Blake's mythology

The prophetic books of the English poet and artist William Blake contain a rich invented mythology (mythopoeia), in which Blake worked to encode his revolutionary spiritual and political ideas into a prophecy for a new age. This desire to recreate the cosmos is the heart of his work and his psychology. His myths often described the struggle between enlightenment and free love on the one hand, and restrictive education and morals on the other.

Among Blake's inspirations were John Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, the visions of Emanuel Swedenborg and the near-cabalistic writings of Jakob Böhme. Blake's vision went further, in that he not only expanded on the world of Biblical revelation, but sought to transcend it by fusion with his own interpretations of druidism and paganism.

The longest elaboration of this private myth-cycle was also his longest poem, The Four Zoas: The Death and Judgment of Albion The Ancient Man, written in the late 1790s but left in manuscript form at the time of his death. In this work, Blake traces the fall of Albion, who was "originally fourfold but was self-divided". This theme was revisited later, more definitively but perhaps less directly, in his other epic prophetic works, Milton a Poem and Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion.

The parts into which Albion is divided are the four Zoas:

The Blake pantheon also includes feminine emanations that have separated from an integrated male being, as Eve separated from Adam:

The fall of Albion and his division into the Zoas and their emanations are also the central themes of Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion.

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