PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,

SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

William Blake’s
Visions
Art, Hallucinations, Synaesthesia

David Worrall
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK

Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

Jessica Howell
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting, prize-­
winning series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplin-
ary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and
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Editorial board:
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 David Worrall

William Blake’s
Visions
Art, Hallucinations, Synaesthesia
David Worrall
Nottingham Trent University
Nottingham, UK

ISSN 2634-6435     ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-031-53253-5    ISBN 978-3-031-53254-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2

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 Finding Blake’s Artwork

The William Blake Archive: All of Blake’s illuminated books (usually in

examples of variant copies), and many manuscripts, paintings and draw-
ings, are available at www.blakearchive.org.

v
 Accessing the Secondary Sources

Apart from a few student textbooks, research publication in the areas of

hallucinations and synaesthesia usually occurs in the form of journal arti-
cles. You will almost certainly need an institutional login to access them.
The best point of entry is ScienceDirect which should be used in conjunc-
tion with PubMed and Scopus, platforms which also aggregate cognate
research.

vii
 Preface

Talking to Blake’s early biographer J.T. Smith in 1859 about ‘the nature
of Blakes visions,’ the painter Samuel Palmer told him he ‘thought they
were seen as real objects by his outward eyes and as such painted.’
However, by 1859 ‘Blakes visions’ were already associated with madness.
The aspersion of insanity started early. As Keri Davies discovered, after
noting that some of Blake’s illuminated books were available in Joseph
Johnson’s fashionable left-wing bookshop in 1794, the bibliophile Richard
Twiss wrote ‘I suppose the man to be mad; but he draws very well.’
Nothing much has changed. Reviewing the Blake exhibition at Tate
Britain in November 2019, a journalist from Britain’s left-leaning, cultur-
ally progressive Observer, national Sunday newspaper, managed to make
an extraordinary leap between ‘the almost exquisitely bewildering mad-
ness of Brexit’ and ‘the strong element of madness present in almost all of
Blake’s works.’
My original research question was simply to ask whether Blake’s
‘visions’ had a traceable perceptual phenomenology? The answer is, yes. By
using archives of journal articles, such as those from ScienceDirect, it is
possible to match the descriptions and appearances of Blake’s ‘visions’ to
the kinds of neurophysiological conditions which could have given rise to
the patterns of hallucination evidenced in his art, writing and poetics. In
December 1825, Henry Crabb Robinson, another journalist, but one
who had just interviewed Blake at his home in Fountain Court, reported
that, ‘Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early
infancy—He thinks all men partake of it—but it is lost by not being cul-
tivd.’ Blake claimed he had a ‘faculty of Vision,’ not a unique gift or power.

ix
x PREFACE

‘He thinks all men partake of it.’ That is, his ‘faculty of Vision’ had some
degree of prevalence across the population. He even identified that it had
an early onset, in ‘infancy.’ That is already a lot to go on. I simply carried
on from there.
Fifty years ago, when I was 23, David V. Erdman accepted for publica-
tion my essay on Blake and Erasmus Darwin. It looks like I’ve returned to
my first interests. Shortly afterwards, G.E. Bentley Jr., courteously inquired
(by airmail) whether there was anything else I had written on Blake which,
perhaps, he had missed? Some chance. I was amazed that they immediately
treated me as if I was an equal. We all owe a huge debt to their industry
and example.
For many acts of kindness and consideration over many years, I would
like to thank Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, Morton D. Paley and Joseph
Viscomi. I have always listened very carefully to Keri Davies, Steve Clark,
Jon Mee, Mei-Ying Sung, Sibylle Erle, Minne Tanaka, Jason Whittaker,
Angus Whitehead, Helen Bruder, Susan Mathews and Nancy Cho. At cru-
cial stages, Dominic H. ffytche read an early draft of part of the book, Tim
Heath gave me a platform at the Blake Society, Martin Myrone listened to
me very politely and Peter Otto invited me to give a paper at the University
of Melbourne. None of the above should be mistaken for a chorus of
approval, but while writing this book, I often heard their imaginary voices
in my ears and have attempted to anticipate their likely objections. All
errors and mistakes, however, are entirely my own. A different version of
Chap. 4 was published as ‘“Seen in my visions:” Kluver Form-Constant
Visual Hallucinations in William Blake’s Paintings and Illuminated Books,’
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 55:4 (2022).
To Sharon Ruston, one of the editors of this marvellous series, thanks
for not forgetting me.
My wife, the playwright and actress Georgina Lock, is an endless source
of fun and inspiration.

Snape, Suffolk, UK David Worrall

 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 The Physiology of Blake’s Hallucinations 35

3 Perceiving More than Perception 59

4 Klüver Form-constants 99

5 The Induction of Klüver Visual Hallucinations145

6 Blake’s Synaesthesia173

7 Blake’s Synaesthesia, The Visionary Heads193

8 Blake’s Synaesthesia: The Testimony of Crabb Robinson221

9 Discussion and Conclusion237

Index251

xi
 Abbreviations

BR(2) G.E. Bentley Jr., Blake Records Second Edition: Documents (1714–1841)
Concerning the Life of William Blake (1757–1827) and his Family,
Incorporating Blake Records (1969), Blake Records Supplement
(1988) and Extensive Discoveries since 1988 (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2004)
Butlin Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) 2 vols.
E The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Newly Revised Edition
(ed.) David V. Erdman, Commentary by Harold Bloom (New York:
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982). A free online copy of E is available at
The William Blake Archive (below).

xiii
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 The four Klüver form-constants 8

Fig. 4.1 William Blake, An Allegory of the Bible, c.1780–1785,
graphite, ink and watercolour on paper, Tate Britain 105
Fig. 4.2 William Blake, Jacob’s Ladder, or Jacob’s Dream c.1799–1807,
pen, grey ink and watercolour on paper, British Museum 110
Fig. 4.3 William Blake, The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church
c.1793, ink, watercolour and gouache on paper, Tate Britain 115
Fig. 7.1 John Linnell, William Blake in conversation with John Varley,
c.1821–26, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 202

