Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas continues from here
AG: And then picking up on what you said, yes, it was Gnostic, also. The reason I’m using Hindu and Buddhist parallels is that many of us here are familiar with them, and are particularly familiar with the notion of the Shakti or Devi or Goddess being the phenomenal universe projected by the meditator, and the meditator uniting with his mate in that sense is the meditator coming to at-one-ment with the external phenomenal universe that he himself has projected, coming to recognize that it is his projection and, thus, uniting with it rather than fighting it.
So a similar thing would be in old Gnostic Hebrew notions. The Shekhinah is female?
Student (Helen Luster): In the Kabbalah, the Shekhinah is female.
AG: Yeah.
HL: It’s associated with the lower sefirot…(representative of a female (energy)
– The Shekhinah
AG: And the other?
HL: (Other energy?) – And it’s, well, in his “Mystic Marriage“, or whatever it is …
AG: Yeah.
HL: … (it’s) between a man and a woman..(she is the) Shekhinah.. (she) makes it and he takes, or she… they both take on the whole … (they’re both integral to) the whole Tree of Life..
AG: Okay. So there would be, say, some relation ..
HL: Yeah.
AG: … in a mystic marriage – the earthly woman representing … what? The feminine element of nature, or being the feminine element of nature, at one with the feminine element of nature and the man marrying her?
HL: Yeah
AG: And uniting with her.
HL: But this is a very special mystic marriage..
Student: Helen, would you speak up please?
HL: Okay. It’s a special mystic marriage (a Gnostic marriage), in which the whole universe is apprehended.
AG: Well, like in Blake, in that sense, when they get together. But Blake’s sources, according to Foster Damon, were Kabbalistic, or Western Gnostic – Kabbalistic and Hermetic. The only relation there between the Buddhist-Hindu stuff is that probably the sources of both Hindu and Buddhist and Kabbalistic were Middle Eastern to begin with. They all came from the same source.
to be continued