BLAKE’S TRANSFORMATIONS OF EZEKIEL’S CHERUBIM VISION IN JERUSALEM
DAVID STEN
HERRSTROM
During the only period he lived away from London, Blake underwent what he describes in a
letter-poem to his friend Thomas Butts as nothing less than a personal Last Judgment, a
harrowing experience which involved a crisis of faith in himself and his friends, as well
as an accusation by the spectres of “Poverty, Envy, old age & Fear.” These demons
hounded him until he found the strength to resist and defeat them in what he calls a
“fourfold vision” (E693/K818).1↤ 1 All textual references are to E: The Poetry and Prose of
William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1970), and to
K: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1966). For a fuller discussion of this letter-poem and its relation to Ezekiel,
see Randel Helms, “Blake at Felpham: A Study in the Psychology of Vision,”
Literature and Psychology, 22 (1972), 57-66. Jean Hagstrum places this
experience in the broader context of Blake’s life, “‘The Wrath of the Lamb’: A Study of
William Blake’s Conversions,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed.
Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp.
321-26.
Blake’s allusion to Ezekiel’s vision, which sparked a sudden, liberating personal vision
of poetic and prophetic power, marks a turning point in his life. Having abandoned his
heroic efforts to forge the “torments of Love & Jealousy” into The Four
Zoas, Blake gained the necessary strength to endure the pressure of maintaining
artistic faith and integrity in face of William Hayley’s destructive patronage and to
persist in the epic tasks of Milton and Jerusalem.
This vision awakens him, he says, from his “three years Slumber on the banks of the Ocean”
at Felpham (E697/K823), and he adopts a new stance. “If all the World should set their
faces against” his work, he declares, “I have Orders to set my face like a flint (Ezekiel
iiiC, 9v) against their faces, & my forehead against their foreheads” (6 July 1803;
K825). Like Ezekiel on the banks of the Chebar, Blake experiences a personal, as well as
political “call” to “Spiritual Acts” of perception and creation.
From this time on Blake’s life and art are informed by Ezekiel’s vision of the
Cherubim—the four “living creatures” come out of the whirlwind of cloud and “fire
infolding itself,” having the “likeness of a man” (Ezek. 1, 10). Less than a year after
Blake returned to London in 1804 he rendered this vision in a watercolor for Butts,
“Ezekiel’s Wheels” (illus. 1), which features the human fourfold man, his hand raised in a
sign of peace above the wheels whirling in flames. The awakened sleeper, Ezekiel himself,
is depicted at the bottom of the picture, lying on a rock beside the river. In the same
year Blake painted St. John’s metamorphosis of this vision, “The Four and Twenty Elders
casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne” (Rev. 4).2↤ 2 “Ezekiel’s Wheels” is also known as “Ezekiel’s
Vision of the
Whirlwind.” The change in Blake’s life recorded in his letter-poem is also registered by
the contrast between this painting of the wheels and his earlier depiction of Ezekiel’s
wheels in an illustration to the ninth night of Edward Young’s Night
Thoughts (c. 1795), repro. by Geoffrey Keynes in Illustrations to
Young’s Night Thoughts (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1927), no. 28, p. 56, as
mathematic mysteries intimidating a benighted worshipper on the shores of the sea of
chaos, a far cry from the expectant, ecstatic visionary of the later picture. “The Four
and Twenty Elders” is repro. by Darrell Figgis in The Paintings of William
Blake (London: E. Benn, 1925), pl. 4. Blake’s insistence on the human form of the Cherubim, his emphasis on its
hand,
fire and wheels, and his attention to the sleeper’s landscape of rock and river become
central to Jerusalem, also begun in this year.
Blake explicitly identifies Ezekiel’s Cherubim, his idiosyncratic Hebrew spelling in the
margin of Plate 32 of Milton alluding to the identification of the
Cherubim and humanity, with aesthetic and moral wholeness, the “Human Form Divine” and
“holy Brotherhood” (E130/K521).3↤ 3 On
Blake’s Hebrew spelling see Alicia Ostriker, ed., William Blake: The
Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 981. All graphic references are to IB:
The Illuminated Blake, ed. and anno. David V. Erdman (Garden City,
N. Y.: Doubleday, 1974). Having seen this
vision, he proclaims to the public in his Descriptive Catalogue that it
contains the archetypes of all true art, “those wonderful originals called in the Sacred
Scriptures the Cherubim” (E522/K565). Blake refers
begin page 65 |
↑ back to top
here
specifically to graphic works, but the culmination of his seizing on the vision of the
human, bodily form of the Cherubim as the original of all truly imaginative art, verbal
and graphic, occurs in the last plates of Jerusalem. Here the “Four
Living Creatures” (98:24, 42) frame a celebration of resurrection in which
everything—animal, vegetable, mineral—becomes individuated living being that appears
united in the “One Man” (98:39) of Ezekiel’s vision. Furthermore, Blake makes it clear
that these “Visionary forms dramatic” (98:28) or Cherubim is the “exemplar” (98:30) of all
true art, including his own prophecy—Jerusalem. This is why, when Blake
in a later work, The Laocoön, condemns classical art for being mere
“mathematical diagrams” as opposed to the “Naked Beauty displayed” of prophetic art, he
further and more damningly accuses it of being a debased copy of the “Cherubim of Solomon’s
Temple” (E270/K775-76) reflected in Ezekiel’s vision.
As Ezekiel’s Cherubim vision became the paradigm in Blake’s mind not only for the clarity
and unity of vision but for the shape and method of his epic prophecy, its demonic parody
in the form of Ezekiel’s “Covering Cherub” also became important.4↤ 4 That Blake understands the Covering Cherub as the demonic
parody
of Ezekiel’s Cherubim is evident in his painting of him as a winged being, surrounded by
flames, who, posed in a similar attitude to the figure in “Ezekiel’s Wheels,” makes the
same gesture as the fourfold man. In this picture of the Covering Cherub, commonly known
as “Satan in His Original Glory” (repro. in Figgis, pl. 8; Geoffrey Keynes,
Blake’s Bible Illustrations [Paris: Trianon Press, 1957], pl. 82), which
contemptuously alludes to the classical winged “Victory” (Andrew Wilton, “Blake and the
Antique,” The Classical Tradition, British Museum Yearbook 1 [London:
British Museum Publications, 1976], p. 198), the visionary eyes of the spirit-filled
wheels are changed to fallen stars, dying remants of the zodiacal wheel of fate. The
body’s fragmentation is symbolized by the small, faceless, contracted beings hunched in
fear and confusion or hurtling downward, as in depictions of the Last
Judgment. Ezekiel vows to destroy the tyrannous “Cherub” appearing, like the
Cherubim itself, as a man “midst of the stones of fire” (Ezek. 28. 16). This satanic being
is in Jerusalem the “Selfhood” and the Spectre of self-doubt, the
destroyer of brotherhood and prophetic faith masquerading as the true Cherubim (89: 10;
96:8). As the Cherubim is perverted by false artists, such as the Greeks, it becomes a
parody of itself, the Covering Cherub, who is exceedingly dangerous because it is so
easily mistaken for the true Cherubim. Blake is acutely aware, after his experience at
Felpham, that the imposter pretending to friendship is more dangerous than the outright
antagonist, as he makes clear in a couplet privately addressed to Hayley, asking him to be
an “Enemy for Friendships sake” (E498/K545). The Covering Cherub conceals the very truth
that it parodies, for imaginative liberty—Jerusalem herself—is hidden within “as in a
Tabernacle of threefold workmanship, in allegoric delusion & woe” (89:44). When the
outer garment or false body of self-delusion is thrown off, like the graveclothes of
Jesus, the true Cherubim body is revealed. Until this comes to pass at the end of the
poem, however, the threefold Covering Cherub mocks the fourfold Cherubim.
This equivocal opposition is rooted in Blake’s interpretation of an ambiguity in Genesis:
God, after driving man out, placed Cherubim “at the east of the garden of Eden” and a
“flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life” (Gen.
3.24).5↤ 5 Blake’s identification of the Cherubim here with the
fourfold
creatures of Ezekiel and John is clear from his Genesis “Title Page” (repro. in S.
Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary [New York: Dutton, 1971], illus. II)
and his ninth illustration to Paradise Lost (repro. Figgis, pl. 22),
“The Expulsion from Eden” (1808), which pictures at its top four full-faced horsemen and
horses, foreshadowing the end of Jerusalem: “every Man stood fourfold.
each Four Faces had. / . . . the Horses Fourfold” (98:12-13). Does “keep the
way” mean that the Cherubim at
the gate bars man from the tree of life or preserve it for him? Blake provides the answer
in an early work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, saying: “For the
cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life, and
when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite. and holy”
(E38/K154). Blake asserts that the Cherubim must abandon its traditional role as guard if
art and the true prophet-poet are to triumph.6↤ 6 Christian orthodoxy, of course, interprets the Cherubim in Eden as a
guard keeping man out, but Blake was not alone in his heterodox position. John
Parkhurst, a Hebrew scholar and contemporary of Blake’s comments in his widely respected
An Hebrew and English Lexicon, . . . 4th ed. (London: for G. G. and
J. Robinson, 1799), that the Cherubim was “undoubtedly” placed at the gate of Eden “not
to hinder, but to enable man, to pass through it” (p. 343). This book may have prompted
Blake’s renewed interest in the ambiguous Genesis passage, for when Blake was studying
Hebrew at Felpham (E696/K821) he undoubtedly used this text, as it was the best known of
its time, and William Hayley owned the fourth edition (A. N. L. Munby, ed.,
Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons [London: Mansell, 1971], II,
136). The
Cherubim who assumes the role of guard becomes a parody of itself, a perverse imposter
barring man from the Garden of Eden, Blake’s primary symbol for the world of imagination.
This perversion is the Covering Cherub, whom Ezekiel also places in Eden (Ezek. 28. 13), a
nightmare of “Doubt which is Self contradiction” that in the Gates of
Paradise flies around Blake as a “Flaming Sword” (E265/K770). As the accuser,
Satan, the Cherubim in its fallen state becomes the Covering Cherub responsible for
expelling man from the imaginative world and preventing his return by instilling doubt in
himself and his brothers. As the archetype of prophetic art, however, the Cherubim or “One
Man,” whom Blake identifies in Milton (42:11) with Jesus, guides man
into Eden, where self-delusion is removed and all appears “infinite.”
In Jerusalem the ambivalence of the Cherubim as guard or guide is
central. Blake recounts a vision in the proem to Chapter 4 (E230-31/K717-18) of a
“devouring sword turning every way” and Jesus striving “Against the current of this
Wheel.” Jesus is called the “bright Preacher of Life,” who wields the sword of the
prophetic word in opposition to the “dark Preacher of Death.” The “devouring sword” of
death is another name for Blake’s “Covering Cherub.” Jacob Boehme, whose interpretation of
Genesis influenced Blake, calls this the sword “proceeding from Babel,”
that is, the false word.7↤ 7 Quoted
by Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1968), I, 329. Raine specifies Blake’s debt to Boehme on this point in her
commentary to the proem, I, 330-32.
Blake’s vision opening
Chapter 4 is of Jesus’s attempt, in Boehme’s language, to change “the Fire-sword of the
Angel into a Love-sword, . . . And this is the true Cherub which drove
the false Adam out of Paradise, and brings him in again by Christ.”8↤ 8 Jacob Behmen
[Boehme], The Mysterium Magnum; Or an Explanation of . . . Genesis
(London: for G. Robinson, 1772), Vol. III of The Works . . . with Figures
by . . . William Law (London: for M. Richardson, 1764-81), p. 116; italics
his. The true Cherubim, who ushers us into imaginative
realms, is Jesus, the true Word.9↤ 9 Parkhurst shares this view, p.
341. He is the “One Man”
in whose body at the end of Jerusalem the Living Creatures or “Visionary
forms dramatic” of the Cherubim have their unity.
We are invited to view Blake’s prophecy, then, as an attempt to turn the fire-sword into
a love-sword, just as in the first chapter of the poem Los (Blake himself) attempts to
turn Hand’s (Los’s Spectre) fiery sword into a “Spiritual Sword” (9:5, 18). In the prose
introduction to Chapter 3, Blake calls this the war between the “Natural Sword” and the
“Spiritual” sword (E198/K682), which he makes clear is between experiment based on doubt
and revelation based on faith, self-righteousness and love, tyranny and liberty, as well
as the classical warrior ideal and the command of the prophet Jesus to “Conquer by
Forgiveness.” In short, by separating the true from the false Cherub, changing the guard
to a guide, Blake attempts in his prophecy to usher us into Eden and its Tree of Life,
that personal and political liberty grounded in the freedom of the human imagination.
Blake guides us into the world of imaginative liberty in Jerusalem by a
non-traditional meditation on the Cherubim appearing to Ezekiel, that “glorious vision,”
as Ecclesiasticus puts it, “which was shewed him upon the chariot of the Cherubims”
(Eccles. 49.8). Blake, knowing this text, as well as Revelation 4, was well aware that
Ezekiel’s vision was understood to be, as meditated upon by the Jews, primarily a
chariot-vision and was, as Austin Farrer points out, “a technique of ecstasy.” This
tradition of God descending from the heavens
begin page 66 |
↑ back to top
in his fiery
chariot, which catches the worthy meditator up in spiritual ecstasy, preserved in the
books of the Merkabah mystics, came to be one of the two pillars of the
Kabbalah.10↤ 10 Austin
Farrer, A Rebirth of Images; the Making of St. John’s Apocalypse
(1949; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1963), p. 262. On Blake’s knowledge and use of the Kabbalah,
see S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols
(Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958), p. 446; Denis Saurat, Blake and
Modern Thought (London: Constable, 1929), p. 102; Milton O. Percival,
William Blake’s Circle of Destiny (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
1938), p. 82; Désirée Hirst, Hidden Riches (New York: Barnes &
Noble, 1964), p. 156; and Asloob Ahmad Ansari, “Blake and the Kabbalah,” in
William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Providence,
R. I.: Brown Univ. Press, 1969). After completing Jerusalem (c. 1820),
Blake discovered another version of the chariot vision as ecstatic ascent in chap. 14 of
the Book of Enoch, trans. Richard Laurence (London: Oxford, 1821). He does not include
this, however, in a series of drawings illustrating the book (repro. Blake
Newsletter 28, 7 [Spring 1974], 83-86). Blake was not
concerned, however, with
ecstatic ascent but with assertion of the prophetic imagination in times of spiritual and
political oppression. His purpose was to unleash Christ on Antichrist, the true against
the false word, as in his Ever lasting Gospel, where he says Jesus
“Became a Chariot of fire / . . . cursd the Scribe & Pharisee / . . . Broke down from
every Chain & Bar / And Satan in his Spiritual War” (E515/K749). Blake departs from
the traditional, mystical meditation on the Cherubim vision by making the benignly
descending chariot of convention a war-chariot instead. This departure owes much to the
version of Ezekiel’s vision in Paradise Lost (VI: 749-59), but Blake
also changes Milton’s static, patriarchal chariot by identifying it with the dynamic,
fiery prophet Jesus. Traditional Cherubim meditation emphasized watching and waiting for
its appearance, clearly distinguishing God the rider from his chariot, whereas Blake
emphasizes actively uniting with the chariot.
Blake’s meditative technique, like that of Jesus, who “became” the Chariot, achieves the
unity of chariot and rider, image of the true relation of the prophetic poem to its poet,
as well as its audience. He expresses this unity in “Ezekiel’s Wheels” by putting the
human visage of Christ, who “rides” at the top of the picture, in each of the faces which
carry him on the wheels below. This living body of the Cherubim vision corresponds to the
prophetic word of Jerusalem (98:28-40). Consequently, Blake’s prophecy
is not a vehicle for vision, a means of attaining the mystical end of spiritual transport,
but the body of the Word itself in its most disturbing fullness. Blake, as rider, is one
with the chariot of his poem (98:40-42). That is, by a series of transformations of the
chariot-vision, he internalizes or accepts as his own its images of forgiveness, thereby
entering the Cherubim body and freeing himself from guilt and doubt. By this act he
reveals the Covering Cherub as false, casting out “Satan this Body of Doubt that Seems but
Is Not” (93:20).
Furthermore, he expects his audience to do the same, to make “companions” of these
images, which heal a fragmented psyche and society by liberation from self-doubt and
mutual suspicion. Thus he entreats his reader to actively enter his work in A
Vision of the Last Judgment: “If the Spectator could Enter into these Images in his
Imagination approaching them on the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought if he could
. . . make a Friend & Companion of one of these Images of wonder . . . then would he
arise from the Grave then would he meet the Lord in the Air & then he would be happy”
(E550/K611). He would meet Jesus because he would be part of the chariot-body of
Jerusalem, one with Blake’s visionary forms. The
Merkabah is a “giant image,” as Harold Bloom rightly observes, “for the
prophetic
state-of-being, for the activity of prophecy.” But because Blake expects
his audience to join him as rider in becoming one with the chariot, Bloom is mistaken in
his notion that throughout Jerusalem Blake “studies in hope to see” the
Merkabah.11↤ 11 Harold Bloom, “Blake’s Jerusalem: The
Bard of
Sensibility and the Form of Prophecy,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4
(Fall 1970), 15, 10; italics his. This is the hope of
the mystic not of the radical engraver on South Molton street in London. Blake insists
that we “Enter” into his images and that we remember he was first called by Ezekiel’s
vision to speak out against mental and physical tyranny by transforming and embodying that
archetypal vision of wholeness and brotherhood in works of art.
