Blake's Sun

In the presence of the Sun (of Righteousness) there is no thing, no Education, no rituals. Blake's Sun was God; to that thing he was obsessed, to the exclusion of every other thing. If he had been a mystic, he would have stopped there; as a visionary every thing served to express and reflect God; it's all reflected by the Sun. Blake was not a pantheist; everything was a creature of the Sun.

The Word of God extends far beyond the Bible
("And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen" John 21:25).

One of those books was
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake; another might be called Words and Picture of William Blake. Your dealings with Jesus might be another book.

Blake's formal education was minimal. Everyone remembers that story of the young Blake on his first day in school. The Schoolmaster flogged a boy; Blake rose and exited, never to return. He escaped the social conditioning (actually the primary purpose) of School. Henceforth his education came through his own reading; he read the Bible, probably many times (such that it influenced almost all of his creations). School makes us conventional, but not Blake!

School introduces the malleable mind to various rituals, by which most of us live; but not Blake. Religion involves an enormous store of rituals, but not Blake. Raised by dissenters, he escaped the many rituals of the State Church; he rejected most of the rituals of the Dissenters. Every thing Blake observed was subjected to his pure, crystalline mind.

Obsessed with God Blake's life recreated the Bible (which is about God). The myth of the Bible was the story of his myth- and his life. His creations centered about the visions of God that had come to him, from the Angry God in the window to the Savior who dominates the final conclusions of his major prophetic works.

On his way there was Nobodaddy and Urizen. He shares his own personal crisis with the stories of the final battle between Urizen and Los; One of these occurred near the end of Night 7 of The Four Zoas (Erdman 371) One might speculate that this represented Blake's resolution of the healing of the breach between Old and New Testaments, of Jehovah with Jesus, the Eternal Forgiveness.

The Sun Blake looked up to was the Perception of the Infinite: "it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty" (Erdman 555-56).

Look again at the picture in the post called Oedipus & Albion. Speaking crudely we might call the small figure Blake with a (natural) setting sun around him. The larger figure we call Jesus with a small crown of thorns, but overlaying that is the Sun of Righteousness-- Blake's Sun.

Eternity' Sun:
"He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise" (Eternity; Erdman 470; repeated on 474)

In America (Erdman 53):
"The Sun has left left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning "
(The blackness of course bespeaks the colonialism under which the colonies were oppressed. As for the fresher morning? well as Reagan used to say "it's morning in America". Had he read Blake?????????)
This verse is repeated in Night 9 of The Four Zoas (Erdman 406)

"This Earth breeds not our happiness
Another Sun feeds our lifes streams"
(Letter 23 to Butts; E722)

Many other references to Blake's Sun are available if you want to research them in Concord