Blake and Antiquity (Routledge Classics) by Kathleen Raine

Author:Kathleen Raine [Raine, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317834915
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-12-16T07:00:00+00:00

This is the image that Blake has so dramatically humanized—to use his own word.

Bryant, in his all-permissive Mythology, identifies “Thaumas, Thamas, or Thamuz” with Dionysus. Because Blake made such extensive use of the first part of Taylor’s Dissertation on the Mysteries it would have been very strange if he had not used this pretext to add to the story of the Hermetic Thaumas that of the Orphic Dionysus, in the story of whose “fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity” he found yet another version of the ensnaring of spirit in matter. The myth of Dionysus, or Bacchus, as given by Taylor, tells how the god, while still a child, is betrayed through the hostility of Juno, who sends the Titans to offer him playthings. One of these is a looking-glass. The child-god becomes fascinated by his reflection; and while he is gazing into the glass the Titans tear him to pieces, then first boil his members, and afterwards roast them. At this point Zeus intervenes and hurls his thunder at the Titans, giving the body of the god to be properly interred by Apollo. But his heart has been snatched away by Pallas and preserved; and from this living heart he is regenerated.

Taylor explains the symbols; before the “descent” of the god, there must be an image established in matter; as in the Hermetic myth the archetypal man identifies himself with, and so enters, the “unreasonable image” or reflection, the body, so does Dionysus identify himself with his reflection. He is thereupon “distributed,” as Taylor says, in matter; the “boiling” and “roasting” of the god is symbolic of the descent into matter (water) and the reascent of the spirit through fire. Blake’s Tharmas, like Dionysus, is constantly described as lacerated, scattered, and distributed in the ocean, striving to reascend through the “smoke” into his former spiritual condition.

All these myths of captivation by a mirror, or a reflection in water, have the same meaning; and the symbolism persisted in the Alchemical tradition from which Jakob Boehme, whom Blake so greatly revered, must have derived his “Glass of the Abyss”; for the traditional language of symbols, seemingly protean, leads us back, again and again, to the same themes. There is, says Boehme, “a Glass in the Abyss, in which the source beholds itself.” In Boehme also this Glass is a feminine principle, “a Virgin of the temple, wherein the wrathfulness of the flesh discerns itself infinitely without number”; and we may remember that mermaids long continued to lure sailors to their death in the sea by the magic of the looking-glass they carried in their hands.

We must now leave the myth of Tharmas and Enion and examine that strange poem “The Mental Traveller.” This poem tells of an infant boy, sacrificed by “a Woman Old.” But then the boy-victim grows older and the woman younger, until he obtains the mastery, and binds her down; the process continues and the boy babe becomes an old man, the woman old a female

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