FOUR ZOAS VIIA / 90:58-59 (34:78-90:59)


 An excursus on the
 inadequacy of equating
 the body with the female
 and the spirit with the
 male.












 Note connection of
 "spirit" with "breath."

 The Spectre's attempt to
 make the body "Male"
 interferes with his
 identification of"spirit"
 with the "masculine"
 and with the narrator's
 association of the body
 with the female.



















Urizen's female counter-
 part Ahania is absent
 from Night Vila.


"infantjoy" to "Arise & drink your bliss / For everything that lives is holy
for the source of life / Descends to be a weeping babe" (34:78-81).
 At this moment in VIIa, when, due to the perception of Tharmas, Female
forms appear weaving in sweet raptured trance, the division between male
and female which has pervaded the poem since the Tharmas/Enion con-
versation of Night I seems on the verge of possibly being reified into a
division between spectre (soul, spirit, male) and body (female), extending
the implications of the Spectre's vision that the Spectres of the Dead are
Males without counterparts and that to redeem them a "Created body"
must be engineered (87:30-31, 39). This belief of the Spectre inverts his
earlier attempt (in his speech to the Shadow) to identify the created body
with the "Male." In the Spectre's story he claimed to have created Los as a
"Male... counterpart"(84:27) for the Shadow of Enitharmon because he
had abandoned Enitharmon during the process of division: when the
Spectre and Enitharmon divided into infants at "the place of seed" (84:21),
his "masculine spirit scorning the frail body issud forth / From Enions
brain" (84:24-25), much as the "female bright" issued from the nostrils
(84:14-16).
 In this aspect of his account the Spectre clearly opposes his "masculine
spirit" to the "body"; yet he refrains from identifying the "body" as
feminine, for when he says he forms a "Male to be a counterpart" to the
Shadow (84:27), which apparently becomes Los in his perspective, that
Male creation is identified by the Spectre as "That body I created" which
he then wishes to destroy (84:34-35). It is in the context of the Spectre's
attempt to reduce the body to a single gender (first implicitly female, then
explicitly male), that the Spectre first introduces (and thereby brings into
existence in the poem) the "spectres of the Dead" (84:40), the multiple
beings who share the Spectre's title, who are "planted" (like seeds, as in the
Spectre's own division), and who will burst forth as "male forms without
female counterparts" from the Shadow's pregnancy. The Spectre sustains
this reductive gender-identification of male with the created body until
Los builds Golgonooza instead of destroying the body as the Spectre
desired, which leads to Los and Enitharmon's eating the fruit and becom-
ing conscious of a need for redemption. The Spectre's role as "medium"
between Los and Enitharmon during this crisis makes him aware of the
male Spectres without counterparts and forces him to reverse his gender-
identification of the body. Now for the Spectre, "without a Created body
the Spectre is Eternal Death" (87:39).
 A key origin of the males without female counterparts, whose presence
inverts the Spectre's identification of the body with the male, resides in the
Shadow of Enitharmon's story that narratively precedes the Spectre's
account. There the Shadow revealed Urizen to be "First born of Genera-
tion" (83:13); Ahania, Urizen's feminine semblance, was nowhere to be
seen. Ahania is the only major character in the poem who does not appear
either in the Shadow's or Spectre's account; in fact, Ahania does not appear
at all in Night VIIa. As a product of the Shadow's account, Urizen is the