Plate 25
Albion and his Tormentors

In Jerusalem Druidic religion, with its rituals of human sacrifice, represents the cruelty and aggression of England. For Blake, the campaigns then being waged by his countrymen against Napoleon's France were the contemporary expression of that savage, warlike spirit.

Here Albion (England) is the victim of Druid sacrifice, and is being disembowelled by three women, Rahab, Vala and Tirzah. Seated on the right, Tirzah cries as she winds Albion's intestines into a ball in her hand.

The scholar Morton D. Paley (see bibliography) believes that the scene depicts these lines from plate 66:

They sit naked upon the Stone of trial
The knife of flint passes over the howling victim: his blood
Gushes & stains the fair side of the fair Daughters of Albion

or these lines from plate 67:

Tirzah sits weeping to hear the shrieks of the dying: Her knife
Of flint is in her hand: she passes it over the howling victim.

Notice that the posture of Albion is almost identical to that of the man being stoned in Blake's Blasphemer (Tate Online, Collections, NO5195).

For more Druidic elements in Jerusalem see the stone circle in Plate 99, or the trilithon in Plate 70.