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Blake’s almost Taoist recognition of the importance of opposites, along with his understanding of the mental nature of the world we experience, had profound consequences. As we can see, they have already taken him far beyond ideas that were acceptable in contemporary theology. His position was so deeply heretical that, without deep study of his work, it could sometimes be difficult to recognise just how extreme it was. The importance of angels in his writings, for example, could distract readers from his belief that the God worshipped by religion was a product of the human mind.

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Blake’s worldview did not only affect his views on religion and spiritual matters. The dividing line between the external and internal was extremely vague in his mind, as we have seen, and as a result, events in the external world were often seen as being interchangeable with internal states. This had a profoundly human impact on his political ideas.

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ONCE, ONLY IMAGIN’D

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CONVERSED NOT WITH DEVILS

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As a source of authority, Blake looked to his own experience and nothing more. If anything differed from this, it was by definition wrong. Seeing as pretty much every philosophy and system differed from his experience, he had no choice but to reject them all. As he would write in Jerusalem:

I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans

I will not Reason &Compare: my business is to Create

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In 1790, Blake began work on an illustrated book that serves as a critique of Swedenborg. In attempting to explain where Swedenborg was wrong, Blake produced an account of his own theology that was short, profound, funny and shockingly outrageous. Its title alone defines his main difference of opinion with the Swedish mystic. Swedenborg’s best-known and most readable book was titled Heaven and Hell. In reaction, Blake gave his work the theologically extraordinary title of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

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For Swedenborg, heaven and hell were different and separate things. A soul after death would know one but could never know the other. Blake, in contrast, joined the two in holy wedlock because, as he scribbled in the margins of one of Swedenborg’s books, ‘Heaven & Hell are born together.’ His love of contraries and the dynamic tensions between them were found to be sorely lacking in Swedenborg. As he saw it, the concept of heaven without hell, or hell without heaven, was meaningless.

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Blake found absurd the idea that a human soul could know one but not the other, because heaven and hell were both internal states. An individual would no doubt favour one over time, but both were always available. A kind, compassionate individual always had the opportunity to dive gleefully into the selfish world of isolated individualism, just as a cruel-hearted narcissist could awaken at any moment to the peace and light of selfless unity.

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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell begins with the bombastic, heavy metal line ‘Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air’. Here Rintrah is the personification of just wrath. Blake, clearly, is not messing around. The poem that follows is a warning about false gurus, which is easy to read as an attack on Swedenborg’s supporters. It details a just man being led away from the correct path into barren climes, while the trickster who laid the false path feigns innocence:

Now the sneaking serpent walks

In mild humility.

And the just man rages in the wilds

Where lions roam.

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After the warning of this tone-setting prelude, Blake wastes no more time and gets down to business. The next page begins with a couple of sentences which, for most modern readers, will need unpicking:

As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up.

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To help us out Blake wrote ‘1790’, the date he composed that first line, above it in the copy of the book owned by his patron Thomas Butts. Thirty-three years before 1790 was 1757. According to Swedenborg, the Last Judgment – that much debated staple of Judaic, Christian and Islamic thought – had already happened, and took place in the year 1757. Most people didn’t notice because it occurred exclusively in heaven, he claimed, although the spiritual transformation it generated would, in time, affect all of humanity.

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The year 1757 was, therefore, when a new form of consciousness appeared on earth and, it just so happened, it was also the year that William Blake was born. You can imagine how this scenario pleased him. While he was quick to dismiss Swedenborg in areas that he disagreed with, he had no problem with his ideas when they appealed. In these lines, he declares this new era to be hellish and specifically identifies Swedenborg as the angel who announces it. For Blake, of course, ‘hellish’ is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when he wanted to balance Swedenborg’s pro-heaven prejudice. Swedenborg’s writings are described as ‘linen clothes folded up’, suggesting dry, dusty, corpse-like ancient texts, and not the vibrant living words that we now needed. You won’t find any exclamations like ‘Rintrah roars!’ in Swedenborg.

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Blake does not hide or sugar-coat his issues with Swedenborg:

Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear another: he has written all the old falsehoods.

 And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, and conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions.

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Unlike most of Swedenborg’s critics, Blake was not questioning the reality of Swedenborg’s visions. Instead, he argued that his accounts of them were flawed and of little value. They suffered from the limitations inherent in the worldview of successful, privileged authority figures. Swedenborg was too comfortable in his own reality tunnel to question how limited it was. We all have our blind spots, of course, but not everyone wants to discover them.

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To show what Swedenborg was missing, Blake dedicated much of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to exploring infernal wisdom and knowledge. He includes a lengthy section called ‘Proverbs of Hell’, which lists the sayings he heard when he was ‘walking among the fires of hell, delighted with enjoyments of Genius; which to angels look like torment and insanity’. The hellish proverbs include some of his most quoted lines:

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These proverbs were intended to be universal truths. They may contain wisdom that you won’t hear from the mouths of angels, but that doesn’t stop them from being true.

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Blake included accounts of meetings with angels, but the stories were chosen to display the limits and failings of angelic understanding. As he confessed, ‘I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.’ To modern eyes, there is something very funny about a sentence as otherworldly and profound as this starting with the mundane phrase ‘I have always found …’ It is tempting to suspect that he was mocking Swedenborg, who displays a very similar attitude in his written accounts of heaven and hell. It seems more likely, though, that the similarity of prose stems from similar experience. As we know, to both Blake and Swedenborg, visions were everyday experiences. Even conversations with angels can become commonplace.

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Having expressed the failings of Swedenborg’s limited understanding, Blake has no choice but to set out how things are, at least as he sees them. It is this which makes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell so important, raising it above a literary spat. Blake does not argue for his personal perspective; he simply states it as fact. It is from this work that we get some of the clearest statements of his philosophy, many of which we have already talked about or will discuss soon:

Without Contraries is no progression.

Energy is Eternal Delight

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained

Opposition is true Friendship.

Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

God only Acts &Is, in existing beings or Men.

For every thing that lives is Holy

Man has no body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul.

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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell repeatedly highlights the importance Blake places on contraries. For example, at one point he divides humanity into two types of people: the Prolific, who produce and create, and the Devourers, who consume. Other writers might praise the Prolific and condemn the Devourers, but Blake understands that both types are needed to keep the world turning: ‘These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.’ Not one to miss a sharp kick at religion, he adds, ‘Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.’

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For all that Blake argues that both these opposites are needed, he doesn’t do so in a way that those of us raised in the postmodern twentieth century might expect. He is not saying that both are in some way equal, neither is he taking a relativistic approach about their virtues. When he stresses the wisdom of hell, he is not saying that there is no difference between heaven and hell. Nor is he arguing that they are both as bad as each other. He writes very clearly that: ‘Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.’

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For Blake, stressing the need for contraries in no way disturbed his moral compass. If anything, recognising that things do not make sense without their opposites – whether that is heaven and hell, love and hate, spirit and matter or the Prolific and the Devourers – automatically highlights which way this moral compass should face. Should you focus on heaven and ignore hell, you mistakenly believe that heaven is everything. If you understand both, in contrast, you truly grasp why it is you choose to face heaven. Blake never forgot that it was the dynamic struggle between the two that matters, for this is the power that turns the engines of the universe. This is what keeps creation alive, vibrant and constantly dancing. This is why anyone who ‘tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence’.

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Swedenborg could only agree with heaven. Hellish thought was invisible to him. Blake grasped both, rejected neither and, by marrying heaven and hell, truly understood good and evil.

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SEEK LOVE THERE

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‘Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained,’ wrote Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Statements like this have earned him the reputation as a champion of sexual freedom and liberation. He saw sex as something holy and good, and often attacked the Church for its attempts to control the sensual side of people’s lives. ‘Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion […] The lust of the goat is the bounty of God,’ he wrote in the same work. In ‘The Garden of Love’, a poem from Songs of Experience, he describes how:

 Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys &desires.

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The tendency of religion to deny and forbid sexuality was, for Blake, a clear sign that religion was corrupt, foolish and unholy. As he wrote in Jerusalem, ‘We are told to abstain from fleshly desires that we may lose no time from the Work of the Lord. Every moment lost, is a moment that cannot be redeemed every pleasure that intermingles with the duty of our station is a folly unredeemable & is planted like the seed of a wild flower among our wheat.’ The thought of all those lost and forbidden moments of pleasure filled him with horror.

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Blake did see desire as something to be acted on and he believed that repression was psychologically unhealthy. ‘He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence,’ he wrote, a century before the field of psychiatry emerged.

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As he had written earlier in the section: ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’, and, ‘You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.’ We only learn how far we can go, in other words, after we have gone too far. Certainly, the idea that the right to act on your desires should allow you to make others suffer is not found in the rest of his work, and actively contradicts much of his writing. Among the same list of proverbs, for example, he states that: ‘The most sublime act is to set another before you.’

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APPEARD AS ONE MAN

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Blake believed that there was no separation between the body and the soul. Instead, the body was part of the soul. Again, he is clear about this in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul’, he wrote. ‘The notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged.’ This is a distinct break from the dualism which has coloured Western thinking from Plato onwards, in which the immaterial and material aspects of the universe were thought of as separate and incompatible.

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The way we thought about our bodies was starting to change in Blake’s era. Flesh was previously seen as something corrupt, weak and foul. Diets and standards of hygiene were poor and sores, insect bites and potent body odours were considered normal. Diaries and letters of the period reveal the deep repugnance many people felt about both their own flesh, and about that of others. The elaborate wigs and powders worn by the upper classes may now seem comical, but they reflected the desire for refinement and elegance over physical reality.

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Our view of the body started to change in the second half of the eighteenth century. A culture that previously saw plump fleshiness as a sign of status and vitality began moving towards more narcissistic ideas of exercise and controlled diets, such as those favoured by Lord Byron. But this was still a long way from viewing the body as being on a par with the soul.

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Many early Christian thinkers saw the material body as the prison of the immaterial soul, and hence something to be despised. The practice of self-flagellation which runs throughout Christian history is a product of ideas such as this, although thankfully few took it to the lengths of the third-century Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria, who is said to have castrated himself for God.

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The teachings of Augustine a couple of centuries later softened these ideas. He argued that original sin was the cause of all our woes, and not simply the flesh itself. This shifted the spiritual battleground from the body to the will, and argued that we had the ability to resist physical temptation. Augustine’s excuse for bodily sins was in agreement with the Gospel of Matthew: ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’

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None of these developments questioned the centuries-old idea that body and soul were two different things. As we’ve noted, this dualism is central to Western thought, so to find alternatives you need to look outside of Europe. Western, Chinese and Indian Vedic thought all differ in how they conceptualise the fundamental nature of the universe, and hence all have very different perspectives on the subject.

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In Europe, by contrast, philosophers after Pythagoras insisted on a dualist position in which soul and matter were two entirely separate things. In his dialogues, Plato talked of physical objects being poor reflections of perfect immaterial forms which existed elsewhere, in some unreachable heaven. The distinction between soul and matter has since been reframed as the distinction between mind and matter, but the general principle of a fundamental separation remains.

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Here, then, are three very different starting points for the foundation of culture and philosophy. If your idea of the fundamental
principle of the universe was Brahman, you would expect to find this deep inside an object. If your fundamental principle was the Tao, then the object itself would be part of the Tao, and there would be no need to look inside to find it. But if your fundamental principle was dualist, and you considered matter and soul to be separate, then the thing you would be looking for would not be part of the physical object. It would be away somewhere in an unreachable immaterial realm. This is the idea that sits at the heart of the European worldview.

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For Blake to insist that the body was part of the soul was to go against centuries of Western assumptions and philosophy. His contemporaries and peers educated at Oxford and Cambridge placed great authority in ancient Greek and Christian ideas. With a dualist education, they were always going to struggle to understand his worldview. The assumptions that lay at the heart of Western philosophy were buried so deeply in their mental models of the world that they had become invisible, and as such could not be questioned. In those circumstances, Blake’s baffling position was never going to make any sense. To the classically educated, it could only be categorised as madness.

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But Blake was not bound by their categories or habits of thought. He was free of those particular ‘mind-forg’d manacles’, which are adopted early in Western education. He was able to describe the universe as he perceived it, rather than how he was taught it should appear. His perspective offered a radical new framing of the relationship between man and God.

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THE TYGERS OF WRATH

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Claims like this are usually made by artists, poets, mystics and the occasional scientist of rare genius. They serve as a reaction against the opposing trend in Western thought, which is more frequently expressed by philosophers, intellectuals, politicians or academics. This tradition argues that the imagination is of little value compared to the rational intellect. Imagination, from this perspective, is just the brain at play. It is entertaining in its own way but of no real use.

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This dismissal goes all the way back to Plato, whose dialogue Phaedo included the argument that ‘a theoretical inquiry no more employs [mental] images than does a factual investigation’. In Platonic philosophy, imagination belonged on the lowest rank of mental faculties. Aristotle also argued that ‘imaginings are for the most part false’. Later philosophers took a similar dismissive view. The English philosopher John Locke argued that there ‘was nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses’. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl did not see imagination as a ‘productive’ act, because measurable things that exist externally, in time and space, were important in a way that things that exist internally were not. This way of thinking was, according to Husserl, ‘the natural standpoint’.

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Perhaps the philosopher most dismissive of imagination was the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who viewed the world of imagination as a non-existent ‘anti-world’. According to Sartre, imagination was a ‘nothingness of being’ that could not be cured of its ‘essential poverty’. His stance was more than a little disingenuous, however, as he had personal experience of imagination’s vividness and power. In 1926, Sartre took what turned out to be, with hindsight, an excessive dose of mescaline. As a result, he spent many years hallucinating sea creatures, who made a nuisance of themselves while he attended to his duties. As he told the political science professor John Gerassi in 1971, ‘after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “OK, guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.’ That Sartre had to persuade figments of his imagination not to be noisy during lectures suggests that they should be regarded as something more than nothing. Of course, Sartre took the view that everything suffered from a lack of meaning or value, and he was never going to make an exception for imagination.

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Opinions on what imagination is and how it should be valued have clearly varied wildly over the centuries. It may seem curious that what some consider to be the most vital aspect of our minds should be seen by others as so unimportant. This does, however, serve as a reminder of the extent to which the world as we perceive it is a self-portrait. Philosophers and intellectuals are proud of their rationality and believe that the external world works logically. Artists, on the contrary, value their imagination, and perceive the world to be a place where it is of primary importance.

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The difference of opinion is heightened because we have traditionally had difficulty defining exactly what imagination is. In many accounts, imagination, fantasy, hallucination, consciousness and even memory blur into one another, and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. The American philosopher Edward S. Casey is one of the few academics who have attempted to define what we mean when we talk of imagination. According to Casey, much of the philosophic and artistic discourse around the subject is vague, undefined and can safely be discarded.

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Casey believed that the arguments among Greek philosophers about where imagination ranked in the scheme of mental faculties were essentially meaningless. The hierarchical models of mind used in the classical world fail to understand that the brain is a network, with different facilities interacting with and affecting each other at the same time. ‘A recognition of the multiplicity of the mental’, he argues, ‘must replace a vertical view of the mind if we are to avoid the harmful consequences of thinking in exclusively hierarchical terms.’ Casey also believed that poets have overstated the association between imagination and creativity. While the two terms are clearly linked, they do not refer to the same phenomenon. It is possible for imagination not to be creative; many everyday acts of imagination prove to be banal and repetitive.

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Imagination, Casey tells us, is unusual in that it is separate from other forms of thought. Memory, perception and abstract intellectualising easily flow into each other, but an act of imagination is a stand-alone experience. It can be either spontaneous or self-controlled, and it occurs in the mind in imaginal space and time, on a mental stage.

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In a similar manner to Swedenborg, Casey classified acts of imagination into different types, which he called ‘imaging’, ‘imagining-that’ and ‘imagining-how’. The three names are so similar that they are easily confused, but Casey’s categories do provide considerable insight into how imagination becomes deeper and more powerful.

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Imaging, Casey’s first category, is when you bring something to mind. You might, for example, mentally produce an image of the detective Sherlock Holmes. This usually presents itself in the mind’s eye as the image of a thin-faced man with a deerstalker hat and a large magnifying glass in his hand, although the actual form this image might take will vary from person to person. Some might see an image of the actor Benedict Cumberbatch in modern clothes, for example, while others may see the character from the Sidney Paget illustrations that originally accompanied Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. Some will see a still image while others will see a moving one, but all will have a self-contained image of Sherlock and nothing else. We are unlikely to imagine a world around this character, unless we actively decide to conjure one.

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Imaging is usually visual, but the term also applies to other sensory acts of imagination, such as imagining bird sounds or the smell of fresh coffee. We not only see with the mind’s eye, we can also smell with the mind’s nose and taste with the mind’s tongue. Sherlock Holmes can also be brought to mind in an abstract way, with no visual or other sensory aspects, because we can experience non-sensory imaging as well, as we will see later.

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For Blake and Swedenborg, the imagination was a faculty which could be exercised and strengthened, and which ultimately became a path to the land of vision. But what, exactly, do we mean when we say ‘imagination’? It is a common, everyday word, yet tricky to define. Examining what has been written about the imagination over the years, it is clear that the concept is understood in a number of different

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After imaging comes imagining-that. Not just the simple act of bringing a specific single object or person to mind, it is about imagining a more complex scene, with specific dynamics and relationships being acted out among its constituent parts. It is what Casey calls ‘a state of affairs’. Imagining Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty struggling above the Reichenbach Falls is an example of imagining-that. It is a scene that plays out over time, and one which is possible to imagine unfolding in numerous ways. Imagining-that is more complex than imaging, although it is still a scene that we witness in our mind, as if we were a nearby, impartial observer. In this scenario, the mind is watching the mind.

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Imagining-how is more complex still. It involves working out the details of how a scene is going to develop in real time, perhaps to rehearse a task or solve a puzzle. The person doing the imagining does not remain a separate entity who objectively views the action from a distance in their mind’s eye. Instead, they place themselves in the scene. They become an active participant, deciding how to feel, think, act or behave in the scene as it unfurls. An example would be imagining how you could escape from Moriarty’s attack above the waterfall, if you were Sherlock Holmes. You could imagine how the detective might grab on to a tree branch as Moriarty goes to push him over the edge, leaving him dangling over the side but avoiding the fall. Or perhaps you imagine how you as Sherlock elegantly sidestep Moriarty’s attack, resulting in your nemesis toppling alone over the falls.

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In imagining-how, it is necessary to enter the scene either as yourself or, as in this case, as a surrogate for a different character. The difference between imagining-that and imagining-how is like moving from watching a film to donning a virtual reality headset and playing a game. In this way, you can try out scenarios and rehearse different approaches for dealing with a situation. Again, imagining-how can occur using the mind’s eye or other senses, or it can occur non-sensuously; for example, when a computer programmer imagines how an algorithm they are writing will work.

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As we move from imaging to imagining-that and imagining-how, the act of imagination grows in complexity. We find ourselves being drawn into it, moving from passive observer to active participant. We are no longer the audience watching the mind, but an actor taking part in the play. This development mirrors that reported by Swedenborg during his journey from dreaming scientist to full-blown mystic. The contents of his imagination became more complex and compelling, until he fell into them completely.

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Casey, then, shows how imagination is not a single, fixed activity, but something that grows deeper as the person imagining becomes more involved in their mental creation and increasingly blind to the exterior world. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung developed a similar system. The practice of ‘active imagination’ was an important part of Jung’s therapeutic work, and he classified different types of fantasy as either voluntary, passive or active. Voluntary fantasy was superficial and trivial, he thought, while the imagination begins to take over during passive fantasy, and unexpectedly overwhelms the mind without being summoned. In active fantasy, however, there is a ‘positive participation of consciousness’, and the conscious self becomes a central part of the imaginative act, in a process that seems identical to the imagining-how that Casey describes.

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How, though, can this deep imagination lead to the vision states that Blake and Swedenborg describe? A clue may be the overwhelmingly fantastical nature of what they imagined. In Blake’s mythological system and Swedenborg’s tours of hell or alien worlds, there was little that involved autobiographical memory or worldly scenarios which require the brain’s default mode network to be active. As we saw earlier, deep involvement in a task that does not require much assistance from the default mode network can lead to a loss of the sense of self. This, in turn, seems to be a key to visionary experience. A similar process can be found in the practice of transcendental meditation, in which the mental repetition of a mantra works to quiet the chattering mind. This mantra is a collection of syllables which are meaningless in English and which practitioners keep secret, in order not to connect the word with any real-world experiences. As a result, there is nothing for the mind to snag on to when it is repeating the mantra, as there are no mental connections associated with it. It does not trigger trains of thought that distract from the meditation and activate the default mode network. That Blake’s mythology was his alone and had no associations to his wider culture may, perhaps, have kept social and autobiographical parts of his brain quiet and allowed him to reach deeper states of mind.

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Based on Casey and Jung’s models, it is possible to see how an increasingly complex and rich imagination could reach a point where the mind forgets all about the everyday world and experiences what it is imagining as vividly, or even more so, as it does the real world. Their models do not go any further than this. Blake’s accounts of his visions, however, suggest this is only the start, and that it is after this point that things get interesting. His ‘fourfold vision’, for example, implies the existence of a state of imagination more extreme than those in Casey’s work.

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As mentioned earlier, the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s thought that the fourfold visions Blake reported were similar to states of mind that could be induced through the use of psychedelic compounds such as LSD. Such experiences are worth considering here because they go further than Casey’s model in reporting increasingly deep states of imagination and consciousness. One of the more useful models of extreme forms of consciousness comes from the infamous Harvard psychologist and LSD advocate Dr Timothy Leary.

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Leary was originally an academic who excelled at systematic thinking. Over the course of decades of psychedelic drug use, he developed and refined a model of the different states of mind experienced during expanded awareness. He called this the eight-circuit model, where each of the eight ‘circuits’ describes a different level or style of mental activity.

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The first four of these ‘circuits’ are uncontroversial and are largely borrowed from existing models of psychological development. They cover basic survival, recognition of power, manipulation of symbols and awareness of sexuality. It is not until the fifth circuit that we encounter the mind in a non-everyday state.

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The fifth level is called the neurosomatic circuit and deals with feelings of bliss, pleasure, wellbeing and the recognition of beauty. It involves sensual awareness of the body and is sometimes called the rapture circuit. Logic, purpose and utility become irrelevant in the face of overwhelming aesthetic experience. Importantly, there is a sense of detachment from the worldly concerns of the first four circuits. Our past and future, and our worries and responsibilities, fade away until they seem of little importance. The sense of self produced by the default mode network and other brain structures is being dialled down and weakened. This circuit matches what Blake called Beulah, a state of grace likened to a temporary earthly heaven. Beulah was a place of dreams, moonlight and love, and its function was to separate the material world that Blake called Ulro from Eternity above. This fits well with Leary’s model, in which the detachment of the fifth circuit acts as a buffer between the worldly concerns of the first four circuits and the higher levels of consciousness to come.

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After the neurosomatic circuit comes the sixth level, which Leary called the neuro-electrical circuit. This is the circuit that we most associate with the psychedelic sixties; it is what everything from psychedelic music to 1960s poster design was trying to express. It is an explosion of perspectives and connections that can be thrilling or overwhelming, and which can be triggered by a psychedelic drug such as LSD. The self, though greatly reduced, is still present at this level, but the rules of the physical world have become very different.

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Blake has described experiences which sound very similar to being thrown into Leary’s sixth circuit. When he was sitting for the portrait painter Thomas Phillips in 1807, he described an encounter with the archangel Gabriel which we’ve already noted. In this account, the moment when the roof of his study opened and he was thrust upwards into the heavens sounds much like an account of the sixth circuit activating. Blake seems to be trying to describe experiences like these when he talks of ‘fourfold vision’.

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This circuit is also sometimes referred to as the meta-programming level. Leary believed that this was a state of consciousness in which the mind became aware of how it works and could consciously rewrite itself. On the sixth circuit, the ‘mind forg’d manacles’ that dictate how you react to the world are revealed, and religions, prejudices, beliefs and social structures appear arbitrary and changeable. Here the self understands that it is just a story, rather than something real or fixed, and that it is able to rewrite itself if it so wishes. Blake’s declaration that ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans’ is evidence of this state of awareness.

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The ‘meta-programming’ made possible by this state of awareness helps explain why modern therapists have gained promising results from psychedelic drug therapy for the treatment of issues such as alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder. It is also why psychedelic drug use can be dangerous, and why the 1960s and 1970s produced so many ‘brain-fried acid casualties’, to use a common description. Rewriting your assumptions about the world is not something to be done casually or even accidentally. There were many who came down from recreational drug experimentation with new beliefs that were wild, paranoid and entirely at odds with the rest of society.

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Although the sixth circuit still leaves you clinging on to an awareness of the physical world, this is left behind at the seventh circuit. Leary called this the neurogenetic circuit. What remains of the self is in a place outside of time and space. It is here that ancestors are encountered and the history of life is laid out before you. This is the realm of the archetypes, the collective unconscious that Jung wrote about. Swedenborg’s travelogue of heaven and hell seems to be the product of a similar state of consciousness, as do Blake’s references to Eternity.

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The eighth circuit, which Leary added to his model late in life, involves the complete annihilation of the self. It is entering the light at the end of the tunnel in a near-death experience. It is far beyond description, and as such there is little that can be said about it here.

Dmt breakthrough too maybe

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If Blake is to be believed, these higher states of consciousness reported by mystics, saints, poets and psychedelic pioneers can be triggered by exercising the imagination. Of course, both Leary’s structured list of states of expanded awareness and Blake’s visionary mythology are models – they are simplified framings of much richer and more complex phenomena. We can accept them as useful guides, but we shouldn’t confuse them too literally with the mental territory that they are trying to record and describe. Yet the fact that they fit together so well, despite the centuries and experiences that separate their authors, suggests that they describe a universal mental experience.

