The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Jason Whittaker

Zoamorphosis Essential Introductions 1. Blakes Life & Works 2. Songs of Innocence and of Experience 3. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Forthcoming 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. The Continental Prophecies The Urizen Books The Four Zoas Milton a Poem Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Jason Whittaker

Zoamorphosis Essential Introductions

Rintrah Books

Rintrah Books, Redruth, Cornwall 2010 This book may be shared freely under a Creative Commons licence so long as the author is attributed, but it may not be used for commercial purposes or modified without the authors consent. For full details of this licence, go to: http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/.

Contents

Citations

Chapter 1: The Eternal Hell 5 Revives Chapter 2: The form & style of The Marriage Chapter 3: Swedenborg & The Marriage Chapter 4: Without Contraries is No progression 11 17 22

Selected Reading 28

Citations

All quotations are from David V. Erdmans The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Revised edition. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Auckland: Doubleday, 1988. Citations are indicated by the letter E followed by the page number in Erdmans edition.

The Eternal Hell Revives

Chapter 1: The Eternal Hell Revives

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. Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah XXXIV & XXXV Chap: Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason[.] Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. (E34)

illiam Blakes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, published in 1790, is one of the strangest and most remarkable books ever to have been written. Although little noticed during Blakes lifetime (and discussion of it largely repressed by those who had read it), it has also become one of the most important of his works to writers such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, Angela Carter, and Salman Rushdie whose books have been greatly influenced by its astonishing ideas and rhetoric. The Marriage began as a pamphlet denouncing the system devised by the eighteenth century mystic and scientist, Emanuel Swedenborg, but it quickly developed into a much more radical assault on the conventions of religion, politics and morality, as well as providing ironic critiques of the theology of Milton and the Bible. Blakes idiosyncratic, unsettling style and his resolution to write in the voice of the devil was also a response to the drama of the French Revolution, a time when the entire world appeared to have been turned upside down, when the conventions and certainties of Europe became less certain.

The Contrary Vision

As we shall see in the next chapter, The Marriage is not entirely a text that is sui generis, but it is certainly one whose format is exceedingly rare, a factor that ac5

The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

counts for its continuing ability to shock and stimulate generations of readers. The editors of the William Blake Trust/Tate Gallery edition of the book offer one of the best summaries of its effect: The Marriage, provocative, mocking, sexy, pushy, and playful, bristles with... rebellious optimism. Its gumption is never exposed as bravado, and, although it hammers mercilessly on Emanuel Swedenborg and his angelic followers, the mockery is never disillusioned but youthfully, cheerfully antagonistic to foolish conventionality. (Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi 116-7) After the Argument, which introduces one of Blakes mythological figures, Rintrah, the just man driven from the paradise that he creates by a villain of false humility who prefers to steal the labour of others than disturb his ease, Blake establishes the key motifs of The Marriage in the plate cited at the beginning of this chapter. While the structure of The Marriage has often defied critics S. Foster Damon called it a scrap-book of Blakes philosophy (Damon 88) and Michael Ferber thought it a structureless structure (Ferber 90) many have understood immediately the intellectual significance of Blakes satire, exposing conventional folly through a system of dynamic contraries. Contraries attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate and, of course, heaven and hell display a significant element in Blakes thought: one is not simply the negative or absence of the other. As he was to write in Milton a Poem, Contraries are Positives / A Negation is not a Contrary (E129). Blakes contraries share some features with those of other dialectical philosophers, from ancient Heraclitus through to Hegel writing after him, but on the face of it, at least he rejects what can be seen in all those writers as a tendency to subordinate one antinomy to another. For a truly dynamic system, Blake argues that the opposing elements of human experience must engage equally with each other. Blakes attempt to avoid the hierarchy of one term over another which is typical of the exercise of power is compelling but ultimately fails: if this is the marriage of heaven and hell, then too often, as critics have noted, it is devils who triumph over angels. When Harold Bloom attempted to demonstrate the dialectical progress that he argued was evident in the text, he did so in a spirit of tentativeness, respecting its innate trickery (Bloom 501). Much of this is due to the extremely important nature of Blakes struggle with notions of good and evil. John Howard saw The Marriage as Blakes prophetic testament on evil and the way to escape it (Howard 61), which is to work by removing orthodox opposition to sensual enjoyment using his
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The Eternal Hell Revives

infernal method of printing which espouses irony, humour and provocation to subvert systems of codified morality. One means by which Blake does this is to deny the existence of evil at least as it is commonly understood. Sensual enjoyment is not a negation of being in the Augustinian notion of evil but rather its very fulfilment. Yet here arises an important conceptual difficulty for Blakes own system, for the temptation then is simply to invert the traditional hierarchies of good and evil, heaven and hell to declare, as Satan does in Paradise Lost, Evil, be thou my good so that frequently the angels appear as little more than privations of his diabolical heroes. It may be such radical subversion was necessary in the revolutionary contexts of 1790, and the importance of striking against his conservative enemies did not provide him with the luxury of that subtlety of the contrary states of the human soul he was later to demonstrate in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Nonetheless, this relative failure to achieve a true marriage does indicate the considerable difficulty that Blake had, not merely to oppose one system to another in a spirit of rebellion but to break free of systems altogether.