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The aim of this book is to identify the underlying physiologies of what the
British poet, painter and printmaker William Blake (1757–1827), called
his ‘visions.’1 In doing so, I have taken the apparently novel step of assum-
ing that when he wrote that the paintings shown in his small exhibition off
Oxford Street in 1809 were derived from things ‘seen in my visions,’ he
meant it (E 531).2 It is now possible to demonstrate that the perceptual
phenomenology of his ‘visions’ are capable of being identified and assigned
with a physiological basis.3
Throughout his life, he was happy to repeat his claims about ‘my
visions’ to others but as well as visual ‘visions,’ Blake also had verbal

1
For introductions to Blake’s life and art, see Robert N. Essick, ‘Blake, William
(1757–1827),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004;
online edn, Oct 2005 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2585, accessed 21 Aug
2017]; G. E. Bentley, Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001); Robin Hamlyn, ‘William Blake at Work:
“Every thing which is in Harmony,”’ Joyce H. Townsend and Robin Hamlyn (eds.) William
Blake: The Painter at Work (London: Tate Publishing, 2003) pp. 12–39.
2
On account of the multiple modalities of Blake’s hallucinations and synaesthesia, they
may still be best covered by the portmanteau term ‘visions,’ the word he used himself.
3
For a wide-ranging review of how the term ‘phenomenology’ might be included in hal-
lucinations research, see Sam Wilkinson, Huw Green, Stephanie Hare, Joseph Houlders,
Clara Humpston & Benjamin Alderson-Day, Thinking about hallucinations: why philosophy
matters, Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 27 (2022), 219–235.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2024
D. Worrall, William Blake’s Visions, Palgrave Studies in Literature,
Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2_1
2 D. WORRALL

auditory ‘visions.’ The journalist and diarist Henry Crabb Robinson

(1775–1867) wrote in 1826 that ‘His paintings are copies of what he sees
in his Visions—his books … are dictations from the Spirits.’4 In Crabb
Robinson’s testimony, not only did he understand that Blake’s paintings
were ‘copies of … his Visions’; there was a presentation of two modalities:
visual hallucinations (‘what he sees in his Visions’) and verbal auditory hal-
lucinations (‘dictations from the Spirits’) (my italics). This double halluci-
natory modality is made clear many times in Blake’s writings, not least in
his illuminated book Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion
(1804–20), where he describes how ‘I heard and saw the Visions of Albion’
(E 180, my italics).5 William Blake’s Visions shows that, in addition to
certain types of geometric visual hallucination, his ‘visions’ were also trig-
gered by several types of synaesthesia in verbal auditory modes triggered
by graphemes. Thanks to detailed, near-verbatim, records of conversations
kept by Crabb Robinson, dated near the end of Blake’s life, it is now pos-
sible to obtain a reliable insight into his experience of synaesthesia.
It is odd that, given the degree of scrutiny Blake’s visual art and writings
have received (for example, his attitudes to empire, race, gender and class),
no one has really taken seriously his statements about the importance to
him of his ‘visions,’ even though his continual endorsement of their pres-
ence brought him great reputational damage during his lifetime. I have
found no evidence that Blake’s hallucinatory types, including his synaesthe-
sia, were symptoms of any pathological disorder, psychotic or otherwise,
with the sole exception that in childhood he may have had migraine. In the
absence of any pathological markers, I have throughout preferred to use
the term ‘conditions’ when referring to the physiological phenomenology
of his ‘visions.’ For example, a foundational distinction, particularly rele-
vant to his visual art, is that Blake experienced visual hallucinations, not
visual illusions. Visual illusions are pathological. Visual hallucinations of the
types discussed here are conditions. The demarcations between visual hal-
lucinations and visual illusions were established as early as the 1930s and

4
BR(2): 437. On Crabb Robinson, see Newey, Vincent. “Robinson, Henry Crabb
(1775–1867), diarist and journalist.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 28. Oxford
University Press. Accessed 30 Dec 2022.
5
A hypothesis of Blake’s hyperphantasia is proposed in John Higgs’, William Blake vs The
World (London: Orion Publishing Co, 2021) pp. 136–140. No footnote references are pro-
vided. Hyperphantasia, as so far conceptualized, is a newly identified condition (or dysfunc-
tion) arising from a perceptual over-abundance of visual imagery. As Blake insisted he had
verbal auditory, as well as visual ‘visions,’ it would appear to have limited application.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

have been clinically observed ever since.6 The ‘visions’ he saw in his visual
field were images produced on his retina through neural processes, usually
in the absence of external stimuli. No evidence presented here is meant to
suggest that they were the products of psychological illusion, visual delu-
sion or illusions caused by degenerative eye disease. However, to compli-
cate the issue further, he also seems to have had verbal auditory hallucinations
mainly, although not entirely, in the form of variants of synaesthesia. The
phenomenologies of Blake’s conditions are amenable to investigation. His
writings and visual art can usually be accurately dated within fairly narrow
date ranges and come accompanied by extensive documentary records (all
of which have benefitted from long-term scholarly interrogation). Added
to the testimony of his friends and followers, this establishes a personal
profile which, while it may be distinctive, is qualitatively on a par with the
subject samples or anonymized surveys of hallucinations and synaesthesia
used in modern scientific literature.7
Despite a working lifetime of ‘visions,’ although he referred to their
presence intermittently throughout his lifetime, Blake described their phe-
nomenology only infrequently, usually obliquely. The reasons for this are
that he lived before his hallucinatory conditions, or the relevance of their
phenomenology, were understood. Of course, this means he would have
lacked a suitable vocabulary capable of either self-diagnosing his own con-
ditions or being correctly diagnosed by others. This raises immediate
issues about the potential anachronism of declaring something about
Blake which he cannot have known himself. Such features fall broadly
within the discourses of paleopathology, the modern disciplinary area of
retrospective diagnoses.
There has never been a time when judgements about Blake’s mental
health have not been repeatedly expressed. Comments about his sanity
began very early. The first to be recorded, written by an anonymous
reviewer in the Daily Universal Register newspaper, was a report about
four of his drawings included in the 1785 Royal Academy exhibition
(‘some lunatic, just escaped from the incurable cell of Bedlam’).8 This was

