WAR: URIZEN'S RELIGION AND SEXUALITY


sexual desire and his surprise at finding the female "separate" are products
of his unconscious revulsion from sex, a fear of losing conscious control,
which revealed itself in his compulsive concentration on orchestrating the
creation of the geometrical heavens. Now, in Night VIIb, this action of
"reversing all the order of delight" is a conscious battle tactic-one version
of his attempt (in VIIa) to subdue Los by subverting his sexuality. The
mysterious subversive "fires" (dimly related to Luvah's) in the innermost
sanctuary of Urizen's "Golden Hall" in Night II are now explicitly the
appropriated "Sun" glowing over Los: Blake's diction compresses into a
single image the "intoxicating fumes" (a characteristic of the Tree of
Mystery in VIIa) of the secret inner chamber and of the "perfumes" for
Ahania in Night II with the now explicit "machinery" of Urizen's war:
"intoxicating fumes / Roll round the Temple & they took the Sun that
glowd oer Los / And with immense machines down rolling, the terrific
orb / Compell'd" (96:8-11). The syntax makes it possible that the fumes
themselves, like the machines, "roll," and urge Los's sun down "Into the
temple of Urizen" (96:15). The whole cycle of Urizen's war is even more
drastically compressed and compartmentalized: "The day for war the
night for secret religion in his temple" (96:18). Urizen's war is insepa-
rable from the "secret religion," and both necessarily involve a perverse
sexuality.
 The plot of Night VIIb analyzes "the war of Urizen & Tharmas" once
again. Los, "his loins in fires of war" (96:22), is addressed by Tharmas,
who offers Los "the ends of heaven" (97:2), precisely paralleling Urizen's
claim only a page earlier: "The ends of heaven like a Garment will I fold
them round me" (95:20). Thus, because Urizen and Tharmas (who stand
as dialectical inversions of one another) do not directly battle one another,
the war for which this phrase stands ("the War of Urizen & Tharmas"
[ 100:1]) involves the detour of that war through Los, Orc, Vala, and others
as it becomes increasingly complex. Even the verbal confrontation be-
tween Urizen and Tharmas at the beginning and the physical standoff
between them at the end of Night VI cannot occur without mediation-
language acting as spatial journey at the beginning and the Spectre acting
as barrier (guard) at the end. Thus, later in Night VIIb, one aspect of the
war is still narratively constituted by Tharmas' fleeing from Urizen, the
motif that informed Night VI: after Vala begins to emerge into power in
the narrative by sexually uniting with Orc and absorbing his energy, she
"varie[s] in the War in her delight... making Lamentations / To decieve
Tharmas in his rage to soothe his furious soul / To stay him in his flight
that Urizen might live tho in pain" (93:33-37). This action uncovers hid-
den aspects of the events at the end of Night VI when "Tharmas stayd his
flight" (75:11) in order to stand against Urizen by mediation of the Spectre
ofUrthona. Vala is able to absorb Orc's sexual energy via Urizen's "secret
religion" because Urizen's religion exists explicitly to force sexualjoy into
perverted and repressed forms. Narratively, Orc becomes "Jealous that she
was Vala now become Urizens harlot / And the Harlot of Los & the


second, in relation to the
sexuality of Tharmas,
Los, Enitharmon, and
Ore.