Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/286

272 are sacrificed, and Satan is proclaimed God within these boundaries.

P. 9, ll. 15, 16. It is asked by the assembled thoughts of the higher mind, why the innocent emotions are sacrificed thus as an offering for the Satanic faculties ? (Why tho spiritual nature is compelled to be intermixed, with and imprisoned by the lower?)

P. 9, ll. 17 to 26. The answer is that if the imaginative and innocent life did not descend into, "die for", the guilty life, then the condemnation would fall upon the guilty unimaginativeness itself, and it would be cut off wholly from the imaginative, and become "an Eternal Death." The Satanic life has to be constantly "recreated," or reorganized by this descending life, or it would cease to be life. The class of living things that belong to it are called " the elect," those of wrathful Rintrah — the imaginative energy entangled in physical things — the Reprobate, and those of Palamabron the Redeemed, because he is outside of Satan's law — material restraint — being of the obedient mental life alone. Palamabron, fearing that the condemnation might have fallen on him for being other than assertive, convinced imagination, does not dare to assemble the thoughts together to consider the state of man until Satan had put on the anger and assertiveness of Rintrah, and so drawn off the condemnation. As against pure imagination Palamabron is material, as against pure matter asserting its separate life in spectral "pride" he is imaginative. The spiritual state, who tells this, confirms it by "an oath," or by the assertion of his own unity with God or pure imagination.

P. 9, ll. 28 to 31. When the sexual formation — Leutha — sees Satan condemned, she, who is essentially imaginative, descends into corporeal life, takes on her the sin of Satan ; for sexual love is the last outpour, as it were, of imagination in the bodily life. Again the reader is bid to mark that the story is the story of his salvation.

P. 9, ll. 32 to 38. Leutha tells how she loved Imaginative