LUVAH'S ACCOUNT OF THE PHALLIC FEMALE


(23:16-17). Without having direct awareness of Enion's plight as such,
Luvah attempts to feed the insatiable "Earth-worm" in "the cold & dark
obscure" (26:7); Urizen, however, avoids consciousness of all such feed-
ing. Luvah's action thus directly inverts Urizen's cosmological suppres-
sion. Luvah compulsively feeds the worm instead of ignoring it, but this
action merely serves to establish the feeding cycle Enion bewailed in
Night I.
 Luvah hides this female Worm which becomes a Serpent (thus enacting
a male hiding a female, as Enion initially desired), an act which leads,
through repetitious detours, to this female being hidden from Luvah.
Whereas Urizen's avoidance of his sexuality has led (unknown to him) to
the fleeing of nations from Albion's loins, Luvah's repressed sexual energy
(appearing in his speech as a form of feeding) transforms the Earth-worm
into a Serpent and then into a Dragon. In this phase of Luvah's account, the
progressively engorged worm clearly parallels an enlarging phallus, albeit
identified as a female form, a subliminal hermaphrodite. In its next phase,
Luvah's Worm becomes a sexual offspring, a "weeping Infant" (27:2) that
he carries in his "bosom as a man carries a lamb" (27:3), a transformation
which overlaps several prior image clusters: the female (Enion) as a starv-
ing worm; the male Spectre, associated both with "wayward infancy" and
with the "raging serpent"; Los and Enitharmon as "Infants"; their feeding
on the flesh of Lambs; and, more distantly, the Lamb of God. In the final
phase of Luvah's narrative account, the female infant becomes the mother
of his "sons & daughters," re-enacting the exteriorization of Jerusalem's
children in response to Urizen's act of creation.
 Luvah perceives the walls that enclose him (which, from the perspective
of the narrative proper, are the walls of the Furnaces created by Urizen) as
having been built by the sexual offspring of the female Dragon who are his
own "sons & daughters" (27:7-9). Luvah's inability to make references to
Los/Enitharmon and Tharmas/Enion or to the architectural creation
occurring in the narrative proper results directly from Luvah's role as an
inversion of Urizen's sexual suppression. Luvah has assumed the interior
(hidden) aspects of the other characters' attempts to create coherent
fictions around their identities. Thus Luvah's tale connects the story of the
Fallen Man with the narrative accounts of Los, Enitharmon, Enion, and
the Spectre. Because Luvah perceives his act of nurturing the hungry
Worm as a source of hate, not of love, his account also resurrects the
relationship between the parasitic Feast and the substitution of hate for love
that pervaded the Tharmas/Enion and Los/Enitharmon plots in Night I.
If it were possible for Luvah to feed the hungry Worm to the point of
satiation and not have it turn back upon him (i.e., transform itself into a
Serpent, which Luvah experiences as an inexplicable transformation of
love into hate), then the world of Urizen would have some possibility for
love.
 As soon as he acknowledges his enclosure in "walls of iron & brass,"
Luvah shifts from his narrative account to explanatory accusations. He


Luvah's account of feed-
ing the female worm
(associated with Vala)
inverts Vala's feeding the
furnaces where Luvah
dwells.






Luvah's tale: the threats
of the serpentine female:
the transformation of the
dangerously expanding
and poisonous phallic
female into, first, an
infant "a span long"
(27:2) -measurably
analogous to a human
penis-and, then, into a
mother









Cf. the male Dragon
form into which Urizen
falls in Night VIII
(106:25-107:20)