Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/282

268 identified with the flood. The tears become "Jehovah rain," and its object is revealed by its contending with "the fires of Moloch." (Tears are formative in the corporeal sense, and they are now shed in order that corporeal order may bo substituted for mental disorder — physical vitality and sensuous life are to save man from dead reason — the persuasions of Satan. It is the same story as that told in America when the Atlantic mountains — purely imaginative life — arc submerged in the contest of reason with passion, &c. It is also the flood which sweeps away the first churches, and prepares the way for the substitutes of the second Canaan, the physical world for the first Canaan, this mental world.) Blake's vision now changes, and he sees the story in the form of a contest of the imagination and the opaque. The side of mind most allied to instinct, Theotormon, and that most allied to pleasant energy, Bromion, are persuaded by the fascination of the opaque "Satan" to take his side. Michael, of whom we hear nowhere else in Blake, and who is evidently spiritual fire, contends against "Satan," and Thulloh, also mentioned nowhere else, but almost as certainly, procreative instinct, reproves his friend "Satan." (The word Thullius, the female Leviathan, in the Kabala closely resembles Thulloh, and like him is "first slain" or first enclosed in corporeal function. The female Leviathan is the procreative side of opaque existence in the Kabala, and is "slain," lest it should overrun spiritual life, with its offspring. Imagination is alone permitted to create mental forms. Reason can but copy them from the external. Thullius is wife to Satan, the male Leviathan is the Zohas, but Thullah is here merely his "friend," friendship being a symbol for mental life that does not deal with the sexual thing — argument, or contradiction. Even Satan has such a state, and therefore a "friend." He is made masculine because the male is the creation in Blake's philosophy, and this involves the dropping of the feminine "in" at the end of this word. (See chapter on the names.) He reproves Satan