Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Notes

Some notes on Blake


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Notes
The Eternal Man; the fallen man; due to rise.



auguries:



      

Beulah in the Bible was the
href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah%2062:4;&version=9;"
target="-blank">name Isaiah gave to the Holy Land, when it was to be
redeemed.  It means married.  Blake used it as the place of
rest from the fierce contentions of Eternity.


"Both read the same Bible day and night

But you read black where I read white."

(from The Everlasting Gospel by William Blake)

      
name="bacon"> We have Blake's Annotations on
Bacon's Essays (erd 620-32), part of which you may read
at
href="http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Bacon/Advert-Touching-Holy-War.html"
target="-blank">this review of Bacon's thought.



Blake's God

      

Some understanding of Berkeley's thought is a good
preliminary to understanding the shape of Blake's
mature vision of God, which came to him definitively
about 1800.

      
You can say nothing other than the products of your
mind, which means that an objective God is a complete
unknown; Blake would say there's no such thing: 




      
In Blakean theology Jesus is the only God; not the man
named Jesus: he's only a man.  No! Blake's Jesus is the
indwelling spirit within the psyche- the fount of
imagination and forgiveness.  Jesus is one.

      
Thus, when the two Great Commandments meld together,
the neighbor we're exhorted to love is the God within
the other.  So to love God with all your heart and mind
and soul and strength involves loving God in all the
particulars-- not just your neighbor, but his animals,
insects,


insects, sticks and stones.  Nature thus becomes what is groaning in travail; to love and care for it is to love God. "God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men" (MHH plate 16).


Creation
       This from Blake's Design of the Last Judgment


______________________________________________________________
 

Daughters of Beulah

In the upper left corner of the Arlington Tempera, behind the sleeping god, nymphs are playing upon musical instruments. To Digby in Symbol and Image in William Blake these were the daughters of Beulah. The picture here accurately represents their role - to  attend the couches (like nurses in ICU); with their  music they empower man's perception of the archetypal  symbols which address the unconscious more directly than words might. The archetypal symbols are the oxygen, the medicines meant to heal the sufferer in Ulro from the 'mind forg'd manacles' of gross materialism; the unconscious offers us better things. (The daughters are mentioned 29 times in Blake's poetry.):   Four Zoas Night 1 Page 5 line 33-5:    "On all sides within & without the Universal Man  The Daughters of Beulah follow sleepers in all their Dreams Creating Spaces lest they fall into Eternal Death." Or this one: Four Zoas Night 8 Page 113 line 32-6: But thou O Universal Humanity who is One Man blessed for Ever   Receivest the Integuments woven Rahab beholds the Lamb of God She smites with her knife of flint She destroys her own work Times upon times thinking to destroy the Lamb blessed for Ever He puts off the clothing of blood he redeems the spectres from their bonds He awakes the sleepers in Ulro the Daughters of Beulah praise him They anoint his feet with ointment they wipe them with the hair of their head." Or this, Milton plate 34.20-21 E134: "And the Couches of the Martyrs: & many Daughters of Beulah Accompany them down to the Ulro with soft melodious tears."
______________________________________________________________