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As we have seen, imagination varies greatly in terms of depth and involvement. But it also varies in how it is experienced, as neurologists are only just discovering. The experience of the ‘mind’s eye’, it has recently been realised, is very different from person to person.

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If you ask several people to close their eyes and imagine a cow, the results will differ significantly. For most, an image of something roughly cow-like will appear in their mind’s eye. It may be vague and indistinct, and it may soon fade, but they will see something. This is not true for everyone.

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Some people will see nothing at all, which indicates a condition known as aphantasia. Even if you asked an aphantasic to mentally picture something extremely familiar, such as their own kitchen, they would not be able to do so because they have no faculty for mental imagery. Most aphantasics find this normal, and struggle to imagine how it could be otherwise. They tend to assume that the concept of a ‘mind’s eye’ is simply metaphorical, because although they couldn’t see a cow or a kitchen if you asked them to imagine one, they were still thinking about those things. Aphantasics are more likely to have difficulty recognising faces and often have weak autobiographical memories of events in their lives. Roughly 2–3 per cent of the population is aphantasic, which makes it a surprisingly common condition.

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At the opposite end of the spectrum are people with a condition called hyperphantasia. If you could glance inside a hyperphantasic’s mind when you asked them to imagine a cow, what you saw might shock you. A hyperphantasic would see a cow in their mind’s eye as vivid and real as if it was standing just in front of them. They would not only be able to see the cow in pin-sharp focus, but they would also be able to smell its damp hide and feel the heat from its breath. To a hyperphantasic, images are not things that you think, they are things that you encounter.

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Scientists have only just begun to study these extremes of mental imagery vividness. The term ‘aphantasia’ was first coined by the neurologist Adam Zeman and researchers at the University of Exeter in a 2015 paper. Studies of the condition are currently in their infancy, but there are already some interesting correlations being reported. Hyperphantasics tend to spend more time daydreaming than the average person. They are more prone to emotions such as regret, longing and nostalgia; they experience both greater anxiety and greater empathy than most; and they can find reading about a gory incident extremely distressing. Research into hyperphantasia is producing techniques that can help syndromes like post-traumatic stress disorder. Patients suffering from intrusive memories, it has been discovered, can be calmed by being presented with alternative strong visual imagery, such as playing the game Tetris – the mind can only hold one mental image at a time, and the vividness of the new image overwrites the old intrusive one.

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Although retrospective diagnoses of historical psychological conditions are problematic, the case for Blake being a hyperphantasic is strong. As we have already noted, Blake insisted that everything he painted he saw first in his mind. His contemporaries also commented on this. Thomas Phillips wrote how Blake ‘always saw in fancy every form he drew’. This situation was tested by a series of experiments Blake undertook around 1820 with the watercolour painter John Varley. He encouraged Blake to draw portraits of famous spirits that he saw, including Moses, Julius Caesar, William Wallace and Edward III. A cynic may say that these portraits, known as the ‘visionary heads’, owe more to memory than vision, because a number of his drawings of historical figures resembled previous portraits that Blake would probably have seen. The accounts of Blake producing these images, however, suggest that whatever their original source, Blake was indeed sketching people who appeared vividly in his mind’s eye.

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Sessions took place at night, usually starting around 9 or 10 p.m. and sometimes lasting until 3 or 4 a.m. Varley would suggest a historic figure, and after a brief moment, Blake would cry, ‘There he is!’ and get to work. As he sketched, Blake would occasionally look up, as if he had a real sitter before him. Sometimes he would abandon a portrait mid-sketch, saying, ‘I can’t go on, it is gone! I must wait till it returns.’ When he was asked to sketch the monstrous spirit from his famous painting The Ghost of a Flea, Blake started drawing the spirit he ‘saw’ but ran into a problem when it moved position and opened its mouth. He had to abandon his first sketch and start again next to it, this time showing the new position of the creature’s features. This suggests that he was sketching what he saw vividly in his mind’s eye, rather than making up the image as he went. From the many similar accounts, it seems that Blake was telling the truth about drawing what he ‘saw’ in vision.

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There are other aspects of Blake’s life which support the possibility that he was hyperphantasic. When people discuss the great moral problems of the day – in the modern world issues like climate change, inequality and biodiversity collapse – they can usually remain dispassionate and calm. Blake couldn’t; the issues of his age, which included slavery and child labour, pushed him into anger. For an hyperphantasic person, talking about the cruel conditions that plagued child chimney sweeps would conjure vivid visions of the suffocating, claustrophobic darkness that these young children were forced to endure. When talk of these issues causes the reality of those situations to play out in your mind’s eye, a reaction of righteous anger is natural. Blake was always quick to express fury about confinement. In the poem ‘Auguries of Innocence’ he writes:

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage

A Dove house filld with Doves &Pigeons

Shudders Hell thro all its regions

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The increased empathy and anxiety experienced by hyperphantasics suggests a link between Blake’s politics and moral outrage and the strength of his imagination.

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Many hyperphantasics are highly creative, and a striking number are drawn to visual art. It is not the case, however, that they paint to record what they see in their mind’s eye. The contemporary London artist Clare Dudeney is an example. Dudeney is hyperphantasic and her condition can affect her profoundly. ‘When people describe things, especially gory things, I visualise them so vividly it’s like I’m experiencing them first-hand,’ she has explained. ‘A few years ago, I was on the train reading a passage about someone who got a nail stuck in their foot and I passed out.’ Yet she does not have similarly strong spiritual experiences in religious settings, such as churches or cathedrals. Hyperphantasia does not seem to directly coincide with a tendency to experience deep mystical states, such as Blake’s ‘fourfold vision’.

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The work of different hyperphantasic artists is as varied as you would expect from any random group of artists. While they tend to view their hyperphantasia as an asset, it is not the case that they feel compelled to record their internal visions on canvas. If there is a connection, it seems to be one of intent, rather than results. Dudeney, who has the strange ability to draw with both hands at once, produces work that is predominantly abstract, energetic, and focused on colourful shapes colliding. She describes the motivation behind her own work: ‘My practice considers how the subjective experience of “being” might be shared with another […] Imagining “the self” as a network of relationships in flux: fragmented, uncertain and complex. The works map subconscious thoughts and feelings.’ This also serves as a perfect description of the works of William Blake.

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The vividness of the hyperphantasic imagination, however, does fit with the idea that Casey’s imagining-how can tip into Leary’s higher circuits. When the experience of imagining-how is so vivid and real, awareness of both the self and the external world falls away. At this point awareness is focused on only the imagination, which interacts with nothing but itself, and a path to the world of vision is revealed.

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This would still be a rare occurrence, of course. It is not something that every hyperphantasic would experience. But occasionally there will be an individual like Blake with the temperament, upbringing and background for whom deep imagination lessens their sense of self and tips them into expanded states of awareness. In his letter to Thomas Butts from Felpham, Blake described how the twofold vision that was with him always turned into the delight of the threefold vision of Beulah and, finally, the ‘supreme delight’ of fourfold vision. Leary required psychedelic drugs to lessen the sense of self and undergo a similar experience. For Blake, however, the key was vivid, deep imagination.

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While hyperphantasia may provide insights into the mind of William Blake, the study of the contrary condition of aphantasia suggests reasons to be wary of being swept along by Blake’s understanding of imagination.

In 2019, an exhibition of work by artists with aphantasia and hyperphantasia was held in the Tramway gallery, Glasgow. Called Extreme Imagination: Inside the Mind’s Eye, the roots of the exhibition lay in the realisation that a surprisingly large number of both the aphantasics and hyperphantasics that Zeman and his team were studying were creative. This was perhaps most surprising in the case of aphantasics, for whom a lack of a mind’s eye might seem like a barrier to imaginative visual art. Instead, aphantasics were drawn to creating images on canvas or as sculptures, often as a direct compensation for their lack of ability to create them in their mind.

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As the aphantasic Canadian artist Sheri Bakes has explained, ‘Recently, I’ve been thinking that maybe not being able to see things in my mind … maybe that’s a good thing. The paintings have become my brain. The paintings have become the picture inside that I can’t see.’ Other aphantasic artists talk about painting as a way to reveal what the imagination is hiding from them. As the British artist Michael Chance explained: ‘I must physically work on a drawing or painting in order for my imagination to become visually manifest […] Largely bypassing conscious decision making, the way images (usually figures) emerge from my subconscious is akin to dreaming, and the resulting work is often just as strange, surprising and revealing as that would suggest.’ A surprisingly high percentage of animators at Pixar are aphantasic, and so is Ed Catmull, the former President of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios.

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For aphantasics, creativity is not limited to the visual arts. The aphantasic writer Dustin Grinnell describes writing as a form of collage, building his work through the assembly of individual ideas. ‘From my perspective, a writer without a mind’s eye writes by patchwork, using multiple sources and collected ideas and concepts to build something original,’ he has explained. The biotechnologist Craig Venter believes there is a connection between his aphantasia and his scientific achievements. ‘I’ve known many people with photographic memories for facts who can’t even remotely combine them conceptually like I can,’ he has said. The lack of an ability to visualise in the mind, clearly, does not limit intellectual achievement.

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Bringing something vividly to mind quickly and easily is not something that aphantasics are able to do, so instead of relying on this handy mental shortcut they find other ways of understanding and thinking about things. These usually focus on the context and connections between objects and concepts. As a result, their thinking may be slower, but it can also be richer and deeper. To a visionary, the vividness of their mind’s eye is usually a quality they treasure. It is an ability that marks them out as special, different, and perhaps even chosen. It is not unusual for a prophet or a mystic to feel that they are in some way more important than the great majority who are unable to experience visions. From an aphantasic’s point of view, however, being distracted by the surface dazzle of a mental image sounds like a limitation, rather than a blessing. The mind’s eye seems, to them, like a distraction from deep thought and imagination. It is like someone trying to convince a blind person that the most important thing is 20:20 vision. The blind person, who can understand the world and navigate it perfectly well without the benefit of sight, is unlikely to find such an argument convincing.

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Because we take imagination for granted, we rarely stop to think about what a strange phenomenon it is. What we imagine is often trivial or useless and easily dismissed. It is the realm of dreams when we sleep, or daydreams when we are bored, and those fantasies and nightmares are frequently little help in paying the mortgage. Imagination, as intellectuals and philosophers claim, can appear to be a lesser thing than intelligence or reason. Yet when you examine those higher, more celebrated forms of cognition, you realise that they too are dependent on imagination.

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An engineer requires a plan of something that does not exist before they can start to physically construct it. The theory of relativity began when Einstein attempted to imagine how the world would appear if he were travelling on a beam of light. The discipline of philosophy is a centuries-long tradition of imaginative thought experiments. Before a verbal, spoken language can evolve and develop, someone needs to imagine a connection between concepts and sounds. Should you attempt to think of an activity, pursuit or cause that can be described as more important than the ephemeral act of imagination, you soon realise that without imagination it would be impossible. The ability to voluntarily or unwittingly conjure in our minds what does not exist, it turns out, is a necessary part of all the different abilities that differentiate us from the animals.

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Imagined ideas that arise unbidden, which don’t seem to be beholden to the laws of cause and effect, are perhaps the only situation in which we genuinely get something for nothing. This aspect of imagination can legitimately be described as godlike, because it is the ability to create something that did not previously exist. It is not a physical act of creation, of course, but that is not the same as it being nothing. We live our lives surrounded by a physical world, including chairs, desks, houses, laptops and clothes, which would not exist if the idea and design of them hadn’t first formed in somebody’s mind. We can add things like language, fashion, culture, economics and laws to this list of things that began in an act of mental creation. We can also add angels, demons, gods and other wonders. These are the flora and fauna that grow in the human imagination.

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Because imagination seems such a trivial, effortless, daft thing that we do, to declare it to be the most precious quality of our world, as Blake did, might seem anticlimactic. But as we have seen, there are varying levels of imagination. What is trivial in our everyday lives can, in the mind of someone such as Blake or Swedenborg, be profoundly powerful and overwhelming.

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Humanity is the only phenomenon we know capable of experiencing the light of imagination. It appears to be an unlimited resource, and we have only just begun to explore it. If the world of imagination was a vast continent, then we have only wandered along the shore – we still have no idea of the marvels that await us upriver. Imagination is required for that most important and vital quality of life, the generation of enthusiasm. The word ‘enthusiasm’ means to be inspired by the gods, and the gods, Blake reminds us, come from the imagination. It is through the imagination of human minds that purpose, meaning and relevance enter this universe.

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For this reason, Blake viewed the imagination as divine. True, some may have hoped for a concept of divinity that grants power and control over the material world, which imagination alone may not be capable of. But even power and control could not exist without imagination. We think of a black hole as powerful and controlling, but in a dead, pointless cosmos it is meaningless and irrelevant, and as much a random quirk of the physical world as everything else. It is only the human mind that can add qualities like awe and dread to a black hole. Likewise, there would be no concept of divinity itself without imagination.

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The Canadian poet and musician Leonard Cohen told us that there is a crack in everything, which is how the light gets in. From a Blakean perspective, imagination is Cohen’s crack in Urizen’s closed, limited, finite universe, a way in which something new can appear, as if by magic. It is how the inspired, the world changing and the mundane can arrive from out of nowhere. More importantly, it is a direct challenge to Urizen’s belief that he is the creator god of all that exists. This explains why, in Blake’s mythology, imagination is the key to freeing Urizen from his delusions and shattering the self-imposed limitations on his perception. It is through imagination, Blake promises us, that we will be redeemed.

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I COME TO SELF ANNIHILATION

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High-functioning athletes and highly skilled musicians sometimes talk about becoming so focused that they lose all sense of time, space and ego. They become so fully immersed in what they are doing that it is as if they do not exist, except in their actions. This state is called ‘flow’ by psychologists, or more casually ‘being in the zone’. In a similar way, Blake’s work suggests that there were moments when his sense of self dissolved as he wandered the countryside as a child. This state of mind is a profound one, and mystics go to great lengths to experience it. At such a moment, all is truly one and no division exists, because when there is no sense of ‘you’, there is no way that ‘you’ can be separate from the rest of the universe. This is perhaps why the countryside, in Blake’s work, has all the qualities of a prelapsarian paradise.

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Blake certainly valued the experience of the loss of sense of self and viewed it as a spiritual goal. In his epic poem Jerusalem, he writes:

O Saviour pour upon me thy spirit of meekness &love:

Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!

In his poem Milton, he dismisses earthly laws in favour of the ‘Laws of Eternity’, in which the loss of the sense of self is paramount:

 … know thou: I come to Self Annihilation

Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually

Annihilate himself for others good, as I for thee

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‘Self Annihilation’ is something other than death; during the horrors that unfurl in Jerusalem, a character seeking freedom from his struggles desperately cries out, ‘O that Death & Annihilation were the same!’ Blake understood the self as a mental creation separate and distinct from physical life, which can be annihilated without our bodies coming to harm.

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This loss of a sense of self, it should be noted, is different to the psychological experience known as dissociation, a state in which the mind becomes detached and disconnected, often as a way of avoiding dealing with trauma. Unlike the loss of a sense of self, it is a fundamentally passive experience. In contrast, the flow state is intensely active – the mind is so absorbed in an experience or activity that it forgets to conceive of itself as being in some way separate.

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In the twenty-first century, science has made great advances in understanding how the brain generates its sense of self. In 2001, the American neurologist Marcus Raichle started recording the mind ‘at rest’ when he was studying the brain with fMRI scanners at Washington University. His aim was to help calibrate the machine and to understand the differences in brain activity caused by performing mental tasks. To his surprise, he discovered that patients’ brains didn’t just go quiet when they were lying back and doing nothing. Instead, several specific brain sections lit up and started communicating with each other. What that mental activity was about was not immediately obvious, but those brain regions were clearly communicating about something.

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The functions of the brain areas in question related to autobiographical information, such as remembering the past and predicting the future, or thinking about other people and predicting how they might behave. These are all brain functions needed for daydreaming, so it makes sense that they would be active when people were lying back and letting their mind wander. This network of brain areas has now been given the somewhat dull name of the ‘default mode network’ – the network which becomes active by default when we didn’t seem to be doing anything specific.

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What Raichle had discovered was the structure of the brain’s high-level, top-down organising network. Some researchers refer to the default mode network as a ‘task-negative network’ because it goes quiet when the brain has a specific task that it needs to pay attention to, and only starts up again when the job is done. It is when the brain is intensely focused on a task that the default network becomes sufficiently quiet for the selfless ‘flow’ state to be experienced. There is an exception to this general rule, which is that the default mode network also becomes active during tasks that require access to our autobiographical memories or social understanding. This makes sense, because the combined actions of the areas of the default mode network are our current best neurological model for how the brain constructs that most elusive of things: our sense of self.

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The sense of self has long been a tricky problem for philosophers, psychiatrists and neuroscientists alike. We all think we have a sense of self and intuitively believe that it therefore must exist, but it has proven frustratingly difficult to find, or even define. As children, we might assume that our eyes operate like windows, letting light into our heads and allowing our ‘self’ to see the world outside. But how exactly would this work? Is ‘the self’ like a little person who watches this information, as if on a TV screen, with eyes of their own? If that was the case, would that little person also have another person inside their head, in order to watch what was going on in front of their eyes? That person would then need an even smaller person inside them, and so on to absurdity.

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Neurologists have diced and sliced the brain pretty finely and there is no little person to be found, nor indeed any singular part of the brain which seems to act like one. Our sense of self is not a discrete thing, it turns out. It is perhaps better thought of as a story. It is the story of who we are, what we are like and where we are going, and as such it grows out of our history, our relationships with others and our goals for the future. All this is an emergent quality that arises from the interplay of many different areas of the brain, of which the most prominent are the same that make up our default mode network. It is when these areas are communicating that the story of ourselves can be told and our sense of self can be said to exist.

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If it is the case that a profound spiritual feeling of unity is the result of a reduction in the brain’s sense of self, then this has significant implications for another hallmark of the visionary experience. Those who have had visions frequently claim that the experience was in some way more real than normal life. They often view the immaterial spiritual realm that they have encountered as a more fundamental state of reality than our everyday world of matter. This was very much Blake’s opinion, and it was also the conclusion of countless mystical seekers going back centuries, from the mystery schools of the ancient world onwards. Outside the West, however, this is not always the case. In Buddhism, for example, visions are valued, but it is accepted that they may be delusions and the product of the imagination.

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Is this sense of things being ‘more real’ simply a side effect of the absence of a self? When you are present and self-aware you are able to question what is going on around you, and apply doubts and criticisms where necessary. But when the self is absent there is no ‘you’ to question anything, so all that there is can only be accepted as unarguable and true. The voice that questions whether this is nothing more than a dream is no longer present.

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Given our current understanding of consciousness – or rather, our lack of it – a suggestion like this remains speculative. It may, in fact, be that the reason why visionary states feel more real than the everyday world is because that is exactly what they are, and mystics and visionaries are genuinely gaining access to the unfiltered experience of a more fundamental reality. However, for those sceptical of such a position, the suggestion that it is the absence of a sense of self which causes this belief can be a helpful one. The idea that Blake’s visions convinced him that there was a greater reality than the material world can then be accepted, without having to also accept that this was true. With this intellectual hang-up neatly sidestepped, we are free to examine Blake’s visions and explore what it is about them that is of value.

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The default mode network helps us to understand how the physical world works, allowing us to make reliable predictions about what is likely to happen next. It is a stubbornly practical and rational system, and as such it is not interested in populating our material environment with characters from the imagination. The default mode network cuts out a lot of unstructured chatter between different parts of the brain and is therefore a highly efficient way for a brain to function. As a result, our imagination can be constrained by the default mode network. It can become subservient to what we know about the world.

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If you imagine that the connections between different brain regions are a map of the road network, then the default mode network is like the motorway network – the busiest, strongest and most used connections, and the fastest and most efficient way to go from A to B. Deliberately using the motorways to travel is more efficient than heading down country lanes at random, with no clear destination in mind, just to see what we might find.

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We are not born with a default mode network. Babies’ brains are like blank slates, and they are ready to learn and adapt to whatever time and place they find themselves in. This explains why people have no memory of their first years, because autobiographical information requires the default mode network to develop. Gradually, as babies grow, their default mode networks start to emerge and strengthen, and they begin to understand the world around them and their place within it. Our first long-term memories form between the age of two and four. Once we have a memory, we can begin to understand ourselves as a story that is acting out in time.

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While the child brain is developing, and the emerging default mode network is still weak, it is less rational and structured than an adult brain. As a result, the imagination is less constrained. We see this in the phenomenon of imaginary friends, in which a non-existent companion is conjured so strongly that the child perceives them as real. It is tempting to see a similarity here with Blake’s ‘twofold vision’, in which intense imagination leads to a weakened sense of self that results in imagined entities being perceived as externally present. It is rare for an adult to get into an argument with a thistle, but it would be less surprising for a child.

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In child development terms, imaginary childhood friends are believed to be a positive phenomenon that can lead to improved social, linguistic and creative skills. There is evidence from surveys in UK nurseries, however, that imaginary childhood friends have become rarer in recent years. Children now have far less opportunity to be bored, and with less time in their busy schedules for unstructured play and daydreaming they are less likely to invent characters so rich and interesting that they pass as real. Blame for this is sometimes placed on the use of tablets by pre-school children. It is possible that the use of screens is helping children learn about the world and causing their default mode networks to strengthen earlier, while at the same time reducing their need to flex their imaginations.

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The adult mind is, in a sense, in a rut. Once it knows what is likely to happen in the world, it does not usually bother itself imagining scenarios that do not fall into this pattern. A child who has yet to develop a fully formed default mode network may spend time imagining what their life would be like if they had a pet dinosaur they could ride to school and impress their friends with. An adult, in contrast, will think about what they need from the shops and what to watch on Netflix that evening. On one level, this is a much more practical and energy-efficient use of the brain, but it may not be the way to a richer, more fulfilling life.

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In a 2014 paper called ‘The Entropic Brain’, a team of researchers led by Robin Carhart-Harris from Imperial College London looked at the consequences of what they called ‘entropy’. In this context, the word ‘entropy’ referred to how chaotic or ordered the activity in the brain was, with chaotic, unexpected brain activity being classed as high entropy and calm, predictable brain patterns being classed as low entropy. Carhart-Harris’s argument is that the brain has evolved to limit entropy as much as possible, in order to run efficiently. As he explained in his paper, the brain tries ‘to promote realism, foresight, careful reflection and an ability to recognize and overcome wishful and paranoid fantasies’. It does this through several top-down brain networks, with the default mode network being a prominent example. These try to keep the brain running in a predictable and monotonous way with as little wild or unnecessary activity as possible.

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As sensible as this may sound, the brain can take its quest for efficiency too far. Addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, depression and rigid or fundamentalist thinking are all the result of a brain that is too efficient, and which has too little entropy. Where these problems arise, a sprinkling of chaos is needed. In Carhart-Harris’s terminology, what is required is more entropy, not less. To achieve this, it is necessary to quieten rigid structures such as the default mode network. One way to achieve this is to practise certain forms of meditation. Another is to take psychedelic drugs.

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The link between a quiet default mode network and psychedelic drugs was something of a surprise to Robin Carhart-Harris. When his team of researchers from Imperial College London conducted fMRI scans of subjects under the influence of psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient found in magic mushrooms, they found that blood flow in certain parts of the brain decreased. This result was further corroborated by measurements of oxygen consumption in the brain. This was a shock – the team had been working on the assumption that taking compounds like LSD or psilocybin would cause the brain to become more active, not less. The falloff in activity, they realised, was concentrated in the default mode network. The influence of psychedelics was weakening these rigid structures.

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The idea that William Blake took psychedelic drugs, and that this was an explanation for his work, was a common belief in the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Reading accounts of Blake’s visions, it is easy to see how such a belief could take hold. A good illustration of this was an incident in which Blake was in his home in Lambeth reading an edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, which he had agreed to illustrate. As he read, he was struck by a question Young asked: ‘Who can paint an angel?’ Blake later recounted what happened next to the portrait painter Thomas Phillips.

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According to Phillips, Blake closed the book and cried, ‘Aye! Who can paint an angel?’ At that point he heard a voice in the room reply: ‘Michelangelo could.’ Blake looked around, but he saw nothing except a brighter light than usual. ‘And how do you know?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘I know,’ said the voice, ‘for I sat to him: I am the archangel Gabriel.’ ‘Oho!’ Blake responded, ‘you are, are you: I must have better assurance than that of a wandering voice; you may be an evil spirit – there are such in the land.’ ‘You shall have good assurance,’ said the voice. ‘Can an evil spirit do this?’

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‘I looked whence the voice came,’ Blake told Phillips, ‘and was then aware of a shining shape, with bright wings, who diffused much light. As I looked, the shape dilated more and more: he waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun, and beckoning to me, moved the universe. An angel of evil could not have done that!’

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There’s a lot to unpick here. It is telling that when Blake heard a voice claiming to be the archangel Gabriel, he didn’t fall to his knees in worship. Instead, he cried ‘Oho!’ and tried to catch him out. Blake is frequently contemptuous of doubt; in ‘Auguries of Innocence’ he writes: ‘If the Sun & Moon should doubt / Theyd immediately Go out’. But this incident shows us that while he didn’t doubt the reality of his visions, he did not blindly accept their contents.

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Blake’s story, and in particular the sudden rush upwards from the normal world to an expansive cosmic vision as the roof of his study opened, has all the hallmarks of a high-dose psychedelic experience. Yet the idea that Blake can be ‘explained’ as a drug user is not convincing, not least because he experienced the same visions from early childhood to the end of his days. Psychedelic mushrooms do grow in southern England, a fact that some have used to explain Blake’s visions. But there was no tradition of ingesting them deliberately, and the idea that British people in the eighteenth century voluntarily used mushrooms for consciousness expansion is ahistorical. As the author Andy Letcher notes in his study Shroom, ‘while [European] people appear to have been eating hallucinogenic mushrooms for as long as there have been records, until the twentieth century they always did so accidentally and unintentionally’.

