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This blog leans heavily on hyperlinks. Use your mouse to click on any hyperlink, and it will take you to the subject of the link.

Click with this right button of your mouse, and you may bringup the subject in another tag or window, which allows you toreturn quickly to what you were reading at first.

The sidebar contains a lot of links:
1. With the Archive section you may reach any post to this blog. Click on a month, and it shows all the posts for that month.

2. The labels give you a view of all the posts with that subject.

3. Contributors will give you a view of the profile of the oneyou link on.

4. Links to Online Blake give you access to many Blake websites including his complete works.

Blake's Vision of God

Of all the Christian spiritual leaders of the past
200 years this British poet would be placed near
the top by any enlightened Christian. God
was the primary theme and motif of his poetry, his
pictures, and his life. His poetry and pictures
contained his revelations of the reality of life,
ultimate reality, which we call God.

At three he ran screaming to his mother after the
sight of a grim punishing God in his window. A few
years later a similar vision embraced a roomful of
angels. Brought up in a Swedenburg and/or
Moravian climate he escaped the common
fallacies that go by the name of Christian
orthodoxy. But the first half of his life he
occupied wrestling with the Old Testament God.

With The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
he inverted the conventional values of good,
obedient, unimaginative church goers (more likely
to idolize and follow their minister than their God).
Blake called them angels, and called those who
ask questions, who think independently, who
experiment, devils.

With Songs of Innocence and Experience he
portrayed first the childlike, who have not met a
judging God, and second those who have tasted that fateful experience.

In his prophetic books Blake exhaustively pictured
the judging God, the Rulemaker and Enforcer
worshipped today by 'fundamentalist'
Christians and Muslims.

Through the years Blake gradually got free from
the baleful influence of a God of Control, used
mainly by the most powerful to control the rest
of us. He came to refer to him as Old Nobodaddy.

In the fullness of time Blake met the God introduced
to us by Jesus: the Loving Heavenly Father. The
gospel was a matter of forgiveness. Most of us have
to forgive (our) God, forgive our parents, our
spouses, most of all ourselves. Blake's First Vision of Light is the moment when he came into that glad awareness. Afterward the old negative ideas of Diety faded away to be replaced by the New Creation characterized by the Gifts of the Spirit.

Image from Songs of Innocence: Jesus and children in LITTLE BLACK BOY. Click on image for enlargement.

psytheomyth

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Genesis: Adam, Eve and Satan

Psychology, Theology, Mythology: in the last analysis the three things all merge together into one, especially in Blake. Every verse tells something about the human mind, and about God, all wrapped together in the language of poetry and myth. For an example look at an analysis of Genesis 3.

Resources

The links provide the best Blake online:
1. The Primer together with Ram Horn'd with Gold is Larry Clayton's online book with a comprehensive description of Blake's work especially emphasizing his spiritual dimension.

2. Contents gives access to most of Blake's works in poetry and prose.

3. The Concordance shows the location(s) of any word you offer it.

4. The Blake Archive allows you to read the text and view the pictures of all of his illuminated works.