Building a System

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Book of Thel

Plate 1 

       Early in his life Blake and his wife joined a new church of Swedenborgians, but he soon outgrew that 'system'. He had a contemptuous opinion of organized religion in England from early days and throughout his life.        

He read omnivorously and seemed to retain (and use) everything that came into his mind. Some of his most influential reading was the Bible, Plato, the Egyptians, the Neoplatonists, Paracelsus and Boehme. He assembled all this ancient and medieval wisdom (discarded by Western culture with the Enlightenment) into his system, what we call his myth.      

Most of the literature and art of special interest to Blake expressed the almost universal concept of metaphysical reality from the days of the earliest Mesopotamians and Egyptians to the present.  Blake drew on these symbols everywhere along the spectrum of time. 

Blake's friend Thomas Taylor had translated Sallust's On the Gods and the World giving Blake access to Sallust's ideas on the types of myths or fables current in the ancient world. 

In On the Gods and the World, Section IV Sallust taught that the Species of Myth are Five: Myths are natural (physical), metaphysical (theological), psychic (psychological), and material (literal); some are a combination. To these we might add the moral or ethical. Blake's myth is definitely a combination of all of them.

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All of these various elements add up to a reality that exists in two spheres: upper and lower, above and below, Eternity and Time, spiritual and material, Heavenly and Worldly, dry and moist souls, good and evil. But at the deepest level these pairs belong to one another and God is in all ("as above so below"). These are all ways of looking at the fundamental metaphysical reality of life.        

The kernel of meaning in all this wisdom and in all of Blake's system was the myth of the descent of the soul into generation (this fallen world), her extensive travail here and eventual return to the fount of life from which she came.        

Blake drew on the earliest and latest examples of poetry and philosophy to elaborate his myth. Kathleen Raine in her little book, Blake and Antiquity, provides a very good means of elucidating the meanings that Blake intended in all his works. Perhaps the most common trap to avoid is assuming that his symbols connote literal or physical matters rather than psychological or metaphysical one.      

Blake had thorough familiarity with British poetry, where he found the same "kernel of meaning" as in every kind of literature.  For example Blake knew and loved Spenser (Queen Elizabeth's poet laureate who wrote The Faerie Queen).  Raine on page 18 provided examples from Spenser of the oldest myth central to Blake's poetry, namely the descent of the soul and eventual return:

"THE THIRD BOOKE OF THE FAERIE QUEENE

   CANTO VI.....
xxx
262 In that same Gardin all the goodly flowres,
263 Wherewith dame Nature doth her beautifie,
264 And decks the girlonds of her paramoures,
265 Are fetcht: there is the first seminarie
266 Of all things, that are borne to live and die,
267 According to their kindes. Long worke it were,
268 Here to account the endlesse progenie
269 Of all the weedes, that bud and blossome there;
270 But so much as doth need, must needs be counted here.
xxxi
271 It sited was in fruitfull soyle of old,
272 And girt in with two walles on either side;
273 The one of yron, the other of bright gold,
274 That none might thorough breake, nor over-stride:
275 And double gates it had, which opened wide,
276 By which both in and out men moten pas;
277 Th'one faire and fresh, the other old and dride:
278 Old Genius the porter of them was,
279 Old Genius, the which a double nature has.
xxxii
280 He letteth in, he letteth out to wend,
281 All that to come into the world desire;
282 A thousand thousand naked babes attend
283 About him day and night, which doe require,
284 That he with fleshly weedes would them attire:
285 Such as him list, such as eternall fate
286 Ordained hath, he clothes with sinfull mire,
287 And sendeth forth to live in mortall state,
288 Till they againe returne backe by the hinder gate."

Nevertheless with the Enlightenment this sort of idea had fallen into disrepute in most of the materialistic and rational minds of England. Bacon, Newton, and Locke were the primary exponents of rationalism in Blake's day. This meant in reality that no one was interested in the kind of poetry and philosophy that interested Blake.  

Jerusalem, Plate 10, (E 153)

"Therefore Los stands in London building Golgonooza
Compelling his Spectre to labours mighty; trembling in fear
The Spectre weeps, but Los unmovd by tears or threats remains

I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans           
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create"