When Urizen created Man and walled him up in his separate organism with five senses, like five small chinks in a cavern to let in the outside light, he gave him a dual nature, male and female, so that he was at first a hermaphrodite. "The female portion of man trying to get the ascendency of the male portion caused inward strife," so a further subdivision occurred, and Man cast out his female portion, which became woman, and was a mere "emanation" of man. "There is no such thing in eternity as a female will," writes Blake oracularly, his happy experience being based doubtless on the beautiful subjection of Catherine Blake to his own overmastering personality. Yet he is bound to exclaim in "Jerusalem," "What may man be? Who can tell? But what may woman be, to have power over man from cradle to corruptible grave." We may fairly say that the inferior shadowy nature which he imputes to woman was one of those opinions which he chose to adopt, though his real and unconscious belief regarding her was possibly very different. Be that as it may, he often makes her serve as a symbol for material existence, obviously an infelicitous parallel. Having very briefly indicated the nature of Blake's religious and mystical opinions, it remains for us to say a word about his mythology. In a letter written to Mr. Butts while Blake was at Felpham, these lines occur among some verses, and will I think help us: For a double vision is always with me. With my inward eye, 'tis an old man gray; With my outward, a thistle across the way. The personification and nomenclature of these double visions of his seem to suggest the genesis of this mythology. He has peopled a twilight mental world with a dim shadowy population of personified states and conditions. They bear strange mouth-filling names, such as Orc, Fuzon, Rintrah, Palamabron, Enitharmon, Oothoon and Ololon. What each symbolizes must be determined by the reader for himself. No explanation of their separate functions will be attempted in this book. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have carried explanation and analytic criticism as far as it can be carried, and the reader who is interested in the literary matter of the prophetic books should consult their learned work as well as Mr. Swinburne's highly-suggestive critical essay. CHAPTER VI HIS MYSTICAL NATURE To the world of his own time Blake appeared a mad visionary, whose sweet impulsive early poems attracted a few of the rarer souls of the age, but whose pictures and designs were practically unknown. His genius, atmosphere, and modes of thought were antipathetic to his age, and his aims and achievement proved so difficult to understand from the point of view of that day, that he was summarily and uncomprehendingly set down as mad.