This chapter has a twofold purpose:
(Mine come first as preliminary to his, which obviously is the primary subject.)
David Erdman, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (erd)
Prophet Against Empire
S.Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (damon), very comprehensive discussions of the most significant words and ideas of our poet.
Bart D. Ehrman, professor of
Religious Studies at UNC (Chapel Hill), published:
1. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999) Oxford, a
well written and encyclopedic account of the literature of
N.T. times and
2. Misquoting Jesus (2005) HarperSanFrancisco
Milton Percival, Circle of Destiny (per)
Northrup Frye, Fearful Symmetry (fs)
The Great Code, The Bible as Literature (fs2)
Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradion (a condensation is
Blake and Antiquity) (rai):
Much if not most of what I learned about Blake's
sources came from Kathleen Raine:
One afternoon
in 1979 I was sitting in the front waiting room at the
National Gallery and idly picked up
Blake and Tradition, a goldmine indeed. I had just
completed my third reading of Fearful Symmetry and gotten a rudimentary
understanding of what Blake was talking about. In a
famous book of the Bollingen series, published in 1961
Raine had laid out in great detail the various
traditional roots of Blake's thought.
The book is 850 pages and Amazon offers it for $218.95). However the author condensed it into 100 pages of text plus almost an equal amount of images which she called Blake and Antiquity.
Blake and Antiquity are readily available and cost little. Raine provides a valuable introduction into a great many of the symbols that form the skeleton of Blake's work, both textual and visual.
Raine focused especially on The Cave of the Nymphs,The Myth of Psyche, and The Myth of the Kore (Persephone). If you understand what she is talking about in these few pages, you will have a reasonable grasp of Blake's symbology, a vital prerequisite to understanding his myth.
In The Sacred Wood T.S.Eliot wrote an essay on Blake. He found him lacking in the poetic tradition. Kenneth Rexroth wrote more excisively about Eliot's relation to Blake; he referred to Blake's sources as "the tradition of organized heterodoxy." And this from a lecture given by Kathleen Raine:
Blake was not 'unlettered'! Quite the contrary he was a modern throwback to medievalism when 'it all' could be known; he knew all of which Eliot knew nothing. Bacon, Newton (and presumably Eliot) cared little for these cultures, but Blake included them in his 'library' of acquaintance. He despised Bacon and Newton as shallow materialists.
in a Letter to Flaxman Blake wrote
His "nodding acquaintance" was actually much, much broader.
Here are some of the disciplines that Blake had at
least a nodding acquaintance with:
Blake was imbued with a great many of the famous man's values, particularly his esoteric religious ones. As a young adult Blake found many of the same ideas among the great thinkers of the ages. He became less dependent on Swedenborg's thought forms. With MHH Plates 21 and 22 he declared his independence of his childhood teacher.
Perhaps the chief objection of the mature Blake was that Swedenborg had a positive demeanour re the established church:
But one of the things that stayed with Blake was Swedenborg's concept of the Divine Humanity .
To Tirzah (K 220) was a concise summary of Swedenborg's teaching (Golgonooza page 96.)
Swedenburg has another very significant contribution to the thought forms of Blake in what they both referred to as states. A state is a condition through which a person travels in his journey through life.
One can also recognize a close correspondence between Swedenborg and Blake relative to an inveterate hostility toward the established church (cf William Blake and the Radical Swedenborgians page 99). Swedenburg taught that there had been 27 churches, those of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Solomon...Paul, Constantine,Charlemayne and Luther. Blake substantially agreed with that:
According to Raine it was "Swedenburg whose leading doctrine Blake summarized in the Everlasting Gospel". But this is a very difficult poem; not really a poem but intermittent snatches of poetic thought. Very hard to understand because Blake's mood and tone modulates continually, sometimes ironic, sometimes not. It's a source book for whatever gems speak to you. (See also Chapter 7.) It does indicate rather clearly Blake's (and Swedenborg's) view about the organized church and conventional theology.
Homer: The primary source of the Cave of the Nymphs is certainly Homer's Odyssey, while the Myth of Persephone stems of course from the Iliad..
Blake also used a great variety of 'spiritual' documents beginning before Plato and stretching down to his own day. Some of the writers were:
Plato's Myth of the Cave can be seen as the locale of Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Here is the poetry. Here is a short introduction to Plato's philosophy; it closely parallels Blake's myth.
Plotinus: Platonism, neoPlatonism- Blake may have been more of the latter than the former. He used Thomas Taylor's translations extensively in his mythmaking. (If you're up for reading it, here's a colorful description of the man's life. Blake in particular depended heavily upon Taylor's Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries.
Hermes Trismegistus: Wikipedia offers a useful introduction to this mythic figure.
Blake included the Hermetic writings in his library and made use of them in his own creations. (Hermes Trismegistus has an introduction to this material.) The Divine Poemander was perhaps the most important of many works. In Jerusalem plate 91 Blake mentioned the Smaragdine Table of Hermes as the baleful influence on one of his failing characters. He endorsed Proposition 2:
Paracelsus introduced Blake to the rich symbolic language of astrology.
Boehme's Divine Vision not only figured largely in Blake's works, but expressed most aptly his personal approach to creativity.
