FOUR ZOAS VIIA, VIII / 90:5-115:50 (5:1-119:4)


The Tree's role in the
transformation of the
Lamb into the "Body
dead upon the Cross"


The incorporation of the
 labors of Los and Eni-
 tharmon into the weav-
 ing plot


sexual locus of this torture of the Lamb by Rahab and Tirzah again specifi-
cally recapitulates the binding and shrinking of the senses in Nights III,
IV, and VI. It is significant that Blake locates this confluence of events in
the narrative prior to Los's explanation of "States" and the enumeration of
the "Seven" who come to die for (another re-surfaced character) Satan:
"Then Jesus Came & Died willing beneath Tirzah & Rahab" (115:50). In
this account it is Jesus, not the Lamb, who is sacrificed, and the sexual
implications of this event may subtly have shifted via the pun on "Died
willing." Once the Lamb is nailed onto the Tree, Jerusalem immediately
sees the "tree" as the "Cross" and the Lamb as a dead body: "Jerusalem saw
the Body dead upon the Cross" (106:7). From this moment on, the Tree of
Mystery disappears as an explicit element in the narrative proper, reap-
pearing only elliptically in Night IX (119:4). The nailing of the Lamb onto
the "tree" abruptly transforms the "tree" (at first explicitly in Jerusalem's
perception but soon spreading to all perspectives) into the "Cross," a term
and image that has not appeared in the poem before. Thus the nailing of
the Lamb to the "tree" makes possible the entrance of a new (and extraor-
dinarily fixed and frozen) term into Blake's perspective argument.
 This reductive transformation of the "tree of Mystery" into the "Cross"
subtly effects the loss of a large number of associations Blake has carefully
developed with regard to the Tree and at the same time introduces una-
voidable extrinsic associations between the Cross and redemption. Viewed
from a greater distance, however, the Cross is at best an ambivalent re-
demptive device. Though even to the narrator the "tree" suddenly
becomes a "Cross" with little difficulty, this transformation is initially
reported as a drastic perceptual alteration in Jerusalem: "They naild him
upon the tree," (106:2), but "Jerusalem saw the Body dead upon the Cross"
(106:7) -a perceptual transformation that instantly invades every perspec-
tive from this point on.


 Weaving/Fabricating Embodied Forms2
 The second strand of action and imagery, which at first glance seems
new to the poem, is the emergence, toward the end of Night VIIa, of the
"forms sublime" that Los (in one account) fabricates for the "dead" (or
spectrous male forms without female counterparts) who burst from the
bottoms of their tombs in Nights VIIa and VIIb or, alternatively, are
breathed from Enitharmon in Nights VIIa and VIII. This action, however,
allows Tharmas to return to the narrative surface in order to behold these
forms as explicitly "Female" who are themselves engaged in weaving "soft
silken veils of covering in sweet rapturd trance" (90:56). This apparently
decisive turning point in the poem toward the possibility of redemption is
causally rephrased and complicated in Night VIII. There the spectres
emerge "From out the War of Urizen & Tharmas" (100:1), and it is Eni-
tharmon herself who weaves "the Spectres / Bodies of Vegetation"
(100:3-4). Because this action of fabricating semblancess" (according to