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The few accounts we have of people in Blake’s period unwittingly eating psychedelic mushrooms resulted in experiences of horror, during which the mushroom eater was convinced that they had gone mad or been possessed by demons. There was no cultural frame to understand the experience in any way other than madness or religious horror. There was not a shamanic religious tradition, for example, within which the experience could be placed in context. It would be many years before twentieth-century authors such as Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary were able to frame the experience as a positive one in Western culture.

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This is not to say that physical factors had no part to play in Blake’s visions. The mind and body are complicated and interconnected. It is possible that something like the paucity of a poverty diet, for example, may have had an influence on his mind. But while a physical cause is unlikely to be anything more than a contributing factor to Blake’s visions, what he was experiencing neurologically does seem to be a state similar to that which can be triggered by psychedelic compounds. This idea is further supported by the models created by the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, which have distinct similarities with Blake’s view of the cosmos, as we shall see later.

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It is a lovely detail that after Gabriel stood in the sun, he beckoned to Blake before he moved the universe – as if the archangel were excited or proud of what he was going to do. But what does Blake mean by saying that Gabriel ‘moved the universe’? Perhaps he is referring to the constant dance of movement and evolution within the universe, and, if so, the reason this proves Gabriel’s identity is that only angels, and not demons, are responsible for this movement. Regardless of the truth or otherwise of such metaphysical speculation, we do at least have some idea of the rapt expression on Blake’s face as he recounted this incident. Phillips was painting Blake’s portrait as he told this tale, and the result has become the best-loved and most known image of Blake.

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Because Blake was not initially sent to school as a child, he was untrained in the normal academic way of dividing the world into categories and learning lists of facts. This may be a factor in why his default mode network does not seem to have been as well defined as those of other children. By itself, of course, this is not sufficient to explain the unique individual that was William Blake. Many children are not sent to school and do not grow up to become visionaries. But a background like this could still have been an important factor. For most people, the strengthening of the default mode network and the emergence of a strong sense of self is what casts us out of Eden, making us separate from the natural world. Growing up, in other words, is the equivalent of the biblical Fall.

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As adults, we forget what it was like to be a child. There is a sense that the world was different then, and that something important has been lost, but we are unable to recall what this is, or exactly what it felt like. Very few adults can sincerely and unquestioningly believe in an imaginary friend. Those who can have their own subcultures and safe spaces online – they are aware that if they talk about these things in regular society, they are assumed to be suffering from some form of mental illness.

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Blake recognised the link between the innocence of childhood and his visions, and the importance to his imagination of maintaining a youthful mind. In his 1794 poem ‘The Angel’, he fears that he will one day become too old to still see the divine figures of his visions:

Soon my Angel came again;

I was arm’d, he came in vain:

For the time of youth was fled

And grey hairs were on my head.

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In this, Blake did not need to fear. His imagination and capacity for visions never dimmed as he grew older. Accounts of Blake in the last decade of his life frequently focus on the childlike qualities of sweetness and kindness that he possessed, as we have seen. He was described as that rare thing, ‘a man without a mask’ who had no interest in wealth or possessions but who could joyfully lose himself in music or watching children at play. It is striking that all these qualities indicate a lack of focus on the self.

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Of course, Blake’s ego could rear up ferociously when circumstances required. He could be stubborn and self-focused, and this side of him is amply demonstrated in his writing. But at other times his ego would be placed back in its box and his sense of self would be quiet, so that his imagination was free to roam undisturbed.

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Basire was reliable and respected, and known for his work with the Society of Antiquaries. As Blake’s first biographer Gilchrist describes Basire, ‘He was an engraver well grounded in drawing, of dry, hard, monotonous, but painstaking, conscientious style; the lingering representative of a school already getting old-fashioned, but not without staunch admirers, for its “firm and correct outline,” among antiquaries.’ These were attitudes that Blake readily admired and absorbed. He too held the past in great esteem, developed a style that focused on the importance of outline, and took for granted the need for long hours of detailed work.

Deep work

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Blake’s understanding of what Jesus represented was sophisticated and heretical, and the meaning of those lines proves to be more interesting than their popular interpretation, as we will discuss later. What is important here is how the themes and characters of his later, most celebrated lines appeared fully formed in his developing teenage experiments. There is little sense of an artist attempting to find their voice in the way that David Bowie, for example, experimented with different styles and forms of expression before becoming the artist we recognise today. William Blake was simply William Blake from the start. His childhood visions showed him a greater world than the material one, and from the beginning he expressed that visionary world in the form of art. This was as clear and straightforward a mission statement as you can find. Blake did not have to search for his path or wait to hear the call. He just had to begin.

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In 1749, for example, the Genevan philosopher and musician Jean-Jacques Rousseau visited his friend Denis Diderot, who was then held captive in the fortress of Vincennes in Paris. Idly thumbing through a book as he walked, Rousseau was overwhelmed by a wave of inspiration. ‘Suddenly I feel my spirit dazzled by a thousand brilliant insights,’ he later wrote. ‘A host of ideas crowd in upon me all at once, troubling my mind with a force and confusion impossible to express. I feel my head spinning with a giddiness like intoxication. A violent palpitation oppresses and expands my breast.’

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The key insight in his vision was that man was born good, and that it was the abuses of our society and institutions which turned him bad. This was a denial of the teaching of the Church, which claimed that we were born in a state of original sin. If it was true that there was no such thing as original sin and that people were born good, it logically followed that the world could be turned into paradise, if we just fixed or replaced our corrupting institutions.

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After his vision under the tree in Paris, Rousseau wrote a series of books in which he attempted to express what he had understood in those moments of inspiration. He later lamented that he had only managed to convey a quarter of that revelation, but it was still enough to cause huge upheavals in European politics. ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,’ began his book On the Social Contract (1762). ‘One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.’

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As the idea of man’s innate goodness spread through culture, the old established class systems began to appear flawed, and people found themselves entertaining the spectre of revolution. Rousseau’s ideas could not help but impact on Blake, although it should be no surprise by now to learn he would view them from a very different perspective to his contemporaries.

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Rousseau died in 1778, over a decade before the French Revolution. He was honoured as one of the great thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment and an architect of the Revolution, and his remains were disinterred and placed in the Panthéon. But for all that he became seen as a great rationalist, and would be mocked by Blake for this reason, his arguments came to him in a single, blinding vision. As he wrote in Emile (1762), ‘The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.’

In the summer of 1780, at the age of twenty-two, Blake encountered King Mob.

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He was walking in the vicinity of Basire’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields when he found himself engulfed by an angry, violent crowd. This was made up, in Gilchrist’s telling, of ‘boys, pickpockets and “roughs”’, who were ‘flushed with gin and victory’ after destroying a number of Catholic chapels. Swept along by the mass of rioters, Blake found himself at the front of the mob as they surged towards the imposing prison at Newgate. The rioters attacked the gates with sledgehammers and pickaxes. The building was set on fire and the prisoners inside screamed in terror, fearing that they would be burnt alive. Fortunately, the mob swarming the building managed to rip open the roof and drag the prisoners out of their smoking cages. Three hundred convicts were set free, many shuffling off to liberty with their legs still bound in heavy chains. As the historian Christopher Hibbert described the chaos: ‘Showers of sparks and pieces of red-hot metal shot up into the sky as iron bars and flaming beams and great hunks of elaborate masonry tumbled with a “deafening clangor … on to the pavement below.” While all the time the screaming, wild, triumphant figures of the “demoniac assailants” added the final touch of horror to the inferno-like scene.’

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On 2 June, around 50,000 Protestants had descended on the Houses of Parliament, to protest at a Catholic relief bill that allowed Catholics to serve in the armed forces. Events quickly turned ugly as protestors abused and beat members of the House of Lords and attacked their carriages. This was the start of a week-long period of the most destructive rioting in London’s history. Catholic churches and the houses of establishment figures were methodically looted, burnt and destroyed, while the prisons and breweries were opened and Irish communities attacked. Each night the flames around the capital ‘got to such a height that the sky was like blood with the reflection of them’, as Lady Anne Erskine wrote in a contemporary letter. By the end of the week, hundreds of bodies had washed up in the Thames and the army were attempting to calm the protests by methodically shooting into crowds.

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For Blake, what was significant about the Newgate burning was not the politics that drove it, but the terrifying adrenaline rush of the experience. He knew that the fire of revolution burns to some extent within all of us. It is the will to overthrow, to destroy, and to wipe the current situation from the face of history. King Mob usually sleeps, but he still dwells within our psyches.

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Blake’s response was to personify this aspect of us. He gave this spirit the name Orc. Orc plays a prominent role in the work Blake produced during the revolutionary 1790s, from his illustrated manuscripts to watercolours such as Los and Orc (c.1792–3).

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Orc’s arrival coincided with an important development in Blake’s art. Like other artists and writers of the time, his early work relied heavily on established mythology and characters taken from classical or biblical sources. From around 1790 onwards, however, a new mythology of his own devising starts to emerge. Although he is not specifically named, the ‘new born terror howling’ born in the last section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) is usually interpreted as Orc. It is not hard to imagine that Blake’s experience at Newgate had a profound influence on how he was depicted. He describes how a king was confronted by the newly born spirit of revolution and:

[…] hurl’d the new born wonder thro’ the stary night.

The fire, the fire, is falling!

Look up! look up! O citizen of London […]

The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea.

Wak’d from his eternal sleep, the hoary element roaring fled away:

Down rushd beating his wings in vain the jealous king: his grey brow’d councellors, thunderous warriors, curl’d veterans, among helms, and shields, and chariots horses, elephants: banners, castles, slings and rocks,

Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins […]

            crying

 Empire is no more! and now the lion &wolf shall cease.

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Orc is fire, violence and destruction, because that is what is needed to overthrow the ‘lion & wolf’, or the king and his armies. In a few short years the French ruling dynasty would find this out for themselves.

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Orc appears in several of Blake’s works written or begun in the 1790s, including America, Europe, The Book of Urizen and The Four Zoas. Like the rest of Blake’s mythology, the story of this character must be pieced together from multiple different works which can often be contradictory. It is not the case that Blake conceived of his immense mythology as a complete, perfect thing, and then spent decades recording it. Rather, he was constantly trying to understand the energies that these characters represented. He did this by placing them in differing combinations, to observe and record their conflicts.

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Orc was frequently explored as the contrary of Urizen, because the engine of progress was often powered by the dynamic struggle between ordered convention and the fire of revolution. Orc was also the serpent in the Garden of Eden, tempting Eve by recognising her repressed desire for power and knowledge. Orc is deeply anti-authoritarian. He justifies his furious destruction on the grounds that it is the only way we can overthrow what keeps us down and prevents us from reaching our true potential.

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In The Four Zoas (1797–1807), Orc was bound by his parents on top of a mountain with a ‘Chain of Jealousy’. His limbs, the rock, the chain and the vegetation all knotted together, permanently trapping him physically, but leaving his fiery imagination free to spread throughout the world. The binding of an energy was, for Blake, always a tragedy, but he recognised and understood the necessity of suppressing Orc’s revolutionary fire. He also knew that an energy like Orc would always burn itself out in time.

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Blake’s examination of Orc in his writing was an attempt to discover where the desire for revolt came from. Orc was the child of Los, who represents the imagination, and Enitharmon, who represents spiritual beauty. In theory, Orc should be the creation of something new and wonderful. But Orc, having been bound by those ‘chains of Jealousy’, was repressed or in shadow. As a result, he is the process by which love turns to war. In one account, the children of Los and Enitharmon are said to be characters representing wrath, pity, frustrated desire and logic. These, Blake suggests, are the constituent elements of Orc, the fiery spirit of revolution.

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It wasn’t that Blake was against revolution; he was delighted to see the people of France take power from King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. On one occasion he wore a red bonnet to show support for the republican cause, a risky act in those paranoid times. As he wrote, ‘The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.’ But for all that revolutions can sweep away the unjust and the tyrannical and can be necessary and unavoidable, they also have a dark aftermath. In practice, revolutions typically lead to a power vacuum which results in bloodshed and the rise of a powerful military leader, such as Napoleon or Cromwell. From Blake’s accounts of Orc, we see that he understood this process clearly.

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Blake had a far more profound and nuanced understanding of revolution than most of his contemporaries. The young Wordsworth visited Paris and famously eulogised the French Revolution: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very Heaven!’ Enraptured, Wordsworth looked at the political upheaval with only hope and excitement. As a result, he was entirely unprepared for the Reign of Terror that followed. He responded by rejecting his earlier politics and came to value tradition and stability over calls for social justice that might lead to revolution.

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Blake’s understanding was different. He was not as concerned with the immediate political results of revolution, seeing it, like everything else, as the expression of mental energies. His primary interest was in the root causes of this part of our minds. Having a deeper understanding of its cause, he was more prepared for the darkness of its fallout.

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The result of looking to the Bible as the source of authority turned out to be the creation of countless different sects. Amid this confusion, some radical thinkers started to argue that the Bible itself shouldn’t be thought of as the ultimate authority. Instead, we needed to look to the divine light within us for guidance. Because we needed to be free to listen to our hearts if we were to hear the Word of God, liberty of conscience became an issue of fundamental importance. For some groups, such as the Quakers or the Family of Love, this meant that the scriptures could only be properly understood by believers for whom the spirit of God lives within. Others went further and argued that, so long as you were moved by the divine spirit, the scriptures were not necessary and neither were priests and bishops. The visionary preacher Theaurau John Tany burnt the Bible at St George’s Fields in the winter of 1654, arguing that ‘the people say it is the Word of God, and it is not’. It is here, in the arguments of seventeenth-century theology, that the spark of individualism took hold.

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To believe in individual conscience and to experience the light within was to realise that you were free. For the first time, people no longer had to worry about priests, magic, hell or even sin. A person who experiences the nature of Christ, this argument claimed, was incapable of sin. They were no longer bound by the ‘Moral Law’ of the Ten Commandments. Before Christ, people needed this Law in order to understand how to behave because they did not know any better – or so the thinking went. The Moral Law may have been a blunt tool, but it was a necessary part of Old Testament society. But once Jesus had entered the hearts of men, they knew what was good and how to behave without being told. At this point, the Moral Law became irrelevant. Some argued that for a true believer all law was irrelevant, both religious and secular. This position was called antinomianism, which means ‘against law’. There is a strong antinomian streak in the work of William Blake.

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Once theologians set off down this road, it led to some radical conclusions. Some denied the existence of sin altogether and claimed that it had been invented by priests and kings in order to keep men subjugated. Others practised what they preached and took the antinomian argument to the logical extreme. Being free from law and incapable of sin, they were free to indulge in as much drinking, sex, feasting, smoking and sport as possible, and made a point of doing so publicly. In this tradition, religious gatherings were frequently held in taverns. ‘To be called a libertine is the most glorious title under heaven,’ wrote the London-born antinomian clergyman Tobias Crisp. ‘If you be freemen of Christ, you may esteem all the curses of the law as no more concerning you than the laws of England concern Spain.’ As Crisp saw things, ‘sin is finished’. A similar attitude is found in the introduction to Blake’s epic poem Jerusalem. Here he writes, ‘The Spirit of Jesus is continual forgiveness of Sin: he who waits to be righteous before he enters into the Saviours kingdom, the Divine Body, will never enter there. I am perhaps the most sinful of men! I pretend not to holiness! yet I pretend to love, to see, to converse.’

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In the words of the Lancashire preacher Lawrence Clarkson, ‘There is no such act as drunkenness, adultery and theft in God […] What act so ever is done by thee in light and love, is light and lovely, though it be that act called adultery […] No matter what Scripture, saints or churches say, if that within thee do not condemn thee, thou shalt not be condemned.’ It is possible that there were some who made this argument who did not genuinely feel the light of Christ within themselves.

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Although the name is very loosely defined in theological terms, those who favoured these extreme views were referred to as Ranters – usually by their enemies. They were frequently held up as a warning against heretical thought, even if a grudging admiration can sometimes be detected among the criticism. ‘They are the merriest of devils for extempore lascivious songs […] for healths, music, downright bawdry and dancing’, explained one Puritan with perhaps a hint of jealousy. Blasphemy and swearing were great favourites of the Ranters, for they were a symbolic expression of freedom from social constraints and the liberty of conscience. The Ranter and writer Abiezer Coppe is said to have sworn for a solid hour in the pulpit. In 1652, a lady stripped naked during a service in the chapel at Whitehall while shouting, ‘Welcome the resurrection!’ In the heady atmosphere of the times, pigs and horses were heretically baptised. The Wiltshire rector Thomas Webbe, who had long shaggy hair and enjoyed music and mixed dancing, is said to have declared that ‘there’s no heaven but women, nor no hell save marriage’. He made this claim in his defence during his trial for adultery, for which he faced the death sentence.

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It is in the ideas of the Ranters and their ilk that we find a tradition for the political views of Blake. Many historians have been confused to find those concepts still in circulation well over a century after their time. Much of our knowledge about these radical beliefs comes from a period between 1640 and 1660, when censorship broke down and subversive ideas were able to be published as cheap, popular pamphlets. After the monarchy was restored in 1660 and Charles II took the throne, extreme ideas like these seem to drop away from the historical record.

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There are many reasons for this change, most obviously the desire for calm after the bloodshed of the civil wars. In the late seventeenth century, those listening to their inner light were unsurprised to find that it began to counsel pacifism. Unlike other religious heretics, the Ranters and radicals who were arrested and tried proved to be quite willing to recant their beliefs, if it meant they would not be put to death. Theirs was not a philosophy that pushed people towards martyrdom.

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Some groups, such as the Quakers, moved away from their radical roots and gradually became respectable. Most Ranters were anarchistic individuals only loosely tied to established organisations, so it was easy for them to disappear. Society moved on from the austere Puritan years, for example by reopening the theatres, and Britain became more liberal and less judgemental. In this atmosphere, it was easy for ex-radicals to rejoin the established Church of England, which did not concern itself too deeply with the actual beliefs of its members. The Toleration Act, which became law in May 1689, granted a whole range of nonconformists the freedom to worship as their conscience dictated, just so long as they weren’t atheists or Catholics. English Protestantism concluded that it would be better to be a broad church than a shattered and divided one. After the Restoration, the English radical tradition, at least as far as the establishment was concerned, simply faded away.

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And yet, we find those ideas alive and well in the work of Blake over a century later. For example, the Family of Love, who were founded by the sixteenth-century mystic Henry Nicholas, preached that heaven and hell were to be found in this world, not the next. A group called the Family of the Mount rejected prayer and also thought that heaven and hell only existed in life. As far as they were concerned, heaven was when people laughed, and hell was sorrow, pain and grief. Groups such as the Anabaptists and the Diggers believed that all men were alike and that any differences between masters and servants were essentially manmade delusions with no religious support. The fourteenth-century English preacher John Ball was enthusiastically quoted during this time. In a sermon during the Peasants’ Revolt, Ball had asked, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ The Digger Gerrard Winstanley equated heaven with mankind. As he wrote: ‘There is no man or woman who needs to go to Rome nor to hell below ground, as some talk, to find the Pope, Devil, Beast or power of darkness; neither to go up into heaven above the skies to find Christ the word of life. For both these powers are to be felt within a man, fighting against each other.’ These are all profoundly Blakean ideas.

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The English radical tradition itself makes a good analogy to this situation. Many British people who were educated about history at school, and consume stories of British history through books and television, have never heard of the English radical tradition. It sits in the blind spot of establishment media, which is far more enthused about Tudors, Victorians and the Second World War. Yet it continues to this day, and can be found wherever politics and spirituality intersect, especially regarding issues of land ownership and popular authority. The writer C. J. Stone has traced the English radical tradition from the Diggers and Levellers of the seventeenth century, through Blake, and onwards through individuals like the socialist druid George Watson MacGregor Reid in the early twentieth century to the counterculture festivals founded in the 1970s.

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The spirit of open-minded exploration and freedom of thought that Johnson’s circle promoted was not of great interest to Blake. He did not need debate and conversation to help form his opinions. He already knew exactly what his position was. Socially he could be blunt or stubborn. He believed wholeheartedly in his own truth and did not see the need to discuss, test or refine his ideas. As he later explained, ‘When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.’

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As far as Blake was concerned, the external world was an echo of the internal world. If you wanted to understand the politics of the material world, it was necessary to understand the energies of the mind. His works that appeared at first to analyse global history, such as America a Prophecy (1793) or Europe a Prophecy (1794), were as much concerned with his own mythological personifications of mental states as they were with actual history.

Blake was focused on his own reactions to global politics, rather than the details of the events themselves. To an extent, this is true of all political commentators, whether they recognise it or not. There are, however, degrees to which people focus on the outer and inner worlds. When Mary Wollstonecraft decided to write about the French Revolution, she travelled to Paris and risked her own life to observe events as they were happening. When Blake wrote about the French Revolution, he stayed home and looked inside himself. It may be tempting to mock his approach, but it produced some remarkable insights. His analysis of the impulses behind revolution, in the form of his character Orc, is a good example.

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Blake toiled away with his metal plates, acid and printing presses. He alludes to this practice in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, explaining his vision ‘by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’

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As Blake saw it, his printing technique was a way to bring text from the eternal realm into the world of man. By dissolving the metal, he was revealing the infinity hidden within. In the same work he describes a ‘mighty Devil’, who we can easily interpret as Blake himself, using this technique to give infernal wisdom to humanity:

I saw a mighty Devil, folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock: with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, &read by them on earth.

 How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,

 Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

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Steeped in the antinomian tradition, Blake had escaped from the belief that other people had authority over him. He referred to such societal constrictions as the ‘mind forg’d manacles’ which keep so many of us down. Those who recognise no masters or leaders must lead themselves and take responsibility for their own life. By taking control of every aspect of the creation, production and publication of his works, Blake was free from compromise. He could express himself freely, constrained only by his own abilities.

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Because the exercising of his creative abilities was so important to Blake, it is not surprising that a personified form of it has such a prominent role in his personal mythology. In his work, the character who represents the expression of the imagination in this world is known as Los. Typically portrayed as a blacksmith, Los is said to be endlessly labouring with his hammer at the furnace, constructing a city of art known as Golgonooza. This sense of creative effort as hard physical labour without end, forged by sweat, fire and determination, stands in contrast to images of refined aristocratic poets being visited by the graceful muses. It is, however, an apt description of Blake spending his entire life working with metal and acids.

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The creation of art, as Los represents it, is not a pleasing pastime or mild entertainment. It is hard and necessary; it is the only way in which our world can be redeemed. In Jerusalem, Blake describes both himself and Los when he writes:

Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish’d at me.

Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes

Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity

Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination

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Los can be seen as the hero of many of Blake’s works, and his selfless labours are ultimately the cause of mankind’s redemption, as we shall see. Los is smart and insightful, and he understands the nature of all, including himself. He knows, for example, that he exists in the human mind. In The Four Zoas, Los states that:

Tho in the Brain of Man we live, &in his circling Nerves.

Tho’ this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain.

Where Urizen &all his Hosts hang their immortal lamps

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Blake’s politics were encapsulated by Los. They existed in what he created. He may have had great empathy with the poor, but he did not spend his days working to better their situation. Instead, he believed that the imagination was the tool needed to improve society, and that the labours of Los would do more to liberate people than canvassing or protesting. To do this would take integrity, self-belief, and effort.

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It is here that we find the strongest expression of Blake’s politics. True politics are not ideologies to discuss, but an attitude to your relationship with the world which is enacted in your daily life. Your politics are not what you tell yourself you believe. They are not the set of ideas that you identify with, or look to for personal validation of your goodness as a human being. Your politics are expressed in the choices that you make, the way you treat other people, and the actions you perform. It is here that hypocrisy and vanity fall away, as the reality of your politics is revealed in the countless decisions that you make every day. Who you work for, whether you volunteer for charity work, if you become a landlord, whether you eat meat, the extent to which you pursue money and consumer goods – these are the types of decisions in which our true politics are expressed.

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On a practical level, Blake needed commercial engraving work to keep a roof over his head. But he also needed to be free of compromise when it came to his own work. He produced his art as an individualist antinomian, asking no permission, answering to nobody – a position that we have come to understand better over the past couple of centuries. In Blake’s time, however, these were radical politics indeed.

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GREEN & PLEASANT LAND

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IN LOVE WITH THE PRODUCTIONS OF TIME

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The late eighteenth century, as a result, became a time which delighted in fads, fashion and what we would now call conspicuous consumption. For an artist with no interest in changeable fashion and a desire to represent the eternal, Blake had been born at the wrong time.

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Blake was never going to have his head turned by the new and contemporary. Eternity was profoundly important to him, and the concept runs through his work. The opening of ‘Auguries of Innocence’, for example, represents some of his best-known lines:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

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Blake’s concept of eternity sits at the heart of his Albion mythology and was central to his understanding of the universe. He often uses the word as you might expect a Christian to use the word heaven, as some blissful realm different to the material world. But while heaven is distant, Blake’s eternity is always just within reach, simultaneously within and without and potentially available to all. In his copy of Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, Blake had written that Swedenborg’s argument was ‘False’ on the grounds that ‘if a thing loves it is infinite’. After a moment’s reflection, he then added, ‘Perhaps we only differ in the meaning of the words Infinite & Eternal.’ Eternity is a word that can be used in ways that are only loosely defined, and he recognised that his understanding of the word may be different to how others used it. So what, exactly, was Blake talking about when he used the word ‘Eternity’?

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One common definition of eternity is that it refers to an infinite period of time. Understood in this way, eternity is simply time without end. This definition does not fit well with modern cosmology, however. This claims that time did not exist before the creation of the universe in the Big Bang, and that time may also end at some far-off future moment if the universe does indeed cease to exist, as some models predict. Eternity cannot refer to infinite time, therefore, because according to our current understanding of the universe there will only be a finite amount of time.

