THE SHADOW: SEXUAL CONFERENCE WITH THE SPECTRE


the division of the sexes not from the outside as the Shadow does, but from
the inside, as the Spectre did in Night IV. And while the "fallen Man"
perceived an involuntary reflex, "a double form Vala...A Male / And
female" (83:14-15), the Spectre recalls having consciously "formd a Male
to be a counterpart to thee" (84:27). As the Shadow perceives Los and
Enitharmon enslaved to "vegetative forms," the Spectre seems himself a
"Slave" of Los, the bodily "Creation I created" (84:31). Just as the "Fallen
Man" names Luvah only to be usurped and smitten by him in the Shadow's
story, so the Spectre sees Los performing a similar (though less bloody)
function in relation to him. The Spectre also reveals his plan to lure down
Vala, not to punish her as the Shadow wants but rather to "destroy / That
body I created" (84:34-35), thereby paralleling Urizen's plan to lure the
Shadow to the Spectre to destroy Los. As the Shadow wants to punish the
figure in her story who covertly performs her own role, the Spectre reduc-
tively identifies the "body" with Los and wishes to destroy Los when-by
his own logic-it is precisely a body which he needs to unite with Enithar-
mon. Though both seem "deluded," the amount of apparently new infor-
mation (and its relatively subordinated discrepancies) seduces the reader
into disregarding the delusive context. Though this interchange occurs
within the Tree of Mystery, specifically within a form of feeding off the
Tree's poisonous fruit, in an interchange explicitly grounded in "delusion,"
we still want to seize on its information; it is as if the Spectre's temptation
of the Shadow were being re-enacted between the reader and the text. The
Eternal Man/Vala sexual encounter seems quite plausible; so does the
Spectre's response," yet they seem confusing and subversive at the same
time.
 As usual Blake provides numerous signals that these remembrances are
fictionalizations of present narrative action. The Spectre's plan to "bring
down soft Vala / To the embraces of this terror" (84:33-34) could mean that
he wants to lure Vala down to Orc. But just as easily it could signify that
Vala (in the guise of Enitharmon's Shadow) will embrace "this terror," i.e.,
the Spectre himself. In perhaps the most crucial and most delusive portion
of the Spectre's reply to the Shadow, he differentiates himself from "these
terrors [the "spectres of the Dead"] planted round the Gates of Eternal
life" (84:40-41), beings which the Spectre seems to create at this point.
The Spectre desperately wants to destroy the body (which he reductively
identifies with Los) and to annihilate the suddenly materialized "terrors"
(the spectres of the Dead) planted, like seeds, around the female "Gates."
The Spectre must see these spectres as potential perpetuations of Los:
indeed, as he has just claimed to have consciously created Los, he now
unconsciously creates "the spectres of the Dead" who have not existed as
such before. The Spectre consciously desires destruction, annihilation of
male forms, but he does not see that this destruction must be his own as
well.
 By the agency of the very sexual conference in which the Spectre is now
 engaged, these spectres will burst forth as the transformed "human


The reader is swept into
the perceptual vortex of
the Spectre/Shadow
conference.









The Spectre of Urthona
creates the "spectres of
the Dead" through the
gaps in the logic of his
speech act: though he
refers to "Gates," he does
not identify himself as a
gatekeeper, as Los
(48:19) and Urizen (65:3)
have identified Urthona.



The "Dead" appear in
conjunction with plant-
ing in Night II
(25:38-39) but are not
referred to as "Spectres."