MICHAEL&SATAN

Harvard Art Muaeum

The Angel Michael Binding Satan

Jewish tradition holds than the angel Michael was the protector and defendor of Israel. Blake was inspired to picture the struggle between Michael and Satan that he read of in the in the Book of Revelation. Milton wrote of Satan and his Angels having been expelled from Heaven. Subsequently when they arrived on Earth they became the tormentors of humankind. The Angel Michael was not of Satan's party but played a militant role on the side of the celestial forces combatting the powers of Hell.

More about Michael.

Michael in Blake's Milton.

Milton, Plate 8, (E 102)

"Wildly they follow'd Los and Rintrah, & the Mills were silent
They mourn'd all day this mournful day of Satan & Palamabron:
And all the Elect & all the Redeem'd mourn'd one toward another  
Upon the mountains of Albion among the cliffs of the Dead.

They Plow'd in tears! incessant pourd Jehovahs rain, & Molechs
Thick fires contending with the rain, thunder'd above rolling
Terrible over their heads; Satan wept over Palamabron
Theotormon & Bromion contended on the side of Satan            
Pitying his youth and beauty; trembling at eternal death:
Michael contended against Satan in the rolling thunder
Thulloh the friend of Satan also reprovd him; faint their reproof.

But Rintrah who is of the reprobate: of those form'd to destruction
In indignation. for Satans soft dissimulation of friendship!  
Flam'd above all the plowed furrows, angry red and furious,
Till Michael sat down in the furrow weary dissolv'd in tears
Satan who drave the team beside him, stood angry & red
He smote Thulloh & slew him, & he stood terrible over Michael
Urging him to arise: he wept! Enitharmon saw his tears         
But Los hid Thulloh from her sight, lest she should die of grief
She wept: she trembled! she kissed Satan; she wept over Michael
She form'd a Space for Satan & Michael & for the poor infected[.]
Trembling she wept over the Space, & clos'd it with a tender Moon

Los secret buried Thulloh, weeping disconsolate over the moony Space     

But Palamabron called down a Great Solemn Assembly,
That he who will not defend Truth, may be compelled to
Defend a Lie, that he may be snared & caught & taken"

Milton, Plate 12 [13], (E 106)

"The Harrow cast thick flames & orb'd us round in concave fires
A Hell of our own making. see, its flames still gird me round.
Jehovah thunder'd above! Satan in pride of heart
Drove the fierce Harrow among the constellations of Jehovah      
Drawing a third part in the fires as stubble north & south
To devour Albion and Jerusalem the Emanation of Albion
Driving the Harrow in Pitys paths. 'twas then, with our dark fires
Which now gird round us (O eternal torment) I form'd the Serpent
Of precious stones & gold turn'd poisons on the sultry wastes    
The Gnomes in all that day spar'd not; they curs'd Satan

Michael in Revelation.

Revelation 12

[7] And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
[8] And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.
[9] And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Revelation 20
[1] And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.
[2] And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years,
[3] And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.

Notice that in Blake's image Michael is not pictured as are typical angels with wings, He looks more like Los with red curly hair and the muscular physique of a blacksmih. Neither is Satan  pictured as he was in Blake's Illustrations to Paradise Lost, but as the dragon or old serpant who fought Michael in the Book of Revelation.

MOUNTAIN

Jacob's Dream

British Museum

We return to Northrop Frye's last major work Words With Power: Being a Second Study of "The Bible and Literature."  Part 2 of his book Frye devotes the four chapters to four metaphoric topics : the Mountain, the Garden, the Cave and the Furnace. The Garden was my first post on these topics; the second is the Mountain.  

The image at the top of this page titled Jacob's Dream shows a spiral stairway between two levels of existence which we identify as earth and heaven. Jacob sleeps and dreams of a ladder between himself asleep on earth, and heaven above him in the sky. Angels of God traverse in both directions connecting heaven and earth.