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Instead, eternity can be defined as all of time. Understood in this way, eternity is the period that contains everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen. Yet for this definition of eternity to be something more than an intellectual abstraction and to describe something real, it is necessary for all of time to actually exist. If Blake’s eternity is a meaningful concept, in other words, then the future and the past need to be as real as the present. They need to be physical things, and not just a thought experiment.

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During Blake’s time, eternity was more of a religious or spiritual idea than a scientific one. As far as eighteenth-century science was concerned, the past no longer existed and the future was yet to happen. Eternity was little more than a metaphor. In the twenty-first century, however, this is no longer the case. This aspect of Blake’s idiosyncratic cosmology is supported by the work of Albert Einstein.

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In his special theory of relativity, Einstein showed that time passes at different rates in different circumstances. As hard to accept as this may be, the passing of time is changed by increases in speed and gravity. As a result, there are circumstances in which an event has not yet happened from the perspective of one observer, but which has already occurred from the perspective of someone else. This raises the question of how it is possible to say that something has happened, given that this may be true in some circumstances but false in others. According to Einstein, the answer is that we cannot. After relativity, the idea of ‘now’ became something that could not be satisfactorily defined.

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This led to the cosmological theory known as the ‘block universe’. In a block universe all of time, including that which appears to us to be the past and the future, exists together, as one large ‘block’ of four-dimensional spacetime. Events that occur within the block universe are defined by the four dimensions of breadth, width, height and duration. The block universe solves the problems of defining ‘now’ by making the concept irrelevant. In a block universe, the passing of time is little more than an illusion. Every event exists always, regardless of whether it happened hundreds of years ago or hundreds of years in the future. Every first kiss and every last word is like an exhibit preserved in a museum that only beings with a godlike perspective can explore.

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Blake displays a similar understanding about the illusion of passing time in Jerusalem, where he writes that, ‘I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once.’ He also writes:

And all that has existed in the space of six thousand years:

Permanent, &not lost not lost nor vanishd, &every little act,

Word, work, &wish, that has existed, all remaining still

These are descriptions of eternity that perfectly describe Einstein’s block universe.

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Belief in the literal existence of a block universe is called eternalism. The implications of eternalism are complex and, to most people, extremely disturbing. If the future already exists and cannot be changed, then there can be no free will. Your future actions were fixed before you are even born. This idea offends our sense of morality and justice, and reduces any feelings of pride and accomplishment we may have about our achievements into little more than vanity. How can we strive to prove ourselves if our life’s work was going to happen regardless? And likewise, how can we condemn Adolf Hitler or Judas Iscariot if the Holocaust and the betrayal of Jesus were always going to occur, and indeed already existed long before Hitler and Judas were born? If it was physically impossible for Hitler or Judas to act differently, how can we judge and blame?

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From the perspective of eternalism our legal system is absurd, because it assumes the existence of free will when it judges those accused of crimes. But in an eternalist universe there is no free will, so we are effectively condemning people for the crime of existing. In a similar way, victims of abuse were preordained to suffer. Their abuse was destined to occur even before life appeared on earth, or the solar system formed. You can debate at length whether this makes the universe immoral or amoral, but it’s clear that such a universe is a hard one to love.

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Supporters of eternalism respond to these issues in two ways. The first is to remind us that just because something is unappealing doesn’t mean that it can’t also be true. There is no guarantee that our universe will be something that we like. There is no reason why our own moral perspectives and sense of justice should coincide with the construction and behaviour of the entire universe.

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The second response is to dismiss the problem on the grounds that, in terms of how we live our lives on a moment-to-moment basis, it doesn’t really matter. Even if our sense of free will is nothing but an illusion, it is a consistent and convincing illusion and it is easy enough to go through life acting as if it was real.

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The greatest literary exploration of the concept of eternalism is the epic, Blake-inspired novel Jerusalem by Alan Moore, which includes a conversation about the true nature of reality between the eighteenth-century nonconformist minister Philip Doddridge and an angel. ‘Might I ask if, anywhere in this ingenious arrangement, any of us ever truly had Free Will?’ Doddridge asks the angel. The angel somewhat apologetically tells him that nobody had. ‘After a well-timed pause as if before the punch line of a joke’, the angel replies with a further question: ‘Did you miss it?’

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This exchange is overheard by a character called Bill, who understands the reason for the laughter triggered by the angel’s question: ‘[Bill] got the gag. In some ways, it was almost comforting, the notion that whatever you did or accomplished, you were in the end only an actor running through a masterfully scripted drama. You just didn’t know it at the time, and thought you were extemporising. It was sort of comical, Bill saw that now, but he still found some solace in the thought that in a predetermined world, there was no point at all in fretting over anything, nor any purpose to regret.’ Moore’s exploration of eternalism has led to him offering the following advice: ‘Never do anything that you can’t live with for eternity.’ Of course, it’s not like you have any choice in the matter.

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Despite these arguments, many people reject the idea of a block universe on principle and have attempted to find a different model of the universe, which, they hope, will work with relativity but also turn out to be more appealing. One such model is the ‘growing block universe’ theory of time. This claims that both the past and the present exist, in a similar way to the block universe proposed by eternalists, but that the future does not. The future remains ours to invent, and thus free will is back in the picture, along with morality and justice.

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In this model, the block universe is said to be continually growing as time passes, like a tree trunk expanding and adding more rings as the years pass. The past is continually present, which accounts for the temporal anomalies reported by the theory of relativity, but the future has yet to appear and, as such, it is not determined. The idea was first proposed in 1923 by the English philosopher C. D. Broad, who wrote that: ‘It will be observed that such a theory as this accepts the reality of the present and the past, but holds that the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.’

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Broad’s growing block universe is intuitively closer to our common-sense understanding of the world than the eternalist approach, but it appeals more to philosophers than it does to scientists. It still leaves the knotty problem of being unable to say if the current moment is actually ‘now’, as the ever-preserved past will feel as much like ‘now’ as the actual present moment. This uncertainty around the concept of ‘now’ makes definitive statements about the non-existence of the future somewhat problematic. From a scientific perspective, the existence of the future is not any weirder than the existence of the past, and to have one but not the other requires explaining.

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The growing block universe model has never shaken off the suspicion that, ultimately, it’s a bit of a fudge based on wishful thinking. That said, it is a model that fits well with the Gothic sensibilities that Blake shared. In Gothic art, the past is never really gone. It remains as an eternal, permanent presence which weighs on the present moment, and its cold, ominous atmosphere teases the idea that what appears to be ‘now’ may also be an undead past, unaware that its time has gone.

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It could be argued that if the future exists but can in no way affect the past or the present then it is ultimately irrelevant. Its existence or non-existence makes no difference. But if we find evidence that the future does influence the past, then we have to take seriously the idea that the future genuinely already exists. In the counterintuitive world of quantum mechanics, the idea that the future influences the past is still controversial, but it has its supporters.

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One of the most bewildering aspects of quantum mechanics is what Einstein memorably called ‘spooky action at a distance’, a phrase he used to describe a situation in which two separate particles have properties that are linked and which are not independent of each other. Physicists call this process entanglement, and it is one of the wildest and most counterintuitive descriptions of reality that we have.

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Imagine a pair of adult twins. Now imagine that they are heading out to a polling booth to vote in an election where there is a left-wing and a right-wing candidate. Both twins are undecided about who to vote for. On the way, however, one twin decides to vote for the left-wing candidate. Now imagine that, because he made this decision, at that exact same moment without there seeming to be any communication between them, the other twin is compelled to vote for the right-wing candidate. Alternatively, if the first twin had decided to vote for the right-wing candidate, then the other would have immediately chosen the left-wing one. This would be the case even if the twins lived in different parts of the country. It would even be the case if they lived on opposite sides of the universe.

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For a rationally minded scientist, this situation is horrible. How can one decision suddenly create a separate decision that is made a great distance away, with seemingly no communication between the two? There seems to be no conceivable possible mechanism which could cause this to happen. Unfortunately for rationally minded scientists, experimental physicists have shown time and time again that this is exactly how two entangled particles behave.

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Entanglement was a problem for Einstein, because it contradicted his work which showed that the idea of events occurring simultaneously a great distance apart was meaningless. It also seemed to suggest that information was travelling between the two particles faster than the speed of light, by some currently unimaginable process. None of this seemed in any way likely, or indeed possible. Entanglement contradicted so many laws of physics that there were many scientists who, like Einstein, wanted to reject it outright. And yet, experiment after experiment on entangled particles kept showing that it exists. If you affect one of a pair of entangled particles by measuring it in some way that fixes its properties, then the properties of the particle’s twin instantly become fixed also, even if the two particles had been separated by countless thousands of miles.

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There are many ways to interpret results of experiments like this, but all of them seem fantastical, and none are universally liked. To give an example, one possible interpretation is that the particles aren’t separated at all because space is an illusion – it doesn’t physically exist. The two particles, therefore, are not really apart from each other. While this idea explains the observed phenomena, you can appreciate how hard it is for all but the most theoretical of scientists to get behind such notions.

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This is where the idea that events in the future can affect things in the past comes in. If we base our interpretation of entanglement on this idea, we find that there is no ‘spooky action at a distance’ occurring. Under this interpretation, instead of instantaneous communication occurring across space as if by magic, measuring one particle causes the change in the other to occur in the past, at the moment they were entangled.

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This ‘retrocausality’, as scientists call it, is as extreme as the other interpretations of entanglement, but it doesn’t break quite as many laws. It fits well with the theory of relativity because it has no need for simultaneous separate events. It also gets rid of any suggestion of faster-than-light communication occurring through some process that is currently unimagined and seemingly unimaginable. The idea that the future already exists is shocking, of course, but this explanation for entanglement is otherwise eminently neat and sensible. Given how horrible other explanations are, you can understand why it had supporters.

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The idea that the future exists and has the ability to affect the past is far from widely accepted among the scientific community, but it continues to linger, simultaneously absurd and implausible yet also temptingly neat and logical. If the Eternity that Blake spoke of is the simultaneous existence of all of time, then from a modern scientific perspective it can’t be ruled out yet.

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For all that we can find passages in Blake’s work that support the idea of a block universe, there are other passages that contradict this model. He repeatedly argued against the idea that the future was already fixed. In his copy of Swedenborg’s Divine Providence, for example, Blake marked multiple passages that showed signs of Swedenborg’s acceptance of predetermination, to illustrate how he was in error. In the margins of chapter 14, Blake wrote: ‘Predestination after this Life is more Abominable than Calvins [belief that those chosen as God’s elect are predetermined] & Swedenborg is Such a Spiritual Predestinarian.’ Blake’s rejection of predeterminism seems to come from an understanding that the four-dimensional block universe it implies is a fixed, static thing, and that this is entirely at odds with his view of the cosmos as a place of energy and delight.

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There is another definition of eternity, however, other than all of time. This eternity is a state of timelessness, somewhere beyond the time-based real world. In this definition, there is no past or future, so the idea of ‘all of time’ becomes meaningless. Instead, there is just the present moment which, being free from the passing of time, exists as an eternal now. This definition is more common in religious and mystical circles,

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an individual’s past and future, which are a source of pain and anxiety, are only illusions created by their minds.

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remaining focused on the present is the key to peace and happiness,

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A similar sense of timelessness was experienced by the American neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, after she suffered a serious stroke in December 1996. This was caused by a major haemorrhage in the left side of her brain, which left her initially unable to speak, read, write, walk or remember her past. With the loss of what she calls ‘left brain’ functions – our capacity for logical, egocentric, analytical, and linguistic thought – she experienced the world through her remaining ‘right brain’ functionality. This was more emotional, holistic, spontaneous and spatially aware. The right brain, she wrote after her recovery, ‘thinks in pictures and learns kinaesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then explodes into this enormous collage of what the present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like […] in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.’ This is a profoundly Blakean image.

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The result of the loss of her left brain was an experience of profound joy and a different relationship with time. ‘The present moment is a time when everything and everyone are connected together as one,’ she wrote. This contrasts with the world as it is experienced by the left brain. ‘By organizing details in a linear and methodical configuration, our left brain manifests the concept of time whereby our moments are divided into past, present and future,’ she explained.

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Bolte Taylor used a ‘bicameral’ model to describe the brain, in which the left and right hemispheres are said to work in fundamentally different ways. This model is less fashionable among neurologists now – the brain is far more complex than this neat, ‘broad strokes’ model suggests, and individual brains develop in different ways. If we are less concerned with how these functions map onto the physical brain, however, the model still proves to be a useful tool. The systematic and rational left hemisphere is what Blake called Urizen. The other three zoas are the domain of the right hemisphere, which is creative, emotional and in touch with the body. Bolte Taylor’s account of losing her left hemisphere reveals the extent to which Urizen has become dominant and works to drown out the other aspects of our mind, or even attempts to convince us that they are not real. This Urizenic domination is what Blake sees as the Fall of man and the cause of the sleep of Albion. It is what cuts us off from Blake’s divine spirit, which is the deep holistic ‘right brain’ bliss that Tolle and Bolte Taylor experienced after trauma to their left hemisphere or sense of ego. If they are to be believed, Blake may be right when he says this divine spirit will return when Urizen is tamed and the zoas brought back into balance.

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The experiences of Tolle and Bolte Taylor were extreme, but a more manageable version is familiar to practitioners of meditation, who often report entering a state of timelessness. Transcendental meditation, for example, is like microdosing Tolle’s epiphany in small, manageable daily doses that leave you energised and productive, and less likely to spend years grinning on park benches. Other forms of meditation attempt to quiet the ever-chattering dialogue of the mind through different methods, but the aim is always for the meditator to quiet the chattering ‘left brain’ voice of Urizen and sink into a deep state of ‘right brain’ consciousness, which has the quality of timelessness. This type of awareness is always present, but the domineering left brain drowns it out and leaves us blind to it. It is like when we see words printed on a page of a book. We are drawn to those words in order to lose ourselves in what they are telling us. It is only if the words dissolve away to nothing that we become aware of the paper.

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The idea of timelessness is not just a product of mystical thinking, however. The notion of a world without time has also been gaining in prominence scientifically. Its most vocal supporter is the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, known both for his poetically readable physics books and his work on quantum gravity.

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As Rovelli notes, one of the strangest things about time is that, at a fundamental level, there doesn’t seem to be any. In the equations that describe how the basic building blocks of the universe behave, a variable for time is absent. If it were somehow possible to film quantum events, the footage would make just as much sense played forwards as it would backwards, to the extent that it would not be possible to work out whether the film had been reversed. On a quantum level, events occur relative to each other, rather than relative to an external sense of the passing of time. As Rovelli explains: ‘The absence of time does not mean, therefore, that everything is frozen and unmoving. It means that the incessant happening that wearies the world is not ordered along a timeline, is not measured by a gigantic tick-tocking. It does not even form a four-dimensional geometry. It is a boundless and disorderly network of quantum events. The world is more like Naples than Singapore.’

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There is only one fundamental physical process which requires the presence of time, Rovelli notes. That process is entropy, the tendency of complicated things to fall apart. Its role in physics is defined by the second law of thermodynamics which states that, in an enclosed system, entropy will increase over time. Importantly, this process is irreversible. If you filmed a snowman melting it would be easy to tell if that footage had been reversed, because puddles of water don’t spontaneously form into snowmen. A snowman melting into a puddle requires the presence of time passing in one specific direction, in the way that a quantum event does not.

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With entropy, unlikely combinations of particles give way, over time, to a more random, jumbled combination of particles. But, as Rovelli points out, there is a problem here. Who gets to say when a combination of particles is unlikely? Who gets to judge if the position of particles in a system forms an intricate pattern that will be prone to entropy? If you looked at a sealed container of a number of gas molecules and found that those molecules were positioned in such a way that they spelt out your name, you would see this as a highly unnatural and unlikely distribution pattern. In technical terms, you would say that it possessed a low level of entropy. And yet, mathematically, every unique pattern of particle distribution is equally unlikely. What is it, other than the opinion of the observer, that marks this particular distribution out as different?

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As Rovelli sees it, defining whether a system is in a high entropy state is very often a subjective judgement call. It requires the presence of a conscious observer, who can declare that one pattern of particles is unlikely and another is not. Entropy, then, is the one physical process that brings the arrow of time into the world, and that process relies on conscious awareness. Or, in other words, time is created by the mind. As Rovelli writes, ‘The initial low entropy of the universe, and hence the arrow of time, may be more down to us than to the universe itself.’ Or, more poetically: ‘Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us?’

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Blake also describes time as being created by the conscious imagination. In The Book of Los, Blake describes how Los’s descent from the Eternal realm creates time itself:

Falling, falling! Los fell &fell

Sunk precipitant heavy down down

Time on times, night on night, day on day

Truth has bounds. Error none: falling, falling:

Years on years, and ages on ages

Still he fell thro’ the void, still a void

Found for falling day &night without end.

For tho’ day or night was not; their spaces

Were measured by his incessant whirls

In the horrid vacuity bottomless.

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In Blake’s mythology it is Los, the personification of imagination, that creates time, just as it is his emanation Enitharmon who creates space. In this way, it is imagination, and not the deluded rational Urizen, who is the ultimate creator of what Blake called, in the title of an 1821 watercolour, The Sea of Time and Space, or the earthly world we inhabit.

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Perhaps this subject only seems difficult because we have yet to adequately grasp what time is. As Rovelli notes, ‘If by “time” we mean nothing more than happening, then everything is time.’

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The word ‘eternity’, it seems, is a contrary. It contains two opposing definitions: all of time exists, and only the present moment is real. The past, present and future are a static, deterministic, unchanging universe or, alternatively, there is only the present moment, and it exists as an ever-changing process rather than as a solid thing.

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As with the rest of Blake’s contraries, he wasn’t interested in choosing one and dismissing the other. He was interested in the tension and dynamics introduced by these opposing ideas, because those dynamics were the engines that powered the universe. What is produced by the interplay of two contrasting models of time is richer and more interesting than if only one of them was presented as valid and the other dismissed. Blake always allowed room for two seemingly contradictory positions to be revealed as different aspects of a larger truth.

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In Blake’s work, you can find evidence for both perspectives. As we’ve seen, in Jerusalem he wrote that ‘I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once’, and he describes the fall, sleep, and eventual awakening of Albion as fixed events in linear time. Yet he disagreed with Swedenborg about predestination, believing instead that the future was not fixed and that we had free will and responsibility for our choices and actions. The importance he places on energy and creation only makes sense in this context. Rovelli’s idea that time is not an innate quality of physics, but emerges through the active engagement of human observation, fits Blake’s work well, most obviously in the labour of Los, his personification of the imagination.

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For Blake, the definition of eternity seems dependent on whether you are inside the human-scale universe looking out, or outside looking in. From outside the present moment, eternity is all of time, and it exists. From inside, in contrast, there is no time but a permanent moment of holistic peace, as Bolte Taylor discovered after her stroke. The reason we are rarely consciously aware of this timeless moment is because the Urizen-like default mode network in our minds has constructed a narrative called the self, a useful and practical illusion we have come to identify with. Being a story, this self needs to believe in the past and future, which fools us into experiencing Einstein’s ‘stubbornly persistent illusion’ of the passing of time.

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Our two contrary definitions of eternity, it’s worth noting, closely match how the two hemispheres of the brain perceive the world. The brain functions associated with the left hemisphere are abstracting, systematic and rational, and give rise to language and the perception of time as linear. This is the controlling, egocentric domain of Urizen, which believes itself to be the creator god of the ordered, prison-like block universe. The right hemisphere, in contrast, only perceives the present moment, and is focused on sensation, emotion and creativity. This is the domain of Tharmas, Luvah and Urthona, the remaining three zoas who are usually drowned out by attention-seeking Urizen. Our two contrasting models of eternity, then, are an illustration of how differently the two hemispheres function. They are also the exact same models you would expect the two hemispheres to create, given that we perceive the external world in our own image. Once again, we are reminded that we live inside our models, and rely on them to make sense of the otherwise unknowable external world.

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An intriguing remark Blake made in the margin of his copy of Swedenborg’s Divine Providence reads: ‘Devils & Angels are Predestinated.’ This suggests that the perspective of spiritual creatures is like Einstein’s block universe, in which all of time exists. For all that Blake criticised Swedenborg for believing in predestination, he also saw angels and devils as trapped in an unchanging Eternity devoid of free will. But Blake’s phrase suggests that it is only these higher spiritual creatures that this applies to. For human beings, it is another story.

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Angels and devils, as Blake saw them, were creations of the human mind. As hierarchical inhabitants of an ordered cosmos, they were the invention of Urizen. This makes sense, because the egocentric Urizen understands himself to be an isolated individual, separate from the rest of the cosmos, and the universe can only be perceived as constricting when you see yourself as separate from it. You cannot be a prisoner if you are also the prison.

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From this perspective, to perceive the timeless present moment is to escape from the limiting horror of the block universe. It is here in the right hemisphere’s model of time that we may find Bolte Taylor’s and Tolle’s conscious experience of pure bliss and joy. All we need to do to achieve this liberation, Blake tells us, is to balance the zoas so that Urizen no longer dominates. Human consciousness can experience liberty while the trapped, static eternal angels and demons of the block universe can only look on, amazed. Perhaps this is why, as Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’ How the angels must envy us.

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The ‘dark Satanic Mills’ of the poem are often commented on. The phrase is usually interpreted as an early condemnation of the factories of the Industrial Revolution, which were then starting to appear across the country, particularly in the north. Blake would have been familiar with these thanks to Albion Mills, a steam-powered flour mill in Southwark, not far from where he lived in Lambeth. The mill opened in 1786 and burnt down in 1791. It seems likely that Blake would have found the name of the factory deeply symbolic, and that he would have been horrified by the inhuman nature of working conditions in this mill and in the Industrial Revolution in general.

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The ‘dark Satanic Mills’ can be interpreted differently, however. They are sometimes said to refer to Oxford and Cambridge, the great universities of the age that were churning out constrained, uninspired minds blind to the divine nature of human imagination. When we read on past the preface, we discover that the rest of the poem keeps returning to this key Blakean image. We find references to the ‘Starry Mills of Satan’ which churn continuously beneath the shell of the physical world. Satan himself is ‘Prince of the Starry Wheels’ and ‘The Miller of Eternity’, grinding time and space into their constituent parts. The fine particles of dust produced are separate, broken and have lost their spiritual component. It is these Starry Mills of Satan that generate the ‘Single vision & Newtons sleep’ that drive the Age of Enlightenment. This is also the same process that generates the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the mills of the Industrial Revolution, so it could be said that all common interpretations of this phrase are valid in their own way.

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There is another candidate for the owner of those feet, who we’ll meet when we examine Blake’s later epic poems. For now, though, it’s worth noting that the matter is complicated by Blake’s understanding of Jesus, and what it meant for someone to be part human and part divine. Blake always saw himself as a committed Christian, and he frequently proclaimed the Christian doctrine that it was only through Jesus Christ that we would find redemption. Yet his understanding of the nature of Jesus was very different to that of the Church, because he also believed that the divine part of Jesus came from the imagination. Blake wrote in Milton about ‘the Human Imagination / Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus. blessed for ever’, for example. ‘Christianity is Art […] Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists,’ he wrote a couple of decades later. ‘The Eternal Body of Man in the Imagination, that is God himself, The Divine Body: Jesus we are his Members.’ If Jesus’ divinity came from the imagination, as Blake believed, then it was theoretically accessible to others. It was, perhaps, theoretically accessible to all.

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Theologically, Jesus was neither a god nor a man, but a combination of both; a perfect illustration of Blake’s belief that humanity and divinity were codependent. From Blake’s perspective, Jesus’ dual qualities were not unusual. Being part man and part god was normal, even if regular people weren’t as aware of their divine element as Jesus was.

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For traditional Christians, Jesus was unique, a one-off gift from God that showed us what perfection would look like. We could never hope to be like him, of course, but by believing in the divine nature of this mortal man we would keep that potential perfection alive in our minds. This, in time, would help us to find redemption. By interpreting Jesus as a man illuminated by divine imagination, however, Blake saw Jesus as the first, not the only. Within us all was the potential to understand the world in the way that he did. In more modern times this idea is known as ‘Christ consciousness’, or sometimes by the less controversial phrase ‘higher consciousness’. It has many similarities with the Buddhist notion of enlightenment, which was also something that was never supposed to be possessed by the Buddha alone.

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In the modern world, the reference to ‘Jerusalem’ being built in Britain may need explaining, given that Jerusalem is a city in Israel currently claimed by both Israel and the Palestinian National Authority. The spiritual significance of the city comes from it being the site of the temple of Solomon, which was the original temple the Israelites built for their god around 960 BCE. Inside this temple was an inner sanctuary called the Holy of Holies, which was revered as the single holiest place in the world. Only the high priest was allowed entry, and then only on one day a year. It was here that the Ark of the Covenant was kept. If ever there was a place on earth where it could be said that God resided, this was it. Around this sanctum and temple grew the city, so Jerusalem was thought to be the city in which God resided.

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After invading Babylonians conquered the city and burnt the temple to the ground in 587 BCE, the Israelite elite were transported to Babylon. For all Babylon’s grandeur and strange temples to the god Marduk, it did not contain the Holy of Holies. The exiled Israelites, therefore, found themselves in a city in which God could not be said to live. Here is the reason why the names of these two cities continued to have spiritual resonance many centuries later. Jerusalem was a spiritual city where the divine dwelt, and Babylon was the city where God was absent. Numerous religious figures looked at the state of London in the eighteenth century and saw it as Babylon. Their mission, they felt, was to turn it into a New Jerusalem.

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Blake’s years away from London hold a special place in his story, because it was here that he started writing the words we now know as the hymn ‘Jerusalem’. The ‘green and pleasant land’ of Sussex became, in time, the archetypal description of England. Other countries see themselves as bold, passionate, courageous, welcoming, strong or beautiful; only England dreams of being thought ‘pleasant’.

