FOUR ZOAS IX / 133:11-30 (5:29-133:30)


The Eternal's repression
 of the feminine gender
 of Beulah created by the
 Lamb of God
























 The harvest feast as a
 covert wedding feast
 for the Lamb and
 Jerusalem, enacted
 through the Eternal's
 need to evade the con-
sequences of the separate
 female


There he reveld in delight among the Flowers / Vala was pregnant...
(83:9-12). In this reading, the Eternal is completely cut off from any
awareness of the heterosexual joy of the Eternal Man with Vala which, in
the Shadow's account, created Urizen and Luvah (83:12-16): the Eternal
can perceive "the Flowers of Beulah" only as a place of "repose."
 Because the Eternal emphasizes Beulah as a place of sleep, the Eternal
 should be aware that Beulah is the creation of the Lamb of God (5:29-33).
 His blindness to this fact seems to derive from the Eternal's need to repress
 female separation: in Night I Beulah is "feminine" (5:30); in the Eternal's
 speech, it seems to have no gender at all. This lack of awareness of the
 Lamb's role in creating Beulah insinuates into this entire situation a suspi-
 cion that the unnamed female who separates at the feast could be Jerusalem
 and that the sub-embedded feast which celebrates the "harvest" in the
 South is simultaneously a celebration in Beulah of the hidden marriage of
 the Lamb to his "bride & wife" Jerusalem.
 In this subversive reading of the sub-text of the Eternal's speech, the
 significance of the term "Consummation" in Night IX suddenly leaps
 into new significance, for its meaning as perfection or completion par-
 tially conceals its meaning as sexual fulfillment after marriage. Since the
 Lamb of God has been closely associated with aspects or versions of Luvah
 and Vala-for example, he "descended thro the twelve portions ofLuvah"
 (105:55) and was nailed to the Tree of Mystery by Tirzah and Rahab
 (identified as "Mystery") (105:31-106:6)-it is significant that "Consum-
 mation" is used in Night IX exclusively in relation to characters or events
 related to Luvah and Vala. "Rahab & Tirzah...give up themselves to
 Consummation" (118:7); "Mystery... in these flames of Consummation"
 (120:4); "Let Luvah rage...even to Consummation" (120:32); "they
 strove to Enter the Consummation" with the vision of "the Cloud of the
 Son of Man" (123:27-124:4), an image closely associated with Luvah as the
 "Son of Man" in the cloud in Night III (40:19-41:3). It is also important to
 recall that Luvah's flames serve the wine at the feast where the female
 separates, and then that separation is repressed.
 This reading opens up the possibility that the primary function of the
Eternal's speech is to enact the hidden Lamb's triumph by obscuring sexu-
ality in general and the female's separation in particular. Considered in this
light, the event recently presented in the narrative proper as the "mild"
(and therefore Beulah-like) embrace of Tharmas and Enion has been per-
ceived by the speaking Eternal as an absorption into "Selfish cold repose,"
while Tharmas and Enion's joining the feast has been seen as a return to
joy. This double blindness is confirmed when the Eternal makes no refer-
ence to "Sin" or indeed "the female" at all, even though his speech is
apparently intended as a direct response to the crisis of female separation.
Both the embrace between Tharmas and Enion and the separation of the
female which just occurred in the narrative proper are obfuscated by his
speech, just as the Eternal Men's immediate perceptions were mystified by
"remember[ing]" the "Days of old."