Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/184

170 or male into female. (61-68.) (Compare "Council of God," for contrast, in Vala I., 428; IV., 246; VIII., 1.) But the angels are overwhelmed. Matter for a while gets the better of spirit. Then, as the sunset leads to starlight, they arose in a new form, as intellectual ideas of a purely reasoning kind, as the "corporeal understanding," as the light of night. They struggle upward, or inward, striving to enter in this form the imagination, the " bosom of God." In the thoughts perturbed they tried, to follow Albion's angel to his ancient temple, serpent formed.

This was the great Druid, error, the mistaking of spiritual significance for corporeal command.

The angel went by London to Verulam, which is the English for saying ("Jerusalem," p. -59, 1. 14, and p. 74, 1. 3) by Palamabron to Rintrah.

There, in the golden south, in the eyes, stands the vision of the temple as it was before it became serpent formed. Then it was the symbolic temple of Jerusalem (Apocalypse, c. 21) of twelve stones, which should be, but is not in the fallen, or non-mystic state of mind, the number of the senses, and give light in the opaque region of experience. But few of them are known on earth. They were left as the zodiacal symbol when the deluge of the five senses left man an unvisionary being. Then the eyes only knew perspective, the ears words of information : the nostrils breathed air, not spiritual atmosphere. (69-86.)

Thought — the power of Albion's angel at night, of the stars, the demons of futurity — in fact, the sons of Urizen and of Albion — changed the infinite into a serpent when the symbol of productivity seemed nothing but a physical instrument. The fires of prophecy — of pitying Los — were changed into the sons of Orc, the devouring and tyrannic passions. Man attempted to hide from them in sorrows, in instincts, in forests. These moods gave rise to the pre-occupation of the mind in scientific study. The heavens were no longer the plenum of potency, the fatherhood, the life-origin, but by