Blake uses the term ladder only four times in his poetry but he uses mountain 224 times in his writings: poems, letters, and annotations. From this we may assume that mountain was an important symbol to Blake. Frey sees the symbol mountain to represent "a cluster of images" including ladders, towers, temples, winding of spiral stairs, "all with the symbolic sense of connecting with a higher a higher state of existence from the ordinary one."

This passage is from a poem enclosed in a letter which Blake wrote to Anna Flaxman in gratitude for her help with his and Catherine's move to Felpham. Notice the words Heaven, Ladder, Angels, descends, Turret, spiral, Ascend - all words that Frye associates with the symbol mountain. Blake's enthuiasm for the move to Felphem led him to feel transformed to a higher plane of existence.

Letters, To Mrs Anna Flaxman, 14 Sepr 1800 (E 709) 

"Away to Sweet Felpham for Heaven is there The Ladder of Angels descends thro the air On the Turret its spiral does softly descend Thro' the village then winds at My Cot it does end You stand in the village & look up to heaven The precious stones glitter on flights seventy seven And My Brother is there & My Friend & Thine Descend & Ascend with the Bread & the Wine"

From Page 151 of Words with Power:

"To the imagination, the universe has always presented the appearance of a middle world, with a second world above it and a third one below it. We may say with some qualifications, that images of ascent are connected with the intensification of consciousness, and images of descent with the reinforcing of it by other forms of awareness, such as fantasy or dream. The most common forces of ascent are ladders, mountains, towers, and trees; of descent, caves or dives into water." 

Genesis 28

[10] And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran.
[11] And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.
[12] And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.
[13] And, behold, the LORD stood above it, and said, I am the LORD God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed;
[14] And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

"The ladder of the dream was a ladder from heaven rather than to it; it was not a human construction but an image of the divine will to reach man." (Page 152)

In this letter Blake cites the book of Ezra as an early influence on his spiritual development:

Letters,  to Flaxman, (E 707)

"Now my lot in the Heavens is this; Milton lovd me in childhood & shewd me his face Ezra came with Isaiah the Prophet,"

A passage in Ezra points out the loving care that that God has for his creation. The connection between God and man is indicated to be in the direction of a providential God to mankind.

4Ezra.8

[47] For you come far short of being able to love my creation more than I love it. But you have often compared yourself to the unrighteous. Never do so!
[48] But even in this respect you will be praiseworthy before the Most High,
[49] because you have humbled yourself, as is becoming for you, and have not deemed yourself to be among the righteous in order to receive the greatest glory.
[50] For many miseries will affect those who inhabit the world in the last times, because they have walked in great pride.
[51] But think of your own case, and inquire concerning the glory of those who are like yourself,
[52] because it is for you that paradise is opened, the tree of life is planted, the age to come is prepared, plenty is provided, a city is built, rest is appointed, goodness is established and wisdom perfected beforehand.

In this passage from the Four Zoas, Urizen the Zoa of reason has been forced into the unconscious or the 'deep dens of Urthona' as a result of refusing to allow his energies to be dedicated to the service of his Lord or the unified wholeness. His mountains symbolize where his thinking took place, and his sons represent the wisdom originating in his brain. Blake insinuates that the loss of his reasoning function had changed Urizen's perception and left him without joy or discernment.

Four Zoas, Night V, Page 63,(E 343) 

"The Woes of Urizen shut up in the deep dens of Urthona

Ah how shall Urizen the King submit to this dark mansion
Ah how is this! Once on the heights I stretchd my throne sublime 
The mountains of Urizen once of silver where the sons of wisdom dwelt
And on whose tops the Virgins sang are rocks of Desolation

My fountains once the haunt of Swans now breed the scaly tortoise
The houses of my harpers are become a haunt of crows
The gardens of wisdom are become a field of horrid graves        
And on the bones I drop my tears & water them in vain

PAGE 64 
Once how I walked from my palace in gardens of delight
The sons of wisdom stood around the harpers followd with harps
Nine virgins clothd in light composd the song to their immortal voices
And at my banquets of new wine my head was crownd with joy

Then in my ivory pavilions I slumberd in the noon 
And walked in the silent night among sweet smelling flowers
Till on my silver bed I slept & sweet dreams round me hoverd
But now my land is darkend & my wise men are departed