Death

Entering the Door of Death (Frontspiece of Jerusalem) The word die is carefully avoided by most of us; when a loved one dies, we say he/she passed away. The question is-- what dies? The Roman Empire died; the British Empire died? But those were not people per se; they were states, conglomerates of materiality. So death is relative-- from what to what?  Ellie asked a workmate if he considered himself a body or a spirit; "a body", he said; "a spirit", she said. So what dies? A body or a spirit or both? (In mortal life our bodies are said to actually die (cell by cell) and be renewed every 7 years.) So at the end of mortal life what dies? the body of course, the garment that we acquired when we descended into the Sea of Time and Space  and the 'daughters of Enitharmon' began to cut and splice it. When Odysseus (or Luvah) threw the garment back to the sea goddess, he was on his way back to Eternity, where we all go sooner or later.     In the French Quarter in N.O. a black friend told me about her dead son;  he had had an incurable and painful disease; he came to her and asked her permission to die, which she of course granted. In one of Charles Williams' delightful metaphysical thrillers two characters are especially memorable: a saintly lady fully in tune with the life of the Spirit, and a man who generations before had been hanged; his spirit still hanged around that locale, which happened to be outside her window.  She met him there and gave him permission to depart in peace. In the series called William Blake Meets Thomas Paine we witness a conversation that Bill Blake had with his brother, Robert (long deceased), and we're led to believe that this was commonplace in Blake's life.   But when once I did descry The Immortal Man that cannot die, Thro' evening shades I haste away To close the labours of my day."(From Gates of Paradise) "Every Death is an improvement in the State of the Departed." (Letter 74 - to Linnell; Erdman 774) By Death Eternal Blake implied descent into mortal life.   By Life Eternal he meant return to our Eternal Origin. "But what have you and I learned here in our mortal life? (One Post can do no more than introduce  this subject; it has other major ramifications.)
**************************************************************
       The Divine Vision represented the radiance of the spiritual realm in its ascendance over the material.  In the Christian world its primary appearance of course is Jesus.        The term appears 48 times in Blake's major poems (The Four Zoas and Jerusalem) according to href="http://www.english.uga.edu/~nhilton/ee/home.html">the Blake concordance. Here is one instance: "For the Divine Lamb Even Jesus who is the Divine Vision.." (Four Zoas [Nt 2], 33.11; E321. Blake used the word divine in many other senses, for example: "For the Divine Lamb Even Jesus who is the Divine Vision" (FZ night ii 33:11). the Divine Family for the communion of saints, the bride of Christ; close in they are a multitude; from afar they are One, Christ.  (For this idea he leaned heavily on John 17.) cocoon:        Blake developed a vividly graphic image of the priestly cocoon in his major work called Milton  (See plate 33).  His poetry here is almost invincibly opaque, but the meaning has extreme significance in regard to his pscyhology, his world view, his religious outlook.  The Mundane Shell represents fallen man, and particularly the worship  of materiality rather than spirit.   And more particularly the encrustation of organized religion (and law) over the spirit of humanity.  Viewed individually it represents the psyche of a person whose consciousness has not yet evolved form the purely material. Or to look at this from another viewpoint: a child who has lost his innocence.         In "Proverbs of Hell" of the target="-blank"> Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake wrote:
        Enion was the consort of the 4th Zoa, Tharmas. He represented the basic physical aspect of Albion.  In relation to Carl Jung's four functions Tharmas would be sensation (however among scholars there is some disagreement about that, borne out by a passage found in Milton and again in Jerusalem: "For Four Universes round the Mundane Egg remain Chaotic One to the North; Urthona: One to the South; Urizen: One to the East: Luvah: One to the West, Tharmas; They are the Four Zoas that stood around the Throne Divine". Tharmas and Enion were the parents of Los and Enitharmon. In his larger mythological works, especially The Four Zoas, Blake gave to Enion some of the most intense poetry that he wrote.        For an introduction to Tharmas and Enion go to href="chap9.htm#tharmas" target="-blank">Chapter 9.
          The term, Death Eternal, means something far different from the conventional intonation.  To Blake it  meant captivity to the Material for someone completely oblivious to the realm of Spirit.
      
Female love did not mean for Blake what one might think.  Female love is love of materiality, nature, beauty, anything to keep you from spirit.        Note that in My Spectre Blake has us agree to give up female love, and a few lines on agree to give up love (means the same thing).

______________________________________________________________
  "There is not one Moral Virtue that Jesus Inculcated but Plato & Cicero did Inculcate before him what then did Christ Inculcate. Forgiveness of Sins This alone is the Gospel & this is the Life & Immortality brought to light by Jesus." (Blake's textual notes to The Everlasting Gospel, Erdman 875)


Golgonooza

         Golgonooza appears a number of times in Blake's works: 17 times in 4Z; 22 times in Milton, and 22 times in Jerusalem. Interpretations of the term are quite varied, depending to a large degree on the interpreter's spiritual orientation: "Los builded Golgonooza":  Los represents the fallen imagination, ie the creative builder of the material realm. Eventually Jerusalem takes the place of Golgonooza.
       More blood has been shed in the name of Christ than almost any other source.


