The hero of America is Orc (giant or devil living in what to the orthodox is Orcus or hell), the first of the “Giant forms” or symbolic characters of the prophecies we have met. Orc is the power of the human desire to achieve a better world which produces revolution and foreshadows the apocalypse; and the “Preludium” to America represents him as having arrived at puberty determined to set the world on fire as a promising youngster should do. To the reactionaries, of course, he is a demonic and hellish power, rising up to destroy everything that is sacred and worth conserving. “Albion’s Angel,” the spirit of English Toryism, addresses him in tones of a righteous indignation which does not at all succeed in concealing an acute nervousness:
Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities,
Lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God’s Law,
Why dost thou come to Angel’s eyes in this terrific form?
This continually suppressed but intermittently struggling power of desire is expressed in the myths of the Greek Titans and the Northern Jötuns: both are groups of earth-bound giants hostile to the sky-gods. That the gods in their turn are hostile to man and that the “Giants who formed this world . . . and now seem to live in it in chains” are our allies comes out in the story of the Titan Prometheus, who was martyred for his friendship to man. The gods maintain their ascendancy over men by keeping their enemies fettered under the earth, according to the myth, whence volcanoes and earthquakes proceed to show that the giants are not dead yet. The real underworld is the physical world as the lazy mind sees it, and the real giants are our own mental powers.