The Marriage of Contraries and the Division of the Sexes

Introduction: Adam Kadmon

In an examination or the Zoharic version or original sin, Blumenthal summarizes the story as follows: “Adam sat in the Garden, i.e., he meditated upon the sefirot. He saw unchanging Tiferet and changing Malkhut, and he was drawn to the latter. God warned him not to meditate on Malkhut, but he, following his wife, did so anyway.. .. [Adam’s sin] … consisted in letting himself be distracted from divine unity and simplicity to divine plurality and complexity. ”

Gerschom Scholem describes this kabbalistic notion of “the Fall” as “the exile of the Shekhinah, or, in other words, the separation of the masculine and feminine principles in God.” Unity is to be found in the Supernal Triangle consisting of the Sephiroth Kether, Chokhmah, and Binah, and which is beyond comprehension and separated from the other Sephiroth by the Abyss.

Kether, the Crown, is the Primordial Point, the cause or manifestation whose brilliance is reflected onto Chokhmah, also known as Wisdom or the first duality. Chokhmah is the active male principle who “stimulates” the receptive female principle, Binah, or Understanding. In receiving Chokhmah’s energy, Binah becomes the underlying root of all form – the Mother.

In Kabbalah, Chokhmah is the highest of the right side sephirot (kav yamin, the “Column of Mercy”) in the Tree of Life. It is at the bottom right of Keter, with Binah in front. Below it are the sephirots of Chesed and Netzach, and has four paths that go to Keter, Binah, Tifereth and Chesed.

Chokhmah, the second of the ten sefirot, is the first power of the conscious intellect within Creation, and the first point of ‘real’ existence, since Keter represents emptiness. According to the book of Job, “Wisdom comes from nothing. This point is at the same time infinitely small, yet it encloses the whole being, but remains incomprehensible until it is given form and is created in Binah.

Chokhmah appears in the configuration of the sefirot at the top of the right axis, and corresponds in the tzelem Elokim (“the divine image”) to the right hemisphere of the brain.

Chokhmah is associated in the soul with the power of intuition, like a flash of lightning through consciousness, Chokhmah’s “wisdom” also implies the ability to look deeply at aspects of reality and to perceive its conceptual essence until one can discover its truth in the depths. These seeds of truth can then be transmitted to Binah’s level for the sake of analysis and intellectual development.

The name Elohim, which is used throughout the first chapter of Genesis, refers to the manifestation of delineation and definition. In general, none of the names of God refer to the Creator Himself. The Creator is only referred to as Ain Sof, which means the Infinite Being, or simply, the Infinite.

The first thing that the Infinite Being created was the name Elohim, which is associated with the Constriction. This alludes to Understanding, the concept that divides and delineates. As discussed earlier, Understanding (Binah) involves verbal thought, while Wisdom (Chokhmah) is pure nonverbal thought.

Wisdom is associated with the nonverbal right hemisphere of the brain, while Understanding is associated with the verbal left hemisphere.

Chokhmah consciousness is fluid, and is represented by water. Memory, on the other hand, is fixed, and is denoted by snow. Binah focuses on a single object, while Chokhmah consciousness encompasses everything.

If Chokhmah is the source of giving, then Binah is the source of restraint. Water, which represents Chokhmah consciousness, thus gives birth to Gloom and darkness. …. Fire, which represents Binah consciousness, then give rise to light, since it is in this state that visible images are perceived.

Blake’s Fall of the Selfhood is similarly rooted in sexual division and can be illustrated in the relationships between Los and Albion and their respective Emanations. Although implicit in Blake’s notion of Emanations is an androgynous whole, his poetry carries within it not only the prejudices of the times, but his own occasional hos­tility towards women and his confused attitudes toward the sexual act as being both liberating and, at the same time, an entrapment.