Good and Evil
       The Creation Story in the Bible ascribes man's fall to eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Blake made this a touchstone of his metaphysical system. Look at what Blake said in his Design of the Last Judgment.        Good and evil might be considered the fallen equivalent of truth and error        The trouble with good and evil is that you value your attitudes, actions, etc. as good and the others' as evil. This has motivated wars through the ages.        Blake believed that in Eternity there is no good and evil.  Instead truth and error are resolved with "intellectual spears, and long winged arrows of thought" (Jerusalem 34:15 180)
       In href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/nph-1965/blake/erdman/erd/@Generic__BookTextView/9599;pt=9683" target="-blank">Milton Eternal Death meant leaving Heaven (as Jesus is reported to have done) to improve the sad situation on Earth.
       In Blake's 'Milton' the poet, Milton, "goes to Eternal Death" from his home in heaven, like Jesus had done or Buddha, to rescue "the nations" from the toils of the God of this World (Milton Plate 14:14).
In 1800 at the invitation of the famous poet William Hayley, the Blakes moved to Felpham in Sussex, near the sea.  By 1803 they were back in London.
Blake used "the God of this world"  7 times according to the href="http://www.english.uga.edu/~nhilton/ee/home.html"> target=""> Blake concordance.  Two of them occur near the end of href="http://users.compaqnet.be/cn127848/blake/collected/chap-08.html" target=""> The Everlasting Gospel (page 523)
mind forg'd manacles:    Blake found people, then (and now) uniformly blind to the mental chains that sentenced them to a mediocre existence. He used this href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/asguru/english/03contexts/14williamblake/popups/index_a.shtml" target="">famous term in his Songs of Experience.         The term is used in this work repeatedly explaining Blake's approach to his prophetic poetry.
Moment of Grace: The Moment of Grace or the Felpham Moment in this work represents the turning point in Blake's life when he awakened to the riches of Christ.  He commemorated it with the poem he called the href"chap4.htm#light">First Vision of Light.        As per  Friedlander: The young Blake had thought the great struggle in human life was between Luvah and Urizen, energy and its boundaries.  By the end of the Felpham period, Blake had come to view the great struggle as being between the visionaries, who saw all men as part of the divine family, and the rationalizing masses, concerned only with personal security.


Mystery
       The exploitative use of superstition by religious authorities concerned Blake greatly.  He called it Mystery Religion.
       Blake found much use of mystery in the Bible in both positive and negative forms.  In Revelation the chief enemy is called the Great Whore, Babylon, and Mystery (17:5 (taken from Frye, The Bible as Literature, page 136).
       The Four Zoas: a long href="http://www.english.uga.edu/nhilton/Blake/blaketxt1/the_four_zoas.html" target="-blank">poem that served as a kind of first draft to 'Milton' and 'Jerusalem'.  Reading this closely one may discern the spiritual growth which Blake went through culminating in the target="-blank">Moment of Grace .
Plato's Myth of the Cave had a big influence on Blake's understanding.
Urizen was one of the four zoas:        Broadly speaking the four zoas were      href="chap9.htm#tharmas" target="-blank">Tharmas- the body.      Urizen- the mind.      Los- the imagination      Luvah- the feelings
       With the "narrow chinks of his cavern" found in Plate 11 of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake of course had an href="http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/greek/philosopher/myth_allegory_cave_plato.html" target="-blank">obvious source.
The Couches of the Dead is a universal symbol representing those who have died to Eternity in order to be born into our fallen world.
The main chance is a term Blake referred to for using his art (without integrity) for commercial purposes.
   

