After the Fall, Urizen explores his dens, bringing the fallen world into being. He follows the powerful heartbeat of the bound Orc, and sits confronting him, writing his books of laws. Orc defies him, then metamorphoses downward into a gigantic serpent. But in the beginning of a counter-movement, Los unites with the Spectre of Urthona and Enitharmon to begin the imagination’s work of redemption.

The effort to brake the Fall, although successful, has driven Lost temporarily mad, and he dances on the mountains. Enitharmon gives birth to Orc, who is chained like Prometheus. Urizen explores his dens, which are the fallen world, following the mighty heartbeat of Orc.

“All deities reside in the human breast,” said Blake. The Zoas are aspects of the fallen Albion’s mind, at odds with one another. They are also alienated from their Emanations or female counterparts, who have become split off and “other.” When that happens, the male is diminished into a Spectre, whose attitude towards what he should love and regard as his other self becomes either possessiveness or antagonism.

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.