# The works of William Blake, poetic, symbolic and critical/2/Symbolic Structure

THE SYMBOLIC STRUCTURE OF THE MYSTICAL WRITINGS.
Before reading the paraphrase, a glance may be given at the chart facing page 8, which shows the way in which the division of the various poems into books and chapters follows the division of their contents into various classes of fable and symbols corresponding to Head, Heart, and Loins, and the fourfold symbolism of the Zoas. It cannot properly be understood until the reader has mastered the poems themselves, but a partial understanding will help him to feel their coherence of structure and to see them as a whole instead of as a succession of unrelated fragments. One or more typical incidents are taken from each chapter of the poems, and placed in compartments by themselves in such a way as to show in each poem a continuous story running through the gamut of Head, Heart, Loins, four times repeated, or through as much of that gamut as the story requires. In many of the poems there are several such stories. We have been content in most cases to choose the more important. In "Milton," and occasionally elsewhere, more than one are given.
In the first chapter of "Milton," Milton, the masculine, spiritual potency, descends into corporeal life. In the second chapter (which is under the emotional feminine Heart, Ololon), the feminine spiritual potency follows him, that he may not lose altogether the world of emotional beauty, and she, too, grows corporeal. In the Head division of the Head, Palamabron, the imaginative mind, tries to do the work of Satan, the external reason, and brings about in the Heart ​division of the Head, a mournful inactivity, for this great mistake shuts the mind out from emotional joy. In the Loins division of the Head, external reason, taking upon itself the separated life of vegetative things, wars upon the paradisiacal emotions. In the Head division of the Heart, the falling light, Lucifer, the intellectual or formative portion of the emotional life descends to organize the external reason into a personality — into an image of that unity or self-consciousness of God, whose abode is in the heart, that it may be saved, finally from the indefinite. This personality is itself shaped in six stages, which correspond to the first six eyes of God, already described in the chapter on the Covering Cherub. The giving of personality to the reason takes place also in the fourth chapter of " Vala " and of " Urizen." The fourth stage of all things is constructive. The corporeal life is completed in three stages, but when the fourth comes " the form of the Fourth " begins to be imprinted on the clay. The same story is revealed, in the incidents tabulated from "Jerusalem." In the first chapter, which is under the head, the winter of materialism and corporeal life covers man, and Divine love, or Jerusalem, is absorbed in Vala or corporeal love. In the second chapter, tabulated under the Heart, the Divine Family, or the passive imaginative moods and affections descend, like Ololon in " Milton," and try to draw humanity back into the world of imagination, but in vain, for they are and not masculine-inspired energy, and can only soothe, not change, the will of man. They are a pleasant rest, but man must wait the fire of God before he becomes regenerate. In the incident taken from the third chapter, " Affection," Luvah becomes generate in turn, and threefold fallen man is completed. But now in the fourth chapter the Divine personality descends into him and he arises into imagination. This story is identical with that of the fourfold story described in " Milton," but it stretches further and carries mankind to the personality of God instead of to the mere semblance of that personality forced by God upon the reason. The first of the ​nine divisions of Vala begins with the entrance of Los and Enitharmon into corporeal life, and the arising out of that life of the spectral reason.
In the second night corresponding to the Heart of the Head, this reason builds round them the beautiful external and feminine or passive world. In the third night the spectral reason wars with its emotional nature, as we have seen Satan in " Milton " war with heaven. The third stage tends always to be a combination of the first and second. Its great symbol is Virgo-Scorpio, the hermaphroditic monster who expresses vegetative life. In the fourth night the reason is forced to take on a personal shape. In the fifth night, or in the Heart of the Heart, Orc, or the love of that beautiful external world built in the second night, is born from Los and Enitharmon. Time and space and all outer things begin to live and move. Reason is awakened by this new energy and begins to explore his kingdom of outer nature. He wanders with a globe of fire — the personal energy, and goes through a series of strange circles from east to west, which symbolizes, among much else, the ever recurring incarnations of man's personal mind. The result of his explorations, or reasoning about outer things, is the creation of restrictive law (a net). In the seventh night (the Head of the Loins), the tree of knowledge or of external nature overshadows all, the mortal body or corporeal personality follows in the fourth stage from the maturing of the mental personality. In the eighth night, corresponding to the Heart and the Loins, a human or imaginative personality is given to mortal love on the fourth night, after its birth from the Heart of Enitharmon. On the ninth night the merely mortal life is completed and ended. Europe, America, and the Song of Los follow, and are tabulated in one line, for they make practically one poem. In Africa (Head) the religions are made, and the emotions are brought under the sway of abstract thought. In Asia (Heart) emotional life gains dominion. In America (the third stage) England, the reason, contends with America its emanation, as ​the spectres do with their emanations in the third night of " Vala." In Europe we get the North (the womb) in its evil aspect of restrictive external reason and necessity confining human energy until it breaks away at dawn. Had the chart permitted, the four poems might have been tabulated under the cardinal points as follows : —
