"The Book of Ahania describes the outcast condition of Earth by a morality that regards the body as evil. Nothing is more dreadful to conceive than a creator who condemns as evil his own creation; and yet, Blake implies, this is the consequence of all those ‘bibles and sacred codes’ that teach that ‘Evil is alone from the Body.’ Earth cast out from heaven becomes one of those Newtonian ‘globes rolling through voidness,’ a dark shadow circling the sky, more like the dead and sterile mood than the living happy earth" (Raine 155)

Ahania is now in the same situation as "Earth in Earth’s Answer" except that she laments her estrangement and remembers happier times before the separation and casting out. Oddly, she speaks of this past happier time as though she and Urizen are two individuals:
The lamenting voice of Ahania
Weeping upon the void. . . .
Her voice was heard, but no form
had she: but her tears from clouds
Eternal fell round the Tree
And the voice cried: Ah Urizen! Love!
Flower of morning! I weep on the verge
of Non-entity; how wide the Abyss
Between Ahania and thee! . . .
Where is my golden palace
Where my ivory bed Where the sons of eternity, singing
To awake bright Urizen my king! . . .
The sweat poured down thy temples
To Ahania return’d in evening. (Blake 88, 89)

"The due harmony of heaven and earth is the blissful state of which banished Ahania seeks always to remind Urizen. Of herself she cannot bring forth ‘eternal births’ but only moral corruption" (Raine156-57).

The end of The Book of Ahania and of her lament echoes "Earth’s Answer":
But now alone over rocks, mountains
Cast out from thy lovely bosom:
Cruel jealousy! Selfish fear!
Self-destroying: how can delight,
Renew in these chains of darkness
Where bones of beasts are strown
On the bleak and snowy mountains
Where bonds from the birth are buried
Before they see the light. (Blake 90)

In the retelling of Ahania’s casting out in The Four Zoas, the circumstances leading up to the event are much less violent than in the first occasion, but the casting out itself is much more brutal:
Then thunders rolld around & lightnings darted to & fro
His visage changd to darkness & his strong right hand came forth
To cast Ahania to the Earth he siezd her by the hair
And threw her from the steps of ice that froze around his throne
Saying Art thou also become like Vala. Thus I cast thee out
Shall the feminine indolent bliss. The indulgent self of weariness
The passive idle sleep the enormous night & darkness of Death
Set herself up to give her laws to the active masculine virtue
Thou little diminutive portion that darst be a counterpart
Thy passivity thy laws of obedience & insincerity
Are my abhorrence. Wherefore hast thou taken that fair form
A sluggish current of dim waters. On whose verdant margin
A cavern shaggd with horrid shades. Dark cool & deadly. Where
I laid my head in the hot noon after the broken clods
Had wearied me. there I laid my plow & there my horses fed
And thou hast risen with thy moist locks into a watry image
Reflecting all my indolence my weakness & my death
To weigh me down beneath the grave into non Entity. . .
So loud in thunders spoke the King folded in dark despair
And threw Ahania from his bosom obdurate She fell like lightning. . .
Fell down down rushing ruining thundering shuddering
Into the Caverns of the Grave & places of Human Seed
Where the impressions of Despair & Hope enroot forever
A world of Darkness. Ahania fell far into Non Entity
She continued falling. Loud the Crash continud loud & Hoarse
From the Crash roared a flame of blue sulphureous fire from the flame
A dolorous groan that struck with dumbness all confusion
Swallowing up the horrible din in agony on agony
Thro the Confusion like a crack across from immense to immense
Loud strong a universal groan of death louder Than Urizen & all his hosts in curst despair down rushing. (Blake 328-29)

"Ahania’s passivity in relation to Urizen is always stressed. From her ‘all the lovely sex shall learn obedience’; for is she not the Platonic ‘image’ of eternity? Urizen, when he casts her out, condemns her for this very quality, because she is purely passive and receptive in her relation to him. Urizen follows up this condemnation of the passive feminine principle with a characterization of Ahania in all those images traditionally associated with the world-cave, Porphyry’s beautiful ‘irriguous cavern’ of the nymphs. Ahania is here the world-cave, a sacred place, beautiful and cool. We remember Porphyry’s description of the exterior parts: ‘pleasant, but its interior and profound parts are obscure, and its very bottom is darkness itself.’ So Ahania is described as the dark feminine principle, the eternal counterpart of the masculine ‘light’ of Urizen. He looks back to a time of harmony, when the world-cave was a sacred place where the immortals ‘sleep’; but now he condemns her, calling her ‘darkness,’ 'deadly,’ and ‘horrid.’
In thus rejecting ‘the fair and beautiful world,’ he has the sanction of many, if not all, of the Platonic philosophers. He is following (while at the same time misunderstanding) the teaching of the first book of the Hermetica, ‘Nothing good upon Earth, nothing evil in Heaven.’ Urizen is acting upon the belief that ‘Things upon Earth do nothing advantage those in Heaven, but all things in Heaven do profit and advantage all things upon Earth.' How, then, can Ahania presume to be Urizen’s counterpart? All virtue resides in him, he declares, none in her. ‘The Earth is brutish, the Heaven is reasonable or rational.’ Urizen does not need Ahania, and casts her out. She retorts by calling him ‘selfish,’ because, one may guess, he refuses to give her his love and life, by which alone she lives. . . .
So poor Ahania falls subject to the reprehension of Urizen, who cannot see that he has any need of her" (Raine 155-58).

Ahania’s Lament in The Four Zoas:
And thus Ahania cries aloud to the Caverns of the Grave
. . . Man who lays upon the shores leaning his faded head
Upon the Oozy rock inwrapped with the weeds of death
His eyes sink hollow in his head his flesh coverd with slime
And shrunk up to the bones alas that Man should come to this
His strong bones beat with snows & hid within the caves of night
Marrowless bloodless falling into dust driven by the winds
O How the horrors of Eternal Death take hold on man
His faint groans shake the caves & issue thro the desolate rocks
And the Strong Eagle now with num[m]ing cold blighted of feathers
Once like the pride of the sun now flagging in cold night
Hovers with blasted wings aloft watching with Eager Eye
Till Man shall leave a corruptible body he famishd hears him groan
And now he fixes his strong talons in the pointed rock
And now he beats the heavy air with his enormous wings
Beside him lies the Lion dead & in his belly worms
Feast on his death till universal death devours all
And the pale horse seeks for the pool to lie him down & die
But finds the pools filled with serpents devouring one another
He droops his head & trembling stands & his bright eyes decay
These are the Visions of My Eyes the Visions of Ahania. (Blake 383-84).

"Ahania in nonentity—that is, the place and state of matter—banished from the intelligible world, laments that her productions are a mere generation of death, after the text of the Hermetica, which sees all earth’s progeny as changeable, dissolvable, mortal, corruptible; that ‘which is always made is always corrupted,’ and earth is ‘a fit receptacle’ only for ‘corruptible Bodies.’ If this is all generated life can give, what difference, Ahania asks, is there between birth and death" (Raine 159).
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