Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

In 1797, in mid-life, Blake attempted an epic The Four Zoas. Remaining in manuscript because he was not satisfied with it, it is indispensable in tracing the development of Blake’s mythology, and also contains some of his greatest poetry.

A female figure of emancipation to complement the male rebels Orc and Fuzon. Oothoon affirms desire and rejects guilt, despite the accusations of the two males in her life. Her speeches praising gratified desire expand into a praise of difference born of individuality. There cannot be “one law” governing all because all beings are different, and one law for the lion and the ox is oppression.

Blake came to see his original figure, Orc, as an ironically cyclical figure, a “dying god” figure, symbolized by Los nailing him to a rock, like Prometheus. Urizen battles and kills his own son, the fire-haired Fuzon, and nails him to the Tree of Mystery. The same image of the ironic cycle.

Blake’s mythology postulates an original unity of the divine, natural, and human that disintegrated into the fallen world as we know it. This began with the contraction of the false god Urizen from Eternity, whose fall parodies the Creation story in seven days. Los, the imagination, feels his female Emanation split from him. Their union results in the birth of Orc.

Urizen is the aspect of the divine nature that fell out of the larger cosmic identity, contracting away. His fall into a void is metaphorically identical with the creation of the fallen world, so it is a Creation-Fall. Los has to create a body for the fallen Urizen or he would plunge into non-being.

To the expanded eyes of the imagination, the American Revolution is more than a political uprising against tyranny. It is also a liberation of human desire on all levels, including sexual and natural. The limits of time and space are on the verge of being shattered, and Atlantis will rise.

Blake’s mythology recreates the Biblical account. The Fall as a Fall of an Aspect of God, which is a Creation-Fall: that is, that Fall is identical to the creation of the fallen world. Blake’s mythology: the fiery-haired Orc, Promethean figure of energy and desire. The poem America: Orc as the spirit of the American Revolution.

Conventional morality defines “good” as the restraint or repression of desire. Blake warns that “He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.” Repression in the long run does not work. The only answer is “expanding eyes,” the transformation of reality through the imagination.

Prose satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was begun in 1790, the beginning of the French Revolution, which inspired wild hope throughout Europe of a crucial upheaval that would transform human life. The first task in this revolutionary moment is the liberation of energy in all its forms, psychological, political, artistic.

Blake saw himself in the line of the prophets railing against social abuses, including racism, child labor, and gender oppression. What both gives rise to these and keeps them in place? The central poem “London” provides the answer: the “mind’forged manacles.”

Blake created his own mythology, which eventually included two characters whose antagonism is comparable to that of Prometheus and Jupiter. But he began by exploring the relationship of what he called Contraries, beginning with The Songs of Innocence and Experience: Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

Changes beyond what common sense deems possible would take place if the human mind could renounce the fear and hate that keep it neurotically imprisoned. The transformation of human nature and even nature itself by love, though with a final limit of time and mutability.

The drama’s conflict ends in Act 3, scene 1, with the demise of Jupiter, with two acts still to come. These are taken up by imagery of the transformation of humanity and nature, not just returning to an ordinary state free of tyranny and suffering, but beginning a metamorphosis into the paradisal.

Asia has descended to the realm of Demogorgon and catechizes him. Who created and rules all things? What is behind and beyond even Jupiter. Demogorgon says, “The deep truth is imageless.” We do not know. All we know is Love, and that is all we need to know.

A change of scene to the feminine counterpart of Prometheus, named Asia, Shelley’s invention. She and Panthea, guided by a Dream and Spirits, descend to the cave of Demogorgon in a mysterious Otherworld.

Prometheus calls up the Phantasm of Jupiter to recall the curse he once pronounced on Jupiter, which he now regrets. Mercury arrives with the Furies, who, in this drama of the mind, are the forms of human despair and hopelessness. Other Spirits arrive, sent from a poet’s imagination, saying don’t give up. End of Act 1.

Prometheus’s opening speech indicates that he has changed. He no longer hates, and would recant his curse on Jupiter, but can’t remember it. No one, even his mother, Earth, dares tell him. But Earth tells him to summon someone from a mysterious Otherworld “below” death, in which reside images which are the doubles of all things in this life.

Interest in Prometheus revived in the Romantic revolutionary age. Short poems by Goethe and Byron show his as defiant rebel. Shelley’s famous Preface to his Prometheus Unbound. The influence of Milton’s titanic rebel, Satan.

Christian writers made Pandora the Classical Eve, disobedient the “cause of all our woe.” But in the 17th-19th centuries, Pandora was transvalued as a redemptive figure, especially by Calderón de la Barca and Goethe (influenced by Calderón) in a fragment called Pandora.

The drama ends with a proud, defiant Prometheus. The last play of the trilogy, featuring his reconciliation with Zeus, is lost. The new interest in the Prometheus myth during the Romantic era, the age of revolutions.

Aeschylus brings in Io, not part of the original Prometheus story, as a positive female figure replacing Pandora. Turned into a cow and stung by a gadfly, she wanders the world, an innocent sufferer. But from her line will come Herakles or Hercules, who will release Prometheus.

An “act” in Greek tragedy consists of dialogue between the hero and another character, followed by an interchange with the Chorus and a Choral Ode. In the second “act,” Prometheus speaks to Oceanus, the ocean, who counsels repentance and humble obedience. Prometheus responds by a remarkable speech in which fire becomes the fire of the creative mind.

Greek tragedy was not realistic, but stylized, ritualized, with actors wearing masks and a Chorus that sang and danced. The opening scene: Prometheus bound to the rock by Hephaestus. Key thematic words are repeated. This is a play about “limits” of all kinds.

Hesiod, a partisan of Zeus, casts Prometheus, the antagonist of Zeus, in a negative light. Zeus’s revenge against humanity is Pandora, an artificially-constructed woman given to Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother. She opens a jar (“box” is a mistranslation), and all evils fly out. Theories that Pandora is a patriarchal distortion of an original Goddess myth.

The myth of Prometheus has been recreated over time by different authors for radically different purposes. The earliest account is in Hesiod’s Theogony. Hesiod champions Zeus as a figure of law and order, and disapproves of Prometheus the Trickster