THE CIRCLE AND THE SPECTRE


round the Circle of Destiny prior to his sinking down into the sea. Indeed,
in Night IV even the word "Circle" has disappeared from the text along
with its bounding power. In the Circle's second appearance in Night I it
was a woven, submerged sexual union between the Spectre ofTharmas and
Enion. The latter movement has been completely undone by the narrative
development of Nights I-III. In drawing the Spectre out of Enion, Los and
Enitharmon were implicitly unweaving the Circle of Destiny since the
second Circle was the woven image of the sexual union of the Spectre and
Enion, which produced Los and Enitharmon as infants in the narrative
proper.
 Just prior to the intrusion ofEno, a Daughter ofBeulah, who opened up
space and drew out time to make possible the subsequent linear, temporal
analysis of the Spectre/Circle's undoing, Los and Enitharmon had already
completed the process of separating the Spectre from Enion by drawing
in "all" of Enion's spectrous life (9:8). Structurally, that moment in Night I
intersects Night III at exactly the point at which Urizen casts out Ahania
and the bounds of (the Circle of) Destiny explicitly burst. Thus in Night I
the completion of the process of drawing out the Spectre unweavingg the
Circle) stopped short of revealing the explicit destruction of the Circle of
Destiny and shifted instead to a complex re-enactment of the events lead-
ing up to the collapse of the woven Circle. Because of the narrative detour
through the Urizen/Ahania plot in Nights II and III, the proximate narra-
tive cause of the bursting of the Circle in both its forms is Ahania's fall,
which forces Tharmas to surface into the narrative and onto the oceanic
landscape.
 A simple return to the pre-Circle of Destiny context that would initiate
an exact repetition of the Tharmas/Enion dialogue in Night I is narra-
tively and ontologically impossible; the situation at the end of Night III
and the beginning of Night IV is a complex perspective transformation of
Tharmas and Enion's narratively primal confrontation detoured through
the plots of the intervening Nights. In Night I the Spectre had to be a latent
aspect of Tharmas or it could not have divided from him as he flowed into
the ocean. But since the logic of the narrative at the end of Night III
requires that Tharmas' Spectre has been absorbed from Enion by Los and
Enitharmon, who conspired in Night II to bring about the division and
fall of Ahania and Urizen, Tharmas emerges from the ruins of Urizen's fall
bereft of his Spectre, who never appears again as such in The Four Zoas.
The syntax in 44:20-21 that overlaps Urizen's crashing down as "Prince"
with Tharmas' rearing up without his Spectre (yet in images reminiscent
of the rearing up of the Spectre ofTharmas in Night I) allows Tharmas to
repeat Urizen's casting out of Ahania by casting out Enion. Until the end
of Night II, Los and Enitharmon, the offspring of the Spectre and Enion
have been assigned responsibility for driving Enion away: now that
responsibility is transferred directly to the Spectreless Tharmas. After
Tharmas casts out Enion, "The bounds of Destiny were broken & hatred
now began / Instead of love to Enion" (45:10-11). The repetition of the


The differences between
the beginnings of
Nights I and IVas an
aspect of the transfer of
the Spectre from Thar-
mas to Los and Enithar-
mon