6
Dominic H. ffytche, Visual hallucinatory syndromes: Past, present, and future, Dialogues
in Clinical Neuroscience, 9 (2007) pp. 173–189.
7
For the shortage of synaesthesia subjects in research experiments, see Mankin
JL. ‘Deepening understanding of language through synaesthesia: a call to reform and
expand.’ Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 374 (2019): 20180350; https://doi.org/10.1098/
rstb.2018.0350.
8
BR(2): p. 40.
4 D. WORRALL

the first time his work had been on public show. The reference to his being
‘incurable,’ like the allusion to his suitability for confinement in London’s
Bethlem mental hospital (colloquially known as ‘Bedlam’), is typical of the
casual pathologies circulating around him even at the start of his profes-
sional career.9 Although, as time went on, Blake’s reception amongst his
small, immediate circle of friends was generous and considerate, in the
wider public sphere he never escaped remote diagnosis accompanied by
continued, if flippant, advocacy of restraint or incarceration.
Concluding a commentary on Blake’s designs (etched by Louis
Schiavonetti) illustrating Robert Cromek’s edition of Robert Blair’s long
poem The Grave (1808), an anonymous writer in the Anti-Jacobin Review
advised that, ‘his friends would do well to restrain his wanderings by the
strait waistcoat.’10 Similarly, Robert Hunt’s hostile review in The Examiner
of Blake’s exhibition in 1809, having described him as ‘an unfortunate
lunatic,’ added for good measure that only his ‘personal inoffensiveness
secures him from confinement.’11 Even the mild-mannered essayist Charles
Lamb, who helpfully forwarded the text of ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ from
Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) for inclusion in a new volume of poetry
edited by James Montgomery, wrote to a friend in 1824 (apropos of say-
ing that he had not only mislaid his copy of the Songs but also lost track of
its author) that ‘the man is flown, whither I know not, to Hades, or a Mad
House.’12 In turn, the periodical, The Eclectic Review, publishing a notice
of Montgomery’s book, said that ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ was ‘like the
singing of a “maid in Bedlam in the spring.”’13 Blake is unlikely to have
met any of these commentators face-to-face. Remote pathological diagno-
sis followed him throughout his life and beyond.
The term for the disciplinary area of retro-diagnosis, paleopathology (from
the Greek, ‘ancient’ plus ‘suffering’), was first proposed by R.W. Shufeldt in
1892.14 It has principally been directed at analysing the pathologies impact-
ing on morbidity, including the final cause of death, with the most common
kind of material evidence being provided by skeletal remains. Examining
human skeletons including abnormalities such as tooth decay or the

9
Leonard Smith, Lunatic Hospitals in Georgian England, 1750–1830 (London: Taylor and
Francis, 2007).
10
BR(2): 274.
11
BR(2): 283.
12
BR(2): 394.
13
BR(2): 396.
14
R.W. Shufeldt, Notes on paleopathology, Popular Science Monthly (1892), pp. 679–684.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

materiality of wounds or lesions left on bones can be studied using micros-

copy, MRI or even DNA analysis. Blake might even be said to have been
present at the birth of this new discipline at a time when phrenology seemed
to hold the possibility that external skull contour could designate sensory
location. In August 1823 the 66-year-old Blake was sought out by the phre-
nologist James S. Deville (1777–1846), who made an apparently uncom-
fortably executed life-mask of him (now in the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge). According to Blake’s friend George Richmond, Deville wanted
a cast of ‘Blake’s head as representative of the imaginative faculty.’15
Phrenology, based on the erroneous assumption that external scalp mor-
phology revealed brain gyrification and, therefore, cortical sensory location,
is not a part of modern paleopathology but the taking of life-masks was an
early example of the basic proposition that the skeleton revealed functional
health.16 Blake had made brief annotations to the phrenologist Johann
Gaspar Spurzheim’s (1776–1832) Observations on the Deranged
Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity (1817) (E 662–663). Since Deville
knew Spurzheim, it is conceivable he gifted Blake a copy of the Observations
when he made the life-mask. Between them, Spurzheim and Deville created
hundreds of life- and death-masks, compiling a three-dimensional library of
phrenological features.17 Blake is unlikely to have missed the four engraved
plates in Spurzheim’s book showing grossly malformed heads and skulls.
Perhaps unexpectedly, this phrenological turn was beneficial to Blake in
permitting a move away from the pathological classification of his mental
health. Its beginnings are best indicated by the record of the artist Samuel
Palmer, who had met him by May 1824 as part of an appreciative set of
young admirers who gathered round him in late life, including John Linnell,
John Varley and Edward Calvert. Palmer was extemporizing the contempo-
rary phrenological idiom when he later told Alexander Gilchrist, Blake’s
Victorian biographer, about his appearance, the ‘great volume of brain that
square, massive head, that piled up brow, very full and rounded at the tem-
ples, where, according to phrenologists, ideality or imagination resides.’18

15
BR(2): 387.
16
O. Parker Jones, F. Alfaro-Almagro, S. Jbabdi, An empirical, 21st century evaluation of
phrenology, Cortex 106 (2018) pp. 26–35.
17
M.H. Kaufman, N. Basden, Items relating to Dr Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832)
in The Henderson Trust collection, formerly the museum collection of the Phrenological
Society of Edinburgh: With an abbreviated iconography, Journal of Neurolinguistics, 9
(1996) pp. 301–325.
18
BR(2): 390.
6 D. WORRALL

