Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakesm cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country. placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, by which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects ; thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth. the causes of its life & the sources of all activity, but the chains are, the cunning of weak and tame minds. which have the power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning.
Thus one portion of being, is the Prolific. the other, the Devouring : to the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.
But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea received the excess of his delights.
Some will say, Is not God alone the Prolific? I answer, God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men.
These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies ; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.
Here said I! is your lot, in this space, if space it may be calld, Soon we saw the stable and the church, & I took him to the altar and open’d the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended driving the Angel before me, soon we saw seven houses of brick, one we enterd ; in it were a number of monkeys, baboons, & all of that species chaind by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but witheld by the shortness of their chains : however I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with & then devoured, by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk, this after grinning & kissing it with seeming fondness they devourd too ; and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off his own tail ; and as the stench terribly annoyd us both we went into the mill, & I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotles Analytics.
So the Angel said : they phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be ashamed.
I answerd : we impose on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics
A man carried a monkey about for a shew, & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain. and conceiv’d himself as much wiser than seven men.
That last bit always reminds me of various characters in the current Administration...
And this thread reminds me that I've lost my beloved complete works of Blake and can't find it anywhere! :cry:
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