| S. | W. | N. | E. |
| Africa | America | Europe | Asia |
| Head | Loins | Womb | Heart |
They give when arranged as above a more coherent story, and repeat the history of the Churches given in the chapters on the Cherub. In Africa the reason makes laws and religions. In America the reason is in turn conquered by the emotions and bodily life (America), a conquest corresponding to the flood, the closing of the Western gate, and the sinking of the Atlantic continent. In Europe the mind travels through the Northern darkness of matter. In Asia it arises into the Eastern dawn, and the bodily life itself grows joyous or imaginative, and the dead bones of reason are clothed with emotion. Each poem is, however, complete in itself. In " Urizen" the first chapter describes Urizen becoming spectral. In the second he hides himself with the opaque passive or feminine nature (compare Second Night of " Vala "), and in the third chapter he tosses about in this opaque nature. In the fourth chapter he is fixed into a personality by Los, or, to take the symbol from another ; point of view, fallen mind is divided into states or moods by Time. In the fifth chapter Enitharmon or ideal space emanates from Los, and the chaos, which in the second chapter I surrounded Urizen, is made mental by being associated with purely ideal life. In the sixth chapter Orc is born of Time and space. In "Vala" he is conceived in Night V. Had "Vala" been divided into " Days " his birth would presumably have been given on the sixth. It is foretold in Night V., l. 63, and an account of his youth is then given as though he were already born, as the poem requires his presence as an understood and ​developed personality for Nights VI., etc. He corresponds on the chart to the energy that enables Urizen to explore his world in the Sixth Night of " Vala." In the seventh chapter of " Urizen " — the first of the vegetative triad of chapters — the succession of moods or states made in the fourth chapter becomes restrictive and is symbolized as a chain of days and nights. In the eighth chapter the community of mental spaces summed up under the name Enitharmon grow restrictive also, and are symbolized as a net, and Urizen' s sons, the children of vegetative space, as those of Los are of ideal Time, are born ; and in the ninth chapter — Loins of the Loins — become wholly corporeal, or in other words, become the multitudes of unimaginative people, who make up the mass of the world's inhabitants. "Thel,"a fourfold book, begins not as the other books do for the most part with the chaos of fallen reason. In its first chapter " Thel " talks with the spiritual personality of beauty typified by the lily ; in its second — the Heart of the Heart — she talks with the cloud, the fleeting and formless emotions ; and in the third — the Loins of the Heart — with the worm, the vegetative instinct in its weakest and most innocent form. In the fourth chapter — the Head of the Loins — she explores for a moment the purely vegetative world of mortality and bodily completion typified by his own grave.
In " The Book of Los," also a fourfold book, Los begins his personality in the first chapter by separating it from the selfhoods or spectres about him. In the second he organizes the void or feminine into elements, a like action to the division of chaos into spaces, in the corresponding chapter — the fifth — of "The Book of Urizen." In the third— the vegetative stage — he sleeps in the world of Tharmas. In the fourth he begins his great contest with the now completed feminine' or external world by fixing the reason into the midst of passion, an action which is the other aspect of his chaining Orс in the corresponding chapter of "The Book of Urizen." This action is another instance of that symbolism which ​makes the third stage always a bringing together of the first and second. Urizen enters external life in the first, Ore enters it in the second, not in his own form, but feminine, so considered in relation to Urizen, — and not here only so perceived (compare " Vala," Night VIII., 1. 82), and in the third they are fastened together, that the more living may vitalize the less.
In the first chapter of "Tiriel," Tiriel loses his emanation and so grows spectral; in the second he comes into contact with the emotional life ; and in the third he rests in a gentle vegetative f orgetf ulness for a while. In the fourth chapter he is sustained by Ijim, who fulfils for him an office like that of Los when Los makes Urizen personal, and then, reinforced by the personal fire of Ijim, Tiriel curses or casts the restrictions of space upon his sons in the fifth chapter. In the sixth chapter he curses his daughter Hela — sight — the only sense left to him, and his sight ceasing to be imaginative becomes vegetative. He is now wholly cut off from the spiritual world and stumbles on his way to the caves of Zazel — corporeal life in its absolute unredeemed form. He passes on in the next chapter, &c, to the same emotional life he had approved in the second, but now that he has ceased to be imaginative it drugs him into that sleep of outer things from which he can only wake when a last judgment has passed over him.
"Ahania" is a threefold book. In the first chapter Urizen wars with Fuzon, his more passionate side, compacting himself into a spectre. In the second he slays Fuzon with outer necessity, feminine nature, symbolized by a great stone — Sinai. In the third, Fuzon is nailed to that Tree of Mystery whose growth is described also in the last three nights of "Vala." "The Death of Abel," "The Visions of the Daughters of Albion." and "The Mental Traveller," not being divided into chapters are excluded from the chart, but they, like the various chapters of the foregoing books, could be divided and again divided according to the symbolism of Head, Heart, and Loins.