FOUR ZOAS I / 18:9-21:19


Luvah's robes of blood
and the Council of God
as narratively restricted
 to The Four Zoas


decisions. In fact, because of the way Blake introduces the information the
Eternals possess, their knowledge seems extraordinarily, even unnecessar-
ily, limited.
 The fact that the "Council of God," like "Luvahs robes of blood,"
appears by name only in The Four Zoas,34 suggests that both of these
terms, structures, or image-complexes are fictions that have primary rele-
vance to the narrative techniques of this poem alone (though they may
bear analogy to elements in other Blake poems). However differently
similar images may function in other poems by Blake, these forces are not
unproblematically providential in The Four Zoas.


 Eternity Bracket: First Embedded Structure: The Messengers from
 Beulah Report
 Even though this section begins with "Then," the Council does not
 meet directly in response to the "image of Eternal Death" at which "Eter-
 The problematic con- nity grand" (18:9) nor to the immediately preceding actions of the Eter-
 vening of the "Council nal Saviour (18:11-15); and The Council of God does not fuse into the
 of God" as "One Man"
 "One Man" called "Jesus the Christ" as a result of assuming Luvah's robes
 of blood (as in 13:8-9); rather, this narrative complex occurs because "mes-
 sengers from Beulah come in tears & darkning clouds" (21:8), thus
 mediating the knowledge possessed by "those in Great Eternity" through
 the ambivalent realm of Beulah. These messengers exhibit desperation in
 the discrete, disconnected statements they use to report that their brother
 The name "Albion" "Albion" is "sick" and "wanders from his house of Eternity." This infor-
 recurs here from the mation intersects one derivative strand of the previous narrative action
poem's revised title and
the pseudo-invocation that the messengers see as primary. It also glances back to the "Universal
 (4:3). Brotherhood" of the invocation. Though they report that the Daughters
 "have closed the Gate of the Tongue" (which also intersects prior informa-
 tion), the messengers are directly cut off from knowing that Eno (a
 Daughter of Beulah) has opened a center (9:4-13) which has made the
 expanded narrative possible.
 In this limited state of knowing the messengers interlock familiar infor-
 mation with explicitly new and contradictory information: "Luvah &
 Urizen contend in war around the holy tent." The Urizen/Luvah war
 "around the holy tent" obliquely parallels the image of Eternal Death
 "without" the Man's limbs, while the image of "the holy tent" per se
 appears in Night I only within the Eternity perspective. The "war" em-
 bodied in the Song at the Feast was syntactically oblique, apparently
 involving all the characters as simultaneously intertwined aspects of
 one another. Now the messengers report that war rages exclusively be-
 tween completely separate characters, instigated primarily by Luvah and
 Urizen. Their reference to the war between Urizen and Luvah gets the
 messengers an immediate introduction to the "divine presence" (a
 being or structure totally unsuspected before this point), before whom
 (21:15) they kneel, "recounting the Wars of Death Eternal." It is undecidable
 whether or not this intrusive indeterminate "divine presence" is ignorant