My songs are turned to cries of Lamentation 
Heard on my Mountains & deep sighs under my palace roofs         
Because the Steeds of Urizen once swifter than the light
Were kept back from my Lord & from his chariot of mercies"

Blake & Quakers

Posted to another blog in Dec 2023

William Blake

Illustrations_to_Robert_Blair's_The_Grave

Friendship

Before his death in 2016 my husband, Larry Clayton, wrote this about how William Blake's thought and experience paralleled the development of Quakerism as George Fox brought it into being.

"The proliferation of radical believers brought forth by the Puritan Revolution included a group called Ranters, who had descended from the the 16th Century Familists of Holland. The direct guidance of the Holy Spirit freed the Ranters from most or all legal restraints, and they were given to extreme statements (and demonstrations!) of their freedom. The Society of Friends grew out of this fertile soil.

In the 17th Century George Fox, an idealistic young man, explored the wide variety of religious options present in the Commonwealth. From a strictly scriptural view point he found something lacking in each of them. For example Jesus had insisted that there should be no preeminence among the faithful ("Call no man father"). Fox found an unchristian preeminence in every religious group which he observed.

After several years of spiritual travail Fox came into an experience of grace. Thereafter he enjoyed the direct and continuous presence of the Holy Spirit guiding his words and actions; he recognized no other control. The ultimate anti-authoritarian, Fox began going to what he called the steeple houses, where he proceeded to denounce the preeminent in each of them. Naturally he won a lot of trouble for his pains. He saw the inside of many jails (like Paul had done), but he started something that's still going on. Modern Quakers still try to be the church together without preeminence. Fox and his friends refused to doff their hats and discarded all titles of honor in favor of the familiar 'thee'. Both of these postures were solid blows aimed at the demise of hierarchical society in favor of the brotherhood of man.

Through the centuries the idea of the inner light in a man's heart has caused various excesses, but Fox's heart was good and the Holy Spirit led him to gather numbers of people around the most admirable moral and social values. The strong anti-authoritarianism of the Friends incurred wrath and persecution from many directions; still they multiplied, witnessing to their spiritual power. By the late 18th Century they had become numerous, prosperous and respectable, and no doubt more conformed to the world than Fox's generation had been.

Blake undoubtedly knew something of the power embodied in the Quaker movement. After the Moment of Grace which Blake experienced, the Quaker term 'self-annihilation' became a key construct of his theology. We could relate other Blakean expressions to the Quaker language. Although Blake preferred to engrave his human forms nude, when he did represent man clothed, the traditional Quaker garb appeared as a symbol of the good and faithful man. Study of Blake's works and his biographers has revealed no formal connection with the Quaker community. Nevertheless many of Blake's values clearly resemble those of the Friends:

The Friends were anti-sacramentarian; they did not practice Baptism or Holy Communion, the two Protestant sacraments. In 'A Vision of the Last Judgment ' Blake put an apostle on each side of Jesus representing respectively Baptism and the Lord's Supper, but he proceeded to define them as follows: 'All Life consists of these Two, Throwing off Error and Knaves from our company continually, & Receiving Truth or Wise Men into our Company continually.'

He also said "The outward Ceremony is Antichrist." And in the famous lines of My Spectre he identified the bread and wine with forgiving and being forgiven, without which we can only commune unworthily.

'Throughout all Eternity

I forgive you you forgive me

As our dear Redeemer said 

 This the Wine & this the Bread'

As already noted Fox and his disciples had no use for priests. Blake used priests repeatedly as objects of derision. In his French Revolution for example the archbishop attempts to speak but finds that he can only hiss. In America Blake has the 'Priests in rustling scales Rush into reptile coverts'. Other examples could be given to show that Blake generally thought of priests as serpents though he did not apply this evaluation to the poor and powerless priests of the people.

The Quakers have always been noted for their refusal to participate in war. Blake held similar perspective on war. 

