Solomon's Secret Arts (67 page)

Access to works of occult philosophy may have been provided by his early mentor the miniature painter Richard Cosway, who praised Blake's engravings as “works of extraordinary genius and imagination.” Through him, Blake may have encountered Boehme, Freher, spiritual healing and ritual magic.
¹⁴⁵
Whether or not Blake was introduced to animal magnetism or the prophecies of Richard Brothers by William Sharp, as has been mooted, is an unanswerable question. The two men were not close friends. Lacking evidence, we can no more infer that Blake shared the attitudes of Cosway or Sharp than we can assume that his passing acquaintance with Alexander Tilloch, whose invention of a device to prevent banknote forgeries Blake endorsed in 1797, had its basis in a shared love of alchemy.
¹⁴⁶

Blake applauded the American and French revolutions as blows against tyranny and slavery. Like the “Nephew of the Almighty,” however, he understood these momentous events in a prophetic sense entirely detached from the conventional rhetoric of rights and liberties. In fact, Blake's poetry displays a marked ambivalence towards the goals and methods of revolutionaries. His verses on the American War of Independence begin with a sexual assault by the rebellious Orc, who is chained to a rock like Prometheus, on his unnamed sister, who recognizes him as “the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa” (a reference to the Swedenborgian dream of finding an African source of revelation). Orc then stirs up a cosmic conflict between the thirteen angels of the American colonies (who sit in “magic seats”) and the angels of Albion. While the American angels seem to be carrying out a judgment on the British monarchy, the plagues that they shoot back at Britain do not present much of a case for republicanism.
¹⁴⁷
Blake's unfinished poem on the French Revolution is even more insistent on representing that upheaval as a curse, as well as a liberation. When “Fayette” marches his army out of Paris, he is surrounded by “pestilential vapours” on which “flow frequent spectres of religious men weeping,” driven from their abbeys “by the fiery cloud of Voltaire, and thund'rous rocks of Rousseau.”
¹⁴⁸
For once, Blake seems to feel sorry for the clerics. Revolution is a disease spread by “deists” (Voltaire, Rousseau and later Edward Gibbon), whom Blake pilloried as the destructive, warmongering advocates of natural religion. They may be instrumental in the overthrow of kings, priests and aristocrats, who are far worse than they are, but nobody really seems to benefit much from their efforts.
¹⁴⁹
Revolution, in short, was a necessary evil in an imperfect moral universe.

Blake's own philosophical views were first expressed in his 1790 pamphlet,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, whose title is derived from a work by Swedenborg. Blake took the opportunity to scorn his former spiritual teacher. “Any man of mechanical talents,” he wrote, “may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg: and from those of Dante or Shakespeare, an infinite number.”
¹⁵⁰
We may assume that Blake himself was that prolific mechanic, but we cannot know what volumes of Boehme or Paracelsus he had read. In philosophical terms, at this stage, not much separates Blake from Swedenborg. Blake maintains that there is no division between body and soul, that all living things are holy and that they are infused by the essential life force of energy—all propositions with which the baron would have agreed.
¹⁵¹
What distinguishes Blake is his insistence that reason (which encompasses conventional religion) puts a cloying damper on energy, whose negative effects can only be overcome by demonic power. Although Swedenborg did occasionally converse with demons, Blake's sympathy for the Devil is a novel feature of his theology. It owes more to John Milton's
Paradise Lost
, in which
Satan takes on heroic characteristics and foreshadows Christ, than to any occult work. Blake's identification of the life force with sexuality was perhaps less original—the concept was not foreign to Swedenborg. It contrasts nonetheless with the strait-laced moralism of the Platonist Thomas Taylor, whose lectures Blake attended at the house of their mutual friend John Flaxman.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, therefore, is a bold, albeit not entirely convincing, declaration of independence from the visions and philosophies of others. Already, Blake was using the names of mythological characters to express his alienation from the material world. While these “Eternals,” as he called them, are infused with the characteristics of classical gods (they have female “Emanations” who often behave as headstrong or lascivious goddesses), they do not correspond precisely to any ancient pantheon. Blake evoked them with a portentous seriousness reminiscent of James Macpherson's Ossian poems. Swedenborg claimed to have encountered spirits from other planets, but he never constructed mythic stories out of their lives as Blake did.
¹⁵²

