BLAKE, JUNG & ART

First posted November 2009.

The self-image of Blake was that of an artist, his life was organized around creating art. But he came to see art as more than the objects created by the artist.

In her web page article, On William Blake, Psychologist Fleur Nelson wrote:

"In The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (1966), Jung describes the creative process as the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and the shaping of this image into a new symbol. He believed that these enacted new symbols have the potential to increase individual and collective consciousness and transform society by integrating them into the language of the current society."

Quoting Carl Jung she says:
"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense – he is “collective man,” a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind
(par. 157, p. 101)."

In John Middleton Murry's book William Blake, on page 198-199, we read:
"Art, for Blake, is the Imaginative Life in its totality, nothing less." and,
"Art, in fact, is a new order of life: the order of life which (Blake believed) Jesus meant by Eternal Life. It is to live in accord with the Divine Vision, as a member of the One Man, through continual Self- annihilation... When every activity of life attains to the condition of the pure and selfless artistic activity, then we are totally regenerated, true members of the Eternal body of Man which is the Imagination." [and Christ]

"Vala produced the Bodies, Jerusalem gave the Souls"

(Vala on the left, facing away from the viewer, produces the female figure; Jerusalem on the right faces us and produces the male. The female and male unite in an embrace.)


William Blake wrote in LAOCOON (E 273):
" The whole Business of Man is the Arts & things Common
Christianity is Art & not Money.
Jesus and his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists."






Library of Congress
Jerusalem
Plate 18

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