Oothoon

A quick summary of the political import of Visions of the Daughters of Albion came in a letter from Scholar James Rovira: "I read VDA (only in part) as a critique of US democracy in the light  of its violation of democratic ideals (personified by Oothoon) by its  legalization of slavery. The forces that would combat slavery are  overly passive (Theotormon, God-tormented, conscience in the light of  democratic ideals) while the forces of market capitalism that benefit  from slavery (Bromion) actively rape/violate these ideals. But, these  democratic ideals are still in charge, yet unable to fully give  themselves to their ideals, so that the most seriously damaged victim  of Bromion's rape was Theotormon, not Oothoon, who is still at least  capable of selfless love and who is going to bring forth life."
______________________________________________________________
  Blake defined the poetic genius as Principle 1 in target="">All Religions are One:
       He originally ascribed this to Jesus, but then added Urthona and Los (the Lord's representatives in his system).
       Rahab: the name Blake applied to the Whore of Babylon of Revelation. However the Bible, and Blake as well, used the name for some more honorable women.
       In Blake's conception (as in the Bible) we come into the world with innocence, lose it (See 'Songs of Experience')  and hopefully evolve to a higher level of consciousness. Blake and the Bible refer to these two developments as fall and return.
       The mundane shell  and the 'covering cherub' are two ways Blake described the fallen condition, and organized religion has a prominent place in both myths.        Two (relatively) contemporary authors deserve mention: Joseph Chilton Pearce's Crack in the Cosmic Egg deserves study.  It looks like an elaborate expansion of Blake's ideas here.  I haven't recently determined what if any recognition he gave to Blake, although I found the mundane shell  mentioned on page xiv of the 1988 edition.  Marcus Borg, on page 114 of his The God We Never Knew, speaks of 'the hatching of the heart', i.e. the conversion of the hard heart to the open heart: "If what is within is to live, the egg must hatch, the shell must break, the heart must open." And he refers us to href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah%2031:31-37;&version=31;" target=-blank">Jeremiah's New Covenant. In Blake's long poem, Milton, the older poet, Milton, imitating his friend, Jesus, comes down from Heaven, and cracks the mundane egg on his way to the center.        Marriage is a sacrament in Christian thought, and for many of us it's the primary sacrament of life.  But in 19th century British society, we may get the idea (from Dickens or Trollope) that matrimony served commercial rather than religious purposes.  Blake violently objected to that (obviously objectionable) custom; it led him to use such phrases as the marriage hearse. 
            Rintrah

In Blake's poetry Rintrah is mentioned 48 times, first
in MHH, then in Europe, the Four Zoas, Milton, and
Jerusalem.  He obviously had a special meaning to
Blake, but shades and nuances of the meaning occurred
throughout.

1, At the beginning (and end) of MHH Rintrah roared;
perhaps in his mind at that moment Rintrah represented
the angry young man who would write the revolutionary
material just ahead.  

2. In plates 5 and 8 of Europe Rintrah is pictured as a
mailed knight of the queens of England and France,
daughters of Enitharmon, who entice Rintrah into the
hideous war between the two countries.

3. Rintrah's identity is best seen in The Four Zoas:

And these are the Sons of Los & Enitharmon. Rintrah Palamabron
Theotormon Bromion Antamon Ananton Ozoth Ohana
Sotha Mydon Ellayol Natho Gon Harhath Satan
Har Ochim Ijim Adam Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Dan Naphtali
Gad Asher Issachar Zebulun Joseph Benjamin David Solomon
Paul Constantine Charlemaine Luther Milton
       (FZ8-107.6 Erdman 380) 


4. At the beginning of Milton (Plates 3-7)  we have The Bard's 
Song.  Rintrah has a prominent place here.  Enitharmon - The 
Shadowy Female - has brought forth all Los's Family: Orc, Rintrah,
Palamabron, and finally Satan.  We see these last three in 
Plate 10. Satan is the fiery one; Rintrah is next, and behind
Rintrah is his peaceable brother, Palamabron.