The “Eternals” appear to stand for aspects of the human mind, which may link them to various psychological theories, from Plato to Hartley. In the early “Lambeth Books” composed in that London suburb from 1790 to 1795, however, they are more active than acted upon, and can be identified more easily by what they do rather than by any correspondence to ideal mental states. Generally speaking, the “Eternals” spread despair and misery, without offering much hope of eventual transcendence. The mythic characters who will eventually confer divinity on human beings—Jesus and Albion, the original man—do not have a strong presence in the “Lambeth Books.” Eventually, readers will learn that Albion's fall into materiality resulted in the separation of the Four Zoas—Urizen, Urthona-Los, Luvah and Tharmas, who stand for reason, intuition or imagination, emotion and bodily sensation. The division of Albion's spirit may reflect the fragmentation of Adam Kadmon, which Blake could have read about in an English-language synopsis of
Kabbala Denudata
.
¹⁵³
In his earlier books, however, the name Albion appears chiefly as the title of a rather sinister angel whose voice issues the “thunderous command” to bring plagues on the rebellious Americans, “as a storm to cut them off / As a blight cuts the tender corn when it begins to appear.”
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If the “Lambeth Books” do not contain much spiritual optimism, neither are they very positive about occult philosophy. The subject is mentioned specifically only once, in
The Song of Los
(1795), where we read that “To Trismegistus. Palamabron gave an abstract Law: To Pythagoras Socrates & Plato.”
¹⁵⁵
As Palamabron was the offspring of the “Eternal” Los, who represents (more or less) the creative or imaginative faculties, this might be regarded as a benevolent gift, but it actually comes from Urizen or reason, whose lawgiving always has a
negative connotation in Blake's poetry. Furthermore, Palamabron's description as a “horned priest” in
Europe: A Prophecy
(1794) hardly seems encouraging.
¹⁵⁶
His gift of “abstract Law,” therefore, cannot be interpreted as an endorsement of Hermeticism, Pythagoreanism or Platonism, which are apparently no better than any other established system of belief. Blake does not spare Hinduism either, as he describes Palamabron's brother Rintrah giving “Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East.” A few lines later, modern philosophy will be lumped into the same overall condemnation. Urizen weeps piteously as he delivers “a Philosophy of Five Senses … into the hands of Newton & Locke.” Meanwhile, in another sign of reason's dulling power, “Clouds roll heavy upon the Alps around Rousseau and Voltaire.”
¹⁵⁷
Evidently, the constraints imposed by Urizen's laws on the senses (Blake accepted many more than five) and the imagination are embedded in empirical science and natural religion as well as in occult philosophy. All are actually concerned with the material rather than the spiritual world. Boehme had signalled in a similar direction by urging “
Seekers
of the Metallic
Tincture
” to “apply yourselves to the
New Birth
in Christ,” but Blake booms in a different register.
¹⁵⁸
No writer of the eighteenth century had gone so far as to reject the whole tradition of Western and Eastern thought as misguided.

The attack on occult philosophy underpins
The Book of Urizen
(1793). Urizen, the “Eternal” associated with reason, worldliness and sensory knowledge, is depicted in a colour plate, measuring the universe with a compass that radiates out from his fingers.
¹⁵⁹
Anyone familiar with the symbols of Freemasonry could have identified him as the Divine Architect, planning out the cosmos. The egomaniacal Urizen goes on to behave like a god of the alchemists, forming an earthly world by controlling the three other seething elements, then writing down his secrets in “books formed of metals”:

These images may be inspired by the engravings showing the creation of the universe in Robert Fludd's
Utriusque Cosmi
, but there is a big difference: for Blake, they mark the beginning of a cursed world of misery and subjection operating under the slogan “One King, One God, One Law.”
¹⁶¹
Apparently, the fulfilment of alchemy does not entail the liberation of the spirit, but the enslavement of nature to a unitary code of material science.

