Jesus Christ

'Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.' Mark 10: 14

What is possibly the most remarkable trait about Jesus Christ's position in Blake's cosmology is that he is quite likely the only dominant character whose function and purpose remains static throughout the poems, a very telling observation considering the protean nature of Blake's rather fluid dramatis personae, where any particular spirit or person might represent one thing in the first instance, and then something entirely different in the second. In sharp contrast to these vacillations in symbolic reference, Jesus Christ does not change in an substantive aspect.

The primary purpose of the Christ is, of course, soteriological; he is the true Messiah who arose from the passivity of death to ascend into spiritual activity, viz. the kingdom of Heaven. This perennial 'hero image' achieves its effect of universal salvation through a vicarious relationship between the resurrection of Christ and the poetic, individual understanding of the iconic symbol that the apotheosis presents; Blake is in full comprehension of this process when he assigns Jesus the herculean role of lifting the newly aware individual into spiritual awakening, as in the end of Jerusalem, and the supplementary role of the Judge, the supreme arbiter of the Just and the Wicked, as in the 'Designs of the Last Judgment'. In either role, Jesus adopts a position of governance that encompasses all humanity either symbolically, through the metaphor as Jesus the universal redeemer, or quasi-literally, through the judgment of all mankind.

This unique task leads us to the deliberation over Christ's greatest function in Blake's vast symbology: the ultimate assimilator (or 'subsumer') of man as an individual. We briefly mentioned above the problem of retaining particularity whilst ascending into universality without offering the clear and specific solution; Blake says that, 'As a mas is So he Sees', so how does this man, who has a different perspective than everyone else, gain entrance into the universal humanity, the 'Four-fold Man' which is more or less wholly unconditioned? The 'more or less' actually exonerates Blake of this issue, since the general form of humanity really is ascribed with a precise and definite structure that directly corresponds with the body parts of the human figure. Thus, every individual has his own unique role (i.e., part of the hand, foot, mind, etc.) to fulfill in order to become an integral part of the single body. This 'inner destiny' is achieved through the Christian relationship with the Godhead, Christ Himself, who subsumes the particular into the universal via the particular's peculiar mode of higher hermeneutics, or the realization of his spiritual and natural constitution according to the principial dharma (crudely translated as 'law') underlying all phenomenal reality. In this way (which is presently explained through a much heavier means than the lucid poetry itself), where the relative is reconciled with the absolute through the identification of his core being with that of the singular 'Four-fold Man', Blake has truly created his own comprehensive 'system' that is, once again, paralleled to Platonic thinking in both the West and the East.

'As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various) So all Religions & all similars have one source.' ~ 'There is No Natural Religion'

Finally, it is no coincidence that the character Jesus Christ enters the act near the end, or that his role in 'Vision of the Last Judgment' is central; the significance lies in the fact that the individual never really beholds Christ until the last vestige of worldly existence is stripped away, and then the shining glory of his almighty redeemer is all that he sees. This strongly relates to the white of Apocalypse, where everything somehow conditioned is eradicated in the pearly sheen of spiritual catharsis. Until this final point where we may behold the awesome beauty of Heaven itself, we can only understand its spiritual nature through symbolic reality, and the only way to understand the ladder that ascends to Heaven is through the symbolic reality of Christ Himself.

Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: over these the second death hath no power; but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years. Revelation 20:6

Nokturnal Mortum - The Voice of Steel

Black metal from eastern Europe has been typically plagued by two main points of sickness: (1) the inability to transcend the politics of any which ideology (National Socialism being the obvious villain) and (2) its incompetence in the proper integration of a folk tradition with the black metal aesthetic. The results of most efforts to do so may indeed incorporate 'folkish' elements and some nice, soothing melodies, but the synthesis ultimately falls flat due to the blindness in regard to the true nature of metal itself.

The Voice of Steel is a clear and shining exception, and that is mostly because it is not actually 'metal' as we formally know it. Sure, the instruments and the technique are unchanged, but what's different is that the music is imbued with a spirit altogether foreign to its foundation. Whereas metal has been essentially of a Dionysian nature, id est one of impulse and rebellion, of darkness and fire, Nokturnal Mortum has somehow managed to create something of which we might call Apollonian, or something pertaining to authority and tradition, to light and order. 