However defunct it is now, phrenology’s willingness to locate ‘ideality or

imagination’ in the skeletal physicality of the ‘square … piled up brow …
rounded at the temples’ increased the distance from designating Blake sim-
ply as a ‘lunatic’ fit only for the ‘strait waistcoat’ or ‘Mad House.’
Today, the ethical and disciplinary parameters of paleopathology and
retrospective diagnosis continue to be debated.19 The polarities of the argu-
ments are perhaps best outlined in journal articles by Andrew Cunningham
(it cannot be done, meanings of diagnostic words such as ‘cancer’ shift over
time) and Piers D. Mitchell (it can be done as long as sources are histori-
cized back to their contemporary meaning).20 Another commentator writes
that, ideally, ‘21st century paleopathology should be profoundly interdis-
ciplinary, occupying a space where the biomedical and social sciences join
the humanities.’21 Paleopathology has not been immune to changing diag-
nostic fashions. Roderick D. Buchanan gives a chastening analysis of long-
term trends in diagnosing Charles Darwin’s health, concluding that, ‘This
parade of diagnoses has a striking syndrome du jour quality, a cavalcade of
presentist conjectures projected on to the past. Most have not aged well.’22
As far as the search for pathological e­ vidence in paintings is concerned,
while it is not a concern of this book, perhaps the most comprehensive
survey to date is the examination of ailments revealed in the collection of
the Prado, Madrid. Some 2.2% of the 5490 paintings studied show some
evidence of disease in the human figures depicted, from mastectomy, right

19
Muramoto, O. Retrospective diagnosis of a famous historical figure: ontological, epis-
temic, and ethical considerations. Philos Ethics Humanit Med 9, 10 (2014). https://doi.
org/10.1186/1747-5341-9-10; Mathias Schmidt, Saskia Wilhelmy, Dominik Gross,
Retrospective diagnosis of mental illness: past and present, The Lancet Psychiatry, 7 (2020)
pp. 14–16; Anne Marie E. Snoddy, Julia Beaumont, Hallie R. Buckley, Antony Colombo,
Siân E. Halcrow, Rebecca L. Kinaston, Melandri Vlok, Sensationalism and speaking to the
public: Scientific rigour and interdisciplinary collaborations in palaeopathology, International
Journal of Paleopathology 28 (2020) pp. 88–91.
20
Cunningham, A. Identifying disease in the past: cutting the Gordian knot. Asclepio, 54
(2002), 13–34; Piers D. Mitchell, Retrospective diagnosis and the use of historical texts for
investigating disease in the past, International Journal of Paleopathology, 1, (2011) pp. 81–88.
See also Axel Karenberg & Ferdinand Peter Moog (2004) Next Emperor, Please! No End to
Retrospective Diagnostics, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 13:2, 143–149.
21
Jane E. Buikstra, Della C. Cook, Katelyn L. Bolhofner, Introduction: Scientific rigor in
paleopathology, Jane E. Buikstra (ed.), Special Issue: Special Issue: Rigor in Paleopathology:
Perspectives from across the Discipline, International Journal of Paleopathology, 19 (2017)
pp. 80–87.
22
Roderick D. Buchanan, Syndrome du jour: The historiography and moral implications
of Diagnosing Darwin, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 90 (2021)
pp. 86–101.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

round the alphabet and back to migraine.23 Paleopathology is an active

research area and, as the evidence of the analysis of the Prado’s paintings
shows, not one short of subjects for analysis. Unsurprisingly, modern health
professionals have thought it wise to codify their relationship to remote
diagnoses. The best known is probably the so-called the Goldwater Rule
(referencing USA senator, Barry Goldwater (1909–1998), a directive of
the American Psychiatric Association passed in 1973 restricting members’
public comments to patients they had personally examined.24 Within the
UK’s National Health Service (NHS), inhibitions about remotely diag-
nosing patients are fast receding. In the foundational British clinical study
of remote diagnosis published in 1975, accuracy was achieved in 80% of
cases.25 By telephone or online, NHS patients are often required to assent
to minimal interactivity with medical practitioners, agreeing to self-iden-
tify their symptoms and be remotely diagnosed and prescribed medication
without face-to-face consultation.
If the retro-diagnosis of Blake has always happened, one crucial differ-
ence with this book is that, as mentioned above, it does not present a
pathology. His ‘visions’ were the products of medical conditions which, in
every case, can be assigned with a known prevalence in modern European
and other populations. These conditions do not normally require clinical
intervention. Some of the wider social and cultural benefits of determining
more accurately Blake’s mental health are set out in the Conclusion.
One of the easiest types of Blake’s ‘visions’ to describe and identify in
his visual art is the geometric patterns known as form-constants associ-
ated with types of entoptic visual hallucination first classified in 1926 by
the experimental neuro-psychologist Heinrich Klüver (1897–1979) and
discussed in Chap. 3 (Fig. 1.1).26 Again, one needs to be wary of scientific
anachronism. Since he died before most of the independent confirmatory

23
Juan J. Grau, Inés Bartolomé, Cristina Garrido, Alex Iranzo, Medicine in the Prado
Museum, Madrid, Spain: Signs of illness, and medical procedures in the art works, Medicina
Clínica (English Edition) 159 (2022) pp. 497–504.
24
Appelbaum, Paul S. “Reflections on the Goldwater rule.” Journal of the American
Academy of Psychiatry Law 45.2 (2017): 228–232.
25
Hampton JR, Harrison MJG, Mitchell JRA, Prichard JS, Seymour C. Relative contribu-
tions of history-taking, physical examination, and laboratory investigation to diagnosis and
management of medical outpatients. British Medical Journal. 2: 5969, (1975) pp. 486–489.
26
Heinrich Klüver, ‘Mescal Visions and Eidetic Vision,’ The American Journal of Psychology
37 (1926), pp. 502–515; Frederick K.D. Nahm and Karl H. Pribram, “Heinrich Kluver.”
National Academy of Sciences. 1998. Biographical Memoirs: Volume 73. Washington, DC:
The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9650.
8 D. WORRALL