As Anne K. Mellors states, “Blake’s theoretical commitment to androgyny in his prophetic books is … undermined by his habitual equation or the female with the subordinate or the perversely dominant.” Ultimately for Blake, Woman is a symbol for “otherness”, as we see in the following excerpt from The Book of Urizen de­scribing the creation or Enitharmon, the Emanation of Los:

All Eternity shuddered at sight                                                                                                                          Of the first female now separate                                                                                                                    Pale as a cloud of snow
Waving before the race of Los

Eternity shudder’d when they saw,                                                                                                              Man begetting his likeness,
On his own divided image.

In Plate 19 of The Book of Urizen Blake underscores his message by dividing the entire page in half, both text and figures. Arising in a serpentine fashion from the flames of creation, Enitharmon is already turning inward and away from Los, who follows suit. Though he calls her “Pity”, he weeps not for her, but for the separation which has taken place within himself. It is interesting to note that in kabbalistic lore, the spiritual experience that is attributed to Binah is that of a Vision of Sorrow.

Los and Enitharmon, Chokmah and Binah, Adam and Eve all represent the active male and receptive Female principles – Force and Form, Father and Mother. Blake contends that, “In Eternity Woman is the Emanation or Man she has No Will or her own There is no such thing in Eternity as a Female Will.” Similarly, the virtue ascribed to Binah is that of Silence, which may be translated in Blakean terms to mean a lack of Will. Blake’s Female Will derives from sexual repression and the attempt to come to terms with a male dominated (and therefore one-sided) society. Rather than desiring to balance this inherently unbalanced situa­tion, the Female Will attempts to dominate and to control the male. This control is achieved through the Female’s unnatural mystification of the sexual act and through re­ligious and societal constrictures regarding marriage and sexuality.

The pencil drawing of Vala for Blake’s unpublished Vala, or the Four Zoas provides an excellent illustration of his identification of sex and religion. Vala is Blake’s whore of Babylon, a Nature Goddess who weaves the “Curtain & Veil & fleshy Tabernacle” which obscures “Divine Vision”. She stands with a pointed crown upon her head and the sanctum sanctorum between her thighs. This “fleshy Tabernacle” represents the unnatural mystery of sex, which is the most potent tool of the Female Will. In this, Vala is strikingly similar to the character or Lilith, an important figure in Jewish demonology. Scholem describes her kabbalistic role as “the seducer of men, from whose nocturnal emissions she bears an infinite number of demonic sons…. In the Zohar [she is known] as the harlot, the wicked, the false, or the black. ”

Asloob Ansari equates Albion’s relationship to Vala with the kabbalistic version or original sin quoted at the beginning of this section wherein Adam looks only at Mal­kuth (the Bride or the Shekhinah, representing the material world) and is therefore unable to see the totality or the Godhead.

Vala is not Albion’s true Emanation but is “a Negation … and she symbolizes the material aspect of sex as opposed to the spiritual one which is represented by Jerusalem.” Hirst sees a further kabbalistic congruence by comparing Jerusalem and Vala to the Sephiroth Binah and Malkuth who thus represent “the Upper and Lower Gardens … the Shekhinah manifested at different levels.”

Plate 25 of Jerusalem depicts Albion with the “Starry Heavens” of Eternity still present in his “mighty limbs”, however, he is surrounded and contained by three women: Rahab, Tirzah and, above him, Vala, who is hovering in a cruciform pose which suggests not salvation but ensnarement. Her hands emit strands of Vegetation, akin to a spider weaving its web. These strands are similar to the umbilicus which emerges from Albion’s navel, what Paley calls “the basic stuff of natural existence”, thus symbolizing the binding force of the mundane world.  Albion’s head is thrust backward so that he can only see the face of the whore, Rahab. The configuration of his arms and legs and the covering of his genitals suggest that he, as the Eternal Man, has been rendered impotent.

