Satan:"[1] a myth, not an allegory; for of allegory pure and simple there is scarcely a trace in Blake.
"I formed the Serpent
Of precious stones and gold turned poison on the sultry waste.
To do unkind things with kindness; with power armed, to say
The most irritating things in the midst of tears and love;
These are the stings of the Serpent."
This whole myth of Leutha is splendid for colour, and not too subtle to be thought out: the imaginative action of the poem plays like fire and palpitates like blood upon every line, as the lips of caressing flame and the tongues of cleaving light in which the text is set fold and flash about the margins.
"The Elect shall meet the Redeemed, on Albion's rocks they shall meet,
Astonished at the Transgressor, in him beholding the Saviour.
And the Elect shall say to the Redeemed; We behold it is of Divine
Mercy alone, of free gift and Election, that we live;
Our Virtues and cruel Goodnesses have deserved Eternal Death."
Forgiveness of sin and indulgence, the disciple perceives, is not enough for this mythology; it must include forgiveness of virtue and abstinence, the hypocritic holiness made perfect in the body of death for six thousand years under the repressive and restrictive law called after the name of the God of the Jews, who "was leprous."
- ↑ Leutha, the spirit or guardian goddess of natural pleasure and physical beauty, is sacrificed as a ransom to redeem the spirit or guardian god of prohibitive law or judicial faith; to him she is sacrificed that through her he may be saved. Thus, in the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, the maiden who "plucks Leutha's flower," who trusts and indulges Nature, has her "virgin mantle torn in twain by the terrible thunders" of religious and moral law: woman was sacrificed and man "fast bound in misery" during the eighteen centuries—through which the mother goddess lay asleep, to weep over her children at her waking; as in the Prophecy of Europe Time the father and Space the mother of men are afflicted and spell-bound until the sleep of faith be slept out. There again the emblematic name of Leutha recurs in passing.