(Elsewhere Blake referred to Satan as a state, not an
individal.  He is the 'state of Error'.)
       The Selfhood is one of many super complex metaphors that fill Blake's works.  We can see three different levels in which he used it:        1. At the moral level it represents the egocentricity, the term Blake gave for the fallen man, He also calls it the href="#spectre" target="-blank">Spectre and Satan.  In modern psychological parlance it has the meaning of the egocentric self as opposed to the Self, which href="http://www.mtnmath.com/whatrh/node112.html" target="-blank">Jung equated with Christ-  the Divine Image.        2. The blindness to the spiritual (Eternal) shown by the person (or culture) who depends exclusively upon the material, the life that one lives in the Sea of Time and Space.        3. A necessity to act in the material world.  This led to Blake's understanding of the necessity to continually annihilate and continually regenerate the Selfhood. The Selfhood acts in the light of good and evil, chooses good to adhere to and evil to abhor or confront.  In Eternity this is no longer necessary, but in this vale of tears there's no other way to interact.        Christ gives the Christian work to do, and it must be done in the realm of materiality.  Mortal life means materiality (among other things of course).       (For an introduction to Self-Annilation look at href="http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/transcription.xq?objectid=milton.d.illbk.46">Plate 40 of Milton.  To read this is a difficult assignment, but it abounds in the particular Blake ideas that will help you understand the whole bit.)
       For Blake (and before him for Swedenborg) states are the stages or conditions through which we pass in our journey through life.  Blake had colorful designations for the various states.  For example Satan is the state of Death, Adam, Abraham, and many other biblical figures serve to designate various states we may pass through in time.  Jesus was the Divine Humanity, the final and perfect state that we achieve.        According to Damon (page 386) "States are stages of error, which the Divine Mercy creates so that the State and not the individual in it shall be blamed."        Once you realize that a person is not a state, but in a state, it becomes possible to forgive.  Forgiving is the characteristic of the Divine Humanity (Jesus), the one state that is not error.        Blake did not consider Adam, Abraham, Moses, etc. to be merely individuals in history.  No, they were types of states through which we may pass in our journey upward or downward.  Christ is the ultimate state toward which we aspire, a state of forgiveness rather than judgment.        The states represent "all that can happen to Man in his pilgrimage of seventy years" (Jer 16:67 E161).
  Satan has varying identities in Blake's poems, but href="http://www.pathguy.com/blake/blakemil.txt" target="">Friedlander, describing Blake's Milton indicated Satan was "any person who thinks himself "righteous in his vegetated spectre, holy by following the laws of conventional piety". (Thus he is very close to Jesus and Paul, both of whom considered self-righteous judgment as the Ultimate human evil.)        Another word for this is the limit of opacity.
(From Damon, page 386): "the stars symbolize Reason"; they belong to Urizen; in Eternity they were part of Albion, but with the Fall they fled, and formed the Mundane Shell. Blake also provided a href="primer.htm#stars2" target="">redemptive dimension to stars.
       Time and Space are creatures like Adam and Eve.  Blake tells us that Los created time and Enitharmon space. The magnificent Arlington Tempera is often called the Sea of Time and Space.

**************************************
         Water symbolizes matter or the material world. In Genesis God moved over the face of the waters. Here it stands for chaos. Creation was made out of chaos, but in Blake's myth water continuously symbolizes the fall from Eternity into materiality. Narciss fell in love with his watery shadow-- and chose it for his life.  Albion did the same in his descent from Eternity into the water of material life.

**************************************************

Notes on Thel: Har is the place of primeval innocence where Thel lived until her unhappy journey into time and space.  (Damon p. 174) (Har has an entirely different meaning in the poem, Tiriel.)        This figure suggests the Cave of the Nymphs, used by Blake in the Arlington Tempera, a painting portraying man's descent into the Sea of Time and Space (by the "northern bar"). This reference in Thel is an early example of a mythological figure much more extravagantly elaborated at a later date with the painting.  (Kathleen Raines' book href="http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/world/modeur/ph-mana.htm">Blake and Tradition gives a good source for interpretation of the Cave of the Nymphs as used by Blake.)

Cave of the Nymphs

 The northern and southern gates symbolize the descent of human beings from the Eternal into the material via the northern gate and the return to the Eternal via the southern. The Book of Thel amply demonstrates that where "The eternal gates' terrific Porter lifted the northern bar" and Thel, an eternal being "entered the land of sorrows".
       Pity meant to Blake (and perhaps for 18th century English) something entirely different from its general current connotation. It was much closer to compassion than it is in our day.          According to the Blake Concordance  the word is mentioned 178 times in Blake's Complete Works.  But the poem that best defines the meaning that pity had for him is The Divine Image from Songs of Innocence.        In Plate 7 of href="http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/transcription.xq?objectid=milton.b.illbk.05">Blake's Milton we read about the "three classes of mortal men": the elect (self-righteous), the redeemed (saved sinners), and the reprobate (prophets harried from place to place).