Reason and Energy

If the relationship of good and evil is a fundamental moral concern of The Marriage, then the metaphysical origin of conventional dualism also has an important role to play, and this Blake traces to what he considers its source in the split between body and soul, outlined most clearly in plate 4: All Bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of the following Errors. 1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul. 2. That Energy. calld Evil. is alone from the Body. & that Reason. calld Good. is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True 1 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses. the chief inlets of Soul in this age 2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is The bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3 Energy is Eternal Delight (E34) The origins of good and evil lie in religions and the errors of their sacred codes, fundamental to which is the separation of soul and body, the latter
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The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

being repressed in the service of the former. However, religious folly, which denies the true nature of humanity by denying the body, is also served by philosophy. Since Platos division of reason from appetite at least, philosophy had been complicit in the error of dualism and this is an important area in which Blake distinguishes himself from Enlightened anti-religious commentators: Cartesian dualism may have been an extreme version, but to Blake most if not all Enlightenment philosophers had mistakenly deposed a theistic god, only to replace him with deistic reason that was equally effective in repressing the desires and energy of the body, forgetting the origins of intellectual life that lay in those desires. The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country. placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslavd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounced that the Gods had orderd such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. (E38) Robert Essick has noted the ways in which politics, science, the Bible, and linguistics collide in Blakes work during the 1790s (Essick 189), and though this was particularly the case following the publication of Thomas Paines The Age of Reason in 1794, the beginning of the decade saw a surge in biblical exegesis that spread the fruits of Enlightenment criticism. Much of what Blake writes in plate 11 above would not look entirely out of place in David Hume, Voltaire, Pierre Bayle or Constantin Volney, but Blakes attitude to perception creates an important distinction from such figures: for them, reason operates upon the faculties of sense as a higher order, ordering and categorising sense impressions. However, for Blake the role of energy and imagination as the animating motivation of such systems of categorisation (whereby poets placed cities and countries under mental deities) returns the desires of the body to the highest capabilities of which humanity is capable. Blakes final statement, that All deities reside in the human breast, can be read as remarkably close to atheism: however, it is more accurate to emphasise
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The Eternal Hell Revives

that in this and his other works he emphasises again and again the divine nature of humanity. God is a creation of imagination, and Blake appears to have no problem with conceiving of man as the creator of God. Mans mistake is to apotheosise his reason, abstracting a system of mental deities as separate from the material world and projecting it onto the heavens. Plate 11 explicitly attacks priestcraft, denounced by many Enlightenment philosophers as that scheme by which God was removed to the heavens from where he could still meddle in human affairs. The radical nature of Blakes critique is that ultimately he sees little difference between such abstraction and that of the philosophers themselves, who removed the divine entirely from the universe and, through Deism, contented themselves with a prime mover which, like Newtons Pantocrator, established an immutable system of nature that imposed upon the passive perception of mankind. Both priest and philosopher forgot that all divine energy resides in the human breast, not in an abstract out there, whether heaven or the origin of the universe.

Revolutionary Satire

While Blakes Marriage may have begun life as an anti-Swedenborgian pamphlet, it very quickly transformed into a much more wide-ranging satire as the events of 1790 unfolded. David Erdman was one of the first critics to trace in detail the connection between The Marriage and the events of the French Revolution, although unfortunately the fact that he dates its composition between 1790 and 1793 means that he frequently looks for allusions that are simply not there, seeing the final Song of Liberty, for example, as a celebration of the casting out of French monarchy and the rout of Brunswicks starry hosts at the end of 1792 (Erdman 192). By contrast, if we view Blake as being inspired into a new way of thinking by the progress of the Revolution in 1789-90, it is possible to understand more profoundly what Eaves, Essick and Viscomi recognise as the optimism of his diabolic support for what was taking place in France. After the meeting of the Three Estates in 1789 and the formation of a new National Assembly at the end of that year, which brought with it the promise of potential republicanism or at the very least constitutional monarchy, the Revolution was largely still in its benevolent phase. Certainly there had been the Great Fear of the Summer of 1789, which betokened the potential tyranny that would come, but the brief fits of violence that occurred, such as the storming of the Bastille, could still be presented as part of the progress of France towards enlightened government. Feudalism had been abolished and in May the Assembly had even renounced any involvement in wars of conquest. With the exception of Edmund Burke, perhaps, few suspected that the Revolution itself would lead directly to despot9

The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

ism, and even he could not have realised just how bloody the Terror would be when it was unleashed in 1793. As such, Blakes Marriage is a joyful manifesto, one which celebrates fully the revolutionary fervour that had exploded in France. Announcing himself as being of the devils party, he launched into radical visions with an exuberance that rapidly disappeared from his illuminated books as the decade progressed. There is little of that exultation in texts such as The [First] Book of Urizen or The Book of Ahania where the innocence of his diabolism is tempered by the knowledge of revolutionary violence. Peter A. Schock has observed the ways in which the figure and mythology of Satan was used by both radicals and conservatives in the early years of the Revolution. His argument, like that of Erdman, suffers slightly from the current understanding that The Marriage was published in 1790 (thus removing some of the immediate sources that he draws upon), but it is clear that British propaganda against Satanic rebels made Blake increasingly proud of his diabolism at least until it became no longer safe to display such partisanship publicly (Schock 446). Richard Cronin notes the difficulty of determining who The Marriage was actually written for, building on Howards observation that it could have been the circle around Joseph Johnson, which included Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and Joseph Priestley. Cronin suggests that Blake had turned against the Swedenborgians when they abandoned the more revolutionary aspects of their founders ideals and increasingly declared themselves in favour of the political status quo (Cronin 48-51). Yet the Johnson circle, as Cronin observes, was not itself amenable to the wilder flights of fancy that Blake indulged in and, in Jon Mees words, The Marriage does not represent a retreat from conventional Christianity into Deism but rather a move into radical enthusiasm that would have been denounced by the rationalists gathered around Johnsons table (Mee 53). The Marriage, then, responds with energy and optimism to the events of 1789-1790. Although Blake had originally sought to mock the tenets of a fashionable but still slightly obscure sect in London, he quickly expanded his vision to politics, religion, and literature, easily sweeping in literary giants such as Milton. In tone and style, if not always in content, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is sometimes reminiscent of his earlier satire of the 1780s, the unpublished An Island in the Moon, mixing raucous Augustan comedy with matters of import. As the dawn of Revolution turned into the bloody sunset of the Terror, it was a mood that was largely to disappear from his writing for more than two decades.