Departing from the tradition of the Cherubim meditations in Revelation, the Kabbalah and
Paradise Lost, Blake replaces God as rider with the visionary himself,
Jesus-Blake, and thus effects the union of rider and chariot. That is, he insists on the
unity of imaginative vision—the chariot—and its landscape—ultimately the mind and body of
the prophet. Blake employs Ezekiel’s chariot-vision of “wheels within wheels” (Ezek. 1.16)
and “burning coals of fire” (1. 13) or furnace as an image of man’s imaginative part. For
Blake, the “spirit of the living creature” in the wheels (Ezek. 1.20) is man’s
imagination, as is the furnace, which he associates with Jesus. The furnace in Daniel is a
threefold fiery death for the three faithful sons of Israel until Jesus, by his saving
appearance as the “son of God,” makes it fourfold (Dan. 3.25; cf. E533/K578). The scene or
natural landscape in which the prophet lies is, on the other hand, an image of the body
alienated from itself. It is a projection and externalization of the imaginative body
until, “all Ridicule & Deformity” (E677/K793), it mocks the prophet and becomes in
Jerusalem the threatening “serpent” nature (43[29]: 80). Blake adds the
obdurate rock, symbol of contracted vision, to the natural landscape in Ezekiel, but
otherwise conflates the landscape of its first and tenth chapters, respectively, where the
visionary lies beside a river and stands in the court of a temple-city. Developing John’s
use of Ezekiel in Revelation, Blake adopts his metaphoric identification of temple, city
and bride (Rev. 3.12; 21.2, 10-27), one confirmed by St. Paul’s trope of the temple-body
(I Cor. 6.19) and by the appearance of the Cherubim in the “likeness of a man” (Ezek. 1.
5). Its appearance of wholeness is the unity of the body and imagination, rider and
chariot, in the “One Man.” Man’s fragmented state is a result, therefore, of the
separation of imaginative vision from the landscape of his body. In this fallen condition,
the furnace and the wheels of the chariot-vision are exiled outside the landscape of the
temple-city (E146/K623; Ezek. 10.19) in which the sleeper or potential prophet lies on a
rock beside a river (illus. 2), just as Adam and Eve are exiled outside the East gate of
Eden.
By a series of meditative transformations, then, Blake brings the exiled chariot-vision
back inside its landscape of the rider-visionary, thereby restoring man to psychic and
bodily wholeness. In Blake’s symbolism, that is, the furnace and wheels are recalled to
the temple-city. And in this he follows the progression from Ezekiel 1, where the Cherubim
appears outside the temple, to Ezekiel 10, where the Cherubim appears inside. The drama of
the
begin page 67 |
↑ back to top
begin page 68 |
↑ back to top
furnace and wheels is reunited with its true scene in
the temple-body when Albion and his soul, Jerusalem the spirit of imaginative liberty,
embrace. At this point in
Jerusalem, the visionary ceases externalizing
his landscape, and, consequently, the temple-city no longer contains him; he is the temple
itself (98:24-26). Interaction between the temple and its exiled vision, between Albion
and Jerusalem, generates much of the power of the poem. Moreover, the smith Los, Blake’s
figure of imagination, labors throughout at his furnace in the center of the wheeling
universe to restore the members of the divided man to unity.
Before examining Blake’s transformations of Ezekiel’s vision, we must view them within
the context of his larger debt to Ezekiel. Addressing the “Public” at the opening of
Jerusalem, he repeats a phrase from his letter to Butts, saying, “After my
three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean, I again display my Giant forms”
(E143/K620). The allusion here to Ezekiel’s slumber by the river Chebar is clear, and
Blake reinforces it in his subsequent reference to himself as a “true Orator” (E144/K621),
a term Bishop Robert Lowth invokes from Milton to describe Ezekiel, who “frequently
appears more the orator than the poet.”12↤ 12 Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of
the
Hebrews (London: J. Johnson, 1787), II, 61. Milton uses the phrase in his
preface, “The Verse,” to Paradise Lost.
Jerusalem is fundamentally a series of orations aimed at different audiences—the
general public, Jews, Deists, and Christians. Consequently, its gross structure is
rhetorical; we are confronted with four addresses, saying much the same thing but adapted
by varied emphases to their respective readers. Like the gospels it tells virtually the
same story four times. Unlike the gospels, however, Blake is not concerned to narrate the
life of Jesus but to anatomize the “Temple of his Mind.” Like the books of Ezekiel and
Revelation, the basic question of Jerusalem is who shall have dominion,
Jerusalem or Babylon, God or Satan, but all attempts to show that its form is congruent
with the narrative of the book of Ezekiel are ultimately unsatisfying.13↤ 13 See Harold Bloom’s “Commentary,” E843-44, and Randel Helms’ “Ezekiel
and Blake’s Jerusalem,” Studies in Romanticism, 13
(1974), 133-40. Joanne Witke, “Jerusalem: A Synoptic Poem,”
Comparative Literature, 22 (1970), shows that Blake’s four chapters are
addressed to what were traditionally conceived to be the respective audiences of the
four gospels. But she goes further and makes the largely unsubstantiated claim that
“just as each of the evangelists’ gospels carries the image of one of the apocalyptic
animals, so each of Blake’s four chapters bears a particular stamp of one of these
creatures” (p. 275). Blake was very likely aware, as she notes, of S. Irenaeus’
comment—“Fourfold, Christ’s Gospels, fourfold the Cherubim whereon he sitteth” (p. 267,
n. 6)—but Blake would have viewed this as a structural criticism of the gospels. The
body of Christ is not separate from the chariot-throne in Jerusalem; it
is the Cherubim body itself, as in “Ezekiel’s Wheels.” Blake’s prophecy is not a vehicle
for vision; it is vision incarnate, the body of Los-Jesus. This method, which correlates the events of one book with those of
the other, reveals that Blake is continually aware of Ezekiel’s prophetic strategies, even
at times giving them an ironic twist, but it obscures Jerusalem’s most
prominent symbols—furnace, hand, wheel—and, more important, its basic structural
principle—successive transformations of Ezekiel’s Cherubim vision.
As an orator Blake is a literalist, both verbally in his expository, declarative
language, and visually in his schematic tendency, as in the diagram on Plate 36 of
Milton (IB252) of the Mundane Egg surrounded by the four universes. As a
rhetorical and artistic strategy, the literalness of Blake’s paradigmatic scene that
includes the sleeper on a rock by a river in a temple-city offers an advantage. The
setting remains the same, giving Blake’s readers a point from which to get their bearings
and, by its repetition, enabling them to grasp the substance of the prophecy. At the same
time, however, it offers astounding variety, as the schema remains inviolate but the scene
is transformed by Blake’s continual renaming: the sleeper is variously
Blake, Albion, England, Los, or even Ezekiel himself; the rock is
sometimes the English isle, the Rock of Ages, a sepulchre, an altar, Golgotha, Mt. Zion,
or London Stone; the river is the Chebar, the Thames, the Euphrates,
Tyburn’s brook, the Jordan, or the River of Paradise; and the
temple-city is England, Jerusalem, Golgonooza the city of art, or Stonehenge the
Druid place of sacrifice. The physical relations of these archetypal elements of the
setting of Ezekiel’s vision do not change; the reader has the assurance of being rooted
always in the same visionary landscape, though Blake shifts perspective, as he constantly
changes the names of the visionary sleeper, the rock, the river, and the temple-city. The
relationship between the furnace and the wheels in each transformation, however, as well
as that between this vision and its setting, varies according to the audience.
Jerusalem consists, then, of a series of transformations of this
paradigmatic scene and vision. Blake creates a tranformation by renaming the scene’s fixed
elements—sleeper, rock, river, temple-city—and reestablishing the presence of the furnace
and wheel. Each of these transformations, which embodies a different relation of exiled
vision to landscape, as well as of wheel to furnace, is usually marked as a rhetorical
subunit by a shift in speaker or by an introductory or concluding phrase: “such is my
awful vision” (15:5), for example, or “Thus they contended” (9:31).14↤ 14 Blake’s playing the present
fallen landscape off the past landscape of the beginning in Eden, however, does not
constitute a transformation. I suggest that Jerusalem consists of
twenty-eight transformations and tentatively submit the following table, which in the
second chapter assumes Erdman’s order, though my argument is not changed by Blake’s
alternate arrangement in Keynes; edition (bracketed numbers): Chapter 1—(1) Proem; (2)
4:1-7:8; (3) 7:9-50; (4) 7:51-9:31; (5) 9:32-12:24; (6) 12:25-15:5; (7) 15:6-16:69; (8)
17:1-19:47; (9) 20:1-25:16. Chapter 2—(1) Proem; (2) 28:1-30[34]:16; (3)
30[34]:17-35[39]:11; (4) 35 [39]:12-42:81; (5) 43[29]:1-46[32]:15; (6) 47:1-50:30.
