Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas continues from here
Student (Helen Luster): ….Yeah. He renamed this text, which was first “Vala, A Dream in Nine Nights” “, he renamed it “The Four Zoas” because he realized… because he had read the Bible in Greek and he realized that the word “Zoa” meant “animals” and was later related to the Four Evangelists ..
AG: Yeah.
Student (HL): … so he saw that…
AG: So could you make an outline of those? What are those four? Because we now can compare, now that we have some sense of the Four Zoas of Blake, we can compare….
Student (HL): The four (images in the) pictures are a man, an eagle, an ox, and a lion.
AG: Does everybody remember where that comes from? The Book of Revelations?
Student: Chapter Six.
AG: Does everybody remember that? You know? Has anybody ever not read the Revelations of St. John? Okay. So, then, could you explain that?
Student: Ah, yeah.
AG: Yeah, sure. Blake is drawing from this in that Blake’s paralleling it and so we’ve got to get back to that ground.
Student: I’d say, just from experience, that these are wild visions, very much like what we’re reading in Blake.
AG: What are they, though? What were the four beasts?
Student (HL): The four beasts are man, an eagle, an ox, and a lion.
AG: Representing?
Student (HL): Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But not in that order.
AG: Yeah.
Student (HL): As being the … I don’t want to say (symbolic) but the four things that say it all.
AG: Um-hmm.
Student (HL): ..(representing the) four directions.