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and the law of death. By being born of a virgin, He accomplished the first, and by His resurrection the second, of these designs. By His death He cast off the material body of humanity, never to take it again. He reclothed Himself with the immaterial body which we shall all possess at the end of time. It must not be forgotten that His coming, and the mystery of His passion and His death, are only symbols of what is passing in the unchangeable present of Eternity. It is the mystical history of the Universal Man, and consequently of the entire human race, and of each of us in particular. Just as He was able to be born again, with His material body—and He alone could do this so shall we be born again. Our captivity, our contraction into matter, are not eternal: we shall one day be free spirits as formerly, belonging, with Him who is our very essence, to the immortal world of the Living. Our passage through this world of illusion is only a sleep lasting for a few years; soon the golden gate will open, and admit us to Eternal Life. This explains the expression so often used by Blake: "the sleep of death," meaning our terrestrial life.

Hence arise also two very different branches of Blake's doctrine : his conception of the sexes, and his attitude towards death.

It is the regeneration of man which has made the distinction between the sexes necessary. Woman must exist, in order that Christ might be born of her to deliver us from generation.

When Man sleeps in Beulah, the Saviour in mercy takes
Contraction's Limit, and of the Limit he forms Woman: that
Himself may in process of time be born, Man to redeem.

Thus generation, which, in the beginning, was a dividing and therefore a destroying process, becomes a means of salvation. But once the work of Redemption is accomplished, the sexes again become useless. In Eternity there will be no sex. The distinction between the sexes is but an illusion of matter, and will disappear.

The Sexes sprung from Shame and Pride

Blow'd in the morn; in evening died. 2

As to his attitude towards death, it requires no explanation. It appeals eloquently to all minds, even those outside the pale of mystic belief. For him, to die was only to pass from one room into another. He felt more vividly, perhaps, than many spiritualistic or religious souls, 1 Jerusalem, 42, 32. Songs of Experience. To Tirzah.

that death was nothing but a birth into real life. It held nothing gloomy or terrifying for him. Had not Christ said to man,

Repose on me till the morning of the Grave: I am thy life. 1 He could have written like Victor Hugo speaking of the Angel of Death,

Et je vis dans sa main l'étoile du matin,

or ask, like him, with ardent desire for death's coming,

Quand verrons-nous, ainsi q'un idéal flambeau,
La douce étoile mort, rayonnante, apparaître

A ce noir horizon q'on nomme le tombeau ? 2

He has left us his conception of Death's Door: a massive stone building; the heavy door half-open, showing a couch within, and outside, a trembling old man, with long white hair blown about by the storm. Bending beneath the blasts, and leaning on his crutch, he totters, weary and exhausted, towards the threshold of the dark dwelling-place. But above appears the rejuvenated spirit, scarcely able yet to rise from the ground in the ecstasy of some marvellous vision, while behind him the rising sun darts its rays across a sky bathed in light. And in the Dedication to the Grave illustrations, he has expressed the same idea in some splendid lines.

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3

The Door of Death is made of gold,
That Mortal Eyes cannot behold;
But, when the Mortal Eyes are clos'd,
And cold and pale the Limbs repos'd,
The Soul awakes; and, wond'ring sees
In her mild Hand the golden Keys:
The Grave is Heaven's golden Gate,
And rich and poor around it wait;
O Shepherdess of England's Fold,
Behold this Gate of Pearl and Gold!

The Grave produc'd these Blossoms sweet

In mild repose from Earthly strife;

The Blossoms of Eternal Life ! 4

After this deliverance of individuals will come the great deliverance

1 Jerusalem, 62, 1.

2 Contemplations, VI, 8. Claire.

3 Illustration to Blair's Grave, with partial replicas in several of the Prophetic Books. See Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and America.

To the Queen.

of the Universal Man. When all men shall have come to believe their prophets and their poets; when, by brotherhood and love, they shall have realized that they are all one, and done away with egotism and the feeling of separate individuality; when all these bodies of death shall have disappeared, when the Spectres are subdued and the Emanations restored to their primal spirits-then the Day of Judgment will come. But it will be also the hour of Resurrection. The corpse of the Fallen Man will revive upon the Rock of Ages. He will live again, and be united in perfect communion with Christ, who is the Divine Humanity. He will recover his lost power of Infinite Vision, and will seat himself once more at the feast of the Eternals.

And not only will the human race be saved, but the whole universe also. Christ, in saving man, has saved the world. It must be remembered that the whole world, the whole of nature, is but a part of the human spirit. Man's elements have separated themselves, have become distinct, and have found their symbols in matter. Some of his passions have spoken in the roaring of wild beasts: his strict, unyielding laws have become impenetrable stones; his joys have burst forth in the glowing colours of the flowers.

