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.

Blake’s mythology recreates the Biblical account. The Fall as a Fall of an Aspect of God, which is a Creation-Fall: that is, that Fall is identical to the creation of the fallen world. Blake’s mythology: the fiery-haired Orc, Promethean figure of energy and desire. The poem America: Orc as the spirit of the American Revolution.

Conventional morality defines “good” as the restraint or repression of desire. Blake warns that “He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.” Repression in the long run does not work. The only answer is “expanding eyes,” the transformation of reality through the imagination.

Prose satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was begun in 1790, the beginning of the French Revolution, which inspired wild hope throughout Europe of a crucial upheaval that would transform human life. The first task in this revolutionary moment is the liberation of energy in all its forms, psychological, political, artistic.

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.