Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/60

46 imagination only being positive. It is not the final Humanity and Union of all, but the final Limit of Opacity, the aggregate of separateness massed. It is piled-up dust, not the water of life. It coheres by the water of death; fleshly instinct. It is bound by the fire of vegetation; fleshly growth and decay. At the incarnation Christ put on this water and this fire. The one burned the other. He ended by putting them both off. His mother was Law and Nature. His body was Satan. When crucified he was his own destroyer, destroying the Serpent in Himself. This Serpent, Satan, was what was nailed to the tree. This body was destroyed or devoured in three days. This devouring is the meaning of the serpent with his tail in his mouth. Christ's self-sacrifice (or suicide) was the thrusting into death of Satan, and who had become Himself as a result of the Incarnation. It was the eternal putting-off of Reason and Memory and Morality as delusions, that Imagination, Eternal Present, and Forgiveness might survive.

The cross was the tree of vegetation, since it was the burning stake at which Satan was consumed. It was Moloch, the Wicker Man of Scandinavia. It was also sensuality. Sex in the body is the cross because it is vegetative division and vegetative transfixture. Lust is fire. It is also the basis of our human imagination which develops from it. Thus lust, seeking to destroy mind and make body everything, unites the sexes bodily, consumes their separateness, and is the basis of that union which is the entrance of mankind into the state called Man. In other words, it is the destruction of the dust, type of separateness, and the release of the Image of God from that dust by the Breath Divine that moved on the waters and made them the source of Unity in the infinitely divided. Thus it made dust water, and water fire, for the waters burned up the divisibility of the Divided, and the Divided ceased to exist as Dust.

Thus, to this hour, Satan also, himself the type of Christ by being Christ's mental opposite, tempts man to lust that he may accuse him, restrain him, make him take morality for religion,