Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/77

Rh what can I do ? My Selfhood cruel marches against thee deceitful from Sinai and from Edorn, into the wilderness of Judah, to meet thee in his pride! " (" Jerusalem/' p. 96, 1. 8, &c.) And this Selfhood is the Serpent into which Man entered six thousand years ago. (Compare chapter on the Worm.)

Edom, then, is Nature that was re-created when the worm was seen to be holy because of the Incarnation. It is also relegated to its place, the place of beauty and seat of judgment, the loins, the earth, the grave. Its rehabilitation is to be like that of the palaces broken down when God's sword is bathed in heaven, and both spiritual and earthly pride are humbled, until it is shown that happiness and safety belong not to any form of pride whether of angel or king, but to the simplicity that thinks no evil, — as told in Isaiah xxxiii. and xxxiv., to which Blake bids us to turn.

The Kabalists tell of seven early worlds destroyed before this world began. They call these seven worlds Edom. Blake uses the idea contained in this myth without repeating it or endorsing it.

The plea for evil follows. It is mere energy when rightly understood, and a necessary portion of the pair of wedded contraries without whom is no progression. The voice of the Devil is made to utter the fundamental doctrine of Blake's philosophy, and of all transcendentalism, and all pure science, — the doctrine whose negative half is con- tained in the formula : — Man has no body distinct from his soul. Body is soul's energy and delight ; Reason is its limit.

Milton in " Paradise Lost " has given to the limiter of desire the name of the Messiah. The angel of the Divine Presence is called Satan. But in the Book of Job the limiter of the higher spiritual joy (symbolized under terms of patri- archal and pastoral prosperity) is called Satan, and his limits are poverty and disease, the weakness of mind, and its folly.

The limiter (who is really Satan as Reason) believes the force of desire that it controls to have been actually cast out. But the Devil, as the delighter, says that the mobility of God