      The Grey Monk

'But vain the Sword & vain the Bow 
They never can work Wars overthrow
The Hermits Prayer & the Widows tear
Alone can free the World from fear

For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing   
And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King 
And the bitter groan of the Martyrs woe  
Is an Arrow from the Almighties Bow

The hand of Vengeance found the Bed 
To which the Purple Tyrant fled
The iron hand crushd the Tyrants head 
And became a Tyrant in his stead'  

Throughout the 18th Century the Quakers vigorously opposed the slave trade, which had become a profitable element of England's commercial life. Unlike much of the establishment they had enough integrity to see clearly the spiritual implications of human bondage. They formed the first abolitionist society in England and disowned any Friend involved in the slave trade. John Woolman, perhaps the outstanding Quaker of the century, devoted his life to achieving the abolition of slavery. Blake was no Woolman, but one of his earliest prophetic works, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, is among other things a spirited outcry against slavery.

The Quaker oriented reader who becomes familiar with Blake will find other significant correspondences. (Look at the Pendle Hill document Woolman and Blake.) Of all the religious groups in existence today the Quakers in their theology most nearly approximate the thought forms and theology of William Blake. Borrowing a phrase from Northrup Frye the Quakers and Blake both understood 'the central form of Christianity as a vision rather than as a doctrine or ritual' ".  

SANITY

 First posted July 2022

Wikipedia Commons

Frontispiece

Songs of Experience

Here is a section of An Interview Conducted with Kathleen Raine on July 12, 1993 by Donald E. Stanford:

Interview 

"Stanford: One critic has said recently that Blake was not mad, but he understood and described the mental suffering of madness in a profound way. Do concepts of madness such as schizophrenia, hallucination, and so on have a useful place in Blake criticism and will you comment on the direct question, “was Blake mad?”

 

Raine: No, of course he wasn’t mad. He was a sane man in a mad world, roughly speaking. Great genius has a wider field of consciousness. That is what genius is: seeing rather more than other men do, perhaps being in advance of his time. Certainly the nature of genius is to not accept current opinion, and Blake certainly did not accept current opinion. I don’t think that words like “schizophrenia” and “paranoia” add much to human discussion of whatever these words mean. Blake himself says, “Plato says that poets do not know what they write and utter. In that case, why is a lesser kind to be called knowing?” In other words, a poet is an inspired man. Blake believed in inspiration. This must be especially remembered with Blake, but all poets have believed in inspiration, that in an inspired state there is a widening of the field of consciousness. Yeats describes genius as bringing together at certain moments the waking and the sleeping mind. The available knowledge is greater in states of inspiration. Blake certainly had this. 

 

There is much suffering, as your critic says, in the writings of Blake: the turmoil, the anguish of Jerusalem. But this was not a personal thing; he was talking about the nation. He was a spiritual patriot, and he was speaking of the suffering of the giant Albion, as he calls the English nation. He was a prophet in the sense of the Old Testament prophets in the Jewish Bible, who also were speaking for their nation. They were not speaking of their individual suffering; they were speaking of the national psyche, if you like, into which Blake had certainly a remarkably clear insight. He speaks of living. He says, 'in South Molton Street I see and hear' what is going on in the soul of Albion, which is, of course, the soul of England. In other words, here in South Moulton Street I both see and hear the sufferings of the military, or the war against France that broke out after the French Revolution, of the conscription of soldiers, and the suffering of child labor, the endless sufferings of his people at that time, the hangings of boys at Tyburn for the theft of a yard of cloth, the injustices, the national crimes against which Blake spoke out. You may say these were descriptions of deep, deep suffering, the psychological sufferings of various kinds of mental and physical and spiritual tyrannies in his nation at the time. I wonder what he would have been writing about had he lived now. Certainly many things would have been the same — perhaps not all — but when he writes of London and marking, 'in every face marks of weakness, marks of woe,' he felt the collective suffering: that was the nature of his inspiration. He was not a personal poet expressing himself. He was a national prophet, calling to his nation to awake from their 'deadly sleep,' which is unconsciousness of what is going on, and to awake to the truths of the imagination and to reform many things. This is not madness."