Chapter 3—(1) Proem; (2) 53:1-55:69; (3) 56:1-59:55; (4) 60:1-63:25; (5) 63:26-66:15;
(6) 66:16-69:46; (7) 70:1-73:54; (8) 74:1-75:27. Chapter 4—(1) Proem; (2) 78:1-80:56;
(3) 80:57-86:64; (4) 87:1-93:27; (5) 94:1-99:5. The number twenty-eight, which was to be
the original number of chapters of Jerusalem (E731) and which Blake
derives from the union of the twenty-four elders and the four beasts of John’s reworking
of Ezekiel’s vision, signifying wholeness and redemption, is tempting as the total
number of transformations. Twenty-eight cities rise up to restore Albion’s fragmented
psyche and body (37[41]:23; 97:14). Thus, the number of transformations comprising
Jerusalem would be for Blake the seven four-fold furnaces of salvation
that Los (builder of the body) gathers around Albion’s altars (destroyers of the body)
in the Druid temple of England (42:76-77), and the union of the sixteen sons of
Jerusalem and the twelve sons of Albion (soul and body). Blake does not, however, always
indicate his rhetorical subunits clearly enough to establish this figure indisputably as
the total number of transformations. Hence, I fear the number is somewhat arbitrary at
best, an idol at worst. These transformations, as I have provisionally indicated them
(excluding proems), correspond roughly to the “scenes” of what Roger Easson terms, in
“Blake and His Reader in Jerusalem” (Blake’s Sublime
Allegory, ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. [Madison: Univ.
of Wisconsin Press, 1973]), the “visionary drama” (p. 317): Chapter 1—Transformation
(2) to Scene 1; (3-7) to 2; (8) to 3; (9) to 4. Chapter 2—Transformations (2-3) to
Scenes 1-2; (4) to 3; (5-6) to 4. Chapter 3—Transformation (2) to Scene 1; (3) to 2;
(4) to 3; (5-8) to 4. Chapter 4—Transformation (2) to Scene 1; (3) to 2; (4) to 3; (5)
to 4. Though I disagree with Easson’s contention that Jerusalem is
“composed of an allegoric drama embedded in an obscuring matrix of narration” (p.
316), because the latter reveals rather than obscures the landscape or necessary
context of Albion’s vision, Easson’s association of Jerusalem with the drama, and Vala
with the narrative of the poem (p. 319), parallels the split between vision (the drama
of the furnace and the wheels) and landscape (the rock, river, and temple-city)
central to my analysis. In the visionary body of the Cherubim, drama and narrative are
unified, as is Jerusalem-Vala in Albion.
Each of the prophecy’s four chapters is prefaced by a prose introduction together with a
proem, the verses in ballad or distich form, which set the scene and establish the
rhetorical emphasis of subsequent transformations for its particular audience. The
emphasis of the transformations of chapter 1 is on the judgment of the visionary, the
prophet-poet Blake as he begins his poem, not only by God, who divides the “SHEEP” from
the “GOATS” (E143/K620), but by his “Public,” who may not, as he says, forgive this
“energetic exertion of my talent” (E144/K621). Consequently, the rock is Sinai’s “cave,”
where the word was first given to man in what was commonly thought to be the origin of all
writing, as well as the “caverns” of Blake’s ear, which receive the word. At the outset,
Blake correlates body and landscape. The second chapter begins with a proem in which Blake
has a vision of Albion sleeping on London’s Stone (the Roman mile-stone) beside Tyburn’s
brook (place of human sacrifice by hanging) in Satan’s Synagogue (E170/K620) or Babylon.
Emphasis on sacrifice sets the direction for an oration addressed to the “Jews.” This
shifts in the third chapter, its transformations aimed at the “Deists,” to mental
imprisonment, and, as a consequence, the Grey Monk of the proem, a type of Christ, is
bound in a cell of stone in the Synagogue of Satan (E198-200/K682-83). This stone dungeon
bursts open in the proem to the transformations of the last chapter and becomes Mt. Zion
in Jerusalem (E229-31/K716-18). Prefacing an address to the “Christians,” the emphasis
here is fittingly placed on the resurrection of the Lamb of God, who symbolizes the
Imaginative Body as opposed to the vegetable or mortal body. This returns us to the hope
that Blake expresses in his introduction to the “Giant form” of
Jerusalem, that “the Reader will be with me wholly One in Jesus our Lord”
(E144/K621).
One, that is, in the resurrected temple of Albion’s body, which Los-Blake struggles to
build throughout the poem, and which we discover in the end
begin page 69 |
↑ back to top
2 Blake’s Paradigm of Ezekiel’s Cherubim Vision in Jerusalem
(Vision — Furnace/Wheels — Exiled Outside East Gate from Its Landscape —
Temple-City-Body).
3 Jerusalem, Chapter 1: First Transformation (after the proem) —
4:1-7:8 (E145-148/K622-625).
to be the poem itself. By successive transformations of the Cherubim, the true
body is revealed. The proems prefacing each chapter are “fixed solidly like pillars at the
four gates of the poem,” as W. J. T. Mitchell observes of their headpieces (IB283, 307,
332, 357). These four temple gates correspond to the four senses or gates of the
skull—eye, ear, nose, and tongue—and to the fourfold city of spiritual London, and to the
four Zoas.
15↤ 15 W. J. T. Mitchell,
Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 194, 62. Blake mentions
the “caverns” of his ear
in chapter 1, and Reuben can only find his way to help Albion in the second chapter by
using his “Nostrils” to scent the ground (32[36]: 2), since his other senses have been
closed off. In chapter 3 the proem’s first words are “I saw”; Blake’s ocular vision
beginning the second half of the poem here balances his auricular one opening the first
half. In the last chapter, Blake sees the tongue of the word, which flows west (98:17)
with the “current of / Creation,” perverted into a wheel that “devourd all things in its
loud / Fury & thundering course” (E320/K717), a mockery of the “voice of the Almighty”
out of the Cherubim (Ezek. 1.24, 10.4; Enoch 14.18). In the same year he finished
Jerusalem, Blake notes in the margins of his copy of Bishop Berkeley’s
Siris that “Imagination is the Divine Body in Every Man,” and “The Four
Senses are the Four Faces of Man & the Four Rivers of the Water of Life”
(E652-53/K773).
It is this body that is at stake in each of the transformations of Ezekiel’s vision that
make up Jerusalem. The four faculties or “Zoas” of Albion’s body are at
enmity, as are those of the body politic of the English people. That is, the Cherubim body
is fragmented, the furnace and wheels warring against each other outside the
gates of the temple, and must be restored to unity. Blake explores the nature of Albion’s
disintegration by means of eight Cherubim transformations (not counting the proem) in
chapter 1. In the first of these (4:1-7:8), Albion asserts his independence and denies his
wholeness (4:23), expressed in the exile of vision—furnace and wheel—from its
landscape—temple-city—(soul from body, Jerusalem from Albion), but fails to understand the
true nature of his circumstances. Albion’s abstracting, self-dividing skepticism splits
his person into a contemplator self and its object self. Furthermore, as his male and
female aspects (Luvah and Vala) contend with each other, the furnace and the wheel also
separate. It is not until the last two transformations of the chapter (17:1-19:47,
20:1-25:16) that Albion realizes his true situation. He is a victim, his independence a
delusion. Blake symbolizes this by obscuring the redemptive furnace of Los and emphasizing
the oppressive wheel of Vala. Because Albion mistakes the Covering Cherub for the
Cherubim, begin page 70 |
↑ back to top
the furnace and the wheel remain at war. Hand tries to
control first one and then the other, succeeding in his attempt to deceive Albion with a
pretence of unity.
This fundamental conflict between the true and false Cherubim and its ultimate resolution
are explored in the intervening transformations of the chapter. The second and third
(7:9-50, 7:51-9:31) clarify the conflict by introducing its literal context and showing,
respectively, how the isolated wheel or female aspect of the psyche becomes a tyrant,
weaving the veil of mystery, and how the furnace or male aspect in separation becomes a
sacrificial altar of guilt. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth transformations (9:32-12:24,
12:25-15:5, 15:6-16:69), respectively, Los realizes that Hand can be defeated and Albion
saved by reuniting the furnace and wheel, forging the true body of the Cherubim; Los
becomes Ezekiel in order to appropriate the Cherubim vision; and Los reveals himself as
Blake, who from Ezekiel’s perspective reasserts the necessity of wholeness and his
prophetic-poetic method of achieving this by meditation on the Cherubim vision.