Man looks out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast,
Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal body
Into the elemental forms of everything that grows. 1

But all these elemental forms also await their own deliverance. As St. Paul says, "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. . . . The creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." 2 It is for this reason that Nature will triumph and make her joyous songs to be heard, and the universe will exult in the renewal of its eternal youth.

The sun has left his blackness and has found a fresher morning,
And the mild moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night,

And Man walks forth from midst of fires . . .

and one sun

Each morning, like a new-born May, issues with songs of joy.

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.. and in evening sport upon the plains.

They raise their faces from the earth, conversing with the Man :

1 Vala. Night VIII, 553

2 Romans, viii, 21-22.

How is it that all things are changed, even as in ancient times?
The sun arises from his dewy bed, and the fresh airs
Play in his smiling beams, giving the seeds of life to grow,
And the earth beams forth ten thousand thousand springs of life. 1

This is only a very incomplete sketch of man's history, as Blake presents it. He has prolonged the story immensely by introducing numberless episodes, frequent repetitions, and variations on the same theme, sometimes even contradictions. In his earlier works, the Universal Man has no name: in the others he is called Albion. But whatever his name, his history is that of humanity in general and of each of us in particular. An event which happens once, or rather, one which is ever present in eternity, repeats itself to infinity in time and space. It may be interpreted historically or psychologically; and the reader is not a little puzzled by the change from one meaning to the other, when Blake becomes the interpreter.

His ideas, too, are far from being lucid. A logical mind would find in them ample matter for a multitude of questions. What, for instance, was the cause of the initial separation by which creation was begun? What was the precise part played by Christ? What were the phenomena of man's fall, and the different stages of his regeneration? But we must take the myths as we find them; mysterious, like the facts they symbolize. The clear vision of their general characteristics, the broad outlines of the system, detaching themselves sharply from the mass of details, these are enough to enable us to follow his poetic thought, and appreciate all that is really poetic in it. And if his theories of creation by disintegration from a Primal Unity seem strange to us, we have only to think of the Gnostic theory, which represented each Eon as an emanation from a superior Eon, starting from the Ineffable to arrive finally at Matter, the lowest emanation of the last spiritual Eon. We can think of Boehme's theory of Man's fall at the precise moment when his "Ego" detached itself from the universe. Or we can even leave the circle of mystics and dreamers, and find in the modern metaphysicians 2 something analogous to Blake's ideas with regard to the creation of individual personalities all issuing from the Great Supreme Personality, in whom the whole universe is contained.

1 Vala. Night IX, 820.

2 See Renouvier : le Personnalisme.

X: THE FOUR ZOAS AND THEIR EMANATIONS

W

HILE the Eternal Man sleeps in the Saviour's arms on the Rock of Ages, our terrestrial humanity is undergoing evolution. The spirit of man, the soul of the race, "That dark and dismal infinite where thought rolls up and down," 1 is like a stage upon which crowds of actors are moving, as if in some mysterious dream. These beings order the whole of our human life on earth, that of individuals as well as that of nations. Their story, and especially that of the conflicts waged by them within man and against him, fills almost the whole of Blake's Prophetic Books. It is like an immense, ill-constructed epic, sung in disconnected fragments. The impression produced by these poems upon anyone who takes only a careless glance through them is that of some very ancient history of battles fought in remote ages, combats of Titans before the beginning of the world. And then suddenly, in the middle of some vast prehistoric conflict, we come upon the most daring anachronisms the introduction of modern names like those of Washington or Voltaire; or a dissertation upon contemporary society, which makes us forget the battles of the giants and the quarrels of ancient gods. We are really seeing "Eternity in an hour.”

No one can say where it is that these heroes live and fight. Their worlds have names that we have never heard. They fly from chaos to chaos and bestride immensity. Their travels and their falls defy all measurement, even Milton's measure of the vast circles which Satan described in falling from Heaven. They go" from immense to immense" under their steps, Eternity cracks and groans; as missiles they fling universes at one another; ages upon ages pass over them, and still they do not change. They divide asunder; they give forth Spectres and Emanations: they fly from and pursue each other for no visible reason; weep and rejoice without any apparent cause; form friendships and enmities of which no one can understand the object. All of them desire to dominate the whole of man's spirit; and little more can be known concerning the purpose of their struggles. They undergo Protean, and more than Protean alterations of shape and personality. They are slain, and we find them, a few pages further 1 Vala. Night I, 91.

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