Fig. 1.1 The four Klüver form-constants

research had been published, Klüver would probably not have known that
his four form-constant patterns of visual hallucinations (spiral, lattice, cob-
web and tunnel shapes) had precise neural correlates in the Primary Visual
Cortex (V1). The work of tracing their origins back to the neural architec-
ture of V1 was not completed until the early twenty-first century, demon-
strated in two stages in key papers by Ermentrout and Cowan (1979) and
Bressloff and Cowan, et al., (2001).27 These two papers, which identify
and describe the neural correlates of Klüver’s form-constants, are

27
G. B. Ermentrout and J.D. Cowan, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Visual Hallucination
Patterns,’ Biological Cybernetics 34 (1979) pp. 137–150; Paul C. Bressloff, J.D. Cowan,
M. Golubitsky, P.J. Thomas, M. Wiener, ‘Geometric visual hallucinations, Euclidean sym-
metry and the functional architecture of striate cortex,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London, Biological Sciences B 356 (2001) pp. 299–330.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

foundational to substantial sections of this book with respect to Blake’s

visual hallucinations. Klüver’s form-constants were entoptic images vis-
ible to Blake within his normal visual field, eyes open or eyes closed, seen
by him as self-luminous images, retino-cortically mapped onto his retina
from V1. There are no other patterns associated with Klüver’s form-con-
stants although all four may appear, wholly or in part, in amalgamation
with each other. These shapes appear repeatedly in Blake’s visual art and
in the designs to the illuminated books. In other words, he was being per-
fectly accurate when he affirmed in 1799 to Dr John Trusler, a dissatisfied
patron, ‘I see Every thing I paint In This World’ (E 702).
As Bressloff and Cowan describe it in a 2003 paper, ‘Any spontaneously
generated or stimulus-evoked cortical activity pattern in V1 maps to a cor-
responding real or hallucinatory image on the retina.’28 Or, to put it
another way, the model of entoptic perception with respect to Klüver-type
visual hallucinations is that of Ermentrout-Cowan, which (as Cowan puts
it) ‘treats V1 as a cortical retina.’29 It is important to realize that while the
neural network’s messaging between V1 and the retina is connected, it
does not have a currently determinable relationship with mind or con-
sciousness although, of course, V1 is an area of the cortex and embodies a
cognitive function at least sufficient to include the perception of Klüver’s
hallucinatory patterns.30 That the eye has a cognitive role, mediated
through the V1 area of the cortex, is also a significant assumption relevant
to substantial parts of this book. As long ago as 1994, in an influential
journal article on kinetic art, Zeki and Lamb argued that visual perception
is not simply a process of the reception of stimuli but is itself a cognitive
process: ‘The first law is that an image of the visual world is not impressed
upon the retina, but assembled together in the visual cortex. Consequently,
many of the visual phenomena traditionally attributed to the eye actually
occur in the cortex.’31 There is a further, ongoing, debate about whether

28
Paul C. Bressloff and Jack D. Cowan, ‘The functional geometry of local and horizontal
connections in a model of V1,’ Journal of Physiology-Paris 97 (2003) pp. 221–236.
29
Jack D. Cowan, ‘Geometric visual hallucinations and the structure of the visual cortex,’
Daniel Collerton, Urs Peter Mosimann, Elaine Perry (eds.) The Neuroscience of Visual
Hallucinations (2014) chapter 10, pp. 217–253, cited on p. 228. https://doi.
org/10.1002/9781118892794.
30
Some evidence exists to suggest that fMRI can be used to predict subjective responses to
retinotopic patterns in V1, Yukiyasu Kamitani and Frank Tong, ‘Decoding the Visual and
Subjective Contents of the Human Brain,’ Nature Neuroscience 8.5 (2005): 679–685.
31
S. Zeki and M. Lamb, ‘The neurology of kinetic art,’ Brain 117 (1994) pp. 607–636.
10 D. WORRALL

V1 is depictive of mental imagery or whether this imagery is reliant on

further levels of semantic signal. The so-called ‘eye’s mind’ metaphor, as
outlined further below, an indirect development of Zeki and Lamb’s sum-
mary quoted above, provides a useful way of conceptualizing both the
processes of visual perception and its site within the cortex.32
The neuroscience of visual and auditory hallucinations has immense
explanatory power for understanding the nature of Blake’s ‘visions.’
Wherever one looks, he insists on the power and integrity of his ‘visions’
and their centrality to his creativity. In his poetic drama in relief-etching,
The Ghost of Abel A Revelation In the Visions of Jehovah Seen by William
Blake (1822), Blake wrote that ‘Nature has no Outline: but Imagination
has’ (E 270). The contents of Blake’s retina were sometimes filled with
luminous linear ‘Outline’ patterns. It turns out that these were, exactly as
he states, Visions … Seen by William Blake, products of largely neural pro-
cesses, cognitively endowed from a cortical origin and, therefore, also
exactly as he says, formative of ‘Imagination.’ Where his ‘visions’ derived
from the V1 area of the cortex, they were cognitive events or, as he wrote
in a letter of October 1804, examples of ‘intellectual vision’ (E 757). Or,
as he put in 1809 in A Descriptive Catalogue, the products of ‘his visionary
contemplations’ (E 542).
Of course, it is not claimed here that Blake was an artist exclusively, or
even primarily, dependent on ‘visions.’ Anyone turning over the pages of
his illustrations for Thomas Young’s Night Thoughts (1797), or his water-
colour designs illustrating the poems of Thomas Gray, or his tempera illus-
trations of scenes from the Bible commissioned by Thomas Butts, all
examples where Blake composed in series and, therefore, where it is easier
to scrutinize sets of images, will fail to uncover many examples of the
‘visions’ whose neurophysiological foundations are discussed in this book.
Paradoxically, despite his protestations, he was only an intermittent ‘vision-
ary,’ but he placed an extremely high personal value on his hallucinatory
events. It is even plausible Blake distributed, or directed, those paintings
arising from his ‘visions’ to his patrons in proportion to his estimate of the

