Blake and Nietzsche on self-slaughter and the moral law: A reading of Jerusalem

Abstract

Both Blake and Nietzsche deemed the perversion of energy or will by the architects and enforcers of the Judeo-Christian moral law to be the most cataclysmic event in the history of man. Coerced by a false dichotomy of good and evil man’s primordial flux is not only stymied but vitiated through the self-mutilations of bad conscience. This essay examines the specific mechanism of moral coercion – a process of sublimation and condensation whereby the agonistic contraries within man are fixed into negating absolutes – and the extent to which such a process shapes the symbolic landscape of Blake’s final prophetic work Jerusalem. At the heart of this landscape an emblematic network of trees rocks nets and sacrificial altars stands Vala the virgin-whore of Babylon. Presiding remorselessly and remorsefully over the moral law’s slaughter of innocence Vala is revealed as bad conscience personified and vilified. © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.