Blake saw himself in the line of the prophets railing against social abuses, including racism, child labor, and gender oppression. What both gives rise to these and keeps them in place? The central poem “London” provides the answer: the “mind’forged manacles.”

Blake created his own mythology, which eventually included two characters whose antagonism is comparable to that of Prometheus and Jupiter. But he began by exploring the relationship of what he called Contraries, beginning with The Songs of Innocence and Experience: Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

Changes beyond what common sense deems possible would take place if the human mind could renounce the fear and hate that keep it neurotically imprisoned. The transformation of human nature and even nature itself by love, though with a final limit of time and mutability.

The drama’s conflict ends in Act 3, scene 1, with the demise of Jupiter, with two acts still to come. These are taken up by imagery of the transformation of humanity and nature, not just returning to an ordinary state free of tyranny and suffering, but beginning a metamorphosis into the paradisal.

Asia has descended to the realm of Demogorgon and catechizes him. Who created and rules all things? What is behind and beyond even Jupiter. Demogorgon says, “The deep truth is imageless.” We do not know. All we know is Love, and that is all we need to know.

A change of scene to the feminine counterpart of Prometheus, named Asia, Shelley’s invention. She and Panthea, guided by a Dream and Spirits, descend to the cave of Demogorgon in a mysterious Otherworld.

Prometheus calls up the Phantasm of Jupiter to recall the curse he once pronounced on Jupiter, which he now regrets. Mercury arrives with the Furies, who, in this drama of the mind, are the forms of human despair and hopelessness. Other Spirits arrive, sent from a poet’s imagination, saying don’t give up. End of Act 1.

Prometheus’s opening speech indicates that he has changed. He no longer hates, and would recant his curse on Jupiter, but can’t remember it. No one, even his mother, Earth, dares tell him. But Earth tells him to summon someone from a mysterious Otherworld “below” death, in which reside images which are the doubles of all things in this life.

Interest in Prometheus revived in the Romantic revolutionary age. Short poems by Goethe and Byron show his as defiant rebel. Shelley’s famous Preface to his Prometheus Unbound. The influence of Milton’s titanic rebel, Satan.

Christian writers made Pandora the Classical Eve, disobedient the “cause of all our woe.” But in the 17th-19th centuries, Pandora was transvalued as a redemptive figure, especially by Calderón de la Barca and Goethe (influenced by Calderón) in a fragment called Pandora.