ABSTRACT
The new Tharmas speaks with the tragic voice of the dismembered god of the Orphic Mysteries, Dionysus, whose resurrection was the theme of his initiatory mysteries. The passages from Vala already quoted describe Tharmas, "lacerated and scattered", in the condition of Bacchus. It has been said that The Mental Traveller contains elements of all Blake's four Zoas. The Mental Traveller is a poem upon the theme of history, conceived as a perpetual cycle, with the alternate dominance of two principles, symbolized by the man and the woman. Childhood is conceived in Platonic terms as the state of perfection, the end toward which the people strive and emblem of the Golden Age. In Plato’s myth the world is alternately conducted and abandoned by the god. A moment of harmony between the two principles leads on inevitably to decadence, and the spiritual impulse weakens in the very process of realization: the youth becomes an old man.
