despair later in the narrative.

In alchemy there is a corresponding image. Rain descends upon the hermaphroditic body of the King/Queen, lying as though dead in its tomb, thus reviving its spirit (from the Philosophia Reformata, 1622:

Los, too, is at this point a unity of contrasexual opposites, although the feminine has not yet manifested.

He slowly gathers the energy he needs for his great task, and he wields his mighty hammer (Plate 18):

Los is a blacksmith, who puts things in a fire and hammers them into whatever shape is needed, rather like Blake turning flat metal into beautiful art. Los is the passionate imagination, which may save the world from dull reason's certain death.

Los makes nets and throws them, in "shudd'ring fear," around the dark changes. He binds "every change with rivets of iron & brass" (IVa.5.1-2, or 8:9-10). Then "Ages on ages roll'd over" Los, "By earthquakes riv'n, belching sullen fires." And still Los beat on his "rivets of iron" (IVb.1.1-4,8, or 10:1-4,8). Blake's etching immediately above these lines is the following (Plate 10):

According to Erdman, the figure here is Los, since Los is the one described immediately below the picture. But it seems to me it could also apply to Urizen, shut away in Los's confinement. Pictures can mean different things at once, just as words can. Blake says "May God keep us from Single Vision" (Frye, p. 420).

Los spends ages "forging chains" (IVb.2.7, or 10:17). Then:

Like the linked infernal chain,
A vast Spine writhed in torment
Upon the winds, shooting pain'd
Ribs like a bending cavern;
And bones of solidness froze
Over all his nerves of joy. (IVb.6.2-6, or 10:37-41)

Los is binding Urizen into a body, starting with the bones (Plate 8):


Gradually Los fashions the flesh (Plate 11):


There is a corresponding alchemical image, in the putrefactio, where a dead body is purified by fire, a process which first turns it into white bones and then resurrects it in new flesh (from the Philosophia Reformata, 1622):


From causing such suffering, Los feels pity for Urizen. The pity comes out of him as a ball of fiery energy and blood, rather like Sophia leaving Adam in the Gnostic myths, or more familiarly Eve coming out of Adam as he sleeps (Plate 17):


So now there are two of them, Los the smith and his feminine half, Enitharmon, Pity. In Blake's etching, the woman seems to emerge from the very word "Pity" on the page (Plate 19):


With this division of his original androgynous nature, Los's fall is complete. From the pair a child is born, whom Blake names Orc (Plate 20):


The child is his mother's joy (Plate 2; Blake put this illustration at the beginning of his book):


Orc grows quickly, and there are three to face Urizen's world (Plate 21):

The red chain here is the "Chain of Jealousy" (VII.4.4, or 20:24) formed when Orc breaks every "girdle" that Enitharmon ties around him. Fearing Orc's defiance, Los chains Orc to a rock (as Oedipus's father did to Oedipus in the Greek myth), while Enitharmon weeps.

This etching is in another work, called America: a Prophecy (1793). Orc of course will get free of this chain. He is the revolutionary, who if successful only turns into what he rebelled against.. But that is a story Blake tells elsewhere.

Having chained up Orc, Los turns on Enitharmon with his jealousy, encircling her with "fires of Prophecy" (VII.9.2, or 20:43) that keep her from the sight of Orc or Urizen. If Los is an expression of Blake's own personality, as interpreters say, Blake may have been a classic jealous husband.

For his part, Urizen escapes his own chains and forms instruments with which to measure his world. Blake says, "He formed golden compasses, and began to explore the Abyss" (VII.8.4-5, or 20:39-40). Blake had already done this image, the Frontispiece to Europe: a Prophecy (1793). (I am taking this image from Hamilyn and Phillips' William Blake (Abrams, 2000).) It is perhaps Blake's single most famous etching:


Now Urizen roams his world, carrying a "globe of fire lighting his journey" (VIII.:1.3, or 20:47-48). He sees "cruel enormities: forms of life on his forsaken mountains" (VIII.1.5-6, or 20:50-21:1; Plate 20):

Perhaps Blake means the red globe to be the sun, and Urizen is now a sun-god. Or perhaps it is simply fire confined to serve as a lantern. The role of the lion on the right has puzzled interpreters. The lion is the animal associated with the sun, and with rulers. As Erdman observes, it is also associated with St. Jerome as the lion who befriends him after he has removed a thorn from its paw. The lion here seems to me an extension of Urizen and his red globe, a helpful force to him against the "cruel enormities." These are perhaps the shapes above Urizen, coming off the text.