After the proem, we are in the first transformation of chapter 1 (4:1-7:8) presented with
the drama of Albion casting out imaginative vision (illus. 3). The scene of this action is
clearly delineated, as we see him lying on the mountain of England (its island tip rising
above the Atlantic), shrunken to a rock (5:8), by the Thames (4:34) in a temple of
sacrifice (5:15). Before him the “throne” (4:35) of the Cherubim (Ezek. 1.26, 10.1; Rev.
4.2) is dark and cold because the immortal human form has been dethroned, vision
(Jerusalem) cast out and sacrificed (5:15,55). This is a spiritual or imaginative event,
which causes Albion’s fall or vice versa. The order is irrelevant, for the event and its
cause are simultaneous, but Albion’s fallen status becomes clear as we learn that the
Covering Cherub (5:42) hovers over him on his bloody stone altar (5:6) beside the
Euphrates (5:43) in Egypt (5:14), land of slavery.
Albion’s enslavement is a function of his dethroning the Cherubim, the disunity of the
Four Zoas within his body. This casting out of imagination is dramatized by the banishment
of vision from its scene, exiling of furnace and wheel from the temple-city-body, and
their consequent separation. That is, as Albion self-divides, Jerusalem is cast out,
splitting into a spectrous (destructive) and emanative (creative) portion. The former, or
male part, descends into the “Furnance of Los” (5:28) outside the East gate of the city,
just as the Cherubim stands before the East gate of the Lord’s house in Ezekiel (10:19).
This is the “Furnace of beryll” (5:34) or appearance of the Cherubim (Ezek. 1. 16, 10.9).
The latter, or female part, ascends out of the furnace as a pillar of cloud and smoke that
becomes the “Starry Wheels” of a cosmic loom, which includes the sons and daughters of
Albion revolving continually over the furnace in an attempt to destroy it, to “desolate
Golgonooza; / And to devour the Sleeping Humanity” (5:27-30). Thus, the furnace or center
of the Cherubim vision is divided from its wheels or circumference, both exiled from their
proper landscape within the body of the temple-city. Blake summarizes this as “Abstract
Philosophy warring in enmity against Imagination” or Satan against the “Divine Body of the
Lord Jesus” (5:58-59). The horror of these divisions is intensified by Blake’s
illumination on Plate 8 of the female in a cloud of smoke harnessed to an inauspicious
moon-chariot, and on Plate 6 of the grotesque male Spectre revealing itself to Los as a
bat-winged Covering Cherub (IB285, 287).
This male-female conflict between the furnace and the wheels is developed in the next two
transformations, the Spectre’s first speech to Los (7:9-50) and Los’s reply (7:51-9:31).
In their exchange the identities of the male and female parts of Jerusalem—“The Male is a
Furnace of beryll; the Female is a golden Loom” (5:34)—are revealed, respectively, as
Luvah, the figure of physical and political passion, and Vala, the veil of deceit. The
Spectre assumes that Albion is still lying by the Euphrates, but his rock is renamed the
Tower of Babel (7:19), the place of confusion existing in a “once admired” Palace “now in
ruins” (7:16). This is the fallen Eden guarded by what Boehme calls the “devouring sword,”
the false word. The Spectre’s harangue is an attempt, by misconstruing language, to
confuse Los, that he might despair at his “Furnaces of affliction” (7:30). We find that
Luvah is “sealed” (7:30) in these furnaces, while Vala feeds them in “cruel delight”
(7:31) and joins the children of Albion in the wheeling loom of the zodiac, which in its
separation has become oppressive. It is this seal, as in Revelation, which is opened at
the end of Jerusalem to reveal the true Word, as Luvah-Jesus breaks the
bonds of death and bursts the sealed tomb (Rev. 7:9; Matt. 27:66). The wheels of Vala,
daughter of Babel, weave the “mantle of pestilence & war” (7:20), the “webs” of
Religion which roll “outwards into darkness” (7:45-46). These wheels involve all the sons
of Albion in their web, and the Spectre, mocking the true fourfold Cherubim, calls the son
in whom all the others are “One,” a “Fourfold Wonder” (7:48).
The focus on the isolated wheels in the Spectre’s accusation shifts in Los’s reply to a
focus on the separated furnace. The meaning of the wheels as the circumference of Albion,
later “closed” (19:36), is clarified in this third transformation, as we learn that Albion
“saw now from the outside what he before saw & felt from within” (8:25). Here Los
attempts to transform Babel into “Zion’s Hill” (the Word). Los is now himself the
visionary in a scene whose familiar landmarks are renamed, as he lies on the rocky tomb,
which can open to reveal “Immortality” (7:56), by Tyburn’s Brook (8:1), in a temple
garden. The Spectre, seeing the Lamb of God here, desires to supplant this true Cherubim
vision with the “Abomination of Desolation” (7:70) as Jesus predicted (Mark 13.14; Matt.
24. 15-16). It is against such spectrous desire that Los struggles in his furnace. He
knows he operates within the fallen condition, inasmuch as he labors
outside the temple-city of Albion’s body, and as a consequence is himself
split
into Spectre and Emanation, but his labor at the furnace is Albion’s only hope for
reintegration. Golgonooza is here in the furnace at the center. But the separation of the
center from the circumference, inside from outside, furnace from wheels, occurs only when
the
begin page 71 |
↑ back to top
unity of the Four Zoas or Cherubim body collapses. In this
fallen state, what Albion before thought and felt as a whole becomes a neurotically
self-conscious act, so that all spontaneity of emotion and thought is lost, and the result
is a plague of doubt, guilt, and fear—a hoard of spectres.
Los’s preoccupation with the potential fall of the Word into the word, the Cherubim body
become its parody, is also Blake’s. It degenerates, on the one hand, into the wheeling
machinery of tyrannous political and religious abstraction and, on the other, into the
fiery self-destruction of atomistic concreteness. Los’s spectres are Blake’s. At the
outset of the poem Blake reminds us, in a rather confessional passage, that he is the
visionary on the “Rock of Ages” (5:23), writing with a trembling hand beside the river
Thames in Golgonooza-London, the city of art. The disintegration of the psyche and its
necessary reintegration is not only true of the “Public” body, whom he addresses in this
first chapter, but of himself. At its opening the identity of the “sleeper” is ambiguous
(4:6); it can be Albion or Blake. Thus, his reintegration in his own work brings about
redemption of the public as it enters into his images. With Los he rebuilds the
imaginative human form, which he understands literally, perceiving language itself as a
body or building (36[40]:58-59). His most personal fear, consequently, as a prophet-poet
embarking on his greatest prophetic-epic task is that in the midst of extreme
self-consciousness about his role and medium, as well as his powers, either language or
his trembling engraver’s hand will fail—the hill of Zion become Babel. If the Spectre
controls either, the Cherubim or true Word is undone and becomes the Covering Cherub of
the warring wheel and furnace.
Employing his literal method, Blake introduces his own uncertain hand as the personage
“Hand,” who contends with Los and is developed as a major, ambiguous figure in the rest of
Jerusalem. Blake desires not to be the poet whose hand “trembles” with
self-doubt, but the prophet in Ezekiel who boldly stretches “forth his hand” into the
furnace between the wheels of the Cherubim and seizes the “coals of fire” (10:2,7). Blake
in this role seizes his fiery etching acids and cuts verbal and graphic images into the
metal plates of his prophecy. Significantly, Hand first appears to Los as a “triple-form”
(8:34) mockery of the fourfold Cherubim, his “self-righteousness like whirlwinds of the
north!” (7:73; cf. Ezek. 1.4). He takes the “bars” of his “condens’d thoughts, to forge
them: / Into the sword of war” (9:4-5), which Los, in his furnaces, labors to form into a
“spiritual sword. / That lays open the hidden heart” (9:18-19). As a Covering Cherub, the
demonic parody of the four-fold Cherubim, Hand seeks to control both the furnace and the
wheel. Sitting before Los’s furnace, he attempts to appropriate it for his own ends
(7:71), and later he so dominates Vala that her loom becomes known as the “Wheel of Hand”
(60:43).
This symbolic expansion of Hand as the supreme charlatan is not only suggested to Blake
by the editorial signature of the three accusing Hunt brothers, but very likely also by
the only human features in Parkhurst’s well-known drawing of the Cherubim, its three hands
prominently and ludicrously
4 John Parkhurst’s engraving of the Cherubim.
poking out from the right, left, and middle of the figure. Blake would have
noted the cloven hoof of this silly creature and thought it fitting (illus.4).