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The poem begins with two of Blake’s most famous lines:

And did those feet in ancient time,

Walk upon Englands mountains green:

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As ever with Blake, he doesn’t pause to make his meaning clear. Whose feet is he talking about? Blake knows, so he assumes that everyone else will know as well. It is an attitude that makes his writing a glorious puzzle.

Frequent references to feet appear in his work, particularly after his time at Felpham. In Milton, for example, we are presented with the spirit of the poet John Milton falling from the heavens in the form of a star and entering Blake’s body by landing on his foot. The symbolism of the foot can be explained by Blake’s views on the relationship between body and soul. For Blake, the body is an aspect of the soul, as we’ve seen. The foot, therefore, is the lowest part of the soul. It is this that we use to step into the ‘vegetative world’ of the physical realm. The feet in ancient times were the vehicle that brought the divine spirit to the otherwise material realm of England’s mountains green.

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The words we now know as the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ are taken from the preface to the poem Milton: a poem in 2 books (and not, to confuse matters, from his other epic work Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion). In England at least, these are now the most well-known lines that Blake wrote, but he discarded this preface and did not include it in later printings of Milton. When the poem beginning ‘And did those feet’ is seen in the context of the preface, its meaning is revealed to be very different to its popular interpretation. Perhaps Blake found it, with hindsight, too hectoring and political.

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In the preface, Blake does not waste time warming up before delivering his opinions. It starts as a full-on rant. The opening paragraph begins:

The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer &Ovid: of Plato &Cicero. which all Men ought to contemn: are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible.

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For Blake, the enemy was the rational, dualist interpretation of Greek philosophy that was drilled into students at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. What was needed instead was the sublime inspiration of the Bible, and the great works which drew from it, which for Blake included the English writers Shakespeare and Milton. Blake believed that rote university learning of abstract ancient Greek arguments needed to be replaced by engaged creativity. As he put it in the preface, ‘the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration’. This is the same argument made by the education reformer Sir Ken Robinson in his 2006 TED talk ‘Do schools kill creativity?’ It has been highly influential, and at the time of writing is the most watched TED talk of all time.

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The preface very quickly becomes a rabble-rousing rallying cry to all those who want to overthrow the insipid, uninspired establishment of Britain, and replace it with the inspired and the brilliant:

Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, &the University […] We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just &true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever; in Jesus our Lord.

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At this point, Blake switches to verse and asks whether divine inspiration has ever found a home on these damp islands. He calls for mental weapons, such as ‘arrows of desire’, along with physical weapons, such as a sword which won’t sleep in his hand. These weapons are needed to overthrow the existing order and turn this bewildered land into paradise:

And did those feet in ancient time,

Walk upon Englands mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark SatanicMills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green &pleasant Land.

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It is hard now to separate these words from the stirring, patriotic music that Sir Hubert Parry composed in 1916, while the First World War raged on. That this hymn is a favourite of English public schools is one of the great ironies of the William Blake story, because in the context of the preface it is basically a demand that such institutions be overthrown. Parry, it seems, understood the radical nature of the hymn better than his audience. He gifted the copyright to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

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Just as Buddhism believes that we all have the potential to become enlightened like the Buddha, so too did Blake believe that Jesus, being divine through the imagination, was an example we could emulate. The worship of Jesus was not the lowering of oneself in front of unattainable divinity. It was keeping your higher goal alive in your mind, an act of intention focused on spiritual attainment. As the musician George Harrison described the situation in 1967: ‘Everyone is a potential Jesus Christ, really. We are all trying to get to where Jesus Christ got.’

In this context, the identity of the feet in the poem is not particularly important – they are the soul stepping into the vegetative world. What matters is the extent to which the owner of those feet was illuminated by divine imagination. In this interpretation, the poem asks if the ancient Britons were once as inspired as Jesus, and then declares that we should use our mental and physical weapons to become so again. This was the message of those lines that have, stripped of their original context, become the unofficial English national anthem.

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The extraordinary popularity of ‘Jerusalem’ has made Blake a favourite of English patriots, but his actual views on his homeland are more interesting than simple nationalism. Blake saw the value in people from all nations. As he once wrote:

And all must love the human form,

In heathen, turk or jew.

Where Mercy, Love &Pity dwell,

There God is dwelling too

Lines like this were a reaction to the divisive attitudes displayed by members of the established Church, such as the eighteenth-century minister and prolific hymn writer Isaac Watts. Watts’s ‘Song VI: Praise for the Gospel’ begins:

LORD, I ascribe it to thy Grace,

And not to Chance as others do,

That I was born of CHRISTIAN Race,

And not a Heathen or a Jew.

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Blake had no time for anyone who considered their country or creed to be inherently ‘better’ than anyone else’s. For Blake, Albion was an enchanted island, and London a heavenly city, because his imaginative vision made them so. Any other city or nation on earth would have equal claim to the status of the New Jerusalem, if they had been seen with Blake’s eyes, or lay under Blake’s feet. If all the people of the world could learn to see through the eyes of divine imagination, then all the world would be Jerusalem.

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he felt it was necessary to recognise the unique personality of individual places.

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Other nations had spiritual aspects, not just Britain. His works contain references to Erin, the spiritual form of Ireland, and Shiloh, the spiritual form of France. Like all countries, these had a unique personality and a unique role to play in the unfolding story of humanity.

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As we shall see, in Blake’s view Britain did have a pivotal role to play in the spiritual evolution of mankind. As he wrote in Milton, ‘All things begin & end in Albions ancient Druid rocky shore.’

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When the French Revolution began in 1789, it was seen by its many supporters as a beacon of rationalism and humanity. It did not take long, however, until that wave of optimism collapsed before the horror of the Reign of Terror. In September 1792, hundreds of Parisian workers broke into the jails, dragged out the prisoners and butchered them in the streets. About 1,400 people were murdered by the common citizenry, in the name of safeguarding the revolution. Attention then turned to counter-revolutionary threats outside of France. As the politician Jacques Pierre Brissot declared in the Legislative Assembly, ‘We cannot be calm until Europe, all Europe, is in flames.’ This led to the military rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and French control of large parts of western Europe. A revolution undertaken in the name of rationality and Enlightenment values had produced frenzied, irrational slaughter and hatred. This was the process which Blake personified with his mythic character Orc.

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Under the influence of Irving and other religious fanatics, Tatham set about destroying Blake’s ‘satanically inspired’ work. Countless papers and manuscripts went into the fire, and the engraved copper printing plates for his illuminated manuscripts were melted down into scrap. As Rossetti reported, ‘Notebooks, poems, designs, in lavish quantity, annihilated: a gag (as it were) thrust into the piteous mouth of Blake’s corpse.’ This incident is known as the ‘Tatham holocaust’ in Blakean circles and talk of it fills many with a sense of cosmic horror.

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There has been much speculation about whether those two sexual sketches were representative of a much larger body of sexualised artwork which has since been lost. The question arises due to the actions of the painter Frederick Tatham. Tatham befriended Blake in later life and looked after Catherine after her husband died, nominally employing her as a housekeeper to keep her from destitution. After Catherine died in 1831, a great quantity of William’s manuscripts, letters and other work was controversially retained by Tatham. He then became a follower of the Scottish preacher Edward Irving, who believed that the second coming of Christ was imminent. As William Michael Rossetti, the brother of the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, recorded: ‘The fact is – so I have been informed – that Swedenborgians, Irvingites, or other extreme sectaries, beset the then youthful custodian [Tatham] of these priceless relics, and persuaded him to make a holocaust of them, as being heretical, and dangerous to those poor dear “unprotected females” Religion and Morals. The horrescent pietists allowed that the works were “inspired”; but alas! The inspiration had come from the Devil.’

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Leary believed that this state could be deliberately switched on through use of cannabis, tantric sex or certain types of yoga and meditation. Blake would have argued that the creative exercising of the imagination was the real key, although the fact that Blake, Swedenborg and Leary were all highly sexed may be significant. Both Blake and Leary insisted that this buffer stage, for all its seductive appeal, should not be a goal in itself. Passive pleasure can be welcomed when it arrives, but our lives need more purpose.

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THE END OF A GOLDEN STRING

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But as Robinson also noted, ‘Though he spoke of his happiness, he spoke of past sufferings, and of sufferings as necessary. “There is suffering in heaven, for where there is the capacity of enjoyment, there is the capacity of pain.”’

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TWOFOLD ALWAYS

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As James realised, there were several qualities that reports of religious experiences had in common. The most obvious, and the most frustrating, was the quality of ineffability – the impossibility of communicating exactly what the experience was like. As he described a spiritual experience, ‘no adequate report of its contents can be given in words […] mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists.’ Just as you couldn’t explain to a person who had never tasted mustard exactly what the experience of eating mustard was like, people who had experienced a mystical state were equally unable to adequately describe it to others.

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The second quality that James identified was that the experience was noetic – meaning that it was imbued with information: ‘Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge […] They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority.’ It is this noetic quality, and the sense that during the experience you were granted profound, new knowledge, that gives a religious experience a sense of revelation. It is a glimpse of a larger state of mind that shows the poverty of our everyday awareness. Without this, an ineffable experience could be dismissed as little more than a period of feeling strange.

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James also identified two subsidiary qualities, namely transiency and passivity – the experiences do not last for long, and they involve a lack of agency. As he wrote, ‘the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.’ Despite their transient nature, these experiences can produce lasting changes in people.

Note: higher power = left hemisphere

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There wasn’t much that objective study could do with reports of transient, passive reception of ineffable knowledge that had little impact on anything other than the recipient’s quality of life.

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This is what makes the ineffable nature of these mystical moments so frustrating. To give others a glimpse of what these experiences were like was beyond most visionaries. Attempts to explain the impact of the visionary state can come across as trite, sentimental or embarrassingly obvious. The experience of a mystical state in which you understand that all is love can be life-changing, but to be simply told that all is love can have about as much emotional impact as reading a greetings card.

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Now I a fourfold vision see

And a fourfold vision is given to me

Tis fourfold in my supreme delight

And three fold in soft Beulahs night

And twofold Always. May God us keep

From Single vision &Newtons sleep

These are strange statements that need some unpacking.

What Blake is trying to do here is to describe four different modes of perception, or states of awareness. The ‘twofold’ vision we have already encountered. This is a dual mix of physical reality and mental imagination, and again Blake stresses that he has this mode of perception ‘always’. The implication is that it is far superior to ‘single vision’, by which Blake means the material world objectively observed, without any contribution from the mind or the imagination. This is ‘Newton’s sleep’, the scientific perspective that Blake views with horror.

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This scientific mode of perceiving the world had been largely unknown in Britain before the seventeenth century, but it had been growing ever since, especially after the founding of the Royal Society in 1660. A good example of the objective observation that the Royal Society promoted is an article entitled ‘Effects of Lightning in Northamptonshire 1725’ in the Royal Society journal, Philosophical Transactions, written by a J. Wasse. This was a lengthy, dispassionate description of the corpse of a shepherd, who was killed when struck by lightning out in the fields. Wasse describes the effect of the lightning strike on the shepherd’s body and on the objects he had around him with a level of forensic detail that would make Sherlock Holmes proud. What was new here was the absence of any reference to the mythological associations of thunder and lightning, which any earlier account of a similar scene would have contained. There was no sense of awe about the ‘wrath of God’. Nor was there any trace of human feeling for the victim.

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In Blake’s writings there are confusing references to the importance of seeing ‘through’ rather than ‘with’ the eye. This was another way to state his belief in the superiority of double rather than single vision. To see the world with single vision was, for Blake, to be robbed of everything that mattered in life – one of the many ways in which he was in opposition to the spirit of his times.

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Nowadays, we have a greater understanding of the role that the mind plays in supposedly objective, passive observation. We suffer from many psychological biases which affect how we see the world, and as a result we often see what we expect to see. As Blake wrote, ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.’ As the role of the mind in perception becomes increasingly understood, we are learning that we too tend to see the world in twofold vision, rather than the single vision of Newton’s sleep. The difference is that, unlike Blake, we are largely unaware of it.

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If single vision is detached, objective observation and twofold vision is a merging of what we see and what we think, then what is the ‘threefold vision’ he talks about? Blake’s description of it as being ‘in soft Beulahs night’ is not, for most readers, immediately helpful. Beulah is, like Los, another aspect of his personal mythology. It is a sweet moonlit place, associated with dreams, love and divine inspiration. Blake probably got the name from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the land of Beulah is an earthly paradise on the borders of heaven. To experience the state of Beulah is to experience a blissful, post-coital embrace from the whole universe.

The paradise of Beulah is how many would imagine heaven, but Beulah as Blake understood it is just a temporary state. It is too passive to be a true heaven.

Note: maybe it’s like the third jhana

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For Blake, the idea that the afterlife consisted of angels sitting around on clouds playing the harp was not something he found remotely appealing or plausible. Instead, the heaven of Beulah is a temporary kindness that acted as a respite from the constant work of the universe. It was something we could enjoy for as long as it lasted, but it was a holiday from existence, not our ultimate goal. Beulah was also a necessary buffer between the world of men and the higher realm above.

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By calling this state a ‘threefold vision’, Blake is saying that the world of Beulah is an addition to, not a replacement for, the twofold vision previously described. It was as if a state of grace descended upon him after exercising his imagination and experiencing twofold vision.

Note: sounds like kasina practice leading to jhanas

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It did not change the content of what he was experiencing, but instead altered what it felt like. There he was, in angry dispute with a thistle out in the gentle rolling fields of Sussex, when from nowhere a blissful spiritual balm found and embraced him.

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After threefold vision comes fourfold vision – a glimpse of the higher realm that Blake refers to as Eternity. This, he tells us, is the ‘supreme delight’. It is also noetic, as William James explained, and profoundly ineffable. Here is the full-blown mystical state that James analysed and studied. It is a much rarer state of mind than Blake’s ‘twofold vision’, and not something he experienced every day.

Note: kind of like how the suttas say you can perceive Nibbana before full awakening 

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Blake himself struggled with how to describe fourfold vision. As he wrote in his epic poem Milton:

O how can I with my gross tongue that cleaveth to the dust,

Tell of the Four-fold Man, in starry numbers fitly orderd

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For now, we will have to leave this strange state of awareness, although we will return to this subject later. Blake was not able to describe or explain this ineffable visionary state in the poem he sent to Thomas Butts. He did, however, manage to describe the route by which he achieved his glimpse of Eternity.

It began with his imagination, or ‘twofold’ vision. By exercising his imagination, he was able to visualise his personal concerns and difficulties in mythological terms. With his problems brought out into the light and projected onto the world in this way, their contrasting positions were compelled to struggle until a conclusion was reached. Blake had made a psychological breakthrough. It is at this point that Blake’s vision went from twofold, to threefold, to the fourfold of Eternity. This ‘supreme delight’ was not something he created himself, but something he said was ‘given to me’. It was a side effect of Blake’s imaginative struggles. In many ways, it was a reward for achieving a psychological breakthrough.

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Blake was always clear that his route to Eternity came through the exercising of his imagination. On one occasion he was at a party, and he described a walk he had recently taken. ‘I came to a meadow, and at the farther corner of it I saw a fold of lambs,’ he said. ‘Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers; and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite pastoral beauty. But I looked again, and it proved to be no living flock, but beautiful sculpture.’ We can now recognise this statement as another example of his twofold vision, in which living lambs were also perceived as timeless art. A lady at the party, however, pressed him for more details. ‘I beg pardon, Mr Blake,’ she said, ‘but may I ask where you saw this?’ Blake touched his forehead and said, ‘Here, madam.’

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Blake’s visions, then, were neither lies nor objective truth. They were a state of mind he could achieve by exercising his imagination. ‘Imagination’ is a word we all feel we understand, yet it proves to be a tricky concept to define, as we shall see later. For now, however, it’s worth noting that Blake’s claims that his vision was ‘twofold always’ suggests an unusually powerful imagination at work.

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But how can a strong imagination lead to the experience of a vision state? As we will see, a clue can be found in another aspect of the mind – the sense of self. Or, more accurately, in the sense of self being dissolved.

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THEIR FORMS ETERNAL EXIST

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Imagination may have been central to the philosophy of Blake and Swedenborg, but they were swimming against the intellectual fashion of their time. The wider society of the age was becoming increasingly focused on rationality. Through the application of reason rather than imagination, it was felt, we could understand the world of matter.

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By the eighteenth century, proto-scientific experiments, measurements and theories had begun to give a more accurate description of the world than that offered by the Church. An example of this was the debate about heliocentrism – the theory that the earth revolved around the sun. Measurement and observation eventually revealed that the earth was not the centre of the cosmos, as had been claimed. It was hard for the Church to maintain its role as the ultimate authority on truth after its claims about such fundamental issues were revealed to be arbitrary. It made sense that enquiring people would look at the world from a mechanical, materialistic perspective instead, to see if any certainty could be found that way.

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This led to the rise of a philosophical position called deism. The name is derived from the Latin word for god, deus, revealing the nervousness people felt about stepping away from religion. With a name like ‘godism’, you would be forgiven for assuming that this philosophy was nothing at all like atheism. Technically, this was true. Deists claimed to believe in God and agreed that God created the universe. Beyond this claim, however – and on a practical level – deism and atheism were remarkably similar.

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Deists believe that God created the universe as a form of machine, which he switched on and left alone. This ‘universe machine’ then continued to operate according to its original design, even though God was not present or making decisions about its operations. This made it possible to study and understand the universe without making any reference to Him. There was no revelation or divine intervention in this model of the universe, nor indeed any need for them. As a deist, you could study the cause and effect of events within this machine-like material universe exactly as an atheist would, without risking the social condemnation that coming out as an actual atheist would then have caused.

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It’s no coincidence that the rise of deism in the Age of Enlightenment was accompanied by a fad for automatons. The most famous was the Mechanical Turk (1770), a robot wearing a turban that appeared to be able to play chess, and the Digesting Duck (1739). The robot duck had over 400 moving parts in each wing alone, and when switched on it appeared to eat grain, drink water and defecate. While the actual chess playing and duck defecation were faked, the automatons still suggested a new way to think about life. They were clockwork machines that looked and behaved like living things, despite clearly not having a soul or immaterial essence. As such, they give an insight into the universe as the deists, and the abstracting, rational Urizenic part of our minds, perceived it. Urizen was picturing the universe in his own image, as something law-bound, self-referential, and separate from the observer. If the universe was nothing more than a machine, it followed that the animals and people it contained should be understood as machines also. The more people explored the idea of a machine universe, the more it seemed complete and comprehendible. Suddenly, the immaterial world of soul or spirit was no longer required.

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By the mid-eighteenth century, deism had developed into a significant and threatening body of thought which the religiously inclined felt necessary to condemn. In 1754, the English Presbyterian minister John Leland published A View of the Principal Deistical Writers, which detailed leading deist thinkers and their heresies. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, whose essay The Natural History of Religion was published in 1757, the year of Blake’s birth, was brave enough to argue for a position somewhere beyond deism, but at this point there were very few who dared go all the way into full-blown atheism. For the enquiring intellectual who wished to avoid being ostracised by a largely religious society, deism was a philosophy that was treated with suspicion, but which still provided plausible deniability from the damning accusation of atheism. By claiming you were studying God’s handiwork, it was possible to investigate the workings of a godless universe.

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Western philosophy and culture, from the Pythagoreans onwards, had proceeded on the understanding that both the material and the immaterial worlds exist. This position is known as dualism, and it fits our everyday experience of life well. There is a problem, however, and it concerns the interaction between these two worlds. How do the world of solid, physical matter and the world of intangible thoughts and feelings relate to each other? How can a thought that has no physical presence affect the material world?

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In theory, there should be no way that something with no material aspect could impact a physical system. However, this happens all the time, for example when the idle thought, ‘I wonder what’s in the fridge?’ results in a physical human walking across the kitchen, opening the fridge and eating some cheese. This was a problem that deeply troubled the French philosopher René Descartes. Eventually, he managed to hand-wave it away by claiming, with no real justification, that the immaterial and material interacted through the pituitary gland in the brain. In the centuries that have followed, much effort has been expended in seeking a less arbitrary answer.

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Our current model of what’s going on is that, however it happens, it is all the brain’s fault. Although we have no idea how the electrochemical mush of a physical brain interacts with, or creates, the immaterial realm of consciousness, the assumption is that somehow it does. Because of this assumption, it is a common belief that the immaterial world of consciousness only exists inside our brains, and that there is no immaterial aspect to the universe outside of our skulls.

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Some hardcore rationalists argue that the best way to solve the problem of consciousness’s ability to impact matter is to deny that it does. The appearance of it doing so must therefore be an illusion. In this scenario, there is no reason to think that the immaterial exists at all. This position – that there is only a material universe, and that the existence of anything immaterial is meaningless, delusional and false – is called materialism. Although a materialist might acknowledge that we do not currently understand what consciousness is, they typically assume that one day everything, including consciousness, will be explained in a materialist framework, because ultimately everything is only matter. This is something of a circular argument.

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The opposite philosophy of materialism is called idealism, which is the belief that only the immaterial exists and that matter is an illusion. This illusion of the physical world is created out of the immaterial mind of God in much the same way that Urizen created our limited, physical world out of a void of formless potential. An eighteenth-century proponent of idealism was the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. As the politician Lord Chesterfield noted, Berkeley ‘has written a book to prove that there is no such thing as matter, and that nothing exists but in idea […] His arguments are, strictly speaking, unanswerable; but yet I am so far from being convinced by them, that I am determined to go on to eat and drink, and walk and ride, in order to keep that matter, which I so mistakenly imagine my body at present to consist of, in as good a plight as possible.’

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Just as the modern world leans towards a philosophy of materialism without entirely accepting it, so too did the religiously inclined in the early eighteenth century lean towards idealism, usually without fully swallowing it. Here the idealist Bishop Berkeley has much in common with the modern American materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has argued that consciousness is an illusion. Both Berkeley and Dennett were strikingly original and brave thinkers who could construct elegant and impressive arguments in favour of their purist models of the universe. And yet, for all their talents, neither could quite convince the general public of their idealist or materialist philosophy. Just as our everyday experience of the material world prevented those in the eighteenth century from being convinced by idealism, so too does our experience of immaterial consciousness prevent us from accepting materialism. For all our inability to explain how the material and immaterial can interact, we generally believe in both and remain at heart dualists.

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Dualism, however, is a philosophical position not without its schisms. We may accept the reality of both the material and the immaterial, but people have been profoundly split on which came first. Which is primary – mind or matter?

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In the secular twenty-first-century West, the accepted answer is that the material world came first. The physical universe came into existence for no reason 13.8 billion years ago. It was a lifeless, material chaos with no immaterial aspect. In time, the simple, light elements of matter formed into stars, which fused into heavier elements, which became the building blocks of planets. On at least one of those planets, life emerged out of the mineral world in all its wild and glorious forms. Consciousness somehow sparked into being inside life and, more extraordinarily still, it evolved into self-consciousness. In this way, the immaterial became aware of itself.

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It was from within the mysterious world of consciousness that the immaterial world – ideas, spirits, the experience of emotions and so on – was born. It logically follows, then, that for the billions of years that it took for matter to form into life capable of consciousness, the immaterial was entirely absent from the universe. This is, admittedly, a model of the universe that doesn’t fit well with a number of interpretations of quantum mechanics, which require a conscious observer for anything fixed and definite to occur. That aside, this is our scientific culture’s current best model, and there are many scientific and astronomical measurements to back it up.

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The idea that the material world preceded the immaterial one is relatively new, however, and in the eighteenth century few would have been prepared to put their names to such a godless position. That deism was as close as you could publicly get to atheism is a reminder that, for most of history, people believed that it was the immaterial world that came first, and that matter was created out of it. This was the understanding of much of the world’s religions and thinkers up until the time of Blake, Swedenborg and the Age of Enlightenment. As the Bible told us, in the beginning was the Word, and this Word was clearly something immaterial. A word is not a material object.

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For most of the world’s great religions, mind preceded matter. The immaterial came first. This immaterial thing was God, or the universal spirit, or Brahman, or the Tao, or whatever name individual cultures preferred. After an eternal period of solitude, this immaterial spirit eventually decided to produce the world of matter. This physical world was usually described as an ‘emanation’ from the fundamental immaterial reality.

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Just as a material world with no immaterial aspect is problematic in quantum mechanics, so too does the idea of an immaterial universe with no material aspect raise questions. Not least of these is the issue of what God was doing for the uncountable eons before he decided to make the universe. The idea that God sat around for many trillions of years doing nothing strikes many as deeply odd. In the beginning there was the Word, we are told, but what sort of Word could that be when there was nothing for that Word to refer to?

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Whether the material or the immaterial came first looks suspiciously like a trick question. Both appear to be meaningless concepts without each other. Like Blake’s contraries, it may be that neither can exist in isolation, and that both the immaterial and the material are, like two sides of a coin, incomplete without their opposite. Perhaps they are necessary aspects of some other larger reality, in the same way that time and space were believed to be separate, contrasting things before Einstein realised that they were both part of something more fundamental, which he called spacetime. The idea that the material and the immaterial are two aspects of the same, hidden substance has been given the slightly disappointing name of dual-aspect monism.

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Both Blake and Swedenborg, however, believed that the immaterial world had primacy over the material. To them, the divine light of spirit came first, and it logically followed that this was more important than the cold, dense world of matter. This belief is common to those who have experienced mystical states, as William James noted in his ground-breaking study The Varieties of Religious Experience. As we discussed earlier, those who undergo a visionary experience frequently report that the world they saw was more real than the everyday world they left behind – in a way that they can’t quite explain, but which they are entirely certain about. This was a belief expressed by Swedenborg and countless visionaries, mystics and religious leaders across centuries, from the mystery schools of the classical world to the religions, occult schools and traditions that followed.