The musical elements found on this album are many and diverse; there's the folk instrumentation, of course, but there are also bits of rock to be discerned, even some 'psychedelic' solo sections reminiscent of Pink Floyd. Now, usually when a band tries to merge numerous styles into a single composition, the attempt fails utterly; modern popular music is littered with countless barren graveyards testifying to this truth. The Voice of Steel, on the other hand, is, metaphorically speaking, a polygamous marriage of several female entities cohesively married to the central Apollonian principle; that is to say, multiple forms are neatly combined and organized by the album's artistic vision, which evidently results in something that is as varied as it is unified. Furthermore, as a note of interest, nascent legitimate genres of music seldom arise spontaneously but are instead effected by a number of prior traditions; heavy metal, for example, was born out of Classical, rock music, and, one might argue, the blues. 

One of the most appealing aspects of The Voice of Steel is the strength of its structure, of its compositional organization; the entire album (and the duration of which is over an hour long) flows with a special clarity that makes it a truly singular listen. Every song is markedly different from the other, and yet every song is tied tightly together by this unifying bond that runs throughout the album; the resultant impression on the listener is that he knows without question that each song is a definitive component of the entire work. Moreover, much like the surprisingly similar Belus, the album really sounds like a Classical symphony: a theme is presented, then developed, then presented again with a new understanding of it. These themes, along with their corresponding melodies, are dramatic and profound, and they are all the more so given their specific context in the album proper; and, while we are admittedly unaware of the lyrics so far, they (the themes / melodies) presumably accord with the conceptual framework, which is indicated not only by the music itself, but by such song titles as 'By Path of the Sun' and 'White Tower', two striking examples of a distinctly Apollonian nature. 

Much like the aforementioned Belus, The Voice of Steel expands upon a tried and tested form with a relatively novel idea; the effect is something that we have never heard before, something that we are not quite able to recognize. There is a difference between this album and Burzum's new one, however: while Belus is at once the final nail in the coffin of the original Norwegian black metal movement and the potential seed of an art from still to come, The Voice of Steel is simultaneously the synthesis and transcendence of two historical genres, and, while it may not exactly be that possibly incoming art form, it nevertheless aggrandizes the evidence that it is indeed coming.

A Monistic Dualism

'Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, love and Hate, are necessary to human existence.' ~ 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'

As inhabitants of this physical plane, we are necessarily subject to the unfortunate laws that arise from our own conditioned state, the most potent of which is the divisive force of duality, which separates an essence complete in itself into two miserable halves that both hate and love each other; this is the fundamentally Platonic foundation that Blake inherits as he endeavours to construct his own visionary edifice that will potentially relieve us of this ailment.

More than anything else circumstantial, Blake was affected by Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic who, much like Blake himself, could allegedly converse with angels, and peer into the metaphysical realms of Heaven and Hell. Although taking an esoteric and somewhat heterodox approach to Biblical mythology, Swedenborg was essentially 'conservative', and therefore moralistic, in his theological doctrine. While Blake admits that he was positively influenced by Swedenborg in his earlier years, he eventually realizes that he represents the Church's ethical absolutism of assigning terms 'Good' and 'Evil', positing a corresponding spiritual realm for each that symbolically determines an individual's interior constitution. Hence, from this realization forward, Blake gives Swedenborg and others of his ilk the epithet, 'Angels', or those upholding the sterile status quo, and calls himself and other Orc-like spirits 'Devils', or those bringing forth new creation, thereby disturbing the prevailing order of things. Thus, a first duality is formed.

No other writing of Blake's is so profoundly satirical (not that this is the only satire – An Island in the Moon wonderfully encapsulates a Swift-esque laugh at the expense of popular philosophers) while staying true to the predominant idea being expressed than 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', a poem proclaiming doom and joy, death and rebirth, reason and emotion; 'Opposition is true friendship'. Devils and Angels (whom Blake also calls the Prolific and the Devouring - a further link to Platonism) are inseparably chained, and each movement that one makes is countered by the other, thus maintaining the bondage that conditions all in time and space. As this is highly reminiscent of the Urizen-Orc duality, we can expect that there is indeed a possibility of escape from this particular slavery as well.