Laocoon, (E 274)

 "There are States in which all Visionary Men are accounted Mad 
   Men   such are Greece & Rome"

 Poetical Sketches, (E 415)

"   MAD SONG.
The wild winds weep,
  And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
  And my griefs infold:   
But lo! the morning peeps          
  Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling birds of dawn 
The earth do scorn.

Lo! to the vault
  Of paved heaven,              
With sorrow fraught
  My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of night,
  Make weep the eyes of day;
They make mad the roaring winds,      
  And with tempests play.

Like a fiend in a cloud
  With howling woe,
After night I do croud,
  And with night will go;         
I turn my back to the east,

From whence comforts have increas'd;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain."

Annotations to Spurzheim's Observations on Insanity, (E 663) 

 "Cowper came to me & said. O that I
were insane always I will never rest.  Can you not make me truly
insane.  I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of
God I was hid.  You retain health & yet are as mad as any of us
all--over us all--mad as a refuge from unbelief--from Bacon
Newton & Locke"

Letters, to Butts Jany 10 180(3), (E 724) 

"The Thing I
have most at Heart! more than life or all that seems to make life
comfortable without.  Is the Interest of True Religion & Science
& whenever any thing appears to affect that Interest. (Especially
if I myself omit any duty to my [self] <Station> as a
Soldier of Christ) It gives me the greatest of torments, I am not
ashamed afraid or averse to tell You what Ought to be Told.  That
I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven Daily &
Nightly but the nature of such things is not as some suppose.
without trouble or care.  Temptations are on the right hand &
left behind the sea of time & space roars & follows swiftly he
who keeps not right onward is lost & if our footsteps slide in
clay how can we do otherwise than fear & tremble. but I should
not have troubled You with this account of my spiritual state
unless it had been necessary in explaining the actual cause of my
uneasiness into which you are so kind as to Enquire for I never
obtrude such things on others unless questiond & then I never
disguise the truth--But if we fear to do the dictates of our
Angels & tremble at the Tasks set before us. if we refuse to do
Spiritual Acts. because of Natural Fears or Natural Desires!  Who
can describe the dismal torments of such a state!--I too well
remember the Threats I heard!--If you who are organized by Divine
Providence for Spiritual communion.  Refuse & bury your Talent in
the Earth even tho you should want Natural Bread. Sorrow & Desperation 
pursues you thro life! & after death shame & confusion of face to
eternity--Every one in Eternity will leave you aghast at the Man
who was crownd with glory & honour by his brethren & betrayd
their cause to their enemies.  You will be calld the base Judas
who betrayd his Friend!--Such words would make any Stout man
tremble & how then could I be at ease? But I am now no longer in
That State & now go on again with my Task Fearless. and tho my
path is difficult.  I have no fear of stumbling while I keep it" 

Letters, April 25: 1803, To Butts, (E 728)

"Now I may say to you what perhaps I should not dare to say
to any one else.  That I can alone carry on my visionary studies
in London unannoyd & that I may converse with my friends in
Eternity.  See Visions, Dream Dreams, & prophecy & speak Parables
unobserv'd & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals. perhaps
Doubts proceeding from Kindness. but Doubts are always pernicious
Especially when we Doubt our Friends Christ is very decided on
this Point.  'He who is Not With Me is Against Me' There is no
Medium or Middle state & if a Man is the Enemy of my Spiritual
Life while he pretends to be the Friend of my Corporeal. he is a
Real Enemy--but the Man may be the friend of my Spiritual Life
while he seems the Enemy of my Corporeal but Not Vice Versa" 

BLAKE'S FAITH

Larry posted this in April 2015. It is a portion of  Ram Horn'd with Gold by Larry Clayton.

"This book is an introduction to William Blake's thought with primary emphasis on its spiritual dimension. Recent Blake literature has come largely from secular interpreters. The religious community for the most part have totally ignored Blake. Nevertheless he was a profoundly spiritual man.