32
A good starting point for a review of the debate, and an important contribution towards
resolving it, is, Crawford I.P. Winlove, Fraser Milton, Jake Ranson, Jon Fulford, Matthew
MacKisack, Fiona Macpherson, Adam Zeman, The neural correlates of visual imagery: A co-­
ordinate-­based meta-analysis, Cortex, 105 (2018) pp. 4–25.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

warmth of the likely reception of their ‘visionary’ origins.33 At the very

least, he must have realized that their enduring persistence across his
working lifetime allowed him to affirm a distinctiveness separating him
from his contemporaries.
As far as Blake’s auditory hallucinations are concerned, as discussed in
Chaps. 6, 7 and 8, they were often the result of specific types of grapheme
triggered synaesthesia which produced both auditory and, indirectly,
visual creative responses. Synaesthesia is not a disorder. As a neurodevel-
opmental condition, it might be considered a beneficial evolutionary out-
come for H. sapiens, even a gift. First identified in the late nineteenth
century, in the early twenty-first century it is a rapidly developing research
field. It has been argued that ‘People with synaesthesia show an enhanced
memory relative to demographically matched controls. The most obvious
explanation for this is that the “extra” perceptual experiences lead to richer
encoding and retrieval opportunities of stimuli which induce synaesthesia
(typically verbal stimuli).’34 In short, although it is not an idea particularly
pursued here, it is plausible synaesthesia gave Blake a creative advantage
not shared by his peers.
However, one still needs to pick carefully between the different physi-
ologies of his ‘visions.’ They were not all of the same type but all, to some
degree, had neural correlates. That is, they were not conditions or disor-
ders of psychological consciousness but arose from healthy neural connec-
tions across the cortex. This study has not found, for example, evidence of
schizotypy connected to his ‘visions.’ This contrasts with one of the fullest
studies of Blake’s psychological status, which declares, ‘Blake’s mythology
comes more and more to resemble the dynamic of schizophrenia.’35 The
prevalence of hallucinations amongst modern populations may be surpris-
ing. In a northern European sample of 13,057 people made between
1994 and 1997, which screened against recreational drugs, 38.7% of indi-
viduals claimed hallucinatory experiences with 6.4% having monthly hal-
lucinations and a remarkable 22.5% reporting daytime hallucinations up to

33
David Worrall, ‘Les Relations de William Blake et de Mécènes, vues sous L’Angle de la
Neurologie,’ in Le Mécènat litteraire oaux XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Anne Struve-Debeaux
(Paris: Editions Hermann, 2019) pp. 119–139.
34
Nicolas Rothen, Beat Meier, Jamie Ward, Enhanced memory ability: Insights from syn-
aesthesia, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 36 (2012) pp. 1952–1963.
35
Paul Youngquist, Madness and Blake’s Myth (University Park: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1989) p. 42.
12 D. WORRALL

once a month.36 As far as Blake’s voice hearing is concerned, depending on

wide cultural and historical variations in reporting, there is a prevalence of
between 5% and 15%, inclusive of those who also have synaesthesia.37
While his synaesthesia cannot be reliably dated before 1819 when he
was c. 62 years of age, there is evidence to suggest it may have started by
1789. This would make it coincident with works such as his illuminated
books in relief-etching, Songs of Innocence and The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, both dateable to that year. As will be argued below, Blake expe-
rienced several types of synaesthesia, probably concurrently. Such concur-
rency is not exceptional. It is even possible synaesthesia confers increased
visual intensity. As one study puts it, ‘simply having a great deal of synaes-
thesia appears to enhance [visual] imagery across multiple domains.’38
Unlike some of his other hallucinatory types, it is not claimed here that the
visual imagery of Blake’s paintings were based on representing his synaes-
thesia but, rather, that it informed his creativity. The neural basis of visual
creativity is now better understood.39 Evidence for Blake’s synaesthesia is
generally strongest where it concerns his own writings and the records of
his verbal statements made to others, but with some surprising and signifi-
cant exceptions to this generalization. For example, Blake’s extraordinary
Visionary Heads, c. 1819–1825, discussed in Chap. 7, were a series of
drawings illustrating figures from British, Biblical and classical history and
apparently spontaneously produced while with friends. Thanks to the
records left by the small circle of admirers he attracted in his late life, the
circumstances of their composition are unusually well documented. The
Visionary Heads were probably triggered by a type of grapheme synaesthe-
sia. Without any necessity to resort to caricature (although he knew how
to do that), the straightforward vocalization of the names of the people he