16↤ 16 On Blake’s derivation
of “Hand” from the Hunt brothers’ editorial signature, see David V. Erdman,
Prophet Against Empire, 3rd ed. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
1977),
pp. 458-61; for Parkhurst’s drawing, see the plate between pp. 340-41 of
Calmet’s Great Dictionary of the Holy Bible, ed. C. Taylor (London, 1800;
rpt.
Charlestown, N. C. : Samuel Etheridge, 1813), III, pl. II. E. J. Rose notes that on
Plate 26 “Hand resembles the figure of Satan in the illustrations to Job” (“Blake’s
Hand: Symbol and Design in Jerusalem,” Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, 6 [1964], 49). The number symbolism evident in Blake’s
opposition of the threefold Hand to the fourfold Cherubim is structurally, as well as
thematically, significant. He tells us in Milton that “The Sexual is
Threefold: the Human is Fourfold” (4:5), associating three with generation and death,
four with imagination and the “Human Form Divine.” Thus, the numbers four and three and
their derivatives, sixteen and twenty-eight, nine and twenty-seven, come to symbolize in
Jerusalem, respectively, imaginative and fallen forms, Christ and
Satan, the Hebrew four-headed Cherubim and the Greek three-headed Hecate. In this, as W.
J. T. Mitchell concludes, Blake “reverses the traditional numerological preference for
heavenly triads to earthly tetrads” (p. 203). Such a reversal misleads G. M. Harper,
“The Divine Tetrad in Blake’s Jerusalem,” William
Blake, ed. Rosenfeld, and Jane McClellan (with Harper), “Blake’s Demonic
Triad,” Wordsworth Circle, 8, (Spring 1977), to conclude that Blake
was “operating chiefly in the Neo-Pythagorean tradition” (Harper, p. 254) because his
“divinity is tetradic rather than trinitarian” (p. 240), the number three being a
symbol of form without substance (McClellan, p. 172). Harper specifically discounts,
therefore, Blake’s debt to Ezekiel (p. 241), while Milton Percival,
William Blake’s Circle of Destiny, and Désirée Hirst,
Hidden
Riches, respectively, note possible sources in the Kabbalah (p. 294, nn. 8, 26)
and the Arora of Paracelsus (p. 68).
Yet Blake’s source is
clearly Ezekiel’s Cherubim vision, the fourfold man, who is Jesus the true God, form
of the fourth in the fiery furnace, opposed to the abstract, tyrannously dogmatic
trinitarian God. In this view Blake was very likely influenced by Parkhurst’s
interpretation of the Cherubim, which he contrasts to the “material
Trinity of Nature” (italics his) “adored” by the “heathen” (p. 343). The very
body of Blake’s prophecy reflects this opposition, as Stuart Curran observes in “The
Structures of Jerusalem” (Blake’s Sublime
Allegory): “at the end of each of Jerusalem’s four chapters
Christ the Eternal is invoked. But if we divide the poem into three parts, we find
ourselves confronting climactic symbols of the fallen state” (p. 334), a structure
recapitulated in each chapter. In his picture of Hand on Plate 26 (IB305), he
presents the insidious Cherubim imposter as a fire-cloaked Christ in a satanic pose with
nail-wounded hands, a mockery of the stigmata of the Christ rising in flames over Adam and
Eve on Plate 31[35](IB310). When Hand ceases to exist in this form and is redeemed as the
Cherubim (Ezek. 1.81, 10.21), however, he becomes the hand of God himself and, for Blake
as poet-engraver, his own hand.
As Hand’s deception is clarified, Los simultaneously becomes aware that Hand can only be
defeated—parody restored to reality—by reuniting the wheel and furnace as living
contraries in imaginative vision. Accordingly, Los dominates the next three
transformations (fourth-sixth), forcing us to view Albion’s landscape from three points of
view, respectively, that of Los himself, Los as Ezekiel, and Los as Blake. In the fourth
transformation (9:32-12:34) Los remains the visionary by Tyburn’s brook, but the tomb of
the previous scene, an image of regeneration (7:67), is now renamed a grave stone
begin page 72 |
↑ back to top (10:54), because the Spectre of Man is fully revealed as the
“Reasoning Power, / An Abstract objecting power than Negatives every thing” (10:13-14). He
has entered the Temple (10:16) as the Abomination of Desolation and driven out the vision
of furnace and wheels. In face of this, Los intensifies his labor outside the temple walls
at the furnace (9:34-35), convinced that the encircling “Wheels of Albion’s Sons” are
ultimately redemptive, “Giving a body to Falsehood that it may be cast off for ever. / . .
. piercing Apollyon with his own bow!” (12:13-14). Thus, the wheel and furnace are not
absolutely fallen in their separation. The wheels reach from the “starry heighth to the
starry depth” (11:12) and so by imaginative labor can be used in their fallenness against
Hand or the angel of the bottomless pit, as John saw in Revelation (9:11). And out of the
furnaces comes imaginative space, Erin, to fill the void between the starry wheels in
order to consolidate and clarify error so that it may be easily identified and cast
out.
With this hope, Los appropriates the true Cherubim vision at its source, becoming in the
next transformation (12:25-15:5) Ezekiel himself by the Chebar (12:58). From this
perspective we learn that the “dark Satanic wheels” (12:44), taking the form of wheels “as
cogs / . . . in a wheel, to fit the cogs of the adverse wheel” (13:13-14), are explicitly
the fallen version of Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels. But we are focused on the product of
the furnace: the “great City of Golgonooza” (12:46). With its “four Faces towards the Four
Worlds of Humanity / In every Man,” this city is also the fourfold Cherubim body; “And the
Eyes are the South, and the Nostrils are the East. / And the Tongue is the West, and the
Ear is the North” (12:57-60). Los now lies on “Mild Zions Hill” (12:27) rather than on the
grave stone, because even though this temple-city-body is surrounded by the “Twenty-seven
Heavens” of death (13:32), it is a city of “pity and compassion,” a building of hope
against the void. Los knows that the inside and the outside, the furnace and the wheels,
of vision can be restored to unity because even the fallen “Vegetative Universe, opens
like a flower from the Earths center: / In which is Eternity. It expands in Stars to the
Mundane Shell / And there it meets Eternity again, both within and without” (13:34-36).
The ultimate significance of this fact is revealed in Blake’s illumination at the bottom
of Plate 14 (IB293), where we are reminded that Los is struggling on Albion’s behalf, who
is pictured lying on a rocky tomb beside a river, with Jerusalem hovering over him as a
six-winged Cherubim. The arch encompassing her may be interpreted as part of the satanic
wheel or of the rainbow of promise accompanying the Cherubim in Ezekiel (1:28) and
Revelation (4:3), which at the end of chapter 2, as Erin’s bow, encloses the wheels of
Albion’s sons (50:22). This vision of Albion is a counterpoint to Los’s of Golgonooza, for
here, without Los’s hope, he is sad and indifferent.
At this crucial point, hope discovered in the face of indifference, Los, Blake’s
surrogate, gives way in the sixth transformation (15:6-16:69) to Blake himself. He is
sustained by the previous Cherubim vision of the “Four-fold Man” (15:6) but prays for
strength: “That I may awake Albion from his long & cold repose” (15:10). Blake is
haunted, as when he began his task, by the same spectre of doubts and paralyzing
“Reasonings,” as he says, “bruising my minute articulations” (15:12-13). Consequently, we
again see fallen Albion lying on his rock (15:30, 16:27) by “London’s River” (the Thames,
16:40), his counties fleeing out of the temple-city gate (16:30), and as a result the
wheels of the Cherubim vision are “wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic / Moving by
compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which / Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve
in harmony & peace” (15:18-20). These wheels of compulsion are those of mental and
physical slavery, the “loom of Locke” and the “Water-wheels of Newton.” Hence, the
furnaces separate from them and become for Blake the literal sacrifical altars (15:34) of
English sweatshops.
Against this fallen condition, Blake reasserts his poetic-prophetic method, that is,
transformation of the archetypal Cherubim vision: “All things acted on Earth are seen in
the bright Sculptures of / Los’s Halls, & every Age renews its powers from these Works
/ . . . Such is the Divine Written Law of Horeb & Sinai, / And such the Holy Gospel of
Mount Olivet & Calvary” (16:61-69). Los’s sculptures[e] are those of
the Cherubim Blake
refers to in his Descriptive Catalogue, “which were sculptured and
painted on walls of Temples” (E522/K565).17↤ 17 Blake has in mind the “Cherubim of cunning work” on the
veil of of the Temple (Ex. 26.1; II Chron. 3.14), “emblems” that Parkhurst claims the
Jews felt “to be foundation, root, heart, and marrow of
the whole Tabernacle” (p. 356; italics his). Ansari, “Blake and the Kabbalah,”
notes the analogue of this in the idea of the cosmic “curtain,” described in the Book of
Enoch, “on which is inscribed the pre-existing reality of forms and images of every
event and passion” (p. 220). By
transformation of this archetype, the body of prophetic art is created, the contrary union
of wheel and furnace, “Law” and “Gospel,” the universal and the particular. This
inheritance of art as body liberates Blake from the imitative bondage of classical art.