Traditional mysticism, which is not at odds with Platonism, chiefly upholds the value of union, of the concept of achieving a state of Transcendence to the point of a metaphysical comprehension that goes beyond all physical and mental conditioning and becomes purest light, which is true reality. In addition to this, Plato outlines a cosmogonic theory in the Symposium which depicts man as a fallen being split in twain, his other half becoming trapped  in feminine form. Blake adopts the latter theory with the former mystical ideal and creates a system that is well-aligned with those of tradition, and is yet perfectly unique in its own way; in his 'Book of Urizen', for example, Enitharmon becomes 'the first female now separate' when Urizen, or here the Gnostic demiurge, creates something outside of himself, namely, the world.

'I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans

I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.' Jerusalem

Blake immediately encounters a problem in creating his 'system' whenever he recalls the imperative interest he has in the differentiated individual; for, while trying to merge the conditioned into the Platonic All, identity must inevitably be destroyed. Or must it? Blake questions this inevitability the same way that he questioned 'General Forms': the mass is not alive simply because it possesses universality, which of course leads to tyranny, but because of the particulars that together integrate the whole: 'General Forms have their vitality in Minute Particulars'. So, now that we discover Blake's rather ambitious project is indeed possible, our task now will be to discern how it is possible, or, to put it neatly, how exactly does the fallen man depart from his conditional duality to attain the integral 'monism' proclaimed in the Gospels?

'Neither shall they say, lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of Heaven is within you.' Luke 17: 21

On Suffering

'You will not dismiss your Soul lest it go forth taking something with it.’ The Chaldean Oracles

A friend (and supposed ‘co-writer’ for this site) recently expressed praise for a Michel Houellebecq quote that reveled in personal agony, in the persistence of failure, and in the final goal of suicide, the termination of the body / Soul relationship… how typical of the modern ennui! Affliction and suffering are certainly unavoidable, but they have to be, as with everything, properly understood and properly integrated in order to keep from drowning by them, and it is this understanding that we will undertake as our objective in this essay.

In the Inferno of the Divine Comedy, we find in the Second Ring of the Seventh Circle a sad forest comprised of some bleak and forgotten trees, slouching row upon row like a defeated army. These are the suicides of history, the Souls that have waged war upon themselves in their frantic escape from society, from life itself. Dante’s guide, Virgil, implies that this one particular suicide, Pier della Vigna, killed himself because he had misunderstood Virgil’s poetry, a grave testimony to the fragility of the human mind.

'When the save spirit quits the body from which it has taken itself, then Mino sends it to the seventh maw. It falls into the wood, and there’s no place to which it is allotted, but wherever fortune has flung that soul, that is the space where, even as a grain of spelt, it sprouts. It rises as a sapling, a wild plant; and then the Harpies, feeding on its leaves, cause pain and for that pain provide a vent. Like other souls, we seek out the flesh that we have left, but none of us shall wear it; it is not right for any man to have what he himself has cast aside. We will drag our bodies here; they will hang in this sad wood, each on the stump of its vindictive shade.’ Canto XIII, Inferno, Dante Alighieri

The Soul of a suicide is not directed by any kind of higher providence or spiritual order, but merely by fortune, which casually casts the Soul into the woods, where it grows its own trunk, the cruel parody of a human body; the suicide was not content with his flesh in life, but must be so now with his bark in death. The wild Harpies, who feed upon their leaves, and the naked squanderers, who crash recklessly through their branches, ensure that the bodily torture of a suicidal Soul is perpetual.

'But when a man contrives the dissolution of the body, it is he that used violence and torn himself away, not the body that has let the Soul slip away. And in loosing the bond he has not been without passion; there has been revolt or grief or anger, movements which it is unlawful to indulge.’ ‘The Reasoned Dismissal, First Ennead, Plotinus

The violent separation of body from Soul, id est, the impassioned suicide, necessarily means that the Soul is in a poor state at the time of departure; it has given up ‘any hope of progress’ and resigned itself to the pit, to the ‘maw of Minos’. And yet Plotinus realizes also that this is not the only fate of a suicide, for he soon indicates that, ‘under stern necessity’, it is indeed possible for a man to meet his end by his own hand if such is his destiny. Where, then, is it lawful for a man to willingly send his own Soul forward? Where he has rightly recognized his fate. When Otto Weininger shot himself in the heart in the same household where Ludwig van Beethoven died, he knew that there would be no progress in his spiritual state; when Yukio Mishima and his small warrior band committed the ritual of seppuku in defiance of the overwhelmingly decadent state of post-WWII Japan, there was no mere passion involved, but the single-minded dedication to a world besides this one.  These examples do not showcase the inferiority of a man who has submitted to the terrors of existence; they instead exemplify the piercing vision of men who can see that the fundament, the very meaning of their existence is best summarized as its termination.

