ANATOMIZING JESUS' SEPARATION Which to their Phantom Eyes appeared still in the Sepulcher ButJesus stood beside them in the Spirit Separating Their Spirit from their body. Terrified at Non Existence (117:1-5) Although line 117:5 adjoins the next line, "For such they deemd the death of the body" (117:6), with no intervening punctuation, I have temporarily paused at this point because doing so makes fully conscious the possibility that it isJesus who is "Terrified at Non Existence," since syntactically he is at least a viable choice for the role of implied subject. Because Blake has used punctuation visually throughout the poem to connect as well as to disconnect syntactic elements, he leaves open the possibility here that when Jesus "Separat[es] / Their Spirit from their body," he is responding by reflex to his own terror, just as Los can be perceived, "Terrified at Non Existence," tearing down the Sun and Moon by reflex. This event re- enacts the separation of the "Spirit" from the "Body" that occurred earlier in the context of the cloud of the "Son of Man" in Night III (41:1-16), thus interlocking Jesus' action here with the reappearance of the Son of Man in the Cloud in Night IX(123:27). Each character present here has appeared several times in the immediate context of Night VIII. Jesus, however, has appeared in Night VIII only in the most oblique and unresolved narrative situations: as the consolidated form of the "Council of God"; in the vision of the Daughters ofBeulah; in the Song of the Sons of Eden; and in Los's lengthy speech to Rahab which first defines "States." Even in Enion's speech in Night VIII, it is "the Lamb of God," not "Jesus," who is "soon to return / In Clouds & Fires" (110:1-2). In choosing Jesus, Blake seizes upon the least focused "redemp- tive" figure in Night VIII to perform an initiatory act-"Separating / Their Spirit from their body" -which appears to be unusually unambigu- ous for Blake, in part because it seems at first glance to be such a sudden and drastic conventional and misinformed reduction of the complex per- ceptual legacies of Night VIII. Blake has already torn loose the traditional meanings of the terms "body" and "Spirit" and transformed them into his own network ofperspectival connections. Jesus' mysterious separation of body from Spirit here in Night IX also re-enacts the separation of bodily "Clothing" from the "spectres" as told by the Sons of Eden in Night VIII (113:12-18). One origin of this impulse toward separation lies in the speech of the Spectre of Urthona in Night VIIa who takes credit for initiating the "dreadful state / Of Separation" and suggests that he, Los, and Enitharmon "Create them Coun[terparts] / For without a Created body the Spectre is Eternal Death" (87:33-34, 38-39). The Spectre views this situation as one which requires ransom and redemption (87:34) -i.e., makes Jesus or the Lamb necessarily come into existence-and Los feels compelled to "fabricate embodied semblances" (90:9). In a deleted passage the Spectre says, "till / I have thee in my arms & am again united to Los / To be one body & One spirit with him" (E, p. Jesus'separation of body from Spirit conjures up a similar separation in the context of the "Son of Man" sequence in Night III. The desire for union rather than separation Blake's deletion of these lines drives