36
M.M. Ohayon, ‘Prevalence of hallucinations and their pathological associations in the
general population,’ Psychiatry Res, 997 (2000), pp. 153–164.
37
Vanessa Beavan, John Read & Claire Cartwright (2011), The prevalence of voice-hearers
in the general population: A literature review, Journal of Mental Health, 20:3, 281–292.
38
Mary Jane Spiller, Clare N. Jonas, Julia Simner, Ashok Jansari, ‘Beyond visual imagery:
How modality-specific is enhanced mental imagery in synesthesia?, Consciousness and
Cognition, 31 (2015) pp. 73–85. For a nuances to that paper’s findings, see David Brang,
EunSeon Ahn, Double-blind study of visual imagery in grapheme-color synesthesia, Cortex,
117 (2019) pp. 89–95.
39
Pidgeon, L. M., Grealy, M., Duffy, A. H. B., Hay, L., McTeague, C., Vuletic, T., Coyle,
D. and Gilbert, S. J. (2016), Functional neuroimaging of visual creativity: a systematic review
and meta-analysis. Brain and Behavior, 6: 1–26.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

drew, including the actual letter shapes of the graphemes within those
names, triggered synaesthetic responses as visualized personifications.40
There is also evidence to suggest Blake experienced other hallucinatory
types. One such type is his post-bereavement hallucination of his deceased
brother, Robert, who died in early 1787. Blake experienced this as a verbal
auditory and felt-presence hallucination. Post-bereavement hallucinations
are now known to be normal response to the death of a loved one and do
not usually require clinical or even therapeutic attention. There is also
limited evidence that some of his verbal auditory hallucinations, perhaps
including that of Robert, were misattributed inner speech (see Chap. 8).
Paradoxically, another ‘Vision,’ discussed in Chap. 2, which Blake declared
to be ‘My first Vision of Light,’ appears to be based on his seeing real
images, not hallucinated (E 712). To some degree or other, all these con-
ditions have neural correlates and, to repeat, none are usually considered
disorders.
A working assumption of this book has been that Blake’s experience of
visual hallucinations, which may have started as early as c. 1766, benefitted
from the cognitive insights afforded by V1 and, in the case of his synaes-
thesia, also including V4, both areas of the cortex known to be associated
with processing visual hallucinations as well as real images. The neuro-
physiological concept of ‘the eye’s mind’ is now firmly established, not least
indicated by a Special Issue about, ‘The Eye’s mind: Visual imagination,
neuroscience and the humanities,’ in the journal Cortex in 2018.41 That is,
the eye is an area of cognitive processing, to some degree capable of inde-
pendence from the rest of the cortex. There is an array of evidence sup-
porting this conclusion (best accessed through literature references in the
journal articles themselves). One experiment in 2008, perhaps clearer than
others, tested the eye’s cognitive role in a ‘binocular rivalry’ analysis. To
summarize and paraphrase the experiment in simple terms, one eye (Left)
was shown fleeting image x, there was then a time lag and the other eye
(Right) was shown another, slightly different, image, n. The result was
that the Right eye resolved image n by using a memory of x, never having

40
For Blake’s ability to caricature contemporary royalty and political figures, see Alexander
S. Gourlay, “‘Idolatry or Politics’: Blake’s Chaucer, the Gods of Priam, & the Powers of
1809.” Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant (ed.)
Alexander S. Gourlay (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill P, 2002). pp. 97–147.
41
Adam Zeman, Matthew MacKisack, John Onians, The Eye’s mind – Visual imagination,
neuroscience and the humanities, Cortex, 105 (2018) pp. 1–3.
14 D. WORRALL

been exposed to x. Or, as the authors put it, ‘“perceptual priming” might
be elicited without perception, by simply imagining a previous perceptual
experience.’42 The implications of ‘simply imagining’ a previous visual per-
ceptual experience one never had are profound, not least concerning how
one might conceptualize such a connection in the absence of a model of
cortical semantics capable of linking a (Left) visual image with a (Right)
working visual memory.43
The life-time persistence of Blake’s ‘visions’ is also worth emphasizing.
A few sequential points of reference may be helpful. The Peckham Rye
‘vision,’ c. 1766–1768, will be discussed in Chap. 2 but his earliest written
reference to ‘visions’ occurs in a passage from a prose piece called ‘The
Couch of Death.’ This formed part of a volume printed on his behalf by
an early patron for a juvenile collection, Poetical Sketches (1783), where he
wrote of how ‘the visions of Heaven unfold their visitation,’ a construc-
tion already implicitly suggesting an earthly embodiment (E 441). At the
other end of his life, visiting him in 1825, barely two years before his
death, Crabb Robinson recorded of their conversation that ‘He reverted
soon to his favourite expression [visions] my visions—.’44 The painter
Samuel Palmer, who met Blake for the first time in the early 1820s, no
later than May 1824, and who became deeply influenced by his woodcuts
for Robert Thornton’s schools’ edition of Virgil, gave a more thoughtful
verdict to Blake’s early biographer, J.T. Smith. On 11 May 1859, Smith
noted, ‘I had a lengthy discussion with Mr. P[almer]. on the nature of
Blake’s visions—Mr. P. on the whole thought they were seen as real objects
by his outward eyes and as such painted.’45 That is, according to Smith’s
testimony of their meeting, Palmer assumed Blake’s ‘visions’ were ‘seen as
real objects.’
This book assigns Blake’s ‘visions’ to his neurophysiology rather than to
assumptions about the state of his psychological health. As far as his neuro-
physiological condition is concerned, Blake was right-handed (shown in
the Thomas Phillips portrait of 1807, now in the National Portrait Gallery,
London), and had no significant visual impairment which might imply

42
Joel Pearson, Colin W.G. Clifford, Frank Tong, The Functional Impact of Mental
Imagery on Conscious Perception, Current Biology, 18 (2008) pp. 982–986.
43
For a key paper at the beginning of this debate, see Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1973). What the
mind’s eye tells the mind’s brain: A critique of mental imagery. Psychological Bulletin,
80(1), 1–24.
44
BR(2): p. 423, 427.
45
BR(2): p. 729.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

damage or degeneration of areas of the cortex associated with vision.46 As

far as his physical health is concerned, insofar as it may have impacted on
his neural system, there is nothing to show Blake had any type of neuro-
logical disorder other than the possibility of intermittent migraine. A left-
hemispheric stroke, for example, the sort of thing that might have happened
to someone in the comparative old age Blake reached, would probably have
resulted in an immediately noticeable impairment of his artistic skills.47
Nothing similar has been reported in Blake by way of neurological trauma.
Neurological disorders have been recognized in other artists, perhaps most
convincingly Temporal Lobe Epilepsy in Vincent van Gogh, but nothing
has so far come to light about Blake.48 He appears to have avoided the
motor and neurological damage induced by lead poisoning from pigments,
despite the high probability of its presence in similarly prolific artists such
as Michelangelo and Blake’s contemporary, Goya.49 Dangers specific to
watercolourist painters from lead and copper poisoning were understood in
Britain by 1784.50 It is possible Blake took steps to avoid their worst dan-
gers. A modern retro-­pathology of his physical morbidity did not note any

