Monday, July 26, 2010

Blake and Jesus

Though Jesus appears often in Blake's poetry, you might reflect that he truly met Jesus when he heard that he was the ram horn'd with gold.
Long before I had met Blake, under the aegis of C.G.Jung's Four Functions, I had concluded that Jesus was a 4444 type on the Myers-Briggs test;
(if each one of the four digits represents the relative strength of one of the functions, then Jesus was four-fold, unique in fact among the human race.)

Well! fourfold! that's what the Bible is all about:
There are only two instances of four-fold in the Bible, but that's certainly not the whole picture:
The river that went out of Eden divided into four heads (Genesis 2:10); Isaiah spoke of the four corners of the earth, and Jeremiah spoke of the four winds and the four quarters of Heaven.

But it's Ezekiel of course who had most to say about four as he described the temple, followed closely by Revelation. Blake was thoroughly familiar with both of these books.

When Blake said that he must create a system or be enslaved by another man's, he wrote of four fractured facets of the Fall that divided Albion (the universal man, but not the Eternal Man); that was a key to the system he created--

In Jesus, once Blake recognized him as such, all the four zoas (functions) coalesced into 4444, the fourfold wholeness and perfection of the Universal Man.

I wonder if Blake ever made that connection between foursquare and the Saviour; if he had met Jesus earlier in his life, I feel sure he might have been able to include it in his system: Jesus, the foursquare complete man, The Eternal Man incarnated!

Four is the magic number of completeness, and 4444 can only mean completeness in four senses.l

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