FOUR ZOAS VIIB / 92:17-93:33 (5:29-105:13)


 Absence of the serpent
 from the demons'song

 Neither crucified Luvah
 nor the Lamb is charac-
 terized as serpentine,
 while Orc is.


















 Transformation of the
Shadowy Female follow-
ing the second account
 ofher encounter with
 Ore













 Tharmas addresses her
 as "Vala," accepts her
 self-identification
 (93:42).


Urizen in Night VI (67:1-3). But the demons do not simply identify Ore
of the narrative proper with Luvah in the interpolated song: indeed the
demons make no reference to the serpent form Orc has assumed. The
kinship between Luvah being nailed to the tree and lying in a sepulcher
"To die a death of Six thousand years bound round with desolation"
(92:15), and Orc being bound to the Tree of Mystery as a serpent is further
complicated in Night VIII by the Lamb of God similarly being nailed to
the Tree of Mystery and placed in a sepulcher.
 The three event-clusters overlap but are by no means unequivocally
identical. In Night VIII, for example, the Lamb's crucifixion depends
structurally on the Shadowy Female's perceiving him as Luvah's murderer
at the same time that Urizen perceives him as a form of Luvah. The
demons' song in VIIb treats Luvah's being nailed to the tree and laid in a
sepulcher as if it were a cause of the emergence of Urizen's hypocritical
"arts" ("Then left the Sons of Urizen the plow..." [92:17]). In the narra-
tive proper of Night VIIa, on the other hand, Orc's serpent form on the
Tree is an effect of Urizen's hypocritical "arts." Blake strategically inserts
this inverted causal account between the two narrative accounts of Orc's
rending of the Shadow in VIIb in order to disrupt the meaning of the event
and divert attention to its pseudo-history. In the process Blake differen-
tiates Luvah from Orc as much as he identifies them. Blake thus diffuses
the significance of Orc's rending of the Shadow by inserting the demons'
song immediately following the event and then returning to a second
account of the rending immediately following the song: "Orc rent her &
his human form consumed in his own fires" (93:21). The Shadow
immediately "joy[s] in all the Conflict Gratified & drinking tears of woe"
(93:23), thus partially taking on the characteristics of Enion in Night I
who likewise drank "tears of woe" as she wove the Circle of Destiny
(5:18); drinking tears of woe is the first stage of the Shadow's attempt to
deceive Tharmas into thinking she is Enion in the next phase of the action.
 Prior to Orc's rending the Shadow, she is "nameless[.]" In the second
passage she is referred to only as "her" until, after "No more remained of
Orc but the Serpent round the tree of Mystery / The form of Orc was
gone" (93:24-25), and she is strewn on the Abyss, "to her Supreme
delight" (93:29), she is named the "Shadowy Female" (93:33). And only
when she first speaks, halting Tharmas in his flight, saying, "I am Vala," is
she identified with any previously named "character." The narrator, how-
ever, does not identify her by name. Though she says unambiguously that
she is "Vala," the narrator insists that she "varied in the War" (93:33). She is
rent "Into a formless indefinite" (93:27) by Orc, and this dissemination is
her absorption of Orc's sexual energy, thus exposing the underside of
Orc's transformation into a serpent, for the narrator calls her the "form of
life" that Orc rends while "The form of Orc was gone" (93:25-26). In the
context of Nights VIIa and VIIb Blake sustains a relentless indeterminacy
concerning the meaning, identity, and relational essence of the "Shadowy
Female," who narratively and perceptually overlaps both "Vala" and the