’And not only [so], but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.’ Romans 5 3-5

It is a fact that worldly suffering is indeed inescapable: ‘Suffering is the reality of the human condition and the beginning of true spiritual life’, as Father Seraphim Rose said. Hardship can be seen as a kind of ‘test’, a thrust against our personal armor; it might strike flesh and cause deep depression, or we might yet sustain the blow, and thrust it right back at our oppressors; and this is when ‘true spiritual life’ begins.

The strength of one’s armor depends upon two fundamental pieces of knowledge: (1) who you are, what your fixed identity is in the swirling sea of chaos; and (2) who God is, what the only fixed identity is, and how He relates to you; and it is inevitably the case that the knowledge of one leads to the other. There is no emphasis great enough to properly emphasize the fact that these two ideals are the most important things that we can ever concentrate our attention upon; everything spiritual, divine, and truly artistic depends upon this.

There is, in the context of this essay, a fully practical result that can be observed and felt: an inner, radiant joy that permeates all things, that sees into the heart of all things. It is the vision of God; and if we can truly perceive the essence of anything good, and the essence of anything good is the work of God Himself, how blessed we are! This supreme knowledge, this vision, this blessedness, necessarily leads to the cheer of mind and heart that makes life really worth living. This is not, bear in mind, the giddiness of a woman, but a reserved calm, a gentle peace, and a trusting faith in the everlasting God His great providence, and it is precisely this that provides us with the strength required to battle through our tribulations.

The power of suffering reaches also to the domain of art; infact, it is there that it finds its strongest, clearest expression. In his Poetics, Aristotle argues for the tragedy as a cathartic method of evoking tragedy in an objective sense, viz., as the means for the audience to experience a vicarious effect of tragedy without ever having to be subjected to the particular trials themselves. The archetypal pathetic moment is therefore crystallized in the sublime beauty of tragic drama, and it can thereby be applied universally to any human being who undergoes terrible suffering. Thus, a performance with any propriety at all should result in the audience being moved to a profound extent because he directly associates himself with the protagonist of the play, and he should emerge from that brief yet intensive ablution feeling purified and stronger due to the purgation of emotional excess.

Two more examples of the ‘tragic hero’ can be found in the Oedipus of Sophocles of the Bible, and in the Job of the Bible. Aristotle’s ideal is met perfectly in the figure of Oedipus: wise, good, consistent, and his sufferings result both from fate and his own mistakes. He struggles against his dreadful destiny, and, though he, like any good tragic hero, inevitably fails, conveys to his company an inexplicable feeling of grace and goodwill. Job, God’s most loyal, faithful servant, is violently tested by Satan, who is here presented as an agent of God. Faced by unenviable circumstances, Job eventually succeeds against all that Satan could do to beset hi; he triumphed against the death of his family, his economy, his body, the ‘wise’ counsel of his friends simply because of one thing: his unyielding faith in God.

These two ‘heroes’ represent two different aspects of the same thing: Oedipus is filled with a typically Hellenic individualism that spurs him ever forward to his sullen destiny, and Job is filled with an abiding love for God that prevails against Satan and ultimately proclaims the glory of God once again. The Greek knew himself, and the Hebrew knew God, and therefore the Greek knew God, and the Hebrew knew himself!

We have raced through this discourse faster than that thrash the sinful bodies of the lustful, but in the process we have unearthed a persistent truth: that suffering is external, that it is of this world, and that it is to be vanquished like everything else conditional in the time of the Last Judgment which will begin precisely when we will it to begin. The security of self forces the tides of woe to crash over us as the ocean’s waves crash upon the rocks, leaving naught but the sparkling sheen of their passing presence; let us be those proud rocks, defiant against the wrath of fortune and yet tempered by its steady passage.

‘My devotee attains peace by knowing the Supreme Being as the enjoyer of sacrifices and austerities, as the great Lord of the entire universe, and as the friend of all beings.’ 5. 29, Bhagavad-Gita

The Apocalypse of Self

'I see the Four-fold Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep

And its fallen Emanation. The Spectre of its cruel Shadow.

