A quick run-through of the plot elements in the first half of Blake’s The Four Zoas. But then a discussion of why such a synopsis is only a useful fiction or scaffolding. The poem describes a higher order of reality falling into the lower one and becoming it. Things are metamorphosing into their fallen forms, the forms we call ordinary reality. This is a fall from a circumference to an alienated center.

Blake interprets the Fall into our suffering world psychologically and epistemologically rather than morally. The Fall was into the illusion of the subject-object split, or “cloven fiction.” The cosmic being Albion, who united all being and beings, fell, and therefore we are living in an illusion that we take for real. The imagination tries to awaken us, and thereby awaken Albion.

Why bother with the difficulties of this poem? Because Blake is showing us the nightmare we are dreaming right now. The fall of the universal being Albion is into the alienated state of the “cloven fiction,” or subject-object division. But that breeds madness. It breeds delusional “magical thinking,” which breeds strife, violence, terror, despair. We are Albion.

In The Four Zoas, Blake’s vision expands past the fall of Urizen and the conflict with Orc. The original fall was that of Albion, a cosmic being. The four Zoas—Orc/Luvah, Urizen, Los, and Tharmas—are four parts of Albion’s psyche at war. Albion falls by turning from his own emanation, Jerusalem, to Vala, who is other and not part of his own being.

In 1797, in mid-life, Blake attempted an epic The Four Zoas. Remaining in manuscript because he was not satisfied with it, it is indispensable in tracing the development of Blake’s mythology, and also contains some of his greatest poetry.

A female figure of emancipation to complement the male rebels Orc and Fuzon. Oothoon affirms desire and rejects guilt, despite the accusations of the two males in her life. Her speeches praising gratified desire expand into a praise of difference born of individuality. There cannot be “one law” governing all because all beings are different, and one law for the lion and the ox is oppression.

Blake came to see his original figure, Orc, as an ironically cyclical figure, a “dying god” figure, symbolized by Los nailing him to a rock, like Prometheus. Urizen battles and kills his own son, the fire-haired Fuzon, and nails him to the Tree of Mystery. The same image of the ironic cycle.

Blake’s mythology postulates an original unity of the divine, natural, and human that disintegrated into the fallen world as we know it. This began with the contraction of the false god Urizen from Eternity, whose fall parodies the Creation story in seven days. Los, the imagination, feels his female Emanation split from him. Their union results in the birth of Orc.

Urizen is the aspect of the divine nature that fell out of the larger cosmic identity, contracting away. His fall into a void is metaphorically identical with the creation of the fallen world, so it is a Creation-Fall. Los has to create a body for the fallen Urizen or he would plunge into non-being.

To the expanded eyes of the imagination, the American Revolution is more than a political uprising against tyranny. It is also a liberation of human desire on all levels, including sexual and natural. The limits of time and space are on the verge of being shattered, and Atlantis will rise.