The Myth of the Fall in Blake`s Epic

Abstract

Blake's poetic endeavors may be said to be an attempt to provide a dynamic vigor to Christianity by resymbolizing some crucial doctrines. The biblical myth of the fall, for instance, is far from satisfactory. It is hard to understand that the eating of the fruit precipitated the fall of Adam and Eve. How can the acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil be represented as the source of all our woe? Moreover, Creation is not merely the prelude and necessary condition of the fall; it is the fall since it means the passage from the unmanifested One into the manifest multiplicity of nature. His myth is to solve these problems. Blake regards the creation as a result of the fall, and he accounts for the fall as psychic conflict of Albion, symbolized by the struggle for dominion between Urizen and Luvah. Urizen who had come to power constructed the mundane shell, i.e. the firmament that encompasses the natural world, the temple of the religion of suppressed sex, the temple of materialism and Natural Religion. The anterior myth, recounted at several points in Jerusalem, also explains how Albion, turning away from the Divine Vision, had fallen a prey to the sense of guilt, self-idolatry, and self-alienation. Thus Blake's myth of the fall not only implies, but cogently explicates various aspects of this fallen world.