There is an alchemical engraving that corresponds closely to Blake's picture, (from the Museum Hermetica of 1678):

Here the barrel of fire corresponds to Urizen's spiked globe. The lion eating a serpent, I think, corresponds to Urizen's lion, helping him against the "enormities."

Urizen bears his four sons, which we saw previously. His daughters, on the other hand, come "from green herbs & cattle/ From monsters & worms of the pits" (VIII.3.14-15, or 21:20-21; Plate 25)

It seems to me that the serpent coils here represent matter and the chaos in which the daughters emerge.

Urizen is dismayed at his unworshipful descendants. He gave them laws, but none can keep them.. He wanders woefully over their cities. As he goes,

A cold shadow follow'd him
Like a spiders web, moist, cold & dim
drawing out from his sorrowing soul...(VIII.6.5-7, or 25:9-11)

Blake pictures this shadow as the folds of Urizen's robe flowing behind him (Plate 27):

It is not clear what Urizen is doing with his hands. Erdman suggests that he is going through circular spaces and fending off shadows. Perhaps he is making his way through clouds or dense fog. Or he is pushing something before him, such as the globe he was carrying, the sun, or the earth. Blake says this web is "a Female in embryo" (VIII.7.4, or 25:18). I think he has in mind Vala, whom we will meet in Jerusalem.

The membrane becomes a net binding him. He is caught in a "Net of Religion" (VIII.9.1, or 25:22) of his own making (Plate 28):

The Genesis of Blake's world is complete.

Chapter 3: Milton, Albion, and Jerusalem

After setting down his myth describing the formation of the world, Blake's version of Genesis, he devoted several of his visionary books to the problem of how to set things right. A few were about child Orc, who grows up to be a failed revolutionary. Another book, his rewriting of Exodus, imagined Urizen's son Fuzon and his followers leaving Urizen's domain, along with the feminine emanation Ahaina. All of these were engraved in the mid-1790's. Blake was now about 38 years of age, in his middle years

After that Blake published no more prophetic books for almost 10 years. He earned his livelihood illustrating other people's poems. Like his creation Urizen, he was caught in a web of his own making. On the side, he worked on an ambitious project called "The Four Zoas" that he eventually abandoned and never engraved. From 1800 through 1803 he spent three years outside London in the coastal village of Felpham, so as to be near his admirer Hayley. Hayley proposed that Blake do portrait miniaturues and thereby make a lot of money. But Blake did not only fail to make money, he also seems to have found the task quite painful. Meanwhile he worked on revising his "Four Zoas" yet again. By 1802 he felt he could write to his lifelong supporter Thomas Butts, "Tho' I have been unhappy, I am so no longer. I am again Emerged into the light of day...I have travel'd thro' Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion. I have Conquered, and shall Go on Conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my Course among the Stars of God and the Abysses of the Accuser..." (Frye, p. 417).

In July of 1803, Blake wrote that he would have left Felpham after a month, had his "Spiritual Friends"--meaning, I think--friends in the spirit world--not advised him to stick it out. But, he said, his "three years' trouble Ends in Good Luck," because he completed what he considered "the Grandest Poem that this World Contains." It is an example of "Allegory addressed to the Intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from Corporeal Understanding." It will be "progressively Printed & Ornamented with Prints & Given to the Public." What he wrote in Felpham is now lost. What we have is his next revisions, known to the world as Milton, published in 1804, and the 100 plates Jerusalem, which finally saw the light of day in 1818-1820.. Even then, he did only one edition in color, and no one ever bought it in his lifetime.

In Milton, Blake summoned up the spirit of John Milton, the poet before him that he most admired, purged of his shortcomings and returning to Earth as Los confronting as Urizen. I have no photographs of Milton, but I do want to show you two images, which I have taken from published sources.

