Page:The poetical works of William Blake, 1906 - Volume 1.djvu/296

 258 BLAKE'S POEMS and to the human form of God, and to the praise of 'good-ness.' He is derided for not having made prophetic books of his own. Blake now proceeds to ' out-do ' him, and continues the same system ever afterwards. 'JEHOVAH/ ' HEAVEN/ AND 'HELL' ' Jehovah ' is itself, of course, no more a sacred name than the French exclamation Par bleu ! is a binding oath. The original name is well known to be irrecoverably lost, because during too long a period the commandment that forbids taking this name in vain was understood as forbidding its pronun-ciation in conversation or its record in history. The speaking of it once a year by the High Priest in the Holy of Holies hailing ceased, — we do not know why, — it was lost altogether. ' Jehovah' therefore is simply a guess-work substitute, and we may well ask ourselves how much of substitute and of gucss-ivork on the subject of its meaning the Owner of the lost name allowed to arise among men, or how much of such conjecture represents truth.

Blake offers his own reading: — 'After Christ's death, He (who divells in flaming fire) became Jehovah.' — 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ' page 6. This He is the impersonation of fatherhood, and therefore in a more elementary state (before the death of Christ) was the great Desirer, the Spirit of Desire in all men — called (says Blake) Satan by Milton in ' Paradise Lost. ' Blake's own use of the word Satan, first indicated in the close of 'The Ghost of Abel,' is elaborated in 'Jerusalem.' The Creator, as distinguished from the Father — or, in the 'Book of Genesis,' Elohim, as distinguished from Jehovah, is kept apart as a separate idea all through Blake's work. In the close of the book of 'The Ghost of Abel,' he writes the two names in a way that suggests an idea closely resembling that ' of Hengstenberg in the passage, ' Hitherto that Being who, in one aspect, was Jehovah, in another had always been Elohim.The great crisis now dreio nigh 'in which Jehovah Elohim would be changed into Jehovah.' The obscurantism of all keepers of sacred tradition is not yet quite cast off even in our own day, for the authorised version of the Bible still fails to denote the particular places where the particular names come in either by printing them as they stood or by using uniform, equivalents with an initial code vocabulary. In Blake's last book, 'Milton,' the word Jehovah only occurs seven times — Page 6, line 27 ; page 7, line 22 ; page 10, lines 20, 24, and 25 ; page 11, lines 24, 26. The first