Blake: Job and ‘The Mental Traveller’

Abstract

‘THE Mental Traveller’ by William Blake1 is a complex cyclical allegory imperfectly understood,2 and it has gone unnoticed that crucial elements of this poem are conflated from the Book of Job, one of Blake’s favorite biblical texts. Hence, the following Argument. Initially, I submit that ‘The Mental Traveller’ is a Moon Poem. The lunar Eternal Female as a ‘Woman Old’ in ‘The Mental Traveller’ (E 484: 9–16) foetalizes Christ as a Vegetation God, where he is bound down upon the tissues of generation, while this female drinks his ‘Shrieks in Cups of gold’, relevant to the matter that Christ in John (6:54–55) confirms that ‘my flesh is meat … , and my blood is drink’ (my emphasis). (See the bloody generative crescent-cup of the moon, as emblemized on plate 100 in Copy E of Jerusalem.) Blake’s Eternal Female in ‘The Mental Traveller’ unmistakably possesses attributes of the Whore of Babylon, identified by Blake as ‘Rahab Babylon’ in Milton (41/46: 17, E 141). Pertinently, the Whore of Babylon (not to be confused with ‘Rahab’ the Whore of Jericho in Joshua) is ‘drunken with … [human] blood’ in Revelation (17:6)—and she possesses a ‘golden cup’ of ‘fornication’ (mentioned in Revelation 17:4), associated by Blake with a moony ‘cup of Religion’ in The Four Zoas (IX.134: 5–6, E 491).3