I see the Past, present, & Future, existing all at once

Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!

That I may awake Albion from his long & cold repose.

For Bacon & Newton sheathed in dismal steel, their terrors hang

Like iron scourges over Albion, Reasonings like vast Serpents

Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations.' ~ Jerusalem

The above quote reveals the essence of prophecy, the preconception of apocalypse. Humanity is locked in place by manifold constraints formed by illusory misunderstandings arising from the improper positioning of the Four Zoas, which we have explicated to be an inherent rupture and an internal conflict of the main psychic elements of fallen man. Blake's prescription for this archetypal malady is consistent throughout his work: destroy the fabrications of Selfhood through the singular, imaginative contemplation of divinity, which is manifest in the multifarious forms of art. The single word that can be rightly applied to this inner transformation is Apocalypse...

Northrop Frye outlines the cycle of liberty and tyranny in terms of Blake's Urizen / Orc dichotomy. Urizen is envisioned as an 'Odinic' figure; hoary and aged, he is often depicted in icy imagery, such as in 'America', where he is seen hurling ice and snow from his 'law-built heaven' in an effort to douse the fires of Orc, who in turn personifies natural desire and a youthful, creative energy that is perpetually threatening to escape the bounds emplaced by the moral laws of his father Urizen himself. The idea that Urizen is Orc's father strengthens the concept that the both of them are inseparably connected to one another, and indeed we find that Orc grows into Urizen as he ages, thus confirming this revolutionary circle of Ouroboros that is similarly reflected in the poem, 'The Mental Traveler' (which does not concern the scope of this essay).

These poems expressly indicate Blake's political sentiment at the time regarding the chaotic liberal revolutions in the new United States of America and, subsequently, in France. While Blake might have had some initial hope for a true political resurgence, which might consequently lead to a spiritual resurgence, the fact that so much blood was shed immediately dimmed his expectations, and then, to make the whole matter impossible, Blake observes that the 'revolutionaries' now in power only repeat the same tendencies that the old tyrants were guilty of, reminding one of Beethoven's immense disappointment after Napoleon crowned himself Emperor. In summary, political revolution merely turns back on itself, just as Orc the energetic son grows into Urizen the oppressive father.

Well-aware of this irremediable cycle, Blake shifts his gaze to how one might escape it. Soon after the bloody French Revolution murdered Louis XVI and the traditional monarchy, Blake notices that 'The only God that exists exists in man, and all religion consists in following the right men'. This quote contains implicitly two essential concepts, the first of which affirms what we have already hinted at, viz., the divinity in man; and the second, more pragmatic point implicates religion as a mass 'following', making it infinitely more social, which is certainly not to be understood negatively in Blake. If we ascribe 'divinity' to 'humanity' proper, that is to say, to the complete 'Four-fold Man' Himself, all traditional eschatological prophecy becomes as equally valid for the individual in a supremely symbolic sense as it does in the quasi-literal sense, id est the cataclysmic destruction of the prevailing civilization; and we can thereby catch a glimpse of what Blake means by apocalypse.

In review, Blake asserts for the individual a microcosmic edification of the more conventional 'forecast of doom' prophesied for the entire world; and, conversely, Blake imagines for the collective a rejuvenating apocalypse, epitomized by the soteriological effect attributed to the Messianic figure, or Jesus Christ, immortalized in Blakean cosmology as the amoralistic visionary that is the ideal mediator of all humanity ('Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules').  In either case, however, there are clear parallels marking them to be the same cosmic experience indeed; the evisceration of the socio-political dross, or the complete destruction of the egotistical Selfhood, and the consequent revelation of the divinity which lies within proves that Blake's concept of apocalypse is truly beyond the samsaric revolution of Urizen and Orc, of elder and child; and the release from which, this 'augury of annihilation', is nothing less than moksha itself, id est the liberation in toto of the spirit within.