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If the mind or spirit feels ‘more real’ than the physical world to those who have experience of it, then it would seem self-evident that mind came first and that it has primacy over matter. After all, how could the world of matter produce something that seemed more real than itself? As we have already noted, however, this may be a side effect of the mind operating without a sense of self. When an idea appears in the mind normally, the thinker is aware of what has happened and is present to critique that idea. With the thinker absent, the arrival of an idea can feel more like revelation than thought, and it is unquestioningly accepted.

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While those who immerse themselves in the immaterial world find it self-evident that mind or spirit is more fundamental than matter, modern scientists who immerse themselves in the material world are equally convinced that physical reality is more real and more important than feelings or imagination. In the famous ‘double slit’ experiment in particle physics, light behaves as a wave when we measure it as a wave, and it behaves like a particle when we measure it as a particle. In a similar way, consciousness is more fundamental than matter when the world is explored spiritually, and matter is more fundamental than mind when the world is examined scientifically. Whichever truth you wish to find about the nature of things, the universe is happy to show it to you.

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Belief in the primacy of the immaterial lies behind one of the key ideas in Swedenborg’s theology, which is the concept of correspondences. As Swedenborg saw things, everything in the physical world corresponded to something glorious and wonderful in the spiritual realm. Things only exist down here because there is a spiritual equivalent existing up there in splendour. This is an idea that has strong parallels with hermetic and magical thought, although Swedenborg denied that he had read earlier mystical writers such as the German philosopher Jakob Boehme, with whom his philosophy shares many similarities. Blake had read Boehme, however, and rated him highly. His influence is clear when Blake writes that ‘every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause’, or that, ‘We who dwell on Earth can do nothing of ourselves, every thing is conducted by Spirits, no less than Digestion or Sleep.’

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There are similarities between Swedenborg’s correspondences and the Platonic theory of forms. In a number of his dialogues, Plato argued that for an object, such as a chair, to exist in the physical world, there must first exist an idealised, perfect chair in some immaterial abstract realm. A ‘Platonic form’ like this remains unaffected by the fate of chairs on earth. This was one aspect of Platonic philosophy that Blake agreed with. As he wrote in Milton:

The Oak is cut down by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife

But their Forms Eternal Exist, For-ever.

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Swedenborg believed that correspondences were not always a simple one-to-one match. Indeed, it might not be immediately apparent what a physical earthly thing was a representation of in the world of spirits. The light and warmth of the sun on your face, for example, did not correspond to a giant ball of light in heaven’s sky. Instead, it corresponded with divine love and truth.

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Because everything in the material world ultimately corresponded with some higher spiritual event, as Swedenborg believed, it logically followed that the study of earthly reality could reveal much about the nature of the heavens. Each letter and number, for example, would have their own spiritual origin and meaning. This meant that even the most mundane sentence in the Bible could contain profound wisdom, if only the true nature of correspondences was understood. For Swedenborg, everything was a sign: the physical world was a language to be read. This is the logic that gave rise to practices like numerology and astrology. It is also why materialists and dual-aspect monists dismiss them. Even committed idealists can admit that seeing every aspect of this world as a coded message from the spirit world can soon become exhausting.

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Swedenborg tended to favour simple, literal associations between aspects of earthly life and spiritual things. This is why the heaven he described was so similar to earth, and why angels had jobs, prepared food and lived in houses. To the modern mind, it might appear that this is the wrong way around. Swedenborg’s spiritual version of domesticity seems more plausible as a reflection of earthly domesticity, not least because angelic jobs and chores don’t really make a lot of sense in a world where space and time don’t work like they do on earth. But Swedenborg believed that the immaterial was more real and therefore primary. Life on earth, in this scenario, must be a reflection of the angels and not the other way around.

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This may explain why Swedenborg’s angels were sexually active. According to his theory of correspondences, sex on earth must correspond with something in heaven, and the powerful, emotionally involving and overwhelming nature of sex suggested that it must relate to something important. Swedenborg decided that the correspondence in this case was simple and literal, for what else could human sex represent but loving relations between angelic couples? Because of this, he argued in favour of tolerance of a wide variety of human sexual practices on the grounds that these too were echoes of heavenly love. These included pre-marital sex and the taking of other partners by married people should their sexual life with their spouse be, for whatever reason, unsatisfying. It is possible that Swedenborg’s beliefs in this area influenced Blake’s attempt to take a partner other than Catherine in the 1790s. It is also possible that the emotional hurt this caused was the reason the older, wiser Blake told Henry Crabb Robinson that Swedenborg’s ‘sexual religion is dangerous’ thirty years later.

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Swedenborg’s concept of correspondences has been incredibly influential. Charles Baudelaire published his most famous volume of poetry in 1857, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). It included a poem called ‘Correspondances’, which was Baudelaire’s attempt to express Swedenborg’s ideas in a poetic form. It begins with the metaphor ‘La Nature est un temple’ (Nature is a temple), and goes on to describe how we live in a forest of symbols. ‘Correspondances’ is often credited as the beginning of Symbolism, one of the more important artistic movements of the nineteenth century.

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Baudelaire also wrote about a condition now called synaesthesia, in which the senses can be blended so that a person hears colour, or perhaps sees music. The most common form of synaesthesia is called grapheme-colour synaesthesia, in which different letters and numbers are perceived to be associated with different colours. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud experienced letters in this way and wrote about it in his poem ‘Voyelles’ (‘Vowels’). Many other creative people were or are synaesthetes, including Nikola Tesla, Vladimir Nabokov, David Hockney, Richard Feynman, Billy Joel, Joanne Harris and Aphex Twin. The musician and producer Pharrell Williams wrote about his condition on the N.E.R.D. album Seeing Colours.

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Neurologically, it is not well understood, although we know it is lifelong, stable, involuntary and has a genetic component. Around 4 per cent of the population experiences some form of synaesthesia, and the condition can sometimes be experienced by non-synaesthetes through the use of psychedelic drugs. It is possible that Blake experienced a similar condition to synaesthesia, because he wrote of ‘seeing’ words in the air around him. Some synaesthetes, incidentally, not only report seeing the words people say to them in conversations, but also that words in different accents appear in different fonts.

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Neurologists acknowledge that the condition of synaesthesia is not well defined and refers to a broad number of different experiences which may have differing neurological causes. We can say, however, that Blake was extremely comfortable with inner states being expressed in multiple ways through different senses. Metaphor was one of his greatest strengths, from the ‘mind forg’d manacles’ to the ‘arrows of desire’ or the ‘forest of the night’. In a world where text and images and music are now routinely combined, it can be hard to grasp just how ground-breaking were his illustrated books, in which poetry, design and, for Songs of Innocence at least, music were all created at the same time and understood to be part of the same artistic expression.

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Thanks to Symbolist art and early twentieth-century psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the idea that an object in the world symbolises something immaterial is common in the twenty-first century. We understand that different rules apply in the material and immaterial realms. In the physical world and in the ‘single vision’ that Blake hated, it is the case that one object is just one object and nothing more. But in the immaterial world of the mind, things are very different. The immaterial world is a place of metaphor. One thing can be many, and many things can be one.

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The world of vision is not neat or easily catalogued. Recognising this is important for understanding Blake’s work where, for example, a figure such as Orc is understood to be a human-like character and, simultaneously, the urge towards violent revolution. These multiple levels of meaning become increasingly evident in Blake’s work, particularly in, as we shall see, his later epic work Jerusalem.

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Given how heavily Blake used metaphor and symbolism in his work, and his constant efforts to stress the importance of the imagination at a time when people favoured reason, it is easy to assume that Blake agreed with Swedenborg, and believed that this was absolutely a world that existed as the emanation of God. Yet if you read him closer, it becomes apparent that it is not that simple.

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In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake states his belief that, ‘God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men.’ The immaterial, spiritual world requires the imagination of physical humans in order to exist. Without people, in other words, there would be no God. This is a logical consequence of his belief that we create gods by our imaginative powers and that, as he wrote in the same work, ‘All deities reside in the human breast.’

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To Blake, asking whether the spiritual or physical world came first would have seemed a meaningless question. As we have already seen, the boundary between the interior and exterior worlds was blurred in Blake’s philosophy. As far as he was concerned, the imagination of man was the source of everything, both physical and spiritual. By taking this stance, Blake sidestepped the categories of idealism and materialism, and he avoided the dualist question of whether the physical or the immaterial had primacy. As always, he had no interest in perceiving the universe through the categories used by academia.

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In Blake’s philosophy, God creates man and man creates God. This is, for most, an alien way of thinking and it is one of the reasons why Blake’s work is so easily misunderstood. The immaterial imagination is the source of everything, yet this imagination requires a flesh-and-blood human in order to manifest. It seems as if this is an unsolvable paradox. When thinking in standard categories, it is.

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Yet as we have noted, time and space originally appeared to be unrelated concepts, so different that they could almost be said to be opposites. Or at least they did, until Einstein proved they were opposite sides of the same coin – indivisible aspects of a larger cosmological substance he called spacetime. In a similar way, a dual-aspect monist believes that the material and immaterial qualities of the universe are also the opposite sides of a cosmological coin. They could not exist without each other and are both aspects of a higher aspect of the universe we lack the perspective to see.

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In the mind of Blake, this was the same as the relationship between God and man. Neither could exist without the other, for they were both aspects of a larger unperceived reality. And if they were both necessary aspects of the same unseen thing, then man and God had to be considered as equally important. Blake was far outside contemporary thought here, exploring territory a long way from standard theology. With this key idea in place and the value of humanity radically reappraised, he was able to channel these ideas into his work. What followed was an extraordinary creative flowering.

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WHEN I SPEAK I OFFEND

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The Age of Enlightenment caused people to question existing ideas about the nature of mind and disease. The old practice of blaming such afflictions on witches, demons or God was no longer satisfactory, but doctors still lacked better models to explain these conditions. Before it suddenly threatened the nation’s constitution, many people had been content to ignore the problem. The ‘mad’ were simply said to be ‘mad’, and there was little else to be added. Nowadays we avoid derogatory and unspecific terms like ‘mad’ or ‘madhouse’, but such terminology illustrates how these matters were viewed in Georgian England.

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The mentally ill had always been part of society and were looked after and tolerated in various ways. Some were said to be slow, while others were said to have lost their wits. Communities felt a general responsibility to look after them as best they could. The Vagrancy Act of 1714 made specific mention of such people, in its attempt to deal with the problem of wandering masterless men. The law dictated that homeless people who appeared to have lost their reason could be restrained and confined, subject to the opinion of a medical practitioner. In London in the eighteenth century, for all but the wealthiest, this usually meant confinement in the oldest and most notorious asylum in history: the Bethlem hospital, known to all as Bedlam.

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Bedlam wasn’t a hospital in the modern sense of the word; it did not claim to heal people. It was simply a ‘madhouse’, and no real attempts were made to cure the inmates. They were housed, fed and confined, and this was felt to be all that could be done for them. Patients also received bloodletting, were purged by vomiting and were given opium, but this was to make them easier for the wardens to deal with. The form filled out on admission shows how unsophisticated mental health care was at the time. Of the four questions asked, only one was concerned with the nature of the patient’s illness. This question simply asked whether the patient was ‘melancholy, raving or mischievous’.

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Bedlam was a large, impressive looking building at Moorfields. The gates were topped with two sculptures in Portland stone by the fashionable Danish sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber, with a figure representing melancholy on the left and a figure representing raving madness on the right. Despite this impressive façade, the building was poorly built and maintained. It lacked foundations and had been built on a rubbish heap. It soon began to deteriorate, with subsidence, cracked walls and leaking roofs rendering the building a symbol of the people inside in architectural form.

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For a suitable donation, visitors were allowed to observe the inmates, with the wilder and more distressed proving especially popular. Bedlam became one of London’s leading tourist attractions, and its patients were essentially exhibits in a heartless human zoo. There was little concern about how this might impact them, although preachers were banned from visiting on the grounds that their sermons tended to make the inmates madder. One Swiss traveller described his visit in 1725, when he saw ‘dangerous maniacs, most of them being chained and terrible to behold. On holidays numerous persons of both sexes, but belonging generally to the lower classes, visit this hospital and amuse themselves watching these unfortunate wretches, who often give them cause for laughter.’ This profitable entertainment was eventually stopped in 1770.

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One of the unfortunate people who was incarcerated in Bedlam was a Welsh tea broker named James Tilly Matthews, who was committed in 1797. Matthews has the honour of being the first recorded paranoid schizophrenic in the medical record. His case is worth looking at, because it demonstrates how the Age of Enlightenment was creating entirely new forms of mental health problems, which in turn impacted on how Blake was seen by his contemporaries.

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A convinced believer in Enlightenment thought and republicanism, Matthews couldn’t understand how such rational concepts had led to so much fury and slaughter. Neither could he explain why the continent was marching to war when no countries wanted war. The idea that dark hypnotic powers were controlling people’s minds and actions explained a great deal in these circumstances and helped calm the cognitive dissonance he was experiencing. Given the huge advances being made in science and engineering, the idea that a machine could harness these strange hypnotic powers and force people to damage society against their better intentions seemed more or less plausible. More importantly, it could explain a bewildering, chaotic world. His mind latched onto this story because it was the only explanation he had which preserved his pre-existing belief system.

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Before the nineteenth century, there is an almost complete absence of accounts of schizophrenia. It may be that we don’t possess adequate records of early sufferers, and that cases were simply recorded in vague terms such as mania, a lack of wits or religious revelation. However, some historians of medicine argue that the schizophrenic family of illnesses did not exist before this time. At the start of the nineteenth century there were around 5,000 people confined in British asylums and madhouses, and by the end of the century the number had grown to over 100,000. There are many factors in this growth, from an increase in the size of the population to changes in the treatment and medical understanding of mental health issues. Even with these issues acknowledged, there remains at least the suspicion that societal changes such as those caused by the Industrial Revolution, the growth of Empire and a more scientific, rational worldview had a damaging impact on mental health.

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In a similar way, the move to our current networked world has been accompanied by an increase in mental health issues, especially among the young. The huge increase in anxiety reported by teenagers who have never known a world without constant mobile online access is an obvious example of this. The evolution of society, as it becomes increasingly distant from the historical environment our minds evolved to deal with, puts increasing pressure on our minds. Madness is understood to be the opposite of sanity, and sanity is defined as the possession of a clear and accurate understanding of reality. As our changing understanding of reality causes the nature of sanity to shift, so too does the nature of madness change.

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During the Age of Enlightenment, the common societal understanding of reality shifted from a spirit-haunted world to a rational machine-like universe. It was in this period that we see the rise of what we would now call paranoid conspiracy theory. The first popular conspiracy work, Memoirs of Jacobinism by the French Jesuit Augustin Barruel, was translated into English in 1797. Lurid tales about secret societies such as the Freemasons and the Illuminati found a ready audience in a readership unable to understand the rapidly changing world or, like Matthews, grasp why the French Revolution had taken such a dark turn. Just as Matthews’s mind needed to invent the air loom in order to keep its understanding of the world from shattering, so too did people latch onto Barruel’s claim that sinister plotters were masterminding political events from the shadows. Such an idea was more comforting than the idea that world politics was meaningless, random chaos and that no one was in control.

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The behaviour of people in the eighteenth century can seem strange to us now. It was a time, for example, in which weeping in public was considered entirely normal. It was also a time when the King of England had to be restrained in a straitjacket, the former prime minister Pitt the Elder sat in silence in a darkened room when official business reduced him to fits of trembling, and the Lord Chancellor, Charles Yorke, was so overwhelmed with anxiety that he cut his own throat. Fortunately by the end of the century the issue of mental health was, perhaps for the first time, finally being recognised as a subject worthy of study and investigation.

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The Rake’s Progress, a hugely popular series of paintings and engravings by William Hogarth, depicted the downfall of a foolish but initially prosperous eighteenth-century gentleman. The final image, which followed the loss of his fortune through gambling and a spell in a debtors’ prison, is called The Madhouse. Here was the ultimate doomed ending for a person’s fall from grace, the worst fate anyone could arrive at other than death. Madness was something that Georgian people truly feared – no doubt encouraged by the decades of visitors who thrilled at the antics of the lunatics of Bedlam.

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For William Blake, out arguing with thistles and experiencing visions, it was increasingly apparent that others viewed him as mad and a fit subject for mockery and ridicule – an added stress on top of his financial and career problems and his trial for sedition.

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Blake scholars have traditionally fought against the idea that Blake was mad, for fear it would offer an excuse to dismiss him. Aware that his mythology initially appears incomprehensible and devoid of any internal meaning, they have argued for his sanity in order to persuade others that studying his work is worthwhile. This is a notably different stance to that taken by Van Gogh scholars, for whom the painter’s troubled mental health is uncontroversial, accepted and seen as an important aspect of his work.

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The mental strain of Blake’s trial for sedition clearly took its toll. A short verse written in a letter to Thomas Butts shortly after the incident with Schofield shows a sense of despair and self-pity which had previously been absent from his work:

O why was I born with a different face

Why was I not born like the rest of my race

When I look each one starts! when I speak I offend

Then I’m silent &passive &lose every Friend

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Blake was aware he was perceived as different, and that this was part of the reason he was overlooked and unsuccessful. In his notebook, he penned a few lines headed ‘To F——’, where ‘F’ is presumably his increasingly successful sculptor friend John Flaxman:

I mock thee not tho I by thee am mocked

Thou callst me Madman but I call thee Blockhead

Hes a Blockhead who wants a proof of what he Can’t Perceive

And he’s a Fool who tries to make such a Blockhead believe

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After the Schofield incident, Blake began to show signs of paranoia. He seemed to have difficulty accepting that what happened with the soldier was a random, meaningless event. He suspected that an unseen political conspiracy was working against him because of his earlier revolutionary associations, in a similar way to how Matthews believed a conspiracy actively plotted against him. When you believe that everything in this world has spiritual significance, it is easy to elevate an ugly incident into a spiritual melodrama. As Gilchrist wrote, ‘Blake used to declare the Government, or some high person, knowing him to have been of the Paine set, “sent the soldier to entrap him”; which we must take the liberty of regarding as a purely visionary notion.’

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In 1803, Blake returned from Felpham to London. He and Catherine could no longer afford a property like their former house in Lambeth, which had three floors and a rear garden. Instead, they rented rooms on the first floor of 17 South Molton Street, further west down Oxford Street and closer to the site of the Tyburn gallows. As he wrote in a letter to Hayley in August 1804: ‘Money flies from me; Profit never ventures upon my threshold, tho’ every other man’s doorstone is worn down into the very earth by the footsteps of the fiends of commerce. Be it so, as long as God permits, which I foresee is not long. I foresee a mighty change.’

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The sudden switch in tone here between self-pity and blind optimism is representative of Blake’s mind at this point. As he began to rebuild his life as a Londoner his mental health was in poor condition, but his determination to understand the strange workings of the mind was never stronger. He knew that his visions separated him from others and led to people thinking him mad, but he also believed that his work could convince people to understand and even share his reality. In an essay written to promote an engraving, he suddenly lashes out, unprovoked, seemingly at no specific target: ‘It is very true what you have said for these thirty two Years I am Mad or else you are so both of us cannot be in our right senses Posterity will judge by our works.’

In those difficult years, Blake clung to the idea that his art would redeem him.

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The nineteenth century marks a change in the style and ambition of Blake’s illuminated books. The first of these was Milton: a poem in 2 books, which, as we’ve seen, gave us the verses that are now known as the hymn ‘Jerusalem’. Milton was begun in Felpham but took a further decade to complete. It includes a self-portrait in front of his Sussex cottage conversing with a floating female spirit, and perhaps the spirit-rich atmosphere that Blake initially found at Felpham was a factor in the gear change in his work.

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The reason Milton took so long was its scale. At fifty printed pages, it was far longer than anything else he had attempted. It was also considerably wordier. Although it had been created using his unique printing technique, which allowed the combination of words and images, many plates consisted of little more than tightly packed text brightened by a wash of watercolours. There were far fewer illustrations accompanying the text than before, and Blake’s interest in combining text and pictures to create particular effects had dwindled. Had Blake the connections or ability to do so, it would have made more sense to print Milton in the traditional manner. If nothing else, it would have meant that Blake did not need to write out the entire text in mirror writing.

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As he worked on Milton, his mind seemed unable to move on from his relationship with Hayley. In his notebook we find a short verse entitled ‘On H——ys Friendship’:

When H——y finds out what you cannot do

That is the Very thing hell set you to

If you break not your Neck tis not his fault

But pecks of poison are not pecks of salt

And when he could not act upon my wife

Hired a Villain to bereave my Life

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Blake scholars do not take seriously this suggestion that Hayley hired someone to murder Blake, in order to claim Catherine. It appears to be a paranoid fantasy, and one that probably passed fairly quickly. Blake does not return to the idea, and you would not expect him to drop such an accusation if it was based on a true incident. The line is probably intended as a reference to ‘Fair Elenor’, an early, Gothic poem of Blake’s. But Hayley remained a target for his animosity.

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In Blake’s eyes, Hayley had become a spiritual enemy, even if he had trouble justifying or rationalising why he thought this way. As far as Hayley was concerned, of course, he had treated Blake with nothing but kindness and was blameless. But as Blake describes the situation in Milton, ‘Corporeal friends are Spiritual enemies’. Blake was seeking a spiritual reality behind human actions that would fit with his worldview and also explain his lack of earthly success. If the boundary between the internal and external worlds is sufficiently blurred, it becomes easy to project some great spiritual trauma onto an unsuspecting worldly scapegoat. Most of the first third of Milton, a sequence known as the Bard’s Song, is often interpreted as an attempt to justify his animosity towards his former patron.

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The first book of Milton begins with Blake petitioning the muses for inspiration, in order to be able to tell the saga of John Milton’s spirit returning to our world a hundred years after his death. Blake is specific and unromantic about how a writer becomes inspired, and he does not seek the muses in some far-off astral realm. Instead, he asks the muses to:

        […] Come into my hand

By your mild power; descending down the Nerves of my right arm

From out of the Portals of my brain, where by your ministry

The Eternal Great Humanity Divine. planted his Paradise,

As always, he is sane enough to be aware that his mind is the source of everything.

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The lengthy Bard’s Song that follows is the reason why Milton’s spirit decides to descend once again to the human realm. The Bard sings of the three types of human: the elect, the redeemed and the reprobate. Only the redeemed and, potentially, the reprobates, Blake tells us, were capable of entering heaven. Blake’s concept of the elect here is a mocking inversion of Calvinism and other forms of Protestantism, which claimed that there existed a class of people called the elect who were predestined to go to heaven. Much of the power dynamic in those sects involved the right to declare who was and who was not a member of this elect. Blake turned this whole idea on its head by declaring that ‘the Elect cannot be Redeemed’. Rather than being guaranteed entry to heaven, this class of people were damned because ‘they cannot Believe in Eternal Life / Except by Miracle & a New Birth.’ They could only conceive of redemption as an external gift, rather than something that emerged from their own imagination.

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In the Bard’s Song, Milton takes the role of the reprobate, a poet named Palamabron is the redeemed, and the elect is none other than Satan himself. However, Blake scholars frequently interpret this as a spiritual reflection of Blake’s relationship with Hayley, where the poet Palamabron is intended to represent Blake and Satan is intended to represent Hayley. Hayley’s kindness and friendly manner are, therefore, recast as Satanic deceptions. Blake writes of ‘Satans extreme / Mildness’ that allows Satan to cunningly get his own way, because Palamabron feels compelled to give in to Satan’s requests in order not to appear ungrateful. In this, we can see the power structure of boss and employee at work. For those who enjoy their job and are satisfied with their pay and conditions, having a friendly boss whom they get on well with is a perfect situation to be in. For those who resent their work and conditions, or feel trapped in an unsatisfying role, the requirement to fake a reciprocal friendship with a boss can become difficult over time, as it did for Blake.

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The bone of contention in the Bard’s Song revolves around the right to use a harrow – an agricultural tool that breaks up clods of earth and smooths out the surface of soil. A harrow is typically used on a field after ploughing, which disturbs the soil in a deeper and rougher way than a harrow.

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The plough and the harrow in the poem, of course, are spiritual tools. It is the role of ‘the Plow & Harrow to pass over the Nations’. The iron plough is driven by the character of Rintrah, who personifies just wrath. This wrath-driven plough churning across the nations is the spirit of revolution violently churning up the long-existing order of priests and kings. It is then that the divinely inspired poet Palamabron needs to pass over the churned land with the golden harrow, gently repairing the damage of the plough and preparing the soil for a new, golden future based on divinely inspired poetic arts. Or at least, that was the theory.

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The problem was that Satan was jealous of Palamabron’s glorious role, and used his deceitful, weasel-like cunning to persuade him to swap jobs for a day. Satan driving the harrow leads to all sorts of troubles, needless to say, which ripple out from the events in this poem and eventually result in the current fallen state of humanity. In the common interpretation of Satan being Hayley and Blake being Palamabron, this scenario translates as the uninspired, financially comfortable Hayley being jealous of lowly Blake’s divine inspiration and wanting to claim Blake’s gift for himself. The one-sided fallout between the two men, from this perspective, is just an unavoidable consequence of the troubles in Eternity being reflected in the earthly realm.

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This reading, however, betrays a deeply egotistical side to Blake which is at odds with the rest of his philosophy. Hayley was a competent writer who may then have lacked the mark of true genius, but imagination is a muscle that can be strengthened and, as Swedenborg discovered in his fifties, access to divine imagination can come at any time. A central hope in Blake’s work is that all will gain this ability. He ends the preface to Milton with a quote from the Bible to this effect: ‘Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets.’ Yet the conflict in the Bard’s Song is not about everyone rising up to the same level, but a fear that Hayley will take Blake’s special gift away from him. In this scenario, only the Blake character can wield the golden harrow and bring about a glorious future, and anyone else undertaking this role will bring disaster and rob Blake of his glorious destiny. Divine inspiration has now become a jealously guarded prize which Hayley must never have, a situation that is the opposite of the message in the rest of Blake’s work.