10

The Form & Style of The Marriage

Chapter 1: The Form & Style of The Marriage

s it is not clearly dated on its title page, for some time there was considerable confusion as to when Blake had actually published The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with scholars selecting dates between 1790 and 1793 according to contextual hints that they sought in the text. It is now accepted that Blake completed all twenty-seven of the plates in the book in 1790, printing most of the extant copies that survive in that year, although he produced three more in the mid-1790s and another two richly illuminated versions in 1818 and 1827.

The Evolution of The Marriage

In the course of bibliographical work over the past two decades to establish the actual date of publication of The Marriage, Joseph Viscomi in particular has drawn attention to the unusual convoluted, even history of its printing. Eaves, Essick and Viscomi observe in their introduction to The Early Illuminated Books that there are clear indications that the Marriage was not begun and finished overnight, including different shaped letters (particularly lower-case gs with serifs on the left, right or missing) and text that is in upright roman script in some places but slanted italics elsewhere. They conclude, however, that the best evidence suggests that the twenty-seven plates of the Marriage took him months rather than years. (Eaves, Essick, Viscomi 114) In three essays published in the late 1990s, Viscomi traced the evolution of The Marriages publication, drawing on some of the observations that first appeared in Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), where he had argued that it was probably printed shortly before he began etching plates for C. G. Salzmans Elements of Morality in October 1790 (Viscomi 1993 259). In the first of his three related essays, Viscomi proposed that The Marriage had developed through four to six distinct printing sessions, suggesting that Blake did not have a completed manuscript before he began work (Viscomi 1997 58-9). The subsequent essays draw upon this technical insight to make observations about how plates 21-4 were intended as a separate pamphlet (1998) and the connections between references to printmaking in the text and Swedenborg
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The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

(1999). At this point, it is the first essay on the evolution of the printing process that is most relevant. By measuring impressions on copies of The Marriage, Viscomi established that plates 21-4 had been cut from the same piece of copper and were probably produced as a separate pamphlet before work began on the rest of the book. Indeed, one early copy of The Marriage, Copy K, consists only of these four plates which begin with the line I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise and conclude with I have also: The Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no. (E42-3) Through his meticulous reconstruction of the plates, Viscomi is able to propose that Blake used seven plates to print the entire Marriage, cutting larger sheets of copper to make the smaller pages of his book. He is also able to suggest a chronology for the sequence in which The Marriage was composed, some parts of this chronology (such as the original, anti-Swedenborgian pamphlet) being more firmly established than others. As such, Viscomis argument is that Blake composed his book in the following order of plates: 21-4, 12-13, 1-3, 5-6, 11, 6-10, 14, 15, 16-20, 25-7 (1997 48). That Blake then chose to rearrange his plates into the order in which we typically read them now (plates 1-27), extending what began as a pamphlet into a much more ambitious literary work, has important consequences for the fragmentary nature of this remarkable book. Blake appears to have changed his mind about publishing an independent pamphlet and/or a series of individual pamphlets to constitute a Bible of Hell deciding instead to publish a group of interrelated variations on a set of themes, nearly all of which are raised in some form or another in the original pamphlet. (Viscomi 1997 60)

The form of The Marriage

Viscomis careful and technically intricate set of essays offers a compelling insight into the development of Blakes ideas, how the disjointed and apparently arbitrary nature of The Marriage emerged from a series of interrelated pamphlets. Nonetheless, while this explains how the book came to be printed in the form in which it comes down to us, as Viscomi himself observes it does not explain the very strong reactions which readers have had when reading this very strange text. Aside from occasional notices of sale, there was little in the way of response to The Marriage in Blakes lifetime, and if his original intention of provoking a reaction among Swedenborgians met with any success there is no record of this. Of his later acquaintances such as John Linnell and Samuel Palmer who read the book, they left few comments and the reason why may be gathered
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The Form & Style of The Marriage