My introduction to Blake focuses on his spiritual life as expressed in his aesthetics, politics, and psychology. "

Faith 2

God

that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them
and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.
(John 17)

      The theologues of the forties and fifties learned from Paul Tillich that everyone has an ultimate concern, his God. People in Alcoholics Anonymous have told some of their theologically confused members that, lacking any better God, they may worship a 'pot on the mantle', anything at all to break that devotion to the bottle which is actually the worship of a lower form of the self. To remain sober one must believe in a Higher Power of some sort.

       

     The important thing is that one's Higher Power be not a projection of some lower form of self; that's idolatry. The person seriously interested in ultimate reality engages in a life long search for the most real image he can discover, the image of his God. A person's best image of God nurtures his spirit as he goes through life.

       

      The Bible contains a multiplicity of images of God. For example we read about the finger of God, the nostrils of God, even the backside of God. All his life Blake maintained a high level of respect for the Bible as vision. Nevertheless he refused to worship other men's visions of God:

"I (you!) must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's (Jerusalem, 10.21; E153)". 

      He's saying that we have a choice: to adhere to the conventions (whatever conventions may be for us) or to create our own values from our own experience. Blake did this for a lifetime, creating his own myth of meaning, and with his creative works he expressed it over and over again.

       The only thing Blake really trusted was his own immediate direct vision, and he possessed his soul in varying degrees of patience until that vision clarified (and you may be sure that it was criticized, corrected and amended over and over again. The 'Felpham Moment' marks the decisive clarification of Blake's vision of God. Even then the Father remained for Blake a symbol of subjection to the other man's vision, of spiritual tyranny. His own vision came to center upon Jesus.

       Nobodaddy, Father of Jealousy, Urizen, all the creator and authority figures that filled the young Blake's mind, represented in essence his rejection of other men's images of God.

The "Vision of Ahania" (4Z: chapter 3, 39.13ff; E327) expressed Blake's dawning awareness of a fundamental spiritual truth: the transcendental image which had dominated institutional religion is most often a projection of man's primitive negativities. The ultimate negativities, repressed into the unconscious, irupt into consciousness as the ultimate positivity, a God built upon sand, a "shadow from his wearied intellect". This passage, probably as much as anything else in his experience, inspired Thomas Altizer in the sixties to launch his Death of God movement.

       Blake depreciated the God of Law and Wrath in order to exalt the God of Forgiveness. He believed that the far off, elusive, mysterious, transcendental image of God freezes man into spiritual immobility. He wanted to liberate men's minds from this imposture and put them in touch with the true source of creativity:

"Seek not thy heavenly father then beyond the skies,
There Chaos dwells & ancient Night & Og & Anak old. " (Milton 20:33-34)

"I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
Lo! we are One, forgiving all Evil, Not seeking recompense.
Ye are my members...."
       (Jerusalem 4:18-21)

       The prophetic poems which Blake wrote prior to 1800 concern his efforts to know, describe and deal with the old, jealous, wrathful, creator image; he finally dismissed it as a "shadow from his wearied intellect" (FZ3-40.3). The later, major prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem, also contain this theme, happily outweighed by the new vision.

Prior to the Felpham Moment Blake had worshipped his own visionary endowment, his Pot on the Mantle; he called it the Poetic Genius and later the Imagination. 

The evolving figure of Los building Golgonooza personified what we might call a pre-Christian God. When grace fell upon Blake, he came to see the true embodiment of God in Jesus.

       

      In a letter to his friend and patron, Thomas Butts, he described the experience of redemption that had come to him:

       "And now let me finish with assuring you that tho I have been very unhappy I am so no longer I am again Emerged into the light of Day I still & shall to Eternity Embrace Christianity and Adore him who is the Express image of God."  

Letters, Novr. 22: 18O2, (E 720)

       Following John and Paul quite literally Blake believed that all things belong to Jesus. He is in them (us) and they (we) are in him. All his life Blake had kept a firm grip on the oneness of humanity and its identity with God. At the Moment of Grace he came to see all as One Man and his own forgiven and accepted place in that Man's bosom. In the poem the Man refers to the All as "My Fold" and names the awakened Blake as his herald: "Thou Ram horn'd with gold".