One memorable page (Plate 16) shows Milton as he "took off the robe of the promise, & ungirded himself from the oath of God" (15:13):

By "the promise" Blake meant any"covenant" between God and his people interpreted in a this-worldly way, that is, of the form, if you worship me faithfully, I will reward you in material ways-- money, love, prestige, etc. Such a contract simply bound one to a world of illusion.

Having cast the world aside, Milton is in a position to take on Urizen. He separates Urizen from his tablets of the law and pushes him into the water. It is an ironic baptism in the river Jordan (Plate 18):

The words at the bottom read, "To annihilate the Self-hood of Deceit and False Forgiveness." He could perhaps have let Urizen drown. But Urizen has a way of surviving despite everything. Los here is both pushing him and also holding him from sinking. Urizen can be enlightened. It is not clear why the people on top are dancing around. Some interpreters have said that they are trying to entice Los into crossing the Jordan and into more illusion. Others say they are celebrating Los's victory.

Blake does not in this work follow through his grand design. In fact, I think there is something left out. It is not so easy to rid oneself of illusion and rise above the Law. It is like waking oneself up in a dream; one may only dream one is awakening. To reject the Law is not yet to live in freedom.

What does Blake have when his alter ego Los breaks the tablets of the law? On the title page of Urizen, Urizen wrote from two sides, Word and Nature. Urizen chose the Word, twisting it to his purpose as the vehicle of the Law. But the other choice, Nature, is equally twisted, since it has been copied out for us by Urizen. We experience nature, and Blake is concerned mainly with our own nature, through our "reasoning power." By such means love engenders jealousy and exploitation, merit produces envy, achievement becomes pride, reward turns into avarice, and so on. We have eaten of the tree of good and evil, and we are not in Paradise.

It is with such a realization, I think, that Blake started his masterwork, Jerusalem, Emanation of the Giant Albion, a book in 100 plates of words and images.

The Frontispiece (Plate 1) indicates where Blake is going. It shows a man with a lantern, probably Los, stepping across a threshold that appears to lead downwards, as though into the crypt of a church.


Next let us turn to the title page, Jerusalem, Emanation of the Giant Albion (Plate 2):

Albion is Blake's version of fallen Adam, particularized to Britain, which I think includes England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. He is the spirit of the British Isles in the fallen state. The images here give us one frequent metaphor for that state: being in a state of sleep or unconsciousness. It shows a sleeping Jerusalem, while her daughters flit over her and weep. Here are close-ups of the top and bottom of the page, the top showing the daughters and the bottom, Jerusalem:


And who is this Jerusalem, Blake's heroine? We are told only that she is Albion's "emanation." One possibility is that she is his wife, as Eve came out of Adam or Wisdom, Hochma, came out of the mouth of Jehovah. In Milton Jerusalem was the bride of Albion. Here, however, Jerusalem says that "the Lamb of God" made her "His Bride & Wife" and gave Vala to Albion (Frye p. 272). At least for now, Jerusalem is Albion's daughter. This multiplicity and switching of roles occurs in the Gnostic writings about Sophia, too.

Albion slumbers, too, and is taken for dead, as the daughters of Jerusalem weep over him (Plate 9):

Blake presents Albion's condition here as a result of a fall from innocence. At the top of the page, shepherds pipe and pray.surrounded by docile sheep. That is the state of innocence.

Then comes the serpent and its forbidden fruit, and finally Albion's lifeless form at the bottom of the page..

As the drama unfolds, however, we shall see that Blake's view of the fall is not in fact a conventional one. Bit by bit we will learn more about what caused Albion's demise.

His sons and daughers weep over him. Here is another view, this time as a giant, like the Cabbalists' Adam Kadmon. Blake says, "But when they saw Albion fall'n upon mild Lambeths vale: /Astonished! Terrified! they hover'd over his Giant limbs" (20:1-2; Plate 19):


As for Los, he either dreams or has visions of "the mild Emanation Jerusalem," as I think the etching below illustrates (Plate 14). Erdmann says it is Albion in this picture, but the text only mentions Los.