from a letter which Palmer sent to Anne Gilchrist in 1862, in which he recommends she censor the text: I think the whole page at the top of which I have made a cross in red chalk would at once exclude the work from every drawing-room table in England. Blake has said the same kind of thing to me; in fact almost everything contained in the book; and I can understand it in relation to my memory of the whole man, in a way quite different to that roaring lion the press, or that red lion the British Public. (Cited in Bentley 431) Anne did, in the end, allow substantial portions of The Marriage to be published in her husbands Life of William Blake although with very little in the way of critical commentary, remarking instead that the student of Blake will find in Mr Swinburnes William Blake, A Critical Essay, all the light that can be thrown by the vivid imagination and subtle insight of a poet on this as on the later mystic or Prophetic Books. (Gilchrist 68) Swinburne himself declared The Marriage the greatest of all his [Blakes] books: a work indeed which we rank as about the greatest produced by the eighteenth century in the line of high poetry and spiritual speculation (Swinburne 204) and, in contrast to the majority of nineteenth-century commentators, saw the variety and audacity of its paradoxes, heresies and eccentricities as examples of Blakes writing at its most profound. The content alone was not all that caused early critics apart from Swinburne to falter in their assessment of The Marriage. As the editors of the Blake Archive observe, Blakes heterodox perspectives further disorient readers through a radical combination of genres poetry, prose, cultural history and Menippean satire. This latter form, which began to be applied to The Marriage by Blake scholars in the 1990s, originated in the now lost works of Menippus, a Greek Cynic and satirist who lived in the third century BC and whose texts influenced classical writers such as Varro and Lucan (and whose influence on Blake Leslie Tannenbaum noted in the 1970s). Menippean satire combined different genres and styles of writing as well as rapidly shifting viewpoints, a miscellany or medley of positions and situations that can be observed in such writers as Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll. In philosophy, Menippean satire is a method for analyzing propositions, clearing off conceptual confusion, and discrediting intellectual mythology. (Kaplan 21) Dustin Griffin remarks, with some justice, that although Blakeans have seen the Marriage as prophetic satire, they have by and large done little more than label it a Menippean satire. (Griffin 57) Part of the reason for this is
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The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

due to the revision of our understanding of The Marriages evolution in the light of Viscomis careful bibliographical work: Blake did not set out to write a miscellany; rather one emerged during the rather complex schedule of etching different plates. Nonetheless, if he did not intend to produce a Menippean satire Blake appeared happy enough with the final disjointed form of his book. The startling variations that occur from plate to plate, or section to section, serve as intellectual shocks to the reader that prevent him or her from settling too comfortably in the precincts of hell or the fields of heaven.

Proverbs and Fancies

Despite the incongruities in the production and form of The Marriage, it must also be recognised that as well as strong thematic consistencies running throughout the entire text there are also repeated formal motifs that provide some coherence to the structure of the book. For Martin Nurmi, the book developed according to no traditional logic or plan (Nurmi 51) and yet, as John Howard suggests, Blakes infernal philosophy emerges from what is superficially a disjointed collection of heterodox thoughts and fanciful experiences, and that the work has a unity, though it escapes the reader at first (Howard 61). This formal unity is most evident in the series of Memorable Fancies. These comprise the greater part of The Marriage and while the situation and perspective of each one can be radically different (whether dining with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, for example, or witnessing an angel and devil conversing over the true nature of Jesus), after only a few encounters the sudden punctuations of each of these fantasies leads the reader to expect tumult and disorder. This anticipation of anarchy itself provides an unusual form of coherence, an act of imaginative reading whereby we are expected to make intellectual leaps between each scene in a form befitting Menippean satire. The first of the Memorable Fancies offers a short prologue to the section of The Marriage that has become the most famous: As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity. I collected some of their Proverbs: thinking that as The sayings used in a nation, mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell, shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments. When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world. 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 percieved by the minds of men,
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The Form & Style of The Marriage

& read by them on earth. How do you know but evry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, closd by your senses five? (E35) Many of the individual proverbs that follow, such as The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom or Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion, have become memorable in their own right, detached from the immediate contexts of the work in which they first appeared. These maxims obviously have their roots in biblical proverbs such as those found in Ecclesiastes, but whereas the general tenor of the older sayings is conservative in character that of those in The Marriage is deliberately provocative and disturbing. Probably only the aphorisms of Nietzsche approach Blakes for boldness, but in their economy, vividness and sustained wit Blakes proverbs are without peer in the literature of any language. The Memorable Fancy that precedes the Proverbs of Hell also indicates the important transformation of perception that Blake expected to accompany the act of reading: as another famous adage expresses it pithily, If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. Thus, according to traditional theories of experience espoused by Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke, perception was largely a passive affair in which the external world illuminated the closed cave of human senses. Blake, however, unfolds the cave, opens up the abyss so that the bird becomes an immense world when understood by the imagination. Rather than the operation of transcendant reason organising passive sense impressions, active imagination proceeds from the desires of the body. Such an understanding is indicated in the following Memorable Fancy in which the narrator sits down to dinner with Isaiah and Ezekiel: I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert. that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition. Isaiah answerd. I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discoverd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded. & remain confirmd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote. Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied. All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing. (E38-9)
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The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

As such, the form and structure of The Marriage is designed to compel this perception of the infinite in everything, the firm perswasion that it is imagination that shapes the world rather than vice versa, a conscious reformation that, as Gross remarks, is a vital, libidinous and necessary response to the grinding development of political systems of his day (Gross 176). Blakes point is polemical and contentious deliberately so but the important point here is that by refusing the conventions of an orderly narrative, the support of rational, organised, and also restricted thought, the book brings reason to the the abyss of senses so that by falling into the precipice of rational thought it will be forced to take flight, for No bird soars too high. if he soars with his own wings. (E36)

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Swedenborg & The Marriage

Chapter 3: Swedenborg & The Marriage

or new readers of The Marriage, the various allusions within the text to Emanuel Swedenborg are usually somewhat opaque and disconcerting. Although Swedenborgs writings were popular and widely known in the late eighteenth century, they became unfashionable and esoteric during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It would not be unfair to comment that most people who have heard of Swedenborg today have done so because of what Blake writes in The Marriage in particular.

