Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/183

 Rh with results not to be analyzed in this part of the story (see "Milton," p. 9, 1. 38, to p. 11, 1. 36), and Rintrah to bring Ocalthron, the secret jealousy that restricts. These are the two mental powers to triumph in the night, when religion is a literal interpretation of the Scriptures.

Rintrah is bid bring all his troop, all lions, all golden suns in darkness, fury in forests; inspired delight become desire of the jealous, the secondary form of Orc, mere bodily strength. His power helps the dominion of woman. Her net catches nothing more certainly than his fury. (25-54.) Then came the eighteen centuries of Christendom. Woman slept, instinct ceased to have any spiritual energy of her own. Man was a dream, Theotormon the "sick man's dream," of the book of the "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," line 170 — and his dream was the Gospel of Sorrows. (Compare the Book of Asia.) And it was a woman's dream, for it was a thing of tears, dark water, natural affliction, not masculine or belonging to eternal spiritual joy that laughs at nature and  her grief and her talk of sin, and her tree of good and evil. (55-60.)

Now was seen a mystic sunset and star-light night. Armies divided the peace of the world. Men who lived for the body and reason propagated both. Things were the reverse of what they should be. Instead of the light of heaven as a masculine potency dividing the clouds, shadows, that should be female, came in male form and divided the  heavens. These were seen as sunset clouds.

Albion's Angel, who inhabits the sun, fell with the sunset. His own plagues, the mortal-colour, the blood-redness of his clouds, smote him. The cloud, full of fertility — demons of futurity — bears hard on the council house, the feminine hollow  into which the setting sun passes, as Albion's angels attempt to gather there in council, in concentrated activity of the  Obedient (angels were obedient male potencies). This council or gathering in the tent should have been fruitful, a fertilizing act, as should be every descent of spirit into matter,