“The Three Classes of men regulated by Los’s hammer, and woven
By Enitharmon’s Looms, and spun beneath the Spindle of Tirzah:
The first: The Elect from before the foundation of the World;
The second: The Redeemed. The Third: the Reprobate and formed
To destruction from the mother’s womb.”
Into the myth of the harrow and horses of Palamabron, more Asiatic in tone than any other of Blake’s, and full of the vast proportion and formless fervour of Hindoo legends, we will not haul any reluctant reader. Let him only take enough by way of extract to understand how thoroughly one vein of fiery faith runs through all the prophetic books, and one passionate form of doctrine is enforced and beaten in upon the disciple again and again; not hitherto with much material effect.
“And in the midst of the Great Assembly Palamabron prayed;
O God, protect me from my friends that they have not power over me;
Thou hast given me power to protect myself from my bitterest enemies.”
Then the wrath of Rintrah, the most fiery of the spirits who are children of Time, having entered by lot into Satan, who was of the Elect from the first, “seeming a brother, being a tyrant, even thinking himself a brother while he is murdering the just,” “with incomparable mildness,” believing “that he had not oppressed”—a symbolic point much insisted on—
“He created Seven deadly Sins, drawing out his infernal scroll
Of moral laws and cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah,
To pervert the divine voice in its entrance to the earth
With thunders of war and trumpet’s sound, with armies of disease;
Punishments and deaths mustered and numbered; saying, I am God alone,
There is no other; let all obey my principles of moral individuality
I have brought them from the uppermost innermost recesses
Of my Eternal Mind; transgressors I will rend off for ever;
As now I rend this accursed Family from my covering.”
This is the Satan of Blake, sufficiently unlike the Miltonic. Of himself he cannot conceive evil and bring forth destruction; the absolute Spirit of Evil is alien from this mythology; he must enter into the body of a law or system and put on the qualities of spirits strange to himself (Rintrah); he is divided, inconsistent, a mystery and error to himself; he represents Monotheism with its stringent law and sacerdotal creed, Jewish or Christian, as opposed to Pantheism whereby man and God are one, and by culture and perfection of humanity man makes himself God. The point of difference here between Blake and many other western Pantheists is that in his creed self-abnegation (in the mystic sense, not the ascetic—the Oriental, not the Catholic) is the highest and only perfect form of self-culture: and as Satan (under “names divine”—see the Epilogue to the Gates of Paradise) is the incarnate type of Monotheism, so is Jesus the incarnate type of Pantheism. To return to our myth; the stronger spirit rears walls of rocks and forms rivers of fire round them;
“And Satan, not having the Science of Wrath but only of Pity,[57]
Rent them asunder; and Wrath was left to Wrath, and Pity to Pity.”
This is Blake’s ultimate conception of active evil; not wilful wrong-doing by force of arm or of spirit; but mild error, tender falsehood innocent of a purpose, embodied in an external law of moral action and restrictive faith, and clothed with a covering of cruelty which adheres to and grows into it (Decalogue and Law). A subtle and rather noble conception, developing easily and rapidly into what was once called the Manichean doctrine as to the Old Testament.
“If the guilty should be condemned, he must be an Eternal Death,
And one must die for another throughout all Eternity;
Satan is fallen from his station and can never be redeemed,
But must be new-created continually moment by moment,
And therefore the class of Satan shall be called the Elect, and those
Of Rintrah the Reprobate, and those of Palamabron the Redeemed;
For he is redeemed from Satan’s law, the wrath falling on Rintrah.
And therefore Palamabron cared not to call a solemn Assembly
Till Satan had assumed Rintrah’s wrath in the day of mourning,
In a feminine delusion[58] of false pride self-deceived.”
The words of the text recur not unfrequently in the prophetic books. A single final act of redemption by sacrifice and oblation of one for another is not admitted as sufficient, or even possible. The favourite dogma is this, of the eternity of sacrifice; endless redemption to be bought at no less a price than endless self-devotion. To this plea of “an Eternal” before the assembly succeeds the myth of Leutha “offering herself a ransom for Satan:”[59] a myth, not an allegory; for of allegory pure and simple there is scarcely a trace in Blake.