Month: March 2016

Blake and the Spiritual Body, by Northrop Frye

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Awakening from the Material Body

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The central idea of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, to put it crudely, is that the unrest which has produced the French and American revolutions indicates that the end of the world might come at any time. The end of the world, the apocalypse, is the objective counterpart of the resurrection of man, his return to the titanic bodily form he originally possessed. When we say that man has fallen, we mean that his soul has collapsed into the form of the body in which he now exists.

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William Blake and the Radical Swedenborgians, by Robert Rix

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Freemasonry, Illuminism, and the New Jerusalem

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If the philosophy of Immanuel Kant is now studied worldwide, the current climate of philosophical investigation ignores the mystical thinker Emanuel Swedenborg – at best relegating him to footnote status. But towards the end of the eighteenth century, the interest in Swedenborg among intellectuals was immense; his writings “made a lot of noise in the speculative world,” as the leading journal on esoteric matters, The Conjuror’s Magazine, commented in 1791. Kant even felt compelled to respond to Swedenborg in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766). Swedenborg’s teaching became the main substance of the occult revival in the late eighteenth century, and his ideas have had a lasting appeal as a source of inspiration to many intellectuals who were not converts, such as Lavater, Goethe, Coleridge, Emerson, Balzac, Baudelaire, Whitman, Melville, Henry James, and, not least, the poet and painter William Blake, on whom the essay at hand will focus. 

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Anarchism and William Blake’s Idea of Jesus, by Christopher Z. Hobson

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How to create and live in a free society

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The English poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827) left a body of breathtaking art and stirring, sometimes obscure poetry, much of it concerned with religion and much with the revolutionary struggles of his time—the American and French revolutions, the British radical movement of the 1790s, and later, the growing British labour and constitutional movement in the years 1810-1820. Blake’s major poems—which are also beautiful artworks incorporating his own illustrations—include those collected in Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789-1794); short narrative works like The Book of Urizen, America a Prophecy, and Europe a Prophecy, all written in the 1790s; and three long, complex narrative poems, The Four Zoas (1797-1807), Milton (1804-1818), and Jerusalem (1804-1820). This article is about Blake’s idea of Jesus and its relation to revolutionary anarchism.

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Blake and the Book of Job, by Andrew Solomon

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Re-Writing The God Program

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As a work of art, William Blake’s famous set of engravings illustrating the Book of Job is undoubtedly one of his finest achievements. But he made it very clear that his art was never an end in itself. Its purpose was to communicate his visionary perceptions for the benefit of mankind:  “To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes/Of man inwards into the Worlds of Thought”.  Similarly, I shall keep throughout to a psychological rather than a theological interpretation.

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