The fatal association of the occult with materialism and science is emphasized again in
Vala: or The Four Zoas
(1797–1804), a confusing, unfinished poem that provides a link between the “Lambeth Books” and the later epics,
Milton
and
Jerusalem
. Here, Urizen's rationalizing efforts serve to pervert both the Temple of Solomon and the ancient mysteries. On the seventh night of the poem, Urizen “& all his myriads / Builded a Temple in the image of the human heart.” Blake may have had in mind the roughly circular stone “temples” ascribed by William Stukeley to the Druids, and regarded by him as versions of the Temple of Jerusalem. On the last page of his poem
Jerusalem
(1804–20), Blake would copy Stukeley's engraving of the “serpent-temple” at Avebury, behind a scene of writhing “Eternals.”
¹⁶²
As with all his borrowings, however, Blake complicates the original image. The serpent signifies for him the materialism of an earth-bound creature. Urizen's heart-like structure turns out to be a weird parody of Solomon's Temple. Like the pagan temples of Babylon, Jerusalem's opposite, it is served by priestesses as well as priests, “clothd in disguises beastial.” Urizen goes on to imprison the sun in the centre of his temple, where it takes the place of the Ark of the Covenant:

Light is held in darkness so as to conceal secrets—a swipe, perhaps, at the promise of Freemasonry to reveal what is hidden.

Above the temple rises the Tree of Mystery, which Kathleen Raine has compared to the Tree of the Soul, one of Leuchtner's illustrations to Boehme's works.
¹⁶⁴
Blake's Tree, however, is a site of anger, despair and mourning—“in fierce pain shooting its writhing buds”—not a path to paradise. The Lamb of God is eventually nailed to it, but he will return to “rent the Veil of Mystery.” When the “Synagogue of Satan” rises up against Urizen, the tree is burned, so that “Mysterys tyrants are cut off & not one left on earth.” Soon, however, a successor forms in its place:

By using the term “Mystery” as if it were the proper name of the tree, Blake suggests that its grisly power lies in fear of the hidden or unknown. This may seem contradictory, as natural religion was supposed to
reveal
the hand of God in the universe, but, for Blake, the material world actually
disguises
that which is obvious to the inner imagination. Thus, deism becomes the offspring of mystery, or the occult. Through the image of a tree, Blake may also have intended to target the adaptation of ancient mystery cults by Freemasons.
¹⁶⁶
Aeneas found the entrance to Hades beside an elm, and Warburton, among others, had argued that the hero's descent into the underworld (Urizen's domain) mirrored the Eleusinian mysteries. In Masonic myth, the remains of Hiram were discovered under a blossoming acanthus tree. Blake was not celebrating these stories in
The Four Zoas
: rather, he was identifying them as sources of mental slavery.

Blake's attitude towards traditional occult philosophy remains unflaggingly hostile throughout his early writings. Above all, he seems to vilify its attempt to explain nature, which links it to the material world and sensory experience. Of course, he also imagined a more benign magical world, existing entirely in his own fantasy, full of talkative fairies straight out of Shakespeare, a radiant Zodiac, transmuting angels and divinely blessed lily flowers, but these were not associated with any particular philosophical approach.
¹⁶⁷
At least they served to lighten the gloom of the “Lambeth Books.” On the whole, Blake's mental universe, with its abundant spirits, four elements and Ptolemaic geocentrism, is perfectly compatible with that of Thomas Vaughan, Elias Ashmole and William Lilly. What the poet rejects is any systematic analysis of that universe, which only serves to impose boundaries on thought, leading to subjection and misery.
The Four Zoas
finally points towards a solution for the pain of the world, in the restoration of “the Eternal Man” to full divinity—a concept straight out of Boehme. Even here, however, Blake's creative powers labour mightily to make the concept his own.