Chapter 18 From Transitions one Descent

Chapter 18

  Descent

   Descent to the Underworld as a theme in mythology shows the hero or deity journeying into the underworld, the land of the dead and returning with a loved one or something worth talking about or expressing, heightened knowledge. The ability to do this while still alive proves him or her to be more than mortal.

Even in Genesis of the Old Testament relief from the long line of double-crossings, wrong-doings and violence, comes after Joseph’s descent into the pit. The conflict between Cain and Abel, the myopia of Noah, the shame of Lot, the double crossing of Essau and Isaac by Jacob, the double crossing of Jacob by Leah and then .…. for Joseph the pit and the  double crossing of Jacob in turn by his sons’ reports of Joseph’s death … after which, the restoration by Judah!

      However the real point of this section, connected with Blake and other accounts of descent, is about the psychogeography of descent, expounded by James Bennett. For the salient point of our theme is that the gold be found in the depths, or at least in the direction of what we’ve sometimes considered to be beneath us.

Blake and Descent

Blake’s painting of The Sea of Time and Space in Arlington Court represents the soul’s descent and return. It depicts Blake’s most  profoundly considered representation of the essential belief of Neo Platonism: namely that when we are born our souls descend into matter and our lives are the story of its crossing over the material sea of Time and Space.

  

In this allegory figures descend through cliff hung caverns to a dark tumultuous sea and re-ascend into a distant celestial world where radiant beings surround the sun’s chariot. In this energetic cyclic movement the red clad man crouching on the edge of the sea is Odysseus.  the majestic woman standing behind him pointing upwards to the shining world, Athene, looking a little like Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy that Blake had been illustrating. Here she resembles the figure of Divine Wisdom rather than the warrior.

The painting is based on Porphyry’s treatise on Homer’s Cave of the Nymphs to which Blake added details from the story of Odysseus. Here he is shown landed on Ithaca’s seashore in the cove of Phorcys, close to the cave of the nymphs. His house with its classical pillars  sheltered by trees can be seen in the distance.

Odysseus kneels against the sea which has for so long held him captive. He is throwing back to Ino or Leucothea the sea girdle that she leant him to help him return safely to the shore (in Blake’s story not Ithaca but the Phaeacian shore). The scarf-like wreath spirals upwards disappearing into a radiant cloud.  

Descent of Blake’s Los, Intuition, as Soul

     The Eleusian Mysteries were initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone in Eleusis in Ancient Greece. They represented the myth of the abduction of Persephone from her mother Demeter by Hades, the king of the underworld. A cycle with three phases, descent (loss), search and ascent, this last reunion with her mother was the main theme of the festival.

1.     Blake’s illustrations to Blair’s The Grave showing The Soul exploring the Recesses of the Grave expresses the descent of the soul  owing something to emblems of the Eleusian Mysteries             (figures on a Wedgewood vase in his possession).

2.     In the Frontispiece to Jerusalem the figure of Los descending into the recesses of the Grave i.e. exploring the underworld with the light of his Intuition, owes much to his illustration for Blair. Like the low doors leading into the crypt or cloister of Westminster  Abbey where Blake spent much of his time the door is Gothic.    The man advances tentatively but with eager profile, half             afraid, half exalted with wonder.

     This concept was of huge psychological significance to Blake for whom the salvation of humanity was dependent on Los, the Imagination, descending into what Jung would later come to call the unconscious, in order to give light and life to the soul, Blake’s Jerusalem. 

3.     Awake! Awake! Jerusalem