William Blake revived the illuminated manuscript – as a vehicle for the revolution of the imagination – at the end of the 18th century. His Illuminated Books object to the capitalist mode of mass production and present a fusion of the visual and the literary into a form, which cleanses the relationship of the senses to the imagination. This fusion of the visual and the literary is always an existent although rarely recognized aspect of the history of books and writing. As early as antiquity there has been text, which developed an additional meaning by the way it was presented.

The Four Zoas

The Four Zoas

Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion

Jerusalem tells the story of the fall of Albion, Blake's embodiment of man, Britain or the western world as a whole.

The poetic narrative takes the form of a "drama of the psyche", couched in the dense symbolism of Blake's self-constructed mythology.

Because it includes a cast of billions, Jerusalem can seem confusing. The poem does not have a linear plot. Characters morph in and out of each other. A character can be a person and a place. Jerusalem, the Emanation of Albion, is a woman and a city. Albion, "the Universal Humanity", is a man and a land (Britain). He contains twelve sons who co-inhere with the twelve tribes of Israel, as well as Four Zoas. Every Zoa (embodying a life principle) has an Emanation (a feminine figure through which the human can become divine). The Zoas and Emanations include:

· Tharmas, the primal man, linked with Enion, an earth mother.

· Urthona, the spirit of inspiration, embodied in Los, the prophetic artist, who forges a city of art in his furnaces. Enitharmon, his Emanation, weaves beams of beauty.

· Luvah, the "feeling-function" Zoa, is Albion's spectre, whose counterpart Vala is Jerusalem's shadow. Vala eroticises war.

· Urizen embodies Reason. Gracious Ahania is his Emanation.

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