       Ulro: this material world; also called the 'seat of Satan' as in 'the ruler of this present world".        Tirzah is one of Blake's bad women; for a short poem where Blake vividly describes his use of the word look at href="http://www.repeatafterus.com/title.php?i=4914" target="">To Tirzah. The word unbelief, used by Blake was much like what Jesus railed about, while using the positive mode. Neither of them meant by unbelief failure to adhere to the intellectual propositions which are supposed to define the Christian faith.  For both men belief meant commitment to the reality of a loving God. Ulro This world (in the same sense the term is used in the New Testament); also this vale of tears; also the seat of Satan, and a dread sleep (many such usages in 4Z)     Urizen The Zoa who represented Reason.  In Blake's thought he became closely related to Nobodaddy, the unforgiving and cruel Old Testament God.  In 'Milton' Blake describes the contest between the old god, Urizen and 'Milton' (a surrogate here for Christ).  It's a vivid description of the humanizing of God that came to us with the words of Jesus, about the loving heavenly father. Vala The original name of the Four Zoas was Vala. In Blake's mythology she was the consort of Luvah (the god of love). Vala represents woman in general; she is also called Tirzah (purely earthly woman) and Jerusalem (heavenly woman).        In Jerusalem, after the Moment of Grace, Blake wrote "The Wheel of Religion".  In it he showed once again the difference between false and true Christianity, using almost entirely biblical figures:
  "Both read the same Bible day and night But you read black where I read white." (from The Everlasting Gospel by William Blake) The Covering Cherub for Blake sums up [indicated] the 27 Christian heavens which shut man out from Eternity (Damon 93) In the Everlasting gospel  we read " Was Jesus Born of a  Virgin pure..." To appreciate these verses look at The Marriage of Heaven and Earth.        Blake developed a vividly graphic image of the priestly cocoon in his major work called Milton  (See plate 33).  His poetry here is almost invincibly opaque, but the meaning has extreme significance in regard to his pscyhology, his world view, his religious outlook.  The Mundane Shell represents fallen man, and particularly the worship  of materiality rather than spirit.   And more particularly the encrustation of organized religion (and law) over the spirit of humanity.  Viewed individually it represents the psyche of a person whose consciousness has not yet evolved form the purely material. Or to look at this from another viewpoint: a child who has lost his innocence. 
Science, like everything else fell and then ascended. In the fallen 80% of Blake's myth purely material science, ignoring any spiritual content, was denoted by Bacon, Newton and Locke. However it will be redeemed. In the Last Judgment
Thus The Four Zoas end.
In Blake's conception (as in the Bible) we come into the world with innocence, lose it (See 'Songs of Innocence'  and hopefully evolve to a higher level of consciousness. Blake and the Bible refer to these two developments as fall and return.        The 'mundane shell' and the target="main">'covering cherub' are two ways Blake described the fallen condition, and organized religion has a prominent place in both myths.        Two (relatively) contemporary authors deserve mention: Joseph Chilton Pearce's Crack in the Cosmic Egg deserves study.  It looks like an elaborate expansion of Blake's ideas here.  I haven't recently determined what if any recognition he gave to Blake, although I found the mundane shell  mentioned on page xiv of the 1988 edition.  Marcus Borg, on page 114 of his The God We Never Knew, speaks of 'the hatching of the heart', i.e. the conversion of the hard heart to the open heart: "If what is within is to live, the egg must hatch, the shell must break, the heart must open." In Blake's long poem, Milton, the older poet, Milton, imitating his friend, Jesus, comes down from Heaven, and cracks the mundane egg on his way to the center. 
  This last verse quotes  href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=50&chapter=2&verse=3&end_verse=5&version=9&context=context" target="-blank">John 2:4 with Jesus speaking as a spiritual rather than a material person.            I find it very interesting that at the age of four C.G.Jung is reported to have had a dream in which a gigantic turd fell from the sky and landed on the local cathedral.   


       For corrections, comment, or inquiry write to   




 Larry Clayton
  
(lclay3@earthlink.net)
  
 1906 SE 8th St.
 
 Ocala FL 34471
  
 
     
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