Emmanuel Swedenborg

Swedenborg was a remarkable figure in eighteenth century Europe, a man of the Enlightenment and science who also gave rise to a form of mysticism that appealed to many of his contemporaries. Born Emanuel Swedberg at Stockholm, Sweden, in 1688, his father, Jesper Swedberg, was an eminent churchman and later Bishop of Skara. Jespers pietist beliefs, particularly on the importance of communication with God rather than through faith alone, as well as the presence of angels and spirits in everyday life, were to have an important effect on his son. After completing university at Uppsala in 1709, Swedenborg travelled through Western Europe before coming to London where he stayed for four years before returning to Sweden in 1715 to work on scientific and engineering projects. Swedenborg worked as an assessor for the Swedish Board of Mines and published scientific discoveries in his periodical, Daedalus Hyperboreus (The Northern Daedalus). For these, and other services, he was ennobled in 1718 (whereupon the family name was changed from Swedberg to Swedenborg), and in 1724 he was offered the chair of mathematics at Uppsala, a post that he declined. During the 1730s, Swedenborg turned to religious and philosophical subjects, publishing a series of works that attempted to demonstrate how matter related to spirit and the finite to the infinite, such as De Infinito (On the Infinite). Requesting permission to travel abroad in 1743 to gather source materials for a book on the animal kingdom, he began to experience strange dreams on his journeys and recorded them in a journal, some of those dreams forming
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the basis of his later visionary works. By 1744, he was convinced that he had to abandon his scientific studies and devote himself to understanding God, publishing The Worship and Love of God in London in 1745. Two years later, he resigned his post at the Board of Mines and devoted himself to biblical studies for ten years, publishing the final volume of his great work, Arcana Clestia (Heavenly Secrets) in 1756. Until his death in 1772, Swedenborg travelled between Stockholm, London and Holland, writing a number of theological works that expounded his new theological system. In The Last Judgment in Retrospect, he claimed that the Last Judgement had begun in 1757 (the year of Blakes birth) and that it had been a spiritual judgement, God having seen that the churches had lost their true purpose. His last book, Vera Christiana Religio (The True Christian Religion), was completed in 1770, the year after which he suffered a stroke during a visit to London and was buried at the Swedish church in Shadwell. One of his earliest biographers, the Swedenborgian James John Garth Wilkinson (editor of the 1839 edition of Blakes Songs of Innocence and of Experience), observed of this and other works that Swedenborgs philosophy attains its summit in the marriage of scholasticism and common sense, with the sciences, of his age; in the consummation of which marriage his especial genius was exerted and exhausted. (Wilkinson 67)

The Swedenborgian Church

Swedenborgs declaration that the traditional church had lost its way inspired some to use his voluminous writings as the foundation for a new church, helped in part by the philosophers extensive travels and capacity for befriending many and varied individuals. In an entry in his Spiritual Diary for August 27, 1748, Swedenborg had declared that he would have five sorts of readers: the first type would be those who would reject his writings entirely, the second who would take interest in them as curiosities, the third who would accept them intellectually but not be influenced by his ideas, the fourth who would change some of their behaviour in accordance with his teachings, and the fifth who would receive them with joy, and reduce them to practice (cited in Trobridge 90). Certainly some, such as the Bishop of Gothenberg, rejected Swedenborgianism (as it was to become) outright, but others such as the early followers C. F. Nordenskld and Thomas Hartley considered Swedenborgs system the right and proper spiritual path to follow. During his lifetime, however, he made few converts, in part because of his unwillingness to proselytise, and where he did attract followers this was not without difficulties: among his most prominent Swedish disciples, Gabriel
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Swedenborg & The Marriage

Beyer and Johan Rosn, professors at Gothenberg University, were persecuted after accepting his doctrines in the 1760s. Throughout the 1770s and 1780s, however, his influence gradually spread throughout Europe, although it was in England that he found most acceptance and made most disciples (Trobridge 94). John Clowes, Rector of St Johns, Manchester, translated Swedenborgs works into English and by the 1780s a small group of enthusiasts, including William Cookworthy and William Spence, ensured that his works received a wider audience. Because of their isolation, Swedenborgs followers formed societies to share their knowledge and principles. Nordenskld established the ExegeticPhilanthropic Society in Sweden after Swedenborgs death (although this was broken up in 1789), and in London Robert Hindmarsh invited sympathetic readers to form a Theosophical Society in the mid 1780s. This society included a number of Blakes friends and fellow engravers among its number, such as John Flaxman and William Sharp, and by the end of the decade some members of this group went on to form the New Church, or New Jerusalem Church. Although small in terms of membership, Swedenborgianism continued to spread throughout the English speaking world in the nineteenth century, aided by Clowess establishment of the Swedenborg Society in 1810 to propagate his ideas and works, and in America by the work of the missionary John Chapman, more popularly known as Johnny Appleseed.

