Blake and Tradition
Kathleen Raine, 1962
Part 1: The Northern Sun: Visions of a Sage: The Swedenborgian Songs and Jacob Boehme and Tiriel
Part 2: The Myth of the Soul: The Sea of Time and Space, Thel and The Myth of Kore, Oothoon in Leutha’s Vale, Emblems of Love, Gates of Birth and Death, Spectors and Watchers
Part 3: The Zoas of Physical Life: Hermetic Myth, Enion, Tharmas and Mental Traveler
Part 4: The Demon Red or The Zoas of Energy, Energy is the Only Life
Part 5: The Zoas of Reason, The Tyger, The Ancient Trees, The Governor of the Unwilling, and The Children of Urizen
Part 6: What is man? Jesus and the Imagination, Satan the Selfhood, States, The Sickness of Albion
The child is the symbol of human experience as it experiences itself (66)
The Myth of the Soul which descends from an Eternal World or State undergoes experience and suffering in the world of generation and returns at last to her native state of purity. (67)
Cave of Nymphs (porphyry) Descent, Suffering and Return
All Women are Weavers in Blake’s Poetry
The Book of Thel is Neo-Platonist—Ovid and Shakespeare influence. Adonis/Anemone
Moist Soul: Soul Drenched in Moisture (109)
Mountains of the Moon: Cancer Sign (115)
Vaughan’s Cave is a place of generations. Hatched Serpent Signifies decay in new life—the womb to tomb or tomb to womb. (116)
Basilisk or Oboru is the Urizen in Alchemy
Marriage of Heaven and Hell is also Alchemy. Souls Confined in the Temporal Body. (119)
Elysian Mysteries Popular in the 1790s (128)
The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found is Blake’s retelling of Persephone and Demeter’s tale or myth. Lyca is Persephone. (130)
Lyca “Live the Death” and “Wake To The Sleep” (137)
Earthly Existence is a Dream
Lyca passes through Luna House of Canier (140)
Palace of the Deep (146)
Oothoon in Leautha’s Vale is the part of the trilogy with Thel and Lyca. There is a debate between materialistic and idealistic views of the nature of life. Love, as Plato conceived it and Blake, Shelly and Wollstonecraft understood it, is of the soul. (166)
Neo-platonic Structure poem where Oothoon weeded to Ossianic (or Norse) story. (174)
Love is Holy. Love of the body destroys the love of the soul. (212)
The Soul Has No Sex (215)
Lilly Root of Paradise—Boehme
My Pretty Rose True Poem (217)
The poet is attracted toward another woman who he renounces for the save of his wife only to find his wife turns away from him in jealousy.
Turning away from wife was a dissatisfaction with natural love and longing for an object of desire. The Muse is the Supernatural Mistress—she is Divine Wisdom.
Blake’s Sunflower is a Golden Disk representative of the Sun itself (220)
Blake’s Tyger if a Fiery Beast created in the furnaces of the demiurge. The theft of Fire is the Solar Spiritual principle. (230)
Anima Magica Absconda—Vaughan
Plutarch has a similar process.
Ardor Fierce and Liquid Venus (276)
The Mental Traveler Contains All 4 Zoas
The Book of Urizen: Enitharmon Orc Los where Orc is like Prometheus and Los is like Odin. (334)
Energy is Eternal Delight: Love is the Essence of Man’s Life (368)
Heaven in Hell and Hell in Heaven
Swedenborg (A Marriage of Heaven and Hell) was the prophet for the new age. Prometheus Unbound by Percy Bryce Shelly.
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