Tiriel (1789) is Blake's earliest attempt to revise conventional accounts of the origins of this world. Here the serpent of desire rather than Adam and Eve is expelled from the Garden of Eden, leaving our first parents in a state of perpetual ignorance, subject to a senile father, king and god. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, published twelve months after Tiriel was written, he turns to a still earlier episode. Aligning angels with repressive reason and devils with revolutionary energy, Blake confronts the orthodox Christian account of Satan's fall from heaven with its uncanny double, while suggesting that both are dependent on point of view: ‘It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire [Satan] was cast out. but the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss’ (MHH 5–6, E34–5).

This sets the scene for the next phase of Blake's career, during which myths of origin are employed to explain not just how this world came into being but how it is maintained. Poetry and prophecy accordingly become indivisible from a nascent sociology and depth psychology; and political, philosophical and aesthetic questions are found enmeshed with epistemological concerns.