Vision and Allegory

‘He whose thought is stable and for whom time no longer flows lives in the eternal present, in the nunc stans... This eternal present is no longer a part of time, of duration: it is qualitatively different from our profane “present” – from that precarious present that peeps out faintly between two non-entities, the past and the future, and will cease with our death. The “favourable moment” of enlightenment may be compared with the flash that communicates a revelation, or with the mystical ecstasy which is prolonged, paradoxically, beyond time.’ Images and Symbols, Mircea Eliade

Vision is that ‘favourable moment of enlightenment… the flash that communicates a revelation’; it is simultaneously the immediate and the eternal, the profane and the sacred; it is the terrific union of temporal existence with supernal reality. Vision is supra-sensual, for it sublimates the lower faculty of perception into a direct and active correspondent with the Heaven above us, making divine beauty a tangible truth available to the terrestrial sphere.  The function of allegory sits in plain contrast to Vision, for the truth that it conveys is pure relative and therefore cannot transcend mimesis, or the imitation of the natural world; the rest of this essay hopes to further delineate the boundaries between Vision and Allegory.

’Allegory and Vision ought to be known as Two Distinct Things.’ Vision of the last Judgment, William Blake

The clearest area where we might observe the evidence of such a ‘conflict’ lies in the sacral domain of Art. First of all, it is both highly typical and highly tedious of scholars to persist in reducing the eminent works of Dante Alighieri to mild comparisons and allusions to things of a much lower category than what the artist is really stressing; these observations might even be factual but are entirely misplaced when studying The Divine Comedy or The New Life, and this is because they are by nature allegorical, and can thus only relate to things that are of a worldly type. We know that such methods are inadequate simply because we are aware of the visionary, anagogical understanding that perceives the sublime, esoteric beauty that emanates from the superior doctrine underlying the text, revealed to those endowed with a ‘healthy intellect’; this is not to say, however, that this ‘hidden’ level of beauty is at all isolated from the whole of the art; on the contrary, it is the potent force that effectively governs the very meaning of the art, and its comprehension thereby allows the art’s witness to properly integrate all levels of the work according to their hierarchical significance. We close this point with some poignant words from Northrop Frye:

‘The ultimate significance of a work of art is simply a dimension added to its literal meaning, which can no more be separated from it than the depth of a pool of water can be separated from its surface. Dante says that the profoundest understanding of poetry, which he calls anagogy, even in the literal sense, by the very things it signifies, signifies again some portion of the supernal things of eternal glory. All moral, historical, political, biographical and other “interpretations” should lead us directly from the superficial to the complete apprehension of the same thing, the single image of reality which the work of art is. Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye

There is no ‘modern’ artist more astutely alert to the vast chasm that resides between vision and allegory than William Blake, who says that our perception and understanding must be ‘not by deduction, but Immediate by Perception or Sense at once’.  He is presently referring to pastoral, augustan, and romantic artwork when he accuses poets and painters of pointing their focus away from their own art in a cheap and awkward comparison, which he calls allegory. The healthy alternative, therefore, is something that is direct and distinctive, an image of a man that conjures up not a lion in the imagination, but of a perfect, idyllic human being, standing erect in the radiant love of God. This kind of art is called ‘Vision or Imagination’, and which ‘is a Representation of what Eternally Exists’.

In Book X of the Republic, Plato expounds upon his metaphysic by speaking of the artistic function, of how it is even further removed from the ‘ultimate reality’ than the sensible realm is; this is called mimesis (at least in Plato’s case), or his idea that art is a mere representation of something that is already a representation of the ‘thing-in-itself’. While Plato was (in this exceedingly rare instance) somewhat shortsighted in failing to presently announce the higher, visionary qualities of art, something which Aristotle was actually much closer to in his Poetics, he nonetheless provides us with an accurate criticism of allegory. If something already mimics the ‘Eternal Idea’, and is thereby its phenomenon, it is of small necessity or utility that we should once again represent the representation; and that is precisely what allegorical artistry sets out to do. We know the fundaments of morality due to the visionary expositions of Scripture or to philosophical discourse, so the fables and folk tales and political rhetoric serve no greater cause than the education of lesser-minded men who cannot on their own approach the understanding of higher knowledge. The better artists, or Plato’s philosophers, can effectively visualize the intelligible realm, so far as they are able, and this results in the Aristotelian conception of art that demonstrates an idea’s stasis and immutability, and the Platonic conception of a principle’s security from the seemingly incessant river of change.

‘The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness.’ Luke 11:34

Amongst traditional texts and teachers, visual perception is widely regarded as the highest of the senses; the eye is the gateway to the soul, they say, and the eye is the window through which our Intellect can see; not the ear, nor the nose, nor the tongue; none of these occupy the prestigious position that the eye proudly holds. God and His angels, the pagan deities and their avatars, do not make their full majesty known through sound, touch, or thought, but through a glorious revelation made manifest in human eyesight; not even rational discourse can truly conceive of infinity’s grandeur, of the awesome Absolute; it must be like Arjuna’s sudden humility when faced with the transcendent Krishna, or as the prophet John was blessed by God with the gift of Revelation through the medium of the angel. Human perception is not, of course, vision as we properly understand it; but it is the means by which we may know the real faculty of Intellect, namely, the discernment of all things created by God.

In summary, allegory is often mis-appropriated to something which it can have no serious bearing on, viz. the spiritual path and all of its dominions; for all of that which transcends the realm of the demiurge requires something much more potent than the dialectic method of ‘comparing’ and ‘contrasting’, of reducing the supernaturel to the merely natural. Dante’s opus is not prophetic and revelatory for its ability to make perennial events allegorical substance, but for the spiritual current that unites the entire text into a single comprehensive unit that does not bring God down to man, but actually lifts man to God, and this is climactically achieved through the sublime power of Intellect, the source and driving power behind our ever triumphant Vision. 

The Four-fold Man

'Four Mighty ones are in every Man;

a Perfect Unity

Cannot Exist but from the Universal      

Brotherhood of Eden                  

The Universal Man. To Whom be

Glory Evermore Amen.' The Four Zoas

These are the 'Four Zoas': Urizen, the rational, commanding power who is of the South; Tharmas, the generative, bodily impulse who dwells in the West; Luvah, the emotional, desirous aspect who arises from the East; and Urthona, the burning, creative energy who rules the North; together they comprise the 'Four-fold Man' in his properly integrated form.

'But when Luvah assumed the world of Urizen Southward

And Albion was slain upon his Mountains & in his Tent.

All fell towards the Center, sinking downwards in dire ruin,

In the South remains a burning fire: in the East a Void

In the West, a World of raging Waters: in the North, solid Darkness

Unfathomable without end: but in the midst of these

Is built eternally the sublime Universe of Los & Enitharmon.' Jerusalem

When the Fall takes place and Albion slumbers upon his lifeless rock, the human psychic whole is disintegrated, and all four parts engage in a hopeless struggle for dominance. What specifically happens is that, with the exception of Urthona (which we will come back to), each Zoa assumes the place of another, so that no psychic component is performing its natural function, resulting in the inevitable discord of the entire self. Furthermore, as each part is at war with every other part, the individual suffers more and more from the tyranny of reason, or emotion, or bodily impulse, whichever the most potent aspect may be at the time. This internal conflict is truly irreconcilable due to the fact that each Zoa is inseparable from every other Zoa, ensuring that this will indeed be a war without a real, permanent victor.

'Blake's myth is above all psychological. His cosmology, theology, even epistemology are all transpositions of the central inquiry into the self.' ~ Leopold Damrosch Jr.

In his great unfinished poem, The Four Zoas, Blake dispenses with traditional 'psychic hierarchy' in elaborating a dynamic vitality that includes every function working as an essential part of the whole individual. So instead of the scholastic Reason bearing the proverbial Crown, Blake notices the absence of any overriding function, asserting instead a unified collaboration of all the components. This ideal, of course, is only possible in the 'enlightened' state, which brings us back to Urthona, or Los, who is Urthona's laborious 'Spectre'.

In the later epic, Jerusalem, perhaps Blake's most complete and quintessential work of art, the prophet of London depicts the imaginative power, personified in the character of Los, as constantly at work and at watch, ever striving for the reconciliation of Albion's divided self. Psychologically speaking, Los represents the ceaseless creative energy that is the only real Messiah of fallen humanity (Albion); and thus the function of Urthona is the single function of consciousness that remains intact in the 'vegetated state', and is yet merely partially recognized. At the end of Jerusalem, not only do 'the Sons of Eden praise Urthona's Spectre in songs Because he kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble', but when Albion sees Jesus, the Good Shepherd, the Universal Humanity, he observes that he has taken the 'likeness & similitude of Los', which obviously implies the sublime divinity and Christian universality of artistic recreation.