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Paul Miner, The Influence of Hesiod's Theogony on Blake's The Book of Ahania, Notes and Queries, Volume 56, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 361–364, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjp117
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MULTIPLE allusions negotiate William Blake's cryptic allegory in The Book of Ahania, 1795, a compact work of only four pages of text. Subtle ‘borrowings’ embedded in Ahania derive from the Bible, Ovid, John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Locke, Erasmus Darwin, and Paul Henri Mallet (the enumeration is not exhaustive). To the preceding inventory should be added Blake's utilization of Hesiod's Theogony, a crucial source not heretofore associated with the narrative of Ahania. Documentation is as follows.1
Blake in Ahania gives prominent attention to fiery Fuzon's ‘Globe of Wrath’ (BA 2:16–25), an ‘exulting’ and ‘howling Globe’ of the atmospheres, which, ‘burning [as] it flew’, lengthens into a ‘hungry beam’—attacking the genitals of god-like Urizen. Against Fuzon's beaming weapon, Urizen raised his mammoth shield, a ‘broad Disk’ that ‘endur’d the cold hammer’ for ‘ten winters’, allusive to Satan's ‘ponderous shield’ of ‘vast circumference’ in Book Six of Paradise Lost (254–6), as noted by David Worrall,2 a shield that Milton in Book One of Paradise Lost (284–7) describes as a ‘rocky Orb / Of tenfold Adamant’, composed of ‘Ethereal temper massy, large and round … like the Moon’. Urizen's lunar shield, however, proves an ineffective defence, and thus Fuzon's ‘hungry beam’ (2:6–34) surgically divides the ‘cold loins’ of Urizen, Blake's satanic Prince of Light. Such emasculation finds its mythological origins in Hesiod's Theogony, where the Earth-mother's crescent-shaped ‘great sickle’ of ‘flint’ with ‘edged teeth’ castrates supernal Uranus (the Sky personified), the Earth-mother's brutish consort. The Hungry Beam in Ahania that burns in the ‘right hand’ of Fuzon3 in part reflects Hesiod's account, for the sexual organs of ‘huge Uranus’ have been cut off with a sickle held in the ‘right hand’ (Hesiod's words) of Cronus, son of Uranus (a sickle vindictively supplied by Hesiod's Earth Mother, Gaia, mother of Cronus and wife to Uranus).4 Clearly, in the preceding context, Blake's Fuzon is representative of Hesiod's Cronus, while patriarchal Urizen is equated with Uranus. (My emphases.)
