Month: December 2021

The Shadow of Christmas, by Rod Tweedy

Posted on by Golgonooza

Charles Dickens and the Manufacture of Christmas 

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Introduction: Unpacking the Myth of Christmas

When we think of Christmas, we often think of the glowing celebrations and colourful conjuring-up of deep midwinter festivals and festivities, of the re-telling of a story that has gone back 2,000 years to the birth of a child in a manger, under a burning star, or even further back into time – to the glimmerings and Götterdämmerungs of much older, more ancestral pagan celebrations and rituals of solstice suns and the promise of the rebirth of the year, that make us feel somehow that we’re participating in some deep magic, some atavistic world of connection and history, as we cosy ourselves back in our sofas, turn on the TV, and pour another glass of mulled wine.

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Angels in Blake, by Mia Forbes

Posted on by Golgonooza

Unfolding Emissaries:  Angels and Devils as Dialectic

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Just as Blake believed that angels are inter-relational and can interpenetrate many dimensions, a part of the divine fabric that constitutes human imagination and an extended field of gravity-like attraction and connection (“betweenness”), this piece weaves together the thought of three different but interrelated Blake commentators on angels – Mia Forbes, S. Foster Damon, and Northrop Frye – thus hoping to build, in a sense, the wings of mutual communion and flight, ones which constitute the true or ‘best’ sense of the angelic in Blake: wings enfolded within wings.

“Angel” is the Greek word for “messenger” or “emissary”.  Blake used the word in the specific sense only once, in expanding Matthew 1:20, where the Angel of the Lord appears to Joseph in a dream, bidding him marry Mary. In the Bible it is not always easy to be sure whether God himself may not be intended by the word. Blake combined the two: “I heard his voice in my sleep & his Angel in my dream” (Jerusalem). But anything that speaks of Eternity may be an angel; thus the tiny skylark is “a Mighty Angel” (Milton: 12; cf.L’Allegro).

“Every man’s leading propensity ought to be call’d his leading Virtue & his good Angel” (Blake, On Lavater). Blake had one (see ‘A Dream’, Songs of Innocence; or “The Angel that presided o’er my birth”, from Blake’s Notebook 1808-26); Milton had one (Milton); also the unfortunate heroine of ‘The Angel’ (Songs of Experience). Angels guard children and give them sleep (‘Night’, and ‘A Cradle Song’, Songs of Innocence).

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