       Blake sent this poem to the one faithful Christian he knew who had befriended and loved him. The circumstances leave no doubt as to the identity of the One Man. The poem poetically expresses Blake's faith as it relates to God, Man and the relationship between the two. It expresses what the Christian faith has to say about the relationship as well as it can be expressed verbally. It also expresses with vivid eloquence the child like nature of the entrance to the kingdom of God. Blake here celebrates and confesses it. 

      To interpret Blake's experience we could use any number of hackneyed phrases representing the various dialects of the language of Zion; suffice it to say that for most of them as for Blake this is the main event, the center of the Moment of Grace. At this point Jesus became and forever afterward remained the One and the ever present Reality which Blake had formerly known as the Infinite or Eternal. For Blake Jesus was a Man, the Reality of Life, and most ultimately the All. In all three instances Blake strictly followed Johannine and Pauline strains of the New Testament.

BLAKE & WORD of GOD

 First posted Dec 2010

Wikipedia Commons

Victoria and Albert Museum

All Religions Are One

Title Page

Jonathan Roberts and Christopher Rowland contributed a chapter to the Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature in which they present their views on Blake's use of the Bible. On page 375-76 they write:

"Blake was influenced by a view of the Bible which has a long history in Christianity and may have been a part of the radical religious underground of which he was an inheritor. In this view the Word of God is not a book but a person: Christ ( see John 1:14. "And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us" and Hebrews 1:1-2. "God...Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son"). In short, the Bible bears witness to the Word of God (that is Christ), but is not in itself the Word of God. Blake manifests this view when he writes:

'The Bible or Word of God, [when read] exclusive of conscience or the Word of God Universal, is that Abomination which like the Jewish ceremonies is for ever removed & henceforth every man may converse with God & be a King & Priest in his own house.' (Erdman, p.614) [Annotations to Bishop Watson]

"Here Blake exalts 'the Word of God Universal' (Christ, or conscience) over the 'Peculiar Word of God' (the Bible as the exclusive mode of divine communication). This distinction between the two 'Words' (Christ and the Bible) means that an individual inspired by the former (through conscience, the Divine Spirit within) may contest and criticize the latter."
End of Quote

Rowland and Roberts are right that this view has a long history and is apparent in Blake's writing. The view of placing the Living Word (acting through the Holy Spirit) above the Written Word (recorded in books) opens up the possibility of continuing revelation which Blake wholeheartedly affirmed. Placing complete and final trust in the recorded Word limits further revelation of Divine Truth. This obstacle to the possibility of the evolution of spiritual consciousness through the work of Imagination is removed through placing trust in the Living word of Christ. Rowland and Roberts were conveying their view that Blake most trusted the word that came to him in thought, and Vision and the expressions of the Imagination.

GARDEN

We turn to Northrop Frye's last major work Words With Power: Being a Second Study of "The Bible and Literature."  Frye states his central thesis as: "every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature." (page xiii) In Part 2 of his book Frye devotes the four chapters to four metaphoric topics : the Mountain, the Garden, the Cave and the Furnace. He calls these chapters "essays on comparative mythology, organized around four primary concerns: the concern to make and create, the concern to love, the concern to sustain oneself and assimilate the environment, with its metaphorical kernal of food, and the concern to escape from slavery and restraint." (Page 139) 

According to Genesis chapter two, before God created the Mountain, the Cave, or the Furnace, God created the Garden for the man whom he had formed.

[8] And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.  

From Words with Power, by Northrop Frye - Chapter 6 -The Garden we read:

"Romantic poets use the same metaphor. In Blake we have the conception of the 'Emanation' or 'concentering vision,' the feminine principle that expands into the totality of what is loved: 

He plants himself in all her Nerves 

Just as a Husbandman his mould 

And She becomes his dwelling place 

And Garden fruitful Seventy fold
The Mental Traveller, (E 484)

 
In this symbolism 'he' means humanity, whether the individuals are male or female, and 'she' is the natural enviornment. The point is that the union with the environment, as it develops in the human attitude to nature, is not simple sublimation but an expansion of sexual emotions...In our day Jungian psychology has developed the conception of the anima, or female element of the male psyche...