The cavern of Mt. Sinai, where the word originated, is transformed into Mount Olivet,
where the Word is revealed as a living body. The false body of error is cast off to reveal
the naked beauty of the true Word. The fires of Los’s furnace forging a new
temple-city-body are Blake’s etching fires creating the body of
Jerusalem, as well as a new people of England, by removing a false covering.
Because Los-Ezekiel-Blake’s activity has been confirmed and the circumstances of Albion
are now to be presented in their starkest form, along with his realization of his true
state, the furnace is obscured in the last two transformations of the chapter (17:1-19:47,
20:1-25:16) by the wheels. We return to Albion lying on his rock by the Thames (19:40),
but without the comfort, as in the chapter’s opening, of the city of Golgonooza in the
promised land even as we observe Albion in Egypt. He is now emphatically in “Babylon the
City of Vala, the Goddess Virgin-Mother. . . . Nature!” (18:29-30, 21:30), which Blake,
like Ezekiel and John, draws into sharp opposition to the city of Jerusalem.18↤ 18 Ezek. 8-11, 40-48; Rev. 17, 21.
See Farrer, pp. 167-68. Moreover, he ironically parallels the building of
Golgonooza, earthly image of Jerusalem (12:25-13:27), with that of Babylon (24:25-35).
“Nature” or Vala rules Babylon, the city of slavery, because Albion is held captive by
what his age promulgated as the Natural Law of religion (Deism), politics (kingship) and
poetics (the classics), epitomized for Blake in the cold, determinist wheels of the
zodiac. Such an imaginative hold did this abstract philosophy have, that it was in his
view ultimately responsible for the grinding down of individual people slaving at the
looms in Spitalfields.
begin page 73 |
↑ back to top
5 Jerusalem, Plate 22 (copy A).
British Museum.[e]
Albion only becomes truly aware of his enslaved situation as he is able to recognize the
Cherubim imposter. His wheels are absorbed into the great wheel of Hand (momentarily taken
over from Vala), who reveals himself as the Covering Cherub, a demonic triple-form (18:8).
Albion, sitting on a “rocky form against the Divine Humanity” (19:35) in this penultimate
transformation of the chapter (17:1-19:47), is horrified by such “An Orbed Void of doubt,
despair, . . . & sorrow” (18:4). Enslaved by Hand’s “Starry Wheels,” the whole of his
inner or imaginative world is turned inside out, “His Children exil’d from his breast”
(19:1). The product of Hand’s wheels is a deceitful veil, which in the last transformation
of the chapter (20:1-25:16) covers Albion in the form of nature or the Mundane Shell
(42:81, 59:7) and Moral Law (21:15, 23:22), a false Body (55:11, 65:61, 90:4) separating
him from reality. The rock on which he sits, consequently, is renamed Luvah’s sepulcher
(21:16), and he now realizes that his temple-city is Vala’s “Scarlet Tabernacle” (22:30).
He yearns for the “Veil” to be rent (35:36), as it was at the death of Jesus (cf. 30:40,
55:16, 65:61; Matt. 27.51), and as Vala spreads her “scarlet Veil over Albion” (21:50),
the exiled Jerusalem poses a pivotal rhetorical question: “Why should Punishment Weave the
Veil with Iron Wheels of War / When Forgiveness might it Weave with Wings of Cherubim?”
(22:34-35). Flames from the furnace of the true Cherubim consuming the wheels of war are
pictured in Blake’s illustration at the bottom of Plate 22 (illus.
6 Jerusalem, Plate 41 [46] (copy A).
British Museum.
5). Albion’s identification of these wheels as imposters is crucial to his
salvation; for only then is the Cherubim of forgiveness, the whirling love-sword mocked by
the fiery star wheels drawn by four cowering old men pictured on the bottom of Plate 20
(IB299), revealed as imagination and liberty, Jerusalem herself.
By successively renaming and shifting emphases, thus changing the relations of the
archetypal elements of Ezekiel’s vision—the furnace and the wheel—in their exile from the
visionary’s landscape, Blake completes Albion’s public judgment. Moreover, the reader’s,
as well as Blake’s, is also complete. At the end of this chapter Albion realizes, as he
did not in the opening transformation, why he is fallen and precisely what his situation
is, admitting: “O human Imagination O Divine Body I have Crucified / I have turned my back
upon thee into the Wastes of Moral Law: / There Babylon is builded” (24:23-30). By exiling
imaginative vision from the temple-city of his own body, Albion crucifies himself. He
sacrifices his body on the altar of “Law” and “demonstration” begin page 74 |
↑ back to top
based on doubt in the connection of humans with each other and with the world. Blake
survives his own self-judgment, exorcising the spectres of sorrow and self-doubt, by
entering Ezekiel’s vision and creating with it his prophecy, which in turn invites his
readers to enter into its “Visionary forms dramatic.” If they accept this invitation not
to consider these images at a distance but to embrace them, they will be liberated with
Blake from the bondage of doubt, and will wake from the nightmare of separation from each
other and the natural world. They will receive their imaginative soul back from exile.
Albion’s redemptive realization, that is, becomes our own as we enter into and move
through Blake’s transformations of the Cherubim vision.
Blake continues to bring historical and personal imaginative errors under judgment
throughout the rest of his poem by continually renaming and so shifting our perspective,
until, in the final transformation of the last chapter, the wheel and the furnace unite as
true Contraries and return from exile to Albion’s temple-city-body. We will examine in the
remainder of this essay some pivotal transformations. In the second chapter, addressed to
the “Jews,” the dialectic of the true and false sacrifice becomes more acute. Throughout,
Albion in a familiar landscape sits on his rock (28:10, 34[38]:1, 38[43]:79, 43[29]:2,
48:4) beside a river (28:14, 30[34]:48, 37[41]:8, 43[29]:3, 44[30]:24, 45[31]:59, 47:2) in
Babylon. But at the heart of the chapter Albion’s sacrificial body itself becomes a parody
of the true body of the Cherubim. When Los, in the third transformation of the chapter
(not counting the proem; 35[39]:12-42:81), personally enters “Albions House” (36[40]:24)
or body, he opens his Furnaces before Albion (42:2), but “dark, / Repugnant,” he “rolld
his Wheels backward / into the World of Death” (39[44]:5-9). Albion has sacrificed himself
in a parody of the true sacrifice of Jesus, and, as a result, Los discovers in this temple
“A pretence of Art, to destroy Art: a pretence of Liberty / To destroy Liberty”
(38[43]:35-36). Albion’s twenty-eight friends, one in Los-Jesus (35[40]:4,46), respond “in
love sublime, & as on Cherubs wings / They Albion surround with kindest violence to
bear him back / Against his will thro Los’s Gate to Eden: Four-fold; loud! / Their Wings
waving over the bottomless Immense” (39[44]:1-4). They offer to act as Albion’s guide into
Eden, but are rebuffed because his will cannot be bent; he has chosen to close off his
body to genuine self-sacrifice in Los’s Furnaces, thus mocking with his own body the
imaginative body of the One Man of the Cherubim.
The sacrifical body of chariot that Albion chooses is pictured on the lower half of Plate
41[46] (illus. 6) in all its horror, as a false body, and all its humor, as a parody of
the Cherubim. This chariot vision, its chassis and wheels formed by serpents, which Blake
associates with the Druid Serpent Temples of stone devoted to human sacrifice and nature
worship, is revealed as the Covering Cherub. The serpent heads thrust forward, but their
deathly rigid bodies have hardened into yokes and wheels that insure no escape or
movement. Flames from the “Furnaces of Los” glimmer feebly beyond the wheels, while each
beast of Ezekiel’s vision (Ezek. 1.10) is satirized. The shaggy lion manes serve only to
make the men’s faces appear more pompous in their grim determination to move ox-hoofed
bodies, clearly fixed to the ground. And the emaciated eagle-men on their backs, who hold
forth quills as if simultaneously wishing to give them away and commanding the chariot to
move on, satirize the prophet proclaiming change. Instead of the movement that Ezekiel
emphasizes in his vision, where every one “went straight forward” (Ezek. 1.7, 12, 17, 23;
10.11, 22), this chariot is totally static, an image of paralyzing self-doubt. The two
horns of the maned heads curl into serpentine coils and end in hands, each gesturing in
opposite directions.19↤ 19 Blake develops this parody in an
illustration to Dante’s Purgatorio, “Beatrice addressing Dante from
the Car” (c. 1825), reproduced by Martin Butlin in William Blake: Catalogue
of the Tate Gallery Exhibition (London: Tate Gallery, 1978), pl. 74. The vortex
of the wheels, Albert S. Roe observes, Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine
Comedy (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), are “deliberately
introduced by Blake” in a departure from the text (p. 166). The wheels of Ezekiel’s
vision are perverted in this image of death, as is the fourfold man by the three female
forms in its whirlpool. Moreover, the four beasts are ludicrously depicted. Blake’s
caricaturing of the Zoas goes back to an early sketch in Vala, p. 136;
John E. Grant briefly discusses the larger context of such caricature in “Visions in
Vala: A Consideration of Some Pictures in the Manuscript”
(Blake’s Sublime Allegory, pp. 198-99, n. 60).