Blake and Swedenborg

Blake began reading Swedenborgs works in the 1780s, including Heaven and Hell (1784) and Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1788). As such, he would have probably received a general invitation sent out in December 1788 to sympathetic readers inviting them to a conference, the purpose of which was to establish a new church based on Swedenborgs teachings. At the meeting in a public house on 13 April, 1789, the Blakes were asked to sign the following paper: We whose Names are hereunto subscribed, do each of us approve of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, believing that the Doctrines contained therein are genuine Truths, revealed from Heaven, and that the New Jerusalem Church ought to be established, distinct and separate from the Old Church. (Cited in Bentley 50) A manifesto of 32 resolutions, including the rejection of the notion of the Trinity and a separation from the Old Church, was accepted unanimously, and Bentley suggests that although Blake must have agreed to these resolutions at the time his attitude quickly became ambiguous, then openly hostile.
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He never attended the New Church itself, and within a year he was satirising Swedenborgianism. Yet The Marriage itself, while Blakes most sustained commentary on Swedenborgs teaching, is not his final word on the subject. In Milton a Poem, he describes Swedenborg as strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches! (23.50, E117), while in the 1809 solo exhibition he cited the Swedish mystic favourably as inspiration for one of his paintings, The spiritual Preceptor, an experiment Picture. As such, although Blake quickly came to recognise in Swedenborgianism a return to the doctrinal bondage of the Old Church under a new name, he seems to have held at least some of Swedenborgs ideas in higher regard for much of his life. Furthermore, as David Worrall has pointed out, the initial conference attended by Blake brought him into contact with radical figures who were to work with the Swedenborgian Carl Bernhard Wadstrm on his project to establish a new colony in Sierra Leone. For Worrall, the colonial aspects of this project, particularly with regard to certain applications of conjugal relationships, were an important influence on The Book of Thel, and Thels rejection of her co-option into such a community is implicitly, a rejection of the entire colonization project (17). Yet even though Blake was critical of Wadstrms conjugal empire of concubinage, where women were expected to engage in sexual consummation but were denied a franchise, his participation in the New Jerusalem Church conference meant that he met with activists engaged against the slave trade. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell offers Blakes most extensive commentary on Swedenborgianism, written shortly after he had joined the New Jerusalem Church. As we have already seen, Viscomi (1997) argues that plates 21-4 of The Marriage were originally composed as a separate pamphlet aimed at the New Church before it developed into a much more ambitious project: 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: Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho it is only the Contents or Index of already publishd books A man carried a monkey about for a shew, & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and concievd himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shews the folly of churches& exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious. & himself the single One on earth that ever broke a net. Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth:
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Swedenborg & The Marriage

Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods. And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro his conceited notions. Thus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further. Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborgs. and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number. But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine. (Plates 21-2, E42-3) Although this extended passage is scathing in its condemnation of Swedenborg, particularly in denying any originality to a vision that fails to break the old boundaries of the religious, Viscomi in another essay (1999) shows that Blake was still working through many Swedenborgian principles - such as attitudes to anti-clericalism and the role of revelation - more sympathetically than may first appear. According to Robert Rix, the general appeal of Swedenborg at the end of the eighteenth century was his apparent ability to explain occult material scientifically, which was quickly formed by some of his followers into a social gospel combining radical Christianity and politics (Rix 47). While Blake soon took issue with Swedenborgs analytical approach, as well as finding that elements of the Christianity and politics of him and his followers were not radical enough, it is important to note, as Rix observes, that he adapted as well as attacked Swedenborgianism.

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Chapter 4: Without Contraries is No Progression

uring the 1790s, the Enlightenment critique of religion was to advance rapidly into outright hostility. Critical ideas that had been the preserve of an elite of educated philosophers or the rich echelons of society were taken up in very different forms by a wider section of society.

