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To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild FlowerHold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour.
In Blake, the concept of God alone, transcendent, and unattainable, is replaced by a Divine Family as guiding deities of the creative mind, responsible for the ‘expansion’ of inner vision to infinity and eternity, with ‘no limits’.1 He expressed the prototypal fall and redemption of developmental experience with: ‘First God Almighty comes with a Thump on the Head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.’2 In Blake's image of the creative inner world, which he called Jerusalem, the internal deities are: Jesus (or God-as-Jesus), the female muses or daughters of Beulah (the dream-world) who are agents of Jesus and tend the suffering soul; and the ‘little children of Jerusalem’, or (as he synonymously terms them) the ‘minute particulars’ of mental existence — embryonic figments of imagination or intellectual vision, with an innocent potential for experience. Together they comprise the ‘Divine Humanity’ or the ‘Humanity’, for ‘all deities reside in the Human Breast’,3 yet are quite distinct from the ‘selfhood’. The process of coming to knowledge of these internal relationships is the ‘building of Jerusalem’ — the function of ‘every Christian, as much as in him lies’,4 and in particular of the artist. Blake defines his ‘task’ at the beginning of Jerusalem: