Revised 10-22-07
Students may complain about the fearsome amount and variety of ancient, medieval, and modern sources that Blake used for his textual and graphic art. If you or I were as widely and well read, and especially if we retained all we read, then we would find ourselves in ordinary conversation using all sorts of words and phrases appropriate to our subject. Here are some of sources.
This chapter has a twofold purpose:
my sources
Blake's sources
(Mine come first as preliminary to his, which obviously is the primary subject.)
*************************************
My Sources
The Written Word
Word and Image
Commentaries
Geoffrey Keynes, Blake Complete Writings (key)
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.
Works in the William Blake Archive:
Click on the above and you should see a list of Blake's Works. Pick out the one you're interested in and click on that, eg Milton. Click on Milton Copy C again, and you have a list of objects; they are roughly equivalent to the Plates. Click on the one you're interested in. Near the bottom is a menu that says "show me" with four options. If you want the image for example click on image enlargement. If you want a real enlargement click on it. Click again to go back to 'reasonable size'. (If you have the plugins, it's a different situation.)
***************************************
Blake's Sources
Although he was many other things, Blake might well be considered a "man of books". His reading was omnivorous. He might also be considered a Renaissance man if such a thing were possible in the 19th Century.
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's sources and reading proved to be not 'odds and ends' as T.S. Eliot had rather rashly described them. On the contrary, Blake's sources proved to be the mainstream of human wisdom. It was the culture of his age that was provincial, whereas Blake had access to the 'perennial philosophy', an excluded knowledge in the modern West in its pursuit of the natural sciences in the light of a materialist philosophy."
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
"Now my lot in the Heavens is this; Milton lovd me in childhood & shewd me his face, Ezra came with Isaiah the Prophet, but Shakespeare in riper years gave me his hand; Paracelsus & Behmen appeard to me."
His "nodding acquaintance" was actually much, much broader. Here are some of the disciplines that Blake had at least a nodding acquaintance with:
Swedenborg
Homer Plato Plotinus Hermes
Paracelsus Boehme Dante Shakespeare
Milton Michaelangelo
Bacon, Newton, and Locke Berkeley
The Bible
Swedenborg
In the 18th century Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist, philosopher and religionist, had a very high reputation. In London a 'new church' sprang up espousing his values. William Blake's parents were members of the New Church. That probably explains several interesting things about Blake's early life. For example his father appear to be about as permissive as the average modern father in our culture today, but very atypical for his generation. .
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:
O Swedenborg! strongest of men,
the Samson shorn by the Churches;
Showing the Transgressors in Hell, the proud Warriors in Heaven,
Heaven as a Punisher, and Hell as One under Punishment;
With Laws from Plato and his Greeks to renew the Trojan Gods In Albion,
and to deny the value of the Saviour's blood.
The reader no doubt recalls that Samson was shorn of his locks by Delilah, leading to the loss of his unusual strength.
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.)
A Vision of the Last Judgment, page 84:
Around the Throne Heaven is opend & the Nature of Eternal Things Displayd All Springing from the Divine Humanity
Although Blake owed much to Michaelangelo, his Vision of the Last Judgment was more closely related to Swedenborg's; Michaelangelo' picture had an exoteric orientation, while that of Swedenborg and Blake had a mystical one. To put it otherwise the great Italian painter suggested a material event some time in the future, while the other two concerned spiritual rather than material realities. Swedenborg and Blake, but not Michaelangelo, perceived the Last Judgment as an end and a beginning, or a death and rebirth (of individuals, nations, and the world).
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:
Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States.
States Change: but Individual Identities never change nor cease:
You cannot go to Eternal Death in that which can never Die.
Satan & Adam are States Created into Twenty-seven Churches.
(Milton 32:22-25 erd 321)
The first ones were Adam, Seth..., and the last one as I recall was Luther. After which the same old round began again to repeat itself in the Great Year, a depressing form of church history. Neither Blake nor Swedenborg thought much of the organized church. The latter thought that it had passed out, to be replaced by a new church in the New Age. He dated it at 1757, the year of Blake's birth as it happened.
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..
"Then I came upon a marvellous clue in the works of Thomas Taylor the platonist, whose translations of the complete works of Plato, most of Plotinus, Proclus and the other Neoplatonic writings of the third century A.D were appearing contemporaneously with Blake's works."
(from a lecture in India of Kathleen Raine re her initial search for Blake's sources)
Taylor and Blake were almost the same age. Taylor, with his translations of Greek philosophy turned Blake's interest in this direction and led to his use of many of them in his search for symbolic material.
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:
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of the one thing."
but felt that Hermes was a magician trying to pass as a mystic. (Magicians try to pull the beyond down to the material, while mystics have visions of the Beyond.)
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).
Shakespeare
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:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Now look at Blake's verses in (his) Milton"
Some Sons of Los surround the Passions with porches of iron & silver
Creating form & beauty around the dark regions of sorrow,
Giving to airy nothing a name and a habitation
Delightful! (Milton 28:1-4 key 514; erd 125)
But we're told that Blake objected to the word nothing. (Cited in Damon 165)
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.
(MHH): Milton belonged to the devil's party without realizing it.
Blake identified strongly with the 17th Century poet,John Milton. He wanted to do for his age what he assumed Milton meant to do for his own. In his own poem Milton he took Milton's Paradise Lost and attempted to correct Milton's conclusions:
Blake perceived himself as the spiritual descendant of John Milton. One of his major works was entitled Illustrations to Paradise Lost.
Blake's Comment on Bacon, Locke, and Newton:
To bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human
I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration
To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering
To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination
(Milton 41:1-6; Erdman 142)
Blake used Bacon, Newton and Locke as symbols of the retrenchment from the age old wisdom to the age of materialism, 'science' (only what could be measured was real). In an interesting passage at pp 187-9 Northrup Frye points out that Blake had much in common with these three and nothing in common with Thomas Hobb, an extreme political reactionary and apologist for monarchy. (One doesn't waste time complaining about the devil, but the other three would have been good candidates for the severe contentions of friendship with the Eternal Blake.)
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:
The Vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision's greatest enemy. .......
Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read'st black where I read white.
(From The Everlasting Gospel.
Blake's use of the Bible will intrigue, mystify, and finally delight you (unless you're a fundamentalist).
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.
Some Bible Books used by Blake
Genesis
Job
Psalms
Ezekiel
Romans
Blake's Use of Genesis
Blake's myth begins prior to Genesis. Eternity is prior to time and space, both of which were created along with the rest of Creation.
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).
The Flood (Genesis 6) also has its place in The Four Zoas: Tharmas in Jung's functions would be sensation; for Blake he was the body, a mild and pleasant shepherd, but in the Fall he became a whelming Flood; he pretty well sank and then froze Urizen.
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.
The Psalms
In The Four Zoas we read about Los' furnaces, an obvious reference to Psalm 12:6.
Here is a delightful (to me) paraphrase of Romans 7:24: Alas wretched happy ineffectual labourer of times moments that I am! who shall deliver me from this Spirit of Abstraction & Improvidence. (Letter 5 to Butts; E716)
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
In Blake we find:
Los stood before his Furnaces awaiting the fury of the Dead:
And the Divine hand was upon him, strengthening him mightily.
The Spectres of the Dead cry out from the deeps beneath
Upon the hills of Albion; Oxford groans in his iron furnace.
(Jerusalem, 42:55-58, 190)
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).
Luvah was cast into the Furnaces of affliction & sealed
(Four Zoas Night 2 25.40 E317)
Coming down to the present we may presume that any kind of drudgery, and investment of time in something other than "following your bliss" is a furnace. It's something less than the creative possibility.
*******************************************
END OF FILE
for now