Before Jung had had clarified his conception (of the Anima) however, Rilke had produced a poem called Wendung (turning) where he says that he has internalized a large body of images in his earlier work, and that these images now form a single creature or 'maiden within.' ...

I have been dealing with the common tradition in which the poet is a male who begins with the expression of his love for a female, and expands from there into a vision of symbolically female nature. ...The sublimating process starts from the beginning, but it goes in the same general direction, up to a vision with the form of beauty." (Page 199)

Turning Point, Rainer Maria Rilke

"The road from intensity to greatness passes thro sacrifice — Kassner

For a long time he attained it in looking.

Stars would fall to their knees
beneath his compelling vision.
Or as he looked on, kneeling,
his urgency’s fragrance
tired out a god until
it smiled at him in its sleep.

Towers he would gaze at so
that they were terrified:
building them up again, suddenly, in an instant!
But how often the landscape,
overburdened by day,
came to rest in his silent awareness, at nightfall.

Animals trusted him, stepped
into his open look, grazing,
and the imprisoned lions
stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom;
birds, as it felt them, flew headlong
thro it; and flowers, as enormous
as they are to children, gazed back
into it, on and on.
And the rumour that there was someone
who knew how to look,
stirred those less
visible creatures:
stirred the women.

Looking how long?
For how long now, deeply deprived,
beseeching in the depths of his glance?

When he, whose vocation was Waiting, sat far from home-
the hotel’s distracted unnoticing bedroom
moody around him, and in the avoided mirror
once more the room, and later
from the tormenting bed
once more:
then in the air the voices
discussed, beyond comprehension,
his heart, which could still be felt;
debated what thro the painfully buried body
could somehow be felt – his heart;
debated and passed their judgement:
that it did not have love.

(And denied him further communions.)

For there is a boundary to looking.
And the world that is looked at so deeply
wants to flourish in love.

Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work
on all the images imprisoned within you; for you
overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them.
Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand

natures, the merely attained but not yet beloved form." [tr. stephen mitchell]

Jerusalem,Plate 86, (E 245)
"Thus Los sings upon his Watch walking from Furnace to Furnace.
He siezes his Hammer every hour, flames surround him as
He beats: seas roll beneath his feet, tempests muster
Around his head. the thick hail stones stand ready to obey
His voice in the black cloud, his Sons labour in thunders
At his Furnaces; his Daughters at their Looms sing woes
His Emanation separates in milky fibres agonizing
Among the golden Looms of Cathedron sending fibres of love
From Golgonooza with sweet visions for Jerusalem, wanderer.
Nor can any consummate bliss without being Generated
On Earth; of those whose Emanations weave the loves
Of Beulah for Jerusalem & Shiloh, in immortal Golgonooza
Concentering in the majestic form of Erin in eternal tears
Viewing the Winding Worm on the Desarts of Great Tartary
Viewing Los in his shudderings, pouring balm on his sorrows
So dread is Los's fury, that none dare him to approach
Without becoming his Children in the Furnaces of affliction
And Enitharmon like a faint rainbow waved before him
Filling with Fibres from his loins which reddend with desire
Into a Globe of blood beneath his bosom trembling in darkness
Of Albions clouds. he fed it, with his tears & bitter groans
Hiding his Spectre in invisibility from the timorous Shade
Till it became a separated cloud of beauty grace & love
Among the darkness of his Furnaces dividing asunder till
She separated stood before him a lovely Female weeping
Even Enitharmon separated outside, & his Loins closed
And heal'd after the separation: his pains he soon forgot:
Lured by her beauty outside of himself in shadowy grief.
Two Wills they had; Two Intellects: & not as in times of old.
Silent they wanderd hand in hand like two Infants wandring
From Enion in the desarts, terrified at each others beauty
Envying each other yet desiring, in all devouring Love,"