Albion, who sits with Vala in
the chariot, passively lets the reins drop. His face mirrors the lion men’s, its
determined expression working against his body, which has become the sacrificial altar of
stone itself.
If the “Jews” worship the paternal God of vengeance and sacrifice, the “Deists,” whom
Blake addresses in chapter 3, worship the maternal Goddess of Nature and Natural Law. She
is both womb and temptress, protector and tyrant. As Deist, Albion is thus imprisoned in
the coils of serpent nature. And as he sleeps (60:69), in the third transformation of the
chapter (not counting the proem; 60:1-63:25), by Tyburn’s brook (62:34) in the city of
Babylon (60:23), his rock is renamed a Dungeon of Babylon (60:39) where he is forced to
labor at the “iron mill” (60:59). This is the mill wheel in his mind of abstract
generalizing that grinds all the minute particulars of art and life into nothing. And
though the Divine Vision appears in Los’s furnace outside the city (60:5), even walking
among the “Druid Temples & the Starry Wheels” (60:7), Jerusalem’s reason has become
the “Wheel of Hand” (60:43); and Albion returns to his labors in the dungeon, the chariot
of the Cherubim having become a raging war chariot (63:11).
The problem with the “Christian,” though they claim to worship the Cherubim, the
resurrected body of Albion-Jesus or imaginative liberty, is that they habitually mistake
the mortal for the resurrected body. At the center of Blake’s oration addressed to them,
consequently, are two tranformations of the Cherubim (80:57-86:64, 87:1-93:27) which
separate the true from the false body. In the first of these, Albion sleeps by the
Euphrates (82:18) on a rock (84:7) in Babylon (82:18), a landscape revealing his
imaginative death. But Los works outside the gate at his furnace, despite the “Spindle of
destruction” (84:30) whirling overhead, to give Hand a body so that the unimaginative may
be cast out once and for all. We are reminded that the furnace and wheel are still
separate—the “Male is a Furnace of beryll, the Female is a golden Loom” (90:27)—and, like
Hand in the furnace, the “Starry round” (88:2) is revealed for what it is, the false body
of the “Dragon” Antichrist (89:53), serpent Satan. At the same time, however, Los glimpses
their potential unity in his vision of the still imprisoned Jerusalem as the Cherubim, a
temple-body with “Gates of precious stones” (85:23). Her “Form is lovely mild, . . . Wingd
with Six Wings,” and her bright “forehead . . . Reflects Eternity” (86:1-15). More
important, Los sees in her “translucent” body her own landscape, “the river of life . . .
/ the New Jerusalem descending out of Heaven” in “flames,” clear as the “rainbow”
(86:18-23). Here is a reminder of Erin’s promise in her rainbow that the wheel and the
furnace will be united in Jerusalem, who will return to Albion.
begin page 75 |
↑ back to top
This perspective opens out in the next transformation as Albion becomes the dreamer
beside a river, renamed the Thames (89:20, 90:47), on a rock, renamed Golgotha or the
Sepulchre of Luvah-Jesus (92:26). His landscape now reveals the imminence of his awakening
and resurrection; the body of imagination, the Lamb of God, will burst open the sepulchre
and rend the veil in Albion’s “triple Female Tabernacle” of “Moral Law” (88:19).
Accordingly, Los manages to give Hand a body, “Satan” the “Body of Doubt that Seems but Is
Not” (93:20) and is cast off at the resurrection. We are also forced to view the
destructive wheels of the loom overhead weaving a mortal “Womb” (87:14). The Covering
Cherub, moreover, in contrast to Los’s vision of Jerusalem in the previous transformation,
is presented as the false temple-body, a demonic parody of the Cherubim (89: 14-51).
Instead of reflecting the unity of eternity, the Covering Cherub’s mortal body is
fragmented into a “Head, dark, deadly” whose “Brain incloses a reflexion / Of Eden all
perverted,” while his “Bosom wide reflects Moab,” his “Loins inclose Babylon on
Euphrates,” and his “devouring Stomach” is a tabernacle of “allegoric delusion & woe.”
This is the body of “Minute Particulars in slavery, . . . / Disorganizd” and sacrificed to
“Generalizing Gods.” Torn to pieces, his “ribs of brass, starry, black as night,” mock the
rainbow of true vision. He lies brooding on “ridges of stone” beside “the Dragon of the
River” Euphrates in a parody of Ezekiel’s landscape, while his “Furnaces of iron” and
black wings mock Ezekiel’s vision. Furthermore, in a parody of Los’s Jerusalem-Cherubim
witnessing to the unity of vision and its scene, his stomach devours its landscape “From
Babylon to Rome / . . . the World of Generation & Death” (89:48-49). Hence, the
Covering Cherub can no longer be mistaken for anything other than a “majestic image / Of
Selfhood, Body put off, the Antichrist” (89:9-10). So ends his masquerade.
This apocalyptic consolidation of error clears the way for the resurrection of the true
body. The furnace and wheels of the Cherubim are at last united in the final
transformation of Jerusalem (94:1-99:5), and together they return from
exile, becoming the temple-city-body of Jerusalem, as in Revelation (21.2-3,22-23). The
body now becomes its own scene, the scene its body. Albion’s rock (95:1) is renamed an
“Immortal Tomb” of “Resurrection” (94:1, 98:20), and the ocean beside him renamed a river
of Paradise (94:6, 98:25). In deathly slumber he moves “Beneath the Furnaces & the
starry wheels” (94:2). He has made attempts to move before, getting only as far as the
East gate of his temple-city, but now as the Four Zoas rise into “Albion’s Bosom” (96:42),
he awakes from death and walks in “flames, / Loud thundring with broad flashes of
lightning” (cf. Ezek. 1.13-14; Enoch 14.12; Rev. 4.5), “speaking the Words of Eternity in
Human Forms” like a prophet (95:5-9). He takes the living “Bow” of the starry wheels,
which Erin redeemed, making it into a bow that fires “arrows of flaming gold,” and, one
with Los-Jesus, throws himself into the “Furnaces of affliction” (96:35) uniting wheel and
furnace. These Contraries in turn become “Fountains of Living Waters flowing from the
Humanity Divine” (96:37) into the temple-city-body of “Golgonooza” (98:55), the “Four
Living Creatures, Chariots of Humanity Divine” (98:24). Thus the furnace and the wheels,
for the first time in Jerusalem, are recalled from exile. Albion’s
landscape and vision are unified; its emblem is his embrace of Jerusalem, together forming
a flame-engulfed bow on Plate 99 (IB378). The center and circumference are no longer
separate because of the “rejoicing in Unity / In the Four Senses” of the Cherubim and “in
the Outline the Circumference & Form, for ever / In Forgiveness of Sins” (98:21-23),
which is the only true Christianity, the religion of Jesus or Imagination. This is
Albion’s ultimate liberation from the idolatry of the deceitful mortal body, his freedom
from the mind’s male and female errors, worship of an abstract paternal God or maternal
Nature.
In Albion’s resurrected body, the new Jerusalem, there is no accuser causing fear and
doubt because there is no self-division. Here, in Blake’s last Cherubim transformation of
his phophecy, the “Hand of Man,” like that of the man in linen commanded to go between the
wheels of the Cherubim and gather coals to scatter over the city in a prophetic gesture
(Ezek. 10.2), “grasps firm between the Male & Female Loves” (97:15), between the
furnace of beryl and the wheels of the loom. Blake has not arrived at ecstasy, but he has
reached out with his firm engraver’s hand and achieved the prophetic end of rebuilding a
people and a city by transformations of Ezekiel’s Cherubim, whose wings weave forgiveness
of oneself as well as others. Its body is for Blake a symbol of the unity of man and his
imagination, of inside and outside, the visual and the verbal; but it is also a body in
the most literal sense—Jerusalem itself.