46
Right-handedness has a lower correlation than left-handedness with schizophrenia,
Hirnstein, Marco, and Kenneth Hugdahl. “Excess of Non-Right-Handedness in
Schizophrenia: Meta-Analysis of Gender Effects and Potential Biases in Handedness
Assessment.” British Journal of Psychiatry 205 (2014) pp. 260–267.
47
Durjoy Lahiri, Stefano F. Cappa, Left hemispheric stroke in a professional artist: A pro-
spective case study, Cortex, 138 (2021) pp. 203–211.
48
Bradford A. Richardson, MD, Alexandra M. Rusyniak, W. George Rusyniak, Jr, MD,
Charles B. Rodning, MD, PhD, Neuroanatomical Interpretation of the Painting Starry
Night by Vincent van Gogh, Neurosurgery 81 (2017) pp. 389–396.
49
Julio Montes-Santiago, ‘Chapter 9 – The lead-poisoned genius: Saturnism in famous
artists across five centuries,’ Stanley Finger, Dahlia W. Zaidel, François Boller and Julien
Bogousslavsky (eds.), Progress in Brain Research 203 (2013) pp. 223–240. Bartlomiej
Piechowski-Jozwiak and Julien Bogousslavsky consider migraine, but their chapter makes no
reference to Blake, ‘Chapter 11 – Neurological diseases in famous painters,’ Stanley Finger,
Dahlia W. Zaidel, François Boller and Julien Bogousslavsky (eds.), Progress in Brain Research
(203 (2013) pp. 255–275; Gabriele Cipriani, Luca Cipriani, Lucia Picchi, Mario Di Fiorino,
Art is long, life is short. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), the suffering art-
ist, Medical Hypotheses, 117 (2018) pp. 16–20.
50
John Fothergill, ‘Observations on Disorders to which Painters in Water-Colours are
exposed,’ The Works of John Fothergill, M.D. … with Some Account of His Life by John Coakley
Lettsom (1784) 3 vols., vol. 3 pp. 377–381. Margaret DeLacy, ‘Fothergill, John (1712–1780),’
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct
2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9979, accessed 3 March 2015].
16 D. WORRALL

cognitive impairment.51 The astonishing manual dexterity and visual acuity

of Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826), produced by engraving (a method
requiring much greater motor control than etching), evidences no decline
in late life.
Assertions about Blake’s madness have a long history, traceable back to
the very beginning of his career. Although, as mentioned above, there are
earlier examples, by 1794 at the latest, his (rare) prospective customers
already thought him insane, a devastating reputational handicap for some-
one hoping to make their way in the London art world. In the early 1790s,
apart from his commercial engraving, Blake was hoping to get a living by
producing hand-made illustrated (‘illuminated’) books employing print-
ing techniques he had learned during his apprenticeship as an engraver (E
693). Just when he had managed to get Joseph Johnson, the publisher of
the work of contemporary liberal progressives such as Mary Wollstonecraft
and Erasmus Darwin, to stock examples of what became known as the
illuminated books, one of his clients, Richard Twiss, who eventually
bought a copy of the tiny intaglio etched, For Children: The Gates of
Paradise (1793), wrote to a friend advising that there were ‘several more
of Blake’s books at Johnsons in St. Ps Ch. Yd.’ Twiss’ small but influential
circle could have promoted Blake’s books to a wider group of the affluent,
politically progressive, connoisseurs he was targeting. However, Twiss
added, ‘I suppose the man to be mad; but he draws very well.’52
The insanity thesis quickly took hold. By 1809, writing in his Descriptive
Catalogue to accompany his exhibition, Blake claimed his work was
rejected from Royal Academy and British Institution exhibitions because
their ‘Noblemen and Gentlem[en] … Subscribers’ thought his paintings
‘a Madman’s Scrawls’ (E 527–28). In 1833 the poet, Edward FitzGerald,
told a friend Blake was ‘a genius with a screw loose.’53 By 1853, he was
known in America as ‘painter to the spectres,’ manifesting ‘Hallucinations
of Insanity in its Simple State.’54 Paradoxically, suspicions that Blake’s

51
Lane Robson and Joseph Viscomi, ‘Blake’s Death,’ Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 30
(1996) pp. 36–49.
52
Richard Twiss, 13, 25 September 1794, cited in Keri Davies, ‘Mrs Bliss: a Blake Collector
of 1794,’ (eds.) Steve Clark and David Worrall, Blake in the Nineties (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1999) pp. 212–230; Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson, A Liberal Publisher (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1979).
53
BR(2): p. 556, the underlining is in Bentley.
54
Alexander Jacques Francois Brierre De Boismont, Hallucinations or, the Rational History
of Apparitions, visions, Dreams, Ecstasy, Magnetism and Somnambulism (Philadelphia:
Lindsay and Blakiston, 1853) p. 85.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

visions were symptoms of mental disorder, as Colin Trodd has described,

paralleled the rise of his posthumous reputation as an excitingly individual
artist. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the insanity verdict
had become institutionalized, at least in the sense that the stewards of
national collections held such views. In 1895 Richard Garnett, the British
Museum’s Keeper of Printed Books, declared him ‘mentally warped.’55 A
critical tradition of diagnosing the status of Blake’s mental health has given
rise to an exhaustive, if sometimes contradictory, legