William Blake's Cosmologic Model

2. Blake’s cosmological model

Blake’s cosmologic model, as it was mentioned earlier, is fundamented on his visionary, being dominated by a powerful material symbolism.
As Lucretius described Nature in his verses, William Blake transposed the whole universe in his poems. The most relevant examples in depicting this fact are Vala or The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. The universe as a complex mechanism is illustrated by the first poem, since the second one offers the key in decoding the symbolism of the Prophetic works.
Jerusalem, on the other hand, reiterates these two poems, being in fact a synthesis of them. Thus, here Blake manages to create a sincro-history, or more explicitly to describe the Past, the Present and the Future in a

Understanding Blake’s model using ba gua theory The bagua theory (literally: "eight symbols") used in Taoist cosmology, is represented by eight interrelated concepts that are associated with the fundamental principles of reality. Due to their tripartite structural form, they are named "trigrams" in English.
Each of them is composed by three lines and each line, either broken or continuous, represents the fundamental principles yin and yang. The process of creation of the eight trigrams is similar to the symbolical construction of the four Zoas together with their emanative counterparts. In fact, the cosmogony imagined by Blake could be correlated at the symbolical level with the conception of the origin of the universe in Chinese philosophy. There, the evolution of the universe consists in three stages: the Primordial, the "Earlier Heaven" and the Manifested or the "Later Heaven". The universal void (Wuji) produces the Absolute (Taiji) which also produces the dual principles, named yin and yang. This duality is not only marked by contrariness but also by complementarity; the result of their interaction being the eight trigrams (bagua). Obviously, the entire process was mediated by the primordial figure Fuxi who is coreelated here with

In Alchemy, “the immanent Sun” corresponds to the Jung’s mental consciousness and “the transcendental Sun” corresponds to the archetype of the Self, namely the consciousness itself. These two aspects of the alchemical sun are synthesized by the Sol-Los duality. Los represents the immanent sun, while Sol (Urthona-the unfallen Los) symbolises the transcendental sun. Thus the dynamic of the name Los-Sol reflects the report established between the world of archetypes (Urthona/soL) and the material-mental world (Los). Orc, the son of Los and Enitharmon (the psysico-psychical Time and Space or in alchemic terms the Sun and the Moon) is the revolutionary energy which stands for Jungian libido.
His name was probably taken from Roman mythology where Orcus was identified with Hades/Pluton. Excluding the significance given in the previous chapter, Urizen’s name could also be translated as “the zenith of the world”, since in Hebrew uri means “light” (and Urizen ascends to Zenith and after this he falls). The name of his feminine counterpart Ahania comes from Sanskrit where ahan means “day”. Blake possibly was inspired from Greek mythology where Aither was the ether and Hemere the light.

Following this idea, William Blake’s characters are all archetypal figures that symbolize mental