The Bible of Hell

As has been noted, a considerable amount of The Marriage echoes some of the classical Enlightenment critique of religion that could be discovered in Hume, Voltaire and Bayle. For example, in his The Natural History of Religion (1757), David Hume offered the following account of the origins of polytheism that appears to share some similarities with Blakes version of the beginnings of religion which we have already encountered in chapter 1: if, leaving the works of nature, we trace the footsteps of invisible power in the various and contrary events of human life, we are necessarily led into polytheism and to the acknowledgement of several limited and imperfect deities. Storms and tempests ruin what is nourished by the sun. The sun destroys what is fostered by the moisture of dews and rains. War may be favourable to a nation, whom the inclemency of the seasons afflicts with famine. Sickness and famine may depopulate a kingdom, amidst the most profuse plenty In short, the conduct of events, or what we call the plan of a particular providence, is so full of variety and uncertainty, that, if we suppose it immediately ordered by any intelligent beings, we must acknowledge a contrariety in their designs and intentions, a constant combat of opposite powers, and a repentance or change of intention in the same power, from impotence or levity. Each nation has its titular deity. Each element is subject to its invisible power or agent. The province of each god is separate from that of another. (Hume 6) The resemblances between Humes and Blakes texts are that both look for the human rather than superhuman origins of religion (at least explicitly in
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polytheism), and Humes combative vision of the natural world appears to share features with Blakes universe of contraries. The differences, however, are more profound: for Hume, the beginnings of religion are fear, war, famine and privation faced with uncontrollable nature mankind takes refuge in the whims and caprices of human projections, a position that was espoused as one of the three principles of history by Giambattista Vico in his Scienza Nuova (New Science 1725). While Blake does not spell out the motivating desire that leads to religion in plate 11 of The Marriage, by placing its origins in the words of poets immediately he conveys a very different source for religious sentiment than fear, for it is priests not poets who choose systems of worship from poetic tales (E38) and so corrupt the original impulse. Likewise, the contrarian nature of Blakes angels and devils is not that of domination and extermination through war, the subordination of one opposite to another, but argument and intellectual fight whereby angels may become devils (and, presumably, though it must be admitted Blake offers no concrete examples of this in The Marriage, devils transform into angels). While Blake, like the philosophes, has no truck with conventional organised religion, he does not strike camp with the philosophers. In his first experiments in illuminated printing, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion, he had critiqued the use of reason as sufficient to explain religion, choosing instead imagination as its source: Conclusion, If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character. the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again. (E3) To depend on reason alone, as Hume and others had done, is to submit to the dull round in which mankind must ultimately acquiesce to a Deism in which the original creator (or creators) is resigned to rule according to either the iron laws of necessitarianism or fear. While Blake maintained this position throughout his life, he could, however, understand the significance of contemporary attacks on superstition and priestcraft. In his annotations to Robert Watson, Bishop of Landaff s An Apology for the Bible (1797), written in response to Paines The Age of Reason (1794-5), Blake observes that It is an easy matter for a Bishop to triumph over Paines attack but it is not so easy for one who loves the Bible (E611), indicating that while Paines Deism troubled him greatly he also recognised the need for such revolutionary attacks on organised religion. Blake was to decide that, according to E. P. Thompson, Paine had not understood the Everlasting Gospel but was correct in his assault on moral law (Thompson 60), but his radical sympathies with Paine are indicated by an observation near the beginning of his copy of An Apology for the Bible: I have been commanded from Hell not to print this as it is what our Enemies wish
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(E611). What is more radical than Paine, and which continues to make The Marriage such a remarkable text, is that not only does not Blake remark himself as aware of being of the devils party but recruits the fount of Christianity to the same cause: Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire. who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud. and the Devil utterd these words. The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius. and loving the greatest men best, those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God. The Angel hearing this became almost blue but mastering himself he grew yellow, & at last white pink & smiling, and then replied, Thou Idolater, is not God One? & is not he visible in Jesus Christ? and has not Jesus Christ given his sanction to the law of ten commandments and are not all other men fools, sinners, & nothings? The Devil answerd; bray a fool in a morter with wheat. yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him: if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murderd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he prayd for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules. When he had so spoken: I beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire & he was consumed and arose as Elijah. Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense which the world shall have if they behave well (E43-4) As philosophers and priests looked for the origins of religion in fear and reason, Blakes source was very different Jesus Christ was the greatest man because he acted from impulse: not from rules. In his later works, particularly Milton and Jerusalem, Blake linked deistic Natural Religion and pious Moral Law as twin pillars of repression, the gods of this world as it were; as Christ opposes such worldly deities which comprise our mind-forgd manacles, then the only
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option for both Blake (and Christ) to ally with the devil and produce the Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no (E44).

Of the Devils party

While much of The Marriage was written as a counter-argument to Swedenborg, for the majority of readers it is Blakes argument with Milton that has proved to be more stimulating and controversial, taking on as he does one of the greatest poets in the English canon. On Plates 5 and 6, Blake provides a summary of his response to Paradise Lost which has become one of the most famous readings ever to have been made of the poem, even more remarkably so considering its brevity: Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restraind it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is calld Messiah. And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan and his children are calld Sin & Death But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is calld Satan. For this history has been adopted by both parties It indeed appeard to Reason as if Desire was cast out. but the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he, who dwells in flaming fire. Know that after Christs death, he became Jehovah. But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum! Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it (E34-5) Here Paradise Lost provides a specific textual example of the more philosophical statement that precedes it: as the narrator has inverted the relationship between energy and reason to explain the error of biblical codes, so this diabolical
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reader (the section is titled The voice of the Devil) now performs a similar reversal of the typically reception of Miltons account of the war in heaven, ascribing the role of heroic messiah to Satan and concluding with his famous assertion that Milton was of the Devils party without knowing it. Readings of Milton by the Romantics generally, and Blake in particular, have been well-discussed, providing for Blake a role model for the sublime and religious verse (see, for example, Newlyn, Wittreich and Dunbar). At the time of writing The Marriage, it is not necessarily the case that Blakes knowledge of Milton extended much further than Paradise Lost, although he draws on images from the ode On the Morning of Christs Nativity in Europe A Prophecy. A more extensive demonstration of his knowledge, however, is clear after 1800, not only in his composition of Milton a Poem but also the series of illustrations to Miltons works undertaken for a number of clients and covering a very wide range. In this he was almost certainly stimulated by William Hayley who was working on completing Cowpers edition of Milton while Blake was at Felpham (having written a Life of Milton in the early 1790s). Of these illustrated works, Dunbar remarks that they show how Blakes relationship with Milton never became a slavish, one-sided affair but was instead a lively, stimulating, intimate, intense, and provocative kinship of mind and spirit (Dunbar 1). It is important to note that Blakes comments on Milton in The Marriage do not represent his whole opinion of the poet, which indicated much greater complexity in the nineteenth century. Not that he necessarily became less critical of the epic poet: if, as Lucy Newlyn points out, Milton is more important in Blakes works after the return from Felpham then his concerns have also deepened, for he saw that the classicist had won out over the Hebrew prophet (Newlyn 260), impairing Miltons poetic craft and corrupting it to the services of war. While being aware, then, that Blakes response to Milton is much more complex than the few lines from The Marriage cited previously would indicate, there is a pugnacious attitude that runs through all his references to the poet. Although being much more receptive to Miltons revolutionary credentials than many writers of the eighteenth century, Blake has little time for the hagiography that had attended the epic creator of Paradise Lost. The irony of the rebuke to one who could only write at liberty when writing of the devils party should not be forgotten (after all, this is not Blakes voice, but that of the devil); it is also quite clear from Milton a Poem that Blake does not regard Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost. However, the remark in The Marriage draws attention to the unconscious energies of Miltons work and seems especially perceptive insofar as it draws attention to the repressed features of the poets life: the pamphleteer of political liberty could also serve a republican dictatorship, the theological
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freethinker ended with a vision of God as predestinarian tyrant, and the biblical prophet was seduced by the possibilities of neoclassical militarism.