Vala’s Veil, her “beautiful net of gold and silver twine” is, according to Damon, “the film of matter which covers all reality.” The image of the veil, along with the image of Vegetable or organic fibers (often in the form of intestines), is as central to Blake’s visual vocabulary as it is to the language of his poetry. In Plate 46 of Jerusalem we see both Vala and Jerusalem, who is Albion’s true Emanation. Jerusalem and her daughters are gloriously and unashamedly nude, whereas Vala attempts to cover them with her veil. Although, like the Tabernacle, the veil represents the mystification of sex, it also symbolizes the allure of the material world and the deceitful nature of that world.

If Vala represents obscurity, falsehood and division, then it is to Jerusalem that Blake looks for salvation.

Blake’s Jerusalem: A New Earth, a New Heaven, and a New Nature

This epic poem, his longest composite work, concerns the reawakening of Albion, the Eternal Man, by way of his re-unification with his Emanation, or female self. In it, Blake “marries” the English and Hebrew traditions (Albion and Jerusalem), which for him results in the victorious ascendancy of Poetic Vision. Ansari suggests that “the reunion or God and Shekhinah constitutes the meaning of redemption in the kabbalah. Just as the reuniting or Albion and Jerusalem is one of the surest signals or the attain­ment or paradisial bliss in the Blakean universe.” He further notes a close resemblance between Adam Kadmon and Albion based upon their androgyny. It is written in the Zohar that:

The Blessed Holy One does not place His abode in any place where male and female are not found together. Blessings are round only in a place where male and female are found, as it is written: ‘He blessed them and called their name Adam on the day they were created.’

Blake used the image of the Androgyne to suggest the original state or unification (as opposed to the Hermaphrodite, who symbolized sterility and self-contradiction.) Perhaps nowhere is Blake’s use of the androgynous image so effective as in the penultimate plate of Jerusalem in which the figure of Jerusalem is depicted so ambig­uously that it has been interpreted by scholars as both male and female. Albion, who now resembles a sighted Urizen, closely embraces Jerusalem so that their bodies take on a singular form. The only clue to Jerusalem’s feminine identity is her hair, which rises up behind her like the cleansing flames that engulf the figures. The positioning of her arms outward and upward underscores the regenerative nature or the image. Jerusalem and Albion are eye to eye, in mutual recognition, for it is at this moment that the male and female aspects or the personality unite to form a whole.

The nature or this “creation” scene is better understood when we compare an earlier print entitled The Elohim Creating Adam from 1795. The term “Elohim” (which is actually plural) refers to the Creator in Gene­sis, who is viewed by Blake in a rather negative light. He wrote in Jerusalem that “… in [Albion’s] Chaotic State of Sleep, Satan & Adam & the whole world was Created by the Elohim.”

In the print, the Creator, in his Urizenic aspect, hovers over his creation, who is already bound by the mortal coils or material existence (“The vast form of Nature [is] like a Serpent.”) Rather than rising upward like Albion and Jerusalem, the Creator and Adam are horizontally confined by the semicircular sun whose rays attempt to pierce the dark and cloudy sky. They do not embrace and, in fact, Adam’s arms are flung downward and away from the creative force. They do not look at each other and yet both faces reflect a similar agony. If, as Blake suggested, God resides within the human breast, then we are witness to the creation of man in the material world as the division of man and God. It is only when all aspects of the individual reunite, male and female, human and divine, that an “awakening to Eternal Life” can occur.

It is written in the Zohar that, “Every form in which the male and female principle is not found, is not a higher or completed form.” The sephirotic balance which exists between Chokhmah and Binah is paradigmatic. The story of Jerusalem is, in part, the culmination of Blake’s desire for sexual harmony in his own life. As the artist/engraver, the character or Los is often associated with Blake himself. Enitharmon is then, as Paley suggests, on one level Catherine Blake. “The myth of this quarrelling couple occupies much space in Blake’s later works, but when they work together in harmony they produce beautiful ’embodied semblances’ – the illuminated books.”