ABSTRACT
There is in Jerusalem a dichotomy of the original figure of Vala, who in The Four Zoas is at once the “shadowy” female and “the sinless soul”; now the people have Jerusalem, who is a virgin-mother of human souls, the bride of Jesus, and Vala, who is the goddess Nature, the shadowy image of the soul in this world, the “wife” of Albion, mother of bodies. Jerusalem’s children are the twice-born, those born in the eternal principle, as children of God: “For Vala produc’d the Bodies, Jerusalem gave the Souls.” Both Paracelsus and Agrippa give long lists of herbs, animals, and minerals which possess affinities with sun, moon, or some one or another of the planetary rulers. Blake’s animistic genius was not content with an inanimate sun even in the natural world. Blake’s borrowings from Boehme comprise some of the most crabbed puzzles in his own far from lucid works.