The Song of Liberty

Ultimately, Blake does not simply invert the marriage of heaven and hell simply to place Satan in the role of Messiah. The whole of The Marriage is a satirical rebuke to Miltons pomposity and autocracy that deploys a playful energy to indulge the unconscious desires that Milton dares not indulge and so ironically renders more dangerous in their repressed perversity: He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence, as one of the Proverbs of Hell has it. It is this sense of play that remains with the reader long after the conundrums of Swedenborgianism, or the subtleties of arguments with Milton have been settled. The ideas of The Marriage are astonishing, and Swinburne was surely right to number this book among the most profound produced in English literature, but those ideas ferment and proliferate because presented the boldest, liveliest and most vivacious style possible. Blake ends his satire with A Song of Liberty, heralding in his prophetic voice the power of revolutionary forces unleashed in France, searching for the day when Empire is no more! Although that declaration was premature, the line with which The Marriage concludes demonstrates just how far his vision was able to see beyond what would become factional power struggles within the French National Assembly and between the nations of Europe: Everything that lives is Holy (E45).

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Selected Reading

Bentley, Jr, G. E. Blake Records. Second edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Bloom, Harold. Dialectic in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, PMLA, 73.5 (1958): 501-4. Cronin, Richard. The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth. London: Macmillan, 2000. Damon, S. Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. London: Houghton Mifflin, 1924. Dunbar, Pamela. William Blakes Illustrations to the Poetry of Milton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Eaves, Morris, Essick, Robert N., and Viscomi, Joseph. The Early Illuminated Books. London: The William Blake Trust/The Tate Gallery, 1993. Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. Third edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Essick, Robert N. William Blake, Thomas Paine, and Biblical Revolution. Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 189-212. Ferber, Michael. The Poetry of William Blake. London: Penguin, 1991. Griffin, Dustin H. Satire: A Critical Introduction. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994. Gross, David. Infinite Indignation: Teaching, Dialectical Vision, and Blakes Marriage of Heaven and Hell, College English, 48.2 (1986), 175-86. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blakes Lambeth Prophecies. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. Hume, David. The Natural History of Religion. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004. Kaplan, Carter. Critical Synoptics: Menippean Satire and the Analysis of Intellectual Mythology. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2000. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Newlyn, Lucy. Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Nurmi, Martin K. Blakes Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Reprinted. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1982.
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Rix, Robert. William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity. Farnham: Ashgate, 2007. Schock, Peter A. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Blakes Myth of Satan and Its Cultural Matrix, ELH 60.2 (1993): 441-70. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Blakes News From Hell: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the Lucianic Tradition, ELH 43.1 (1976): 74-99. Thompson, E. P. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Trobridge, George. Emanuel Swedenborg: His Life, Teachings and Influence. London: Frederick Warne & Company, 1907. Viscomi, Joseph. The Evolution of William Blakes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Huntingdon Library Quarterly 58 (1997). Viscomi, Joseph. In the Caves of Heaven and Hell: Swedenborg and Printmaking in Blakes Marriage. In Steve Clark and David Worrall (eds.) Blake in the Nineties. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999: 27-60. Viscomi, Joseph. The Evolution of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Essick, Robert N. (ed.) William Blake: Images and Texts. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1997: 5-68. Viscomi, Joseph. Lessons of Swedenborg; or, the Origin of Blakes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Robert Gleckner and Thomas Pfau (eds.) Lessons in Romanticism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998: 173-212. Wilkinson, James John Garth. Emanuel Swedenborg: A Biography. Reprinted. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2008. Wittreich, Jr., Joseph Anthony. Angel of Apocalypse: Blakes Idea of Milton. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1975. Worrall, David. Thel in Africa: William Blake and the Post-colonial, Post-Swedenborgian Female Subject. In Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki (eds.) The Reception of Blake in the Orient. London and New York: Continuum, 2006: 17-28.

he Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of the strangest and most remarkable books ever to have been written. Although little noticed during Blakes lifetime, it has gone onto become one of the most important of his works for later writers and artists. This book explores the origins and contexts of The Marriage and Blakes extraordinary original ideas on religion, politics and philosophy. Jason Whittaker is Professor of English and Media Arts at University College Falmouth, and the author and editor of a number of books and articles on Blake, including William Blake and the Myths of Britain (Macmillan 1999), Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827 (with Shirley Dent, Palgrave 2002), and Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture (with Steve Clark, Palgrave 2007).

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