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Hayley is Satan and Satan is of the Elect, who by definition can never be redeemed. This may seem harsh, but in Milton those ‘Who pretend to Poetry’ are the greatest enemy there is:

He smiles with condescension; he talks of Benevolence &Virtue

And those who act with Benevolence &Virtue, they murder time on time

These are the destroyers of Jerusalem, these are the murderers

Of Jesus, who deny the Faith &mock at Eternal Life:

Who pretend to Poetry that they may destroy Imagination;

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You might think that it would take more than someone failing at poetry to destroy Jesus, eternal life, and the divine imagination itself. Nevertheless, this is the logic that the Bard’s Song hinges on. It is hard to see this as a great spiritual truth, rather than the earthly justification Blake embraced in order to explain his resentment of his patron.

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Blake’s mind remained fixated on this one-sided war in the years after Felpham, elevating the clash into mythic forms. Like James Tilly Matthews, Blake found that retreating into warm delusion worked as protection from a cold, indifferent world. Without his new narrative, Blake would have no alternative but to face up to a deeply uncomfortable scenario. In this, he was generally regarded as mad by those who knew him, this madness was what made his work unappealing to the market, despite his obvious talents, and Hayley’s patronship was essentially charity, offered to a man who was judged unable to earn money or support his wife. It is understandable, perhaps, that Blake would use his imagination to come up with a far grander and more flattering story.

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MY WRATH DID GROW

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As Blake saw it, never had some paintings in a room above a haberdashery shop been of such heightened national and spiritual importance. Yet this dramatic advert did not convince the London public. There were scarcely any visitors and, despite the exhibition being kept open for a couple of months after the intended closing date, none of the pictures sold. The exhibition received only one review, in the 17 September 1809 edition of The Examiner. It began: ‘If beside the stupid and mad-brained political project of their rulers, the sane part of the people of England required fresh proof of the alarming increase of the effects of insanity, they will be too well convinced from its having lately spread into the hitherto sober region of Art.’

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The article’s author, Robert Hunt, states his concern that praise for Blake’s work from his few well-known and respected friends had led him to mistake his madness for genius, an error that Hunt felt duty-bound to correct. He writes, ‘Such is the case with the productions and admirers of WILLIAM BLAKE, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement, and, consequently, of whom no public notice would have been taken …’

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For the rest of the article Hunt delights in being vicious, patronising and cruel. He seems intent on putting this working-class creator in his place. It is hard not to see him as one of the uninspired ‘Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University’ that Blake attacks in the preface to Milton. ‘The poor man fancies himself a great master,’ Hunt wrote, ‘and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are unintelligible allegory, others an attempt at sober character by caricature representation, and the whole “blotted and blurred”, and very badly drawn. These he calls an Exhibition, of which he has published a Catalogue, or rather a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain.’

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Just as Decca Records’s A&R man Mike Smith is forever remembered as the man who turned down the Beatles, so too is Robert Hunt now only remembered as the critic unable to appreciate the work of William Blake. Given the cruel tone of his review, it is hard to feel bad about this. But it is also fair to say that there would not have been many disinterested observers who, after reading Blake’s words and visiting the exhibition, would have come away thinking the artist was sane.

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Of the few visitors, one was Henry Crabb Robinson, who would meet Blake at a dinner party sixteen years later and write in his diary: ‘Shall I call him Artist or Genius – or Mystic – or Madman?’ Robinson paid the one shilling entry fee to James Blake, William’s older brother, who escorted him to the upstairs room to see the exhibition. James was a sober, traditional shopkeeper who still dressed in old-fashioned knee breeches and stockings, and so made an unlikely guide into the extremes of imagination on display.

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Perhaps the two best-known paintings from the exhibition, which are now owned by the Tate gallery, have the unlikely titles of The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan and The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth. The first depicts the recently deceased Admiral Nelson nearly naked and physically idealised in a similar way to Blake’s depiction of Newton. Blake has given Nelson two eyes and arms, and although the painting has become indistinct with age some writers insist he has a prominent erection. The second portrays the prime minister Pitt the Younger as a beatific Christ-like figure. These two establishment leaders are shown controlling the Leviathan and the Behemoth respectively, with these mythological monsters being symbolic of war on the oceans and land.

Exactly how we’re supposed to interpret these compositions has been debated at length. Was Blake being genuinely patriotic, or was this a slightly cynical attempt to produce works with popular appeal, even if that meant going against his own political beliefs? Either scenario would be out of character.

A probable clue to understanding his intentions can be found in the Book of Job, which mocks the idea that the great monsters of war can ever be controlled by human will:

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down his tongue with a cord?

Can you put a rope in his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook? […]

On earth there is not his like, a creature without fear.

He sees everything that is high; he is king over all the sons of pride.

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Blake was fascinated by the subject matter depicted in The Ancient Britons because he believed that pure, uncorrupted religion existed in the distant past, including the deep history of Albion. ‘The antiquities of every Nation under Heaven, is no less sacred than that of the Jews,’ he wrote in the catalogue. In Britain, this original religion was practised by the ancient bards, because it was an expression of imagination and creativity. It would still be recognisable and relevant now, he explained, because it was also ‘the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus.’ It is the question of whether this perfect proto-Christianity existed in Britain that he is referring to in that unofficial English national anthem, ‘And did those feet in ancient time’.

As Blake saw it, the collapse of this uncorrupted religion was marked by the arrival of the druids. Druidism was experiencing a romanticised revival or reinvention in Blake’s time, but he viewed it with disdain. It was too much like priesthood for his liking – the triumph of ritual, hierarchies and dogma over inspiration, revelation and love. He saw stone circle temples and tales of human sacrifice as clear evidence that the original inspired pure religion had become corrupted.

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In Blake’s eyes, the arrival of the druids was the external consequence of the rise of Urizen in human consciousness. This rise, in his mythology, corresponds with the biblical Fall. It was the moment when we ate from the Tree of Knowledge and our reason cast us out of paradise. Urizen was the rational power who abstracted and divided the exterior world until it became a mental model we could confuse with reality. As the druids watched the movement of the stars and performed rituals at stone monuments aligned with the heavens, they too abstracted the greater reality into a system that they could master, and inside which the stories of their lives could be located and comprehended.

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Our Fall began when we started to identify with the mental house of cards that Urizen had constructed, and could no longer see that it was incomplete and approximate. Urizen is, ultimately, deeply insecure. In order to maintain his delusion that he is a creator god, he has to deny, mock or belittle any evidence of a greater world beyond his awareness. Not only must he believe in his model, but he needs other people to believe in it too. Urizen believes he is being rational, but all too often he is just rationalising. He sets out to convince and convert, an angry zealot who refuses to see other perspectives. As a consequence of this, religions rose, competed and clashed. As centuries passed and we moved from the druids to the Crusades and the Inquisition, Urizen became more and more a slave to power, control and blind faith. In Blake’s work, he grew into a dragon form – angry, cruel and cut off from the light beyond.

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With Urizen dominant and the human mind unbalanced, society was moulded in his image, with all his prejudices and delusions. Many people in Blake’s time struggled to understand how the rational enlightenment ideals that fuelled the French Revolution resulted in the bloodshed and horror of the Reign of Terror, but Blake understood. Urizen was not the whole of our minds. There was something divine beyond reason, he knew. Any model in which this was missing was profoundly flawed and ultimately doomed.

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Blake’s attacks on people like Hayley, Cromek and Stothard, who had all initially treated him with kindness and tried to support him, helped to alienate him further from London artistic society. Many artists who are thought of as strange can still maintain a career, but that’s not always the case for those marked as difficult. His bitter criticism of his peers only highlighted the extent to which his thoughts and beliefs no longer made any sense to others.

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As Carl Jung would later write, ‘Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.’

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As we noted earlier, Blake constantly stressed the necessity of forgiveness in his work. Forgiveness was, he argued, the most important Christian act, and the key to redemption. Being unable to forgive was to imprison yourself in what he described in Milton as ‘A Hell of our own making’. As he wrote in The Gates of Paradise:

Mutual forgiveness of each Vice,

Such are the Gates of Paradise.

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It talks not so much about this world, but about the behaviour of the fundamental forces that go on to create it.

British myth is subtly different. It is less concerned with the birth or the end of the world, and more focused on how similarly charged mythic forces act out in individuals. The Arthurian grail quest and the sword in the stone, for example, are stories that belong to the world of myth, but are about psychological challenges and personal epiphanies.

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While many countries’ myths feel safe because they are the sagas of long-dismissed gods far removed from everyday lives, British myths offer strange psychoanalytical stories that, despite their far-off trappings, talk about aspects of ourselves that we may find difficult to confront.

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Blake’s myth was very much a British one, combining the universal with the personal. It was told predominantly in his long illustrated poems Milton and Jerusalem, as well as the unfinished manuscript Vala or The Four Zoas. It incorporated the cast of characters from his own complex personal mythology that he had been working on since the 1790s. We now understand the characters that these books introduced us to, such as the patriarchal engineer Urizen or the fiery revolutionary Orc, to be different aspects of Blake’s own psyche. His myth has all the trappings of gods and apocalypses, but it too is fundamentally a story about the struggles of a mind.

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Blake’s work had always been an exploration of the workings of the mind. Even his early work contained a deep understanding of psychology in poetic form, for example the poem ‘A Poison Tree’ from Songs of Experience:

I was angry with my friend;

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I waterd it in fears,

Night &morning with my tears:

And I sunned it with smiles,

And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.

Till it bore an apple bright.

And my foe beheld it shine,

And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,

When the night had veild the pole;

In the morning glad I see;

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

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Blake, from this perspective, can be seen as a psychologist long before the field was founded. When his characters are understood as separate parts of his psyche, the clashes and drama that occurs between them can be seen as Blake trying to understand his own mental landscape. When the angels and demons who appear to be without are understood to come from within, all mythical and theological sagas are revealed to be the clashing energies of the mind.

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This examination of competing desires and values was, in part, a form of therapy. It brought to light aspects of the mind that people are often blind to. Given the state of our understanding of mental health at the time, it was extraordinarily advanced and sophisticated. Although it is impossible to prove this beyond doubt, it is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest that writing his epic works was a deep, lengthy work of proto-therapy which helped to bring Blake back from delusion and paranoia.

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ALTOGETHER HIDDEN FROM THE CORPOREAL UNDERSTANDING

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Blake’s myth is the story of Albion, a giant.

In British mythology, these islands were originally the home of a race of giants. In the ancient legend of the founding of Britain, as recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century, Brutus of Troy lands at Totnes and must defeat all these giants before he can found the city now called London. Brutus then names the island Britain, after himself.

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Geoffrey does not mention a giant called Albion, but one appears in Holinshed’s Chronicles in 1577. In this tradition, Albion is the giant who founded and named this land. Blake takes this idea further, however, and describes him as the father not just of Britain but of all mankind. As he writes in The Four Zoas: ‘He is Albion, our Ancestor, patriarch of the Atlantic Continent, whose History Preceded that of the Hebrews & in whose Sleep, or Chaos, Creation began.’ The giant Albion, then, is the first being. He is, as we will see, a Blakean reinvention of Adam.

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The giant Albion is the subject of one of Blake’s most famous images – Albion Rose (or, alternatively, The Dance of Albion or Glad Day). A nude male figure with his arms thrown out wide stands in front of glorious streaming coloured light. Blake first produced this image around 1795, and he returned to it repeatedly throughout his life.

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Albion is not just a giant, however. As someone who exists in the imagination, he can be symbolic of many different things at once. The most obvious of these is the country itself. Albion is the oldest name we know of for Britain. It is used to refer to the island in its purest form, before any lines were drawn on the map, when it was free of the divisions, politics and tribal factions that would follow. Although it is often thought that Blake uses Albion as the visionary name of England, there are many references to locations in Scotland and Wales in his myth. The name Albion, Blake knew, referred to the whole island, as it was used long before the kingdoms of Scotland and England existed. It has survived longest in Scotland, which is still called Alba in Scottish Gaelic, Albain in Irish and Yr Alban in Welsh.

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Albion, in Blake’s myth, is also understood to be the hermetic concept of the Universal Man, which Swedenborg called the Grand Man and Kabbalists know as Adam Kadmon. This is the immense human inside which the whole cosmos exists, as discussed earlier. This makes Albion far grander than the representation of one island or its people. He is the representation of everyone, and everything. In Jerusalem, Blake states that ‘Albion covered the whole Earth’.

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The myth of Albion also contains details that are taken from Blake’s life.

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Thanks to the inclusion of personal details like this, Albion is also a representation of Blake himself. The Universal Man is also the individual imagining the Universal Man – as above, so below. The myth, from this perspective, is a dramatising of the psychological processes occurring in his mind.

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Albion is you, the reader. You are the creator of the universe inside your head, and by reading Blake’s work you are seeing it through his expansive eyes. Indeed, when you suspend your sense of self, how could Albion not be you? Whisper it, but there is no ‘other’.

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Blake’s myth of Albion is simple. Long ago, Albion’s mind was in balance and he possessed the divine vision, but he was cut off from it by doubt and shame. As a result, Albion falls into the sleep of death. This sorry state is the materialistic world we are in now. But Albion will, we are promised, awaken again, and the world will once again be perceived through divine inspiration.

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Blake’s myth has an archetypal story structure with many parallels in legend and religion, such as the story of King Arthur. As we saw earlier, Blake referenced the promised return of the ‘once and future king’ in his description of the lost painting The Ancient Britons. Arthur, like Albion, was then understood to be both a person and, as a king, the personification of the land. In the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King, for example, a king suffers a groin wound which results in the land becoming a desolate, barren wasteland. In the world of myth, like the work of Blake, there is always a blurring of the line between the internal and the external worlds. The story of Albion also has clear parallels with the death and resurrection of Jesus, especially as Blake interpreted the half human, half divine figure of Jesus as being the imagination itself.

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The sleep and subsequent reawakening of Albion may seem an extremely simple plot for such lengthy poems, but Blake’s focus is not on this plot. As always, it was the psychological analysis of events that fascinated him, and it is in this arena that we find Blake’s great insights and true genius. To explore the interior of Albion, Blake divided the giant’s mind into four separate sections, each of which he personified as an independent male character. As we saw earlier, he called these four aspects of the mind the four zoas.

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The word zoa is a Greek plural word which Blake used as an English singular. It refers to the four spiritual beasts described by the biblical prophet Ezekiel. This was an important part of the Bible for Blake, because he recognised its disorientating depiction of these strange creatures as being a description of the ‘fourfold sight’ he had experienced. Like Blake’s visions, Ezekiel was confronted by something beyond the regular three dimensions of the material world. He attempted to describe something impossible to visualise, and the effect is unsettling:

Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living
creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the
likeness of a man.
And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings.
And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was
like the sole of a calf’s foot: and they sparkled like the colour
of burnished brass.
And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their
four sides; and they four had their faces and their wings.
Their wings were joined one to another; they turned not when
they went; they went every one straight forward.
As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a
man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four
had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the
face of an eagle.
Thus were their faces: and their wings were stretched upward;
two wings of every one were joined one to another, and two
covered their bodies.

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The poem Jerusalem is likewise frequently disorientating. Like Ezekiel’s vision, it is an attempt to describe something witnessed from the higher perspective of ‘fourfold vision’.

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For Blake, of course, these zoas were not external spiritual beasts but aspects of our own minds. One of them we know well – our old friend Urizen, who represents our cold, rational, reasoning power. He is joined by Tharmas, who represents sensations and the physical body, and Luvah, who is our emotions. These three are joined by Urthona, a zoa who represents creativity and the imagination.

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Urthona differs slightly from the others in that when he is active in the human world he changes and becomes Los. This is probably because while intellect, emotions or bodies can exist as abstract ideas in the Eternal realm, creativity and imagination need to be active in the physical world of time and space in order to truly manifest. Los, Blake explains, is ‘the Vehicular Form of Strong Urthona’.

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Each zoa has a female counterpart called their emanation. Here we again see the influence of the biblical patriarchal worldview, as these female spirits are described as emanating from their male zoa counterparts in the same way Eve emanated from the body of Adam. It can be helpful, however, to not worry too much about the genders of zoas and emanations, not least because eighteenth-century ideas of gender were so different to their twenty-first-century counterparts. If we focus on gender there can be a tendency to project a power relationship between zoas and emanation which the text does not support. Instead, it is more important to notice how zoas and emanations differ not by status but by behaviour.

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Emanations are usually described as active, such as the ‘Emanation that was wont to play before thy face’ who Blake refers to at the start of Jerusalem. Whereas the zoas represent eternal qualities, the emanations are those qualities acting in the world. The distinction is not quite strong enough that we can think of the zoas as nouns and the emanations as verbs, for there is some blurring of roles and zoas can also be active, most notably Urizen. But we can think of emanations as what comes from the qualities which the zoas represent, rather than those qualities themselves. An emanation is what that quality does.

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The title character of Jerusalem is an emanation. As the poem’s full title explains, she is Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. Blake describes the relationship between Jerusalem and Albion as being ‘As the Soul is to the Body’, which gives an insight into the difference between an emanation and the character that produced them.

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That Jerusalem is named after the earthly city currently claimed by both Israel and Palestine can mistakenly give the impression that she is intended to represent a city, and perhaps an idealised spiritual form of London. Blake gave most emanations made-up names such as Enitharmon, Ahania and Enion, and it may have been less confusing if he had done the same for Albion’s emanation. Jerusalem should be thought of not as a physical city but as society, an accumulation of all the actions of the people of Britain. Or at least, what those accumulated actions would have been if Albion had not fallen into the sleep of death and the British people were still aware of the inspired divine imagination. With Albion gone, his emanation Jerusalem wanders the world, lost.

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As well as generating emanations, the characters in Blake’s mythology can also produce a shadowy being called a spectre. A spectre represents the dark qualities of a character, which grow and strengthen when they are cut off from the divine vision. In Jerusalem, Los’s spectre is depicted as a dark, bat-winged dragon that emerges from his back as he works away at his creative labours:

[…] and the Spectre stood over Los

Howling in pain: a blackning Shadow, blackning dark &opake

Cursing the terrible Los: bitterly cursing him for his friendship

To Albion, suggesting murderous thoughts against Albion.

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Los’s spectre is his dark thoughts that criticise and doubt, the voice that declares that friends are false and that creative work is pointless. It is the black dog of depression that cannot see any light or hope. As it tells Los:

O that I could cease to be! Despair! I am Despair

Created to be the great example of horror &agony: also my

Prayer is vain I called for Compassion: compassion mockd

Mercy &pity threw the grave stone over me &with lead

And iron, bound it over me for ever

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The birth of a spectre leads to conflict and struggle, but it is important not to attempt to destroy your spectre, because this would destroy part of you. The goal, instead, is to re-assimilate it. Los achieves this by putting his spectre to work and using it in his creative projects. Work and art were always Blake’s response to depression.

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Blake’s spectre is a similar idea to the Jungian concept of the shadow, the name Jung used for the hidden, usually negative and unknowable aspects of our psyche. Blake’s spectre, like Jung’s shadow, is our blind spot. It knows things that are kept from our conscious minds. As Los’s spectre tells Los:

O! thou seest not what I see! What is done in the Furnaces.

Listen, I will tell thee what is done in moments to thee unknown

The spectre is misguided, due to existing without light, but it is neither worthless nor an enemy. If light can be cast on it, then it can be reintegrated into a healthy psyche, and the knowledge it contains will be revealed.

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Jerusalem, the emanation of Albion, also has a shadow, which is the lovely nature goddess Vala. She is also the daughter and the emanation of the emotional zoa Luvah and represents nature as the deists see it, in the single vision of Newton’s sleep. Vala represents the physical world entirely devoid of imagination. In the myth, it is Vala who seduces Albion away from Jerusalem and sacrifices him with a druid’s knife. This results in his fall and all the subsequent struggles between the zoas and their emanations and spectres.

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The conflict that makes up Blake’s Albion myth, then, comes from the clashes between these central components. The giant Albion, who represents man, Britain, Blake, you and the cosmos, contains four zoas. Both Albion and the zoas produce emanations and spectres. Out of the first man comes the entire cast of this melodrama. This was the structure that Blake used to reframe the internal energies of his own mind into the epic battles of a new spiritual pantheon.

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The characters of Blake’s myth should not be thought of, as is often assumed, as a coherent system of psychological categorisation. Instead, they are a wonderful artistic record of the interplay of mental energies and a creative engagement with many contradictions present. For Blake, the spiritual realm was active, engaged and involved. The mind could be at peace at times, and it will be again after the zoas have returned to balance. But until then, the internal psychological soap opera needs to be brought into the light and understood.

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The main reason why the poem is so intriguing and baffling is that it appears to be the work of someone in a different state of consciousness. Its incomprehensibility comes from it being written from the fourfold perspective of Eternity, which suggests that Blake thought that we future generations would, eventually, develop an understanding of this higher perspective. This is, after all, the message of the poem. Albion, who is also the reader, will one day awaken.

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Here the difficult nature of Blake’s writing can be said to have a distinct purpose. As all teachers will confirm, if you simply tell your pupil something, it is unlikely to make much of an impression. If you put them in a position where they realise it for themselves, however, then this becomes a lesson they are unlikely ever to forget. The dense, difficult nature of work such as Jerusalem forces you to study it, and those rare moments when you solve a mystery and understand an insight have a profound effect. Blake’s myth is an attempt to show you the ‘fourfold vision’ that he has experienced throughout his life. When he makes you realise that you too are Albion, you may find yourself, if only for a moment, seeing the world through his eyes. At moments like this, the idea that it is ‘the Grandest Poem that the World Contains’ does not seem quite so crazy.

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The giant Albion could perceive the divine light of the imagination, which Blake also calls ‘Poetic Genius’, because the different parts of his mind were still in balance. It flowed through him in a pure and uncorrupted form, just as it would enter the world again at a later date in the form of Jesus Christ, who referred to himself as ‘the light of the world’. Because the nature of Albion’s and Jesus’ light was identical, Blake saw Albion as a Christian, even though that religion would not arrive for countless centuries after Albion’s fall.

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The myth of Albion, Jerusalem and their spectres at the beginning of humanity also has strong echoes with the story of Adam, Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. In this scenario, Albion is Adam, Jerusalem is Eve, and the spectre of Jerusalem – and indeed the spectre of anyone cut off from the divine light – is Satan.

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But while the biblical narrative presents Adam, Eve and the serpent as separate beings, Blake saw them as aspects of the same psyche. This is a profound change and one potentially far healthier. It avoids the patriarchal power divide between men and women that has dominated Church teachings for centuries. It also avoids the dualistic split between Satan and man, in which Satan is seen as a separate ‘other’ to be fought, instead of a dark part of ourselves we need to illuminate.

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The Fall occurs in both myths, but only Blake sees a reunification between male, female and Satan as the solution. It was Blake, after all, who called for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

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Blake, therefore, associated Albion with both Adam, who represents mankind not yet cast out of Eden, and Jesus, who as we have noted was interchangeable with divine imagination. With our more modern understanding of prehistory, we might instead see Albion as a personification of the time after recognisably human consciousness appeared in our ancestors, and we moved from the world of animal consciousness into the worlds of gods, cave art and the tribal telling of stories around the camp fire. This was when imagination first arrived in the material world and the moment when the cosmos first gained the ability to intentionally shape itself. It is because this illumination arrived in a human form that many occult traditions speak of the spiritual universe as being the Universal Man.

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This period did not last, however. A shift in human consciousness occurred in which the egocentric rational mind gained superiority over other ways of perceiving. Blake repeatedly dates this change to 6,000 years ago, which is roughly the time when the first Sumerian and Mesopotamian temple cities appeared, along with the wheel, calendar and complex writing and number systems. These were not the first large cities, as places like Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey were considerably older, but they were the first to show signs of social hierarchy, inequality and organised warfare. They represent a time when humanity moved from a cooperative, prelapsarian existence into the more pathological behaviours we know today.

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An echo of this shift in human consciousness at this time is recorded in the origin myths and scriptures of the world, which tell of the arrival of bearded, patriarchal, controlling ‘sky gods’ such as Zeus, Jupiter, Odin and Jehovah. These sky gods typically viewed themselves as creators, even though their acts of creation were limited to imposing order on chaos by abstracting and dividing. In the Book of Genesis, for example, Jehovah creates the world by defining the contraries of light and dark, day and night, land and sea, good and evil, and so on. These sky gods brought law, judgement, reasoning and language. They were often said to have fought and overpowered immense giants or Titans, which were linked with the earth and judged to be brutal, irrational, disobedient or animalistic. In Blakean terms, this story is the rise of Urizen. The description of how he overpowered the creative, physical and emotional zoas, and imposed strict law to police the delusion that he was the one true god, is identical.

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In the old British myths, however, there remain hints of the time before the reign of Urizen. The concept of sky gods and the idea that the spiritual realm is in some way above us first appeared in the writings of Plato and was taken up and propagated by the Roman Church. The old myths of the British Isles, however, still recall a time before this suspect idea arrived on this island, when the spiritual realm was not above or distant, but within and present. They tell of a timeless otherworld known as Tír na nÓg by the Irish and Annwfn or Annwn by the Welsh. Remnants of this ‘land of the ever-young’ still linger in the later English concept of Avalon. To Blake, these myths told of a time before the Fall when the mind was in balance, and the rational Urizen still worked in harmony with creative Urthona, emotional Luvah and the physical sensations of Tharmas.

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The rise of Urizen and the imbalance of the zoas caused what Blake calls ‘the sleep of Albion’. At this point, direct divine inspiration was lost. All that remained were echoes of it in a corrupted form. This original inspiration became codified into ritual and tradition, and the rise of priestcraft

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THE WORK OF THE DEVIL

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the movement which would posthumously adopt Blake and provide a frame within which his work would be understood and studied. For all that Blake and the Romantics shared certain similar sensibilities, however, Blake’s philosophy differed from them significantly.

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The Romantic period, which peaked in the first half of the nineteenth century, was in part a response to the dehumanising effect of both the Industrial Revolution and the scientific era. Quantities had become more important than qualities, and the Romantics reacted against this. The Romantics had a great love of nature, which they contrasted with the inhuman and unnatural world of modern industry. It can be hard now to appreciate just how radical this stance was at the time. Before the late eighteenth century, there was little sense that nature itself was beautiful, beyond individual flowers or animals.

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Even by the early eighteenth century, people generally didn’t travel to scenic locations such as the Alps. Mountain ranges were viewed as obstacles to travel between cities, rather than destinations in their own right. Before we could recognise that nature was beautiful, we had to first think of ourselves as separate to it. The word ‘nature’ came to mean everything in this world that is not us, and not built by us. We could only admire and appreciate it after we saw it as the other. This is still the way that nature is typically understood today.

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A key factor in this new concept of the natural world was the binomial system, which was created in the late 1750s by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus was a rector at Uppsala University whose lectures on the natural world were hugely popular and, when his students travelled the world, they brought back botanical samples for him to study. When he died in 1778, his collection included 14,000 plants and over 3,000 insects – the first natural history collection of its kind in the world. Brought together like this, the specimens vividly showed the extraordinary diversity and endless variety that define the worlds of plants and animals.

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Linnaeus dedicated decades to collating and recording samples and clippings from Mother Nature’s ever-shifting chaos, because he believed he could make sense of them. His system of binomial nomenclature was a categorisation structure that reduced a plant or animal down to two Latin or Latinised words, which in turn defined the genus and the species, such as Canis lupus for a wolf or Homo sapiens for a human.

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We take the system of binomial nomenclature for granted now, so it can be hard to recognise what a huge change it was in how we understand the world. The natural world was large and overwhelming, and we were inside it. It was never static, a constant dance of change and growth. The idea that we could create a mental system large enough and sophisticated enough to contain it all was incredibly bold. But thanks to Linnaeus’s painstaking labour, that is exactly what happened, and the natural world is now defined by the system he imposed. It is labelled, categorised and understood, and as a result we now think of it as something comprehensible to man. By naming and defining, nature was mastered. This was a highly Urizenic left-brain endeavour.

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Romanticism valued emotion over rationality and individualism over a rigidly hierarchical society. It often favoured the medieval over the classical, and so it can be seen as northern Europe shaking off southern European ideas from Greece and Italy in favour of more localised culture. People began to feel intuitively that they had lost something of great value after large parts of the population moved to cities, began working in factories, and started to view the world as a type of machine. The Romantic movement expressed this sense of loss; it was the music and poetry of yearning.

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Wordsworth was the McCartney of this analogy. He was the most traditional of the two, despite his initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution. He gravitated to a comfortable role in the establishment, and eventually became the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. He was also the poet who focused on the importance of nature, and the effect it had on the mind.

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For Wordsworth, observation of the natural world was sufficient to reach states of bliss and ecstasy, both in the moment and in memory. In this, he saw the world very differently to William Blake. Wordsworth reacts to the sight of a host of daffodils in his most famous poem, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, in a very different way to how Blake reacts to the thistle he encountered while walking in Sussex.

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For Wordsworth, observing nature aroused feelings of the sublime, and he recognised that those feelings were generated by a combination of both nature and the human soul. As he notes in ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, the final poem in the original edition of Lyrical Ballads:

  […] Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye and Ear, both what they half-create,

And what perceive;

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This was not how Blake saw things. For him, the sublime and the spiritual were purely the product of the mind alone. Nature lacked the power of imagination, and therefore could not be an aspect of heaven or have an innate spiritual quality when it was not being perceived by man. This was why he told Henry Crabb Robinson that, ‘I fear Wordsworth loves Nature and Nature is the work of the Devil.’

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The importance of the imagination to Coleridge becomes clear in his 1817 autobiographical work Biographia Literaria. Inspired by the earlier proto-Romantic German Sturm und Drang movement, he writes, ‘The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.’ Such an elevated belief in the primacy of imagination made sense to William Blake, as we have seen. In Blake’s words, ‘Imagination is the real and eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow’, or, more bluntly, ‘The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.’

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For Coleridge, there was an important difference between imagination and simple fantasy. Most people in the twenty-first century assume that ‘imagination’ means just making stuff up. This is not what Coleridge meant when he talked of the imagination, although he would have thought this was a fair description of fantasy. For Coleridge, fantasy was essentially a form of mental collage that took existing ideas and put them together, in a way that was unrelated to the real world of time and space. If you took the idea of a horse and the idea of a horn and stuck them together as a form of collage, then you had the idea of a unicorn in a world where no physical unicorns exist. This is fine, as far as it goes, and could even be entertaining in its own right. But it is unconnected to reality. It doesn’t change things.

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As Coleridge saw it, imagination was the arrival, from the depths of consciousness, of something new. True, it might contain things that already exist, but they had now become part of something larger and unprecedented. Coleridge invented the word ‘esemplastic’ to describe this process, in which separate elements were combined to create something original. Fantasy was just the same old stuff rearranged with a healthy disregard for the real world. Imagination, in contrast, was engaging with existing stuff to produce something never seen before, and it had the power to change the world in a way that fantasy did not. Something new now existed, and the world had to adapt around it.

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This distinction would have made sense to the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who differentiated between what he called productive and reproductive imagination. For Kant, a reproductive imagination simply made associations between previous experiences and memories. Productive imagination, on the other hand, synthesised a number of existing concepts into a genuinely new organic whole. This was a distinction also made by the sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus, who contrasted what he called true imagination with mere fantasy. Paracelsus called fantasy ‘the madman’s cornerstone’, which was an ‘exercise of thought without foundation in nature’.

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For Blake and the Romantics, imagination had a vivid quality that fantasy lacked. In fantasy, a thought was just a thought. In deep imagination, a thought was something that you encountered. It was participatory – a living, vital process that you were part of. You were not separate from what you imagined, and imagination was not separate from the world, because the world and imagination could not be understood without each other.

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This linking of the imagination with the arrival of the genuinely new was important to Blake because he knew the rational, material world created by Urizen was fundamentally limited. It extended to the edges of the circle drawn by Urizen’s golden compass and went no further. Being closed off in this way, it could not see or be influenced by the formless void or the light of the spiritual sun which lay over this horizon. As a result, this finite world was fated to decay and fall apart. As the second law of thermodynamics reminds us, entropy can only increase in a closed system.

Note: the circumference

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If there was a way to introduce genuinely new things into this world, however, then that would mean our world was not a closed system, and entropy could be held back. For Blake, as we have seen, human imagination was the loophole that kept this closed, limited world from collapsing in on itself. As such, imagination generated by the labour of Los kept the world alive, and allowed the true light which Urizen had turned his back on to make itself felt in his handiwork.

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It was Blake’s Coleridge-like beliefs about the fundamental importance of imagination, then, which were the reason he was adopted by the Romantic movement.

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VERY WEAK & AN OLD MAN FEEBLE & TOTTERING

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Blake’s other major project was a series of watercolours based on The Pilgrim’s Progress by the seventeenth-century English nonconformist preacher John Bunyan. At the age of fifteen, Bunyan had enlisted as a soldier in the Parliamentarian army during the Civil War, where he would have been exposed to the radical ideas that circulated among the troops. When peace came, he underwent a religious conversion and began preaching in Bedford. He was arrested for not possessing a licence to preach, and, being committed to his beliefs and unwilling to conform, he remained in prison for twelve years. For Bunyan, being a true Christian was a difficult journey during which he was constantly tested. From this background comes his great work, the allegorical story The Pilgrim’s Progress.

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It is often argued that The Pilgrim’s Progress is the first novel written in English. Because Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is also seen as the first major work in the English language, the importance of pilgrims and pilgrimages will forever be embedded in English literature. In his essay ‘Overcoming Tourism’, the anarchist writer Hakim Bey stresses the difference between tourism and pilgrimage. Tourists are consumers. When they flock to a location, they take away some of its magic and leave it less special than before. Pilgrims, in contrast, travel to places and in doing so add to them. They leave sites of pilgrimage more special than they found them. The process of adding or subtracting meaning is, of course, a mental act. It is Blake’s twofold vision in action.

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Blake did not undertake pilgrimages himself – not even to relatively accessible sites of pilgrimage like Canterbury Cathedral. Partly this would have been cultural, for the Catholic associations of these journeys would have been frowned upon during Blake’s time. But for Blake, the proper destination of a pilgrimage was inwards. The imaginative creation of works such as the Divine Comedy and Pilgrim’s Progress were true journeys of pilgrimage. Bunyan had stated clearly that Pilgrim’s Progress was a dream vision. Dante did not claim that his accounts of travels through heaven and hell were anything more than just poetic imagination, but for Blake this did not matter. He considered Dante’s Divine Comedy to be every bit as visionary a journey as that recorded by Swedenborg, such was the power and vividness of Dante’s writing.

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The Pilgrim’s Progress is the story of a man named Christian. Overcome with fear after having read the Bible, Christian leaves his wife and children to embark on a journey. Weighed down by the heavy sack he carries, Christian travels from the City of Destruction through the ‘wilderness of the world’ to the Celestial City. Along the way he must get past the Slough of Despond, the temptations of Vanity Fair and a giant named Despair, who locks him in the dungeons of Doubting Castle. During his journey he meets characters including Hopeful, Obstinate, Faithful, Mr. Worldly Wiseman and Lord Hate-Good.

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For anyone who has read Jerusalem and struggled to remember which qualities characters such as Tharmas, Enitharmon, Ahania or Enion represent, Bunyan’s straightforwardness can be something of a relief. Blake generally considered allegory to be a lesser form of communication than vision, yet he wrote that, ‘Fable or Allgory is Seldom without some Vision Pilgrims Progress is full of it.’ Bunyan’s use of allegory was intended to achieve a similar effect to Blake’s work – a reminder that the material world is not the full story, that there is a different form of reality behind it, and that our world can be interpreted as a series of signs and symbols that refer to a higher immaterial reality.

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The full title of Bunyan’s work, according to the original title page, is The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, To that which is to come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream Wherein is Discovered, The manner of his setting out, His Dangerous Journey; And safe Arrival at the Desired Countrey. The title is something of a spoiler, for it is indeed the case that Christian successfully reaches the Celestial City of Heaven at the end of his trials. It is a positive book, offering hope to other Christians struggling with doubt or other difficulties. This is not to say that it was as simplistic a tale as this outline or some of the names might suggest. Bunyan’s strength lay in his ability to express spiritual truths with the force of felt experience. He was particularly good when writing about fear, and how fear of other people pales in the face of fear of God himself. With Bunyan, the stakes were always high. He intended that reading his allegory of a pilgrimage would make readers aware that they too were pilgrims. As he writes in his apology, ‘This Book will make a Traveller of thee.’

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What is striking about Blake’s choice of both Pilgrim’s Progress and the Divine Comedy is the similarity of their themes. Both are concerned with the journey of the human soul through trials and misfortune, horrors and wonders. Both show how such trials can refine and lighten that soul, bringing them to redemption and union with God. That Blake was drawn to both depictions of this universal story shows how important the narrative must have been to him at that point, in the last years of his life. Both stories were ultimately positive, in that they depicted the higher elevated states of mind as attainable goals. Christian makes it to the Celestial City. Dante’s story was the Divine Comedy, not the Divine Tragedy, and after his travels through Hell and Purgatory he receives a beatific vision of God. In the terms of Swedenborg’s visionary philosophy, where people were free to choose their own place in the many different circles of heaven and hell, Blake was aiming high.

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The Ancient of Days, and it is a portrait of Urizen in a dark formless void, his hair and beard blown sideways by fierce winds, leaning forward out of a golden orb with an enormous golden compass in his left hand, about to create the world of matter beneath him. Urizen, of course, is so focused on this work that he can no longer see the light of the orb behind him. It is an image inspired by Proverbs 8:27:

When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth

Blake’s beloved Milton also described the scene in Paradise Lost:

  […] and in His hand

He took the golden compasses, prepared

In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe

This universe, and all created things:

One foot he centred, and the other turned

Round through the vast profundity obscure,

And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,

This be thy just circumference, O world.

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But even allowing for these sources, it was a scene that Blake made his own. Only Blake understood the psychology behind this act of creation. Only Blake recognised and highlighted the creator’s blind spot, and only Blake understood exactly where the wielder of those compasses resided.

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AS A MAN IS, SO HE SEES

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But if Blake was not Christian, then what was he? As we noted earlier, the poem ‘Auguries of Innocence’ begins:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

This sounds like it comes from a religion like Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism in particular. Yet the passive nature of Zen Buddhism and the focus on watching the mind when it is clear and free of illusionary forms are entirely different to Blake’s philosophy. Blake loved energy and work, and as far as he was concerned the illusionary forms of mind were hugely valuable. At times, his thoughts showed signs of Taoism, as we’ve noted, but the importance he placed on Christian concepts such as forgiveness and redemption means that he was far from a regular Taoist. His belief that the body was part of the soul has sometimes led to Blake being described as a pagan, but his unwillingness to extend a spiritual aspect to the rest of nature surely rules out that particular label. That same belief in the divine nature of the body also rules him out of being described as a Gnostic, because Gnostics saw the body, like the rest of the physical world, as a Satanic prison.

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Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that Blake’s beliefs made him an atheist – a suggestion based on his understanding that the spiritual world, with all its gods, demons and angels, is entirely internal. There is the basis of a logically convincing argument here, but you can imagine how Blake would have railed against it. Would an atheist insist that ‘every thing that lives is Holy!’ with as much passion and commitment? Blake recognised and stressed the importance of a divine quality in the world, which modern-day atheists deny. If Blake were to attend a modern atheist movement meeting, it seems likely that he would not be invited back. In a similar way, Blake was not an agnostic. He was almost entirely devoid of doubt and far too certain about his own beliefs to embrace that noble perspective.

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Few people are as difficult to pigeonhole as Blake. Our inability to categorise his faith and belief system is a credit to his blazing originality, which may be a consequence of his lack of schooling. Blake was always critical of the ‘Hirelings’ from universities because, as he saw it, their formal education brainwashed them into a limited form of groupthink. The Greek idea that heaven was above rather than within, for example, became so internalised during formal education that it was never questioned. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that his peers were incapable of understanding his work or seeing the world through his eyes. As the late maverick theatre director Ken Campbell used to insist, ‘I’m not mad, I’ve just read different books.’

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Our lack of a label to describe Blake’s beliefs is, perhaps, an important factor in the tradition of the establishment getting Blake astonishingly wrong. It would help, therefore, if we gave a name to his philosophy, even if he is the only adherent to that particular belief system. The most suitable name, I would suggest, would be to say that William Blake was a Divine Humanist.

Humanism, as the term is currently used, is a movement that gives primacy to the agency of human beings, both individually and collectively. It is, in its current form, a largely secular, non-religious movement, which looks to science rather than any form of supernatural revelation to understand the world. In doing so, it has a materialist view of the universe, rather than an idealist, dualist or dual-aspect monist one. The universe is a story of matter in motion, where atoms and particles and anti-particles collide, annihilating and creating each other in a constant dance of energy. In this materialist universe, there is no room for an immaterial or spiritual component. There is no meaning or purpose in a cosmos of matter.

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Of course, materialists, humanists and atheists experience meaning, purpose and other, non-material experiences as much as everyone else. Indeed, they will often call upon such things to help promote their materialist worldview. Much is said about the ‘wonder of science’, for example, even though science cannot explain or account for the experience of wonder. The materialist universe is a place of measurable quantities rather than experienced qualities, yet those who believe in it frequently rely on immaterial qualities to celebrate it.

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The reason for this centres on the thorny question of mind. We don’t know how mind – or the illusion of mind – is generated from the damp matter of the brain but, materialists promise, one day we will work it out. Everything can theoretically be explained in a materialist framework, the argument goes, because ultimately there is only matter. Therefore, it is fine for a rational, materially minded person to talk of wonder, awe, love and other immaterial experiences, because these must ultimately arise from physical processes. This, clearly, is a circular argument which presupposes exactly what it is trying to prove. This is not to say that it won’t ultimately turn out to be true, of course, and that a scientist might one day hold a test tube full of wonder. But there are no grounds for assuming it to be true now, with our current level of knowledge. It remains a plausible theory or, perhaps, an act of faith.

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In certain ways, we are more like our animal relatives than we like to admit, particularly in physical and behavioural matters. But for all that evolution has explained where we as mammals sit in the tree of life, and how we have evolved over the millennia, the difference between the human minds we have now and those of our animal kin is, clearly, profoundly significant. Humanity is capable of language, art, comedy, technology and other forms of culture which the animal kingdom cannot begin to conceive of. However much we marvel at the sophistication of octopus consciousness, no one believes that any animal could create something like the works of Shakespeare, Einstein or the Beatles. Our ability to communicate, plan, tell stories and cooperate has allowed us to build complex societies and cultures that have no equivalence in the animal kingdom. All of these require the practice of imagination; none are possible without it.

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Divine Humanism, then, sees humanity as central in the conception of the universe, in the same way that secular humanism does. But it does not agree that this position leads to an atheistic, material universe. On the contrary, it sees that position as a failure to recognise that the minds of humanity are the vehicle in which the light of the spiritual sun finds its way into Newton’s pointless, dead, material world. It declares that what exists in the mind is vital, and that ignoring or dismissing it is to fail to have a useful or truthful conception of reality.

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To a Divine Humanist, we are the light. We are what we have been searching for, and what we have prayed to. As Blake wrote in Jerusalem, ‘there is no other / God, than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity’. Without imagination there is nothing. Such was the philosophy of William Blake.

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Now we have a sense of William Blake’s philosophy, in its general outline at least, the question is what should we, in the secular twenty-first century, make of it?

Blake lived during a time when Enlightenment values were in ascendance. Rationality and the single vision of Newton’s sleep were proving to be too powerful for the old, faith-based philosophies. Blake set himself up in opposition to this, a lone voice proclaiming an entirely different truth. In his lifetime at least, this appeared a one-sided battle. Blake was outgunned and overpowered, but he had chosen the hill he was prepared to die on and neither the cruelties of fate nor the indifference of society were going to cause him to back down. The fundamentalist level of pig-headed stubbornness that he displayed has been reason enough for many to applaud him. From the perspective of a culture on the other side of the post-modern era, however, we now have a greater awareness of the dangers of fundamentalism.

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Blake set himself up as a contrary. Helpfully, he also taught us about the nature of contraries. The goal isn’t to choose one side and declare it to be the one correct truth. Instead, we must accept that both contraries are necessary, and that any philosophy that includes one at the expense of the other is incomplete. It is the tension between the two poles, and the dynamic conversation which they start, that matters. Having learnt this, we should no longer feel that we must choose between Blake and the deist Enlightenment philosophy of a dead, meaningless material world. We do not need to plant our flags on one hill and believe wholeheartedly in everything that dogma stands for. Instead, we can learn from the dissonance and questions generated by those two contrasting worldviews.

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Blake’s denial of reason has also not aged well. Blake only believed in what his senses showed him, and, as a result, he insisted that the world was flat and that atoms did not exist. We can be charitable and recognise that for someone attempting to highlight the limitations of reason at a time when the glorification of it was forging a new world, a stance of outright denial rather than nuanced criticism would have seemed necessary. Now, however, we can recognise the value of reason and the gifts it has given us, while still seeing it as an incomplete description of the universe.

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One aspect of Blake that has drawn admirers was his absolute faith in his own truth. This stubborn unwillingness to bend, doubt or waver has made him a role model for outsiders who feel misunderstood, ignored or derided. A common feature of mystical states is an absolute certainty about the vision revealed which, as we noted earlier, is possibly related to a weakening or loss of the experiencer’s sense of self. There are profound similarities between the visions of saints and mystics, as William James recognised, but a quick glance at the history of theology will reveal a lot of troubling discrepancies too. Blake’s absolute belief in his own vision became increasingly attractive as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, and the philosophy of individualism grew from its avant garde roots in the Age of Enlightenment to its mass cultural acceptance in the mid to late twentieth century. In the current century, in contrast, we are learning to mistrust such absolutes.

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These subjects are peripheral to the one central pillar of the Blakean worldview, which is the idea that the imagination is divine. How, in the secular modern world, should we respond to this?

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Two centuries of reason have not yet lifted the mystery that surrounds this subject, despite the occasional claim to the contrary by fundamentalist materialists. Science has been unable to explain what consciousness is or why it exists. Because science is a method of observation, theorising and testing based on objective measurement, it seems particularly unsuited to this task. Consciousness remains a blind spot for science, even though it is the arena in which scientific thought takes place. It is a great irony that fundamentalist materialists use consciousness and imagination to convince themselves that consciousness and imagination are unimportant.

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In the Divine Humanism that Blake practised and which his work represents, we have a responsibility to recognise the imaginative aspect of our lives and use it well. As Blake told us, how we see is as important as what we see, ‘For the Eye altering alters all.’ For Blake, there was a moral component to perception. As he wrote, ‘The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way […] As a man is, So he Sees.’ We paint the world around us in the colours of the world inside. Just as the driver who complains how bad the traffic was fails to recognise that they themselves were the traffic, so too do those who complain about being trapped in a terrible world fail to realise the extent to which their choice of focus has helped create that world. At stake is our experience of the precious, too-short span of years which we are lucky enough to have right here, right now, and which we can paint as either paradise or hell. This is one of our actions which we have to take responsibility for, and can’t blame on others.

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Blake’s work was not just a description of the human mind and the world it built in its own image. It was also a diagnosis. He believed that he understood what had gone wrong, and he was telling us what we need to do about it.

As Blake saw it, the rise of Urizen into a position of dominance over the other three zoas created the ‘mind forg’d manacles’ which keep us from experiencing the paradise that is our birthright. As the stories of Eckhart Tolle and Jill Bolte Taylor show, the shutting down of Urizen or ‘left brain’ neural functions in favour of other areas of the brain can result in an experience of profound, timeless bliss. This is still something we are all capable of achieving – it was not lost when we left Eden, and neither do we need to wait until after death to be granted it as some form of reward. Blake was regularly in paradise, particularly towards the end of his life. He wanted us all to join him.

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Our inner Urizens fight against this idea, of course, because it is a threat to their self-image.

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Of all Urizen’s lies, this is possibly his most malicious. As those who have experience of paradise will confirm, this couldn’t be more wrong. The state is there for everyone, and the only harm involved comes from a refusal to enter.

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Blake did not view Urizen as an enemy to be defeated, however. He could at times be sympathetic or even pitying towards him. He knew he did not mean to cause the harm he did, and that he only did so out of ignorance rather than intention. Blake did not want to see Urizen vanquished. Instead, he wanted the four zoas to return to balance. Urizen does much that is good and valuable and if he could only understand his limited nature, he would no longer deny or drown out the heavenly parts of our minds represented by Tharmas, Urthona and Luvah.

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There are two responses to this, and the first is focused on how we deal with Urizen. It is not necessary to try to weaken or even destroy our rational side – if Urizen can come to realise his own nature, then he will be a powerful tool in the rebalancing of the mind. It is Urizen, after all, who reads and thinks and can study books like Blake’s Jerusalem. Urizen’s innate rationality is a tool which can be used to realise his own nature, even if this requires a little humility. Urizen needs to accept the limitations of his awareness, to no longer feel compelled to control and dominate, and to be prepared to step back and listen. He needs to recognise his desire to be seen as right for the psychological failing it is. If Urizen can grasp the scale of the potential reward this offers, however, then he will come on board gladly.

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The other response is to strengthen the parts of our selves represented by the other three zoas, in order that they can better balance our rationalising ego. Blake himself focused particularly on Urthona, the creative zoa, who was active in the form of Los. With his particular artistic talents, strengthening Urthona was an ideal way for Blake to counterbalance the rational world through the burning fire of real creativity.

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Those of a less creative nature may instead focus on strengthening Luvah, the emotional zoa. It was Luvah that Blake evoked when he stressed the importance of forgiveness, empathy, and compassion as a route to heaven. As he wrote, ‘Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell / There God is dwelling too.’ Such emotions dissolve the Urizenic hard ego, revealing ourselves to be connected rather than isolated, and revealing the category of ‘others’ to be nothing more than Urizen’s invention. Opening our heart, then, is another route to rebalancing our minds. As Blake explained, ‘Mutual forgiveness of each Vice / Such are the Gates of Paradise.’

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Then there is Tharmas, the zoa of physical sensation. Blake’s embrace of his sexual nature was his method of strengthening Tharmas, which explains why he viewed sex as holy. This was a scandalous position to take at the time, but he was far from alone in realising it. The French term for orgasm, for example, is la petite mort or the little death. This refers not to actual death, but instead to the temporary dissolving of the Urizenic ego that allows a moment of transcendence.

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It is not just sex that strengthens Tharmas, as dancers and athletes in many fields will confirm. The experience of a ‘flow state’ during intense focus on a physical activity is another blissful way to shut down Urizen.

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Here, then, is Blake’s map to the gates of paradise. As his grave marker promised us,

I give you the end of a golden string

Only wind it into a ball

It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate

Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

Note: A golden braid perhaps?

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To follow that string we need to strengthen our emotional, physical and creative aspects – the ‘right hemisphere’ part of our minds. At the same time, our rational side needs to step down and understand and accept the limitations of its mental models. When these two things are achieved, our mind will finally be in balance and we, like the giant Albion, can awaken into a perfect timeless moment. We will step outside of the everyday modern world of noise, anxiety and fear, and experience the world as a Blakean paradise.

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Once Blake’s ‘Heaven’s gate / Built in Jerusalem’s wall’ has been found, we know that at any point we can step from a hell of our own making into the paradise where we truly feel at home.

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This is not a religion to control us. It is not a struggle or a burden in which we have to deny our own instincts and desires, and it’s not a creed that will divide us or generate a delusional elite. It’s simply a testable model of how things are.