ABSTRACT
Turning to the use of myth as the horizon of expectations, this chapter compares the two versions of The Gates of Paradise. The first, subtitled For Children, was completed after he made the transition to the esoteric mode of thought, though before he had consolidated a new symbolic form. At that point in his intellectual development, Blake naively assumed that he would be able to use the exoteric to expose what he believed to have been the deleterious implications of the material laws. However, he eventually realized that he would require a unique symbolic form to structure his vision. A quarter of a century after completing the first emblem sequence, he returned to The Gates of Paradise, now targeted For the Sexes. Blake did not revise the original in the sense of correcting superficial deficiencies, but remediated his vision through what had become his own horizon of expectations, adding some mottos, a verbal apparatus and a concluding bi-modal image act, all to create a new perspective from which to view The Gates of Paradise.