Boehme provided one of many sources for Blake's doctrine of the descent (or fall) of Albion (man): "The one only element fell into a division of four.. and that is the heavy fall of Adam...for the principle of the outward world passeth away and goeth into ether and the four elements into one again, and God is manifested. Blake expressed "the division of four" of course with the Four Zoas. (Percival p 19). The divided four represent the principalities against which Paul wrestled (as he wrote in Ephesians 6:12).
Blake illustrated Dante's Divine Comedy (Many of these pictures are online here).
Damon tells us that the three greatest poets in Blake's mind were Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer. He has a very comprehensive discussion and listing of Blake's use of Shakespeare. He tells us that Venus and Adonis were among his favorites.
In his plays Shakespeare of course had many ghosts and other unworldly creatures. Blake used many of these and pointed out that they had much greater meaning to Shakespeare than was understood by the conventional consciousness.
Blake mined Shakespeare's Sonnets; he painted a great many pictures illustrating Shakespeare's stories.
Note this from a speech of Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream:
Blake spent many hours studying the art of Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael: These are the names of the Renaissance, when one man could learn it all. But with the Enlightenment "it all" was discarded. target="">
Mark Trevor has provided the Last Judgment of Michaelangelo. Here is Blake's.
Blake perceived himself as the spiritual descendant of John Milton. One of his major works was entitled Illustrations to Paradise Lost.
Finally there is the Bible. Northrup Frye referred to Blake as a Bible soaked Protestant. The influence of the Bible appears ubiquitously through his works; but he was no orthodox Bible interpreter:
One can find sources for most of his poetry in the Bible. Bart Ehrman (2) tells us that copyists of the Greek Bible often used an abbreviation for the word and (page 91). Perhaps following that procedure Blake (very often) used & instead of and.
The Garden of Genesis is represented in The Four Zoas by Beulah; here the Eternals rest from the arduous intellectual "wars of life, & wounds of love" (like soldiers periodically rotating from the battlefield). Adam is one of them; originally he is not sexually divided.
For Blake the "Creator" (or demiurge) was something less than Eternal, which was unitary, undivided. In Genesis light was divided from darkness, earth from heaven, waters from the dry land, the sun and moon divided day and night, man as a material being was divided from the spirit (Damon 151). In addition time and space were created, as was good and evil.
The Creator's first mistake in the Garden was to divide Adam sexually; many divisions followed that one, notably good and evil; time and space followed. Adam's descendants had (temporarily!) lost Eternity.
The Garden of Beulah is the halfway house between Eternity (or Eden) and chaos (Ulro). Like all halfway houses the residents may go either way: in this case back to Eternity or down to chaos. In Genesis Cain chose chaos and Abel chose peace (returning to Eternity). In The Four Zoas the residents almost unanimously take the path down.
In Genesis the first parents, choosing to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, paid with exclusion from the Garden, the ground was cursed, Adam had to 'eat his bread by the sweat of his face', and as God had predicted, he died. (He was consigned to Ulro!) (In Blake's myth death does not have the same meaning that is commonly understood by the materialistic mind. Instead it means that the soul is separated from Eternity, but this is not necessarily a permanent condition.
The four zoas, after their errors found themselves in Ulro and are still struggling to find their way back. That is to say the four zoas of Albion (mankind). The individual is a different matter.
Northrup Frye in The Great Code, page 145 points out the way in which the Bible (and Blake) used symbols to tell "the story":
In Genesis 2:9-10 we read about the fountain in Eden from which came the river of life. And we read about the tree of life. The fountain and the tree run all through the Bible until we get to Revelation. There, in 22:1-2, we find the "pure river of water of life" and on each side of the river was the "tree of life". So we're back where we started, which is to say we have returned from the journey of (mortal) life. The fountain and the tree run all through the Bible, and they run all through Blake (Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem, you name it).
That corresponds to the O.T. Flood, but people were not destroyed, they were changed from eternals to creatures of time and space preoccupied with good and evil (which is absent in Eternity); that was the primary meaning of The Fall.
No one ever had more freedom and facility to quote scripture, and particularly to use them for his own purposes.
Studying his heterodox symbols it may become clear that the Bible abounds with the same metaphors. To learn to read the Bible metaphorically represents a quantum improvement over the literal and material. For the religious person this study of Blake may have a liberating influence:
Many or most of the symbols Blake described above are found also in the Bible, which may or may not be the original.
In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell we find that "Jehovah...who dwells in flaming fire" Plate 6.
"My God is a consuming fire" (O.T. and N.T.).
The word occurs 168 times in Blake's works. It may stem primarily from the biblical use of the "iron furnace" as a figure for the 400 years of Israel in Egypt. However it might appear in an alchemical connection.
The activity of the zoas, especially Luvah and Los take place generally in furnaces (much like the alchemical retort), the purpose being of course to improve the metal (in this case metal is a metaphor for the level of being of people in Ulro.
In the Bible the iron furnace signifies the Egyptian Captivity of 400 years (a good round number signifying completeness). Blake speaks of the furnace of affliction.
Furnaces are awful big in Blake and in the Bible.
Looking first at the Bible we find:
Deut. 4:20
I King 8:51
Psalms 12:6
From reviewing these quotatioons we may safely conclude that Blake is comparing the travail of his age to the iron furnace used by the Bible to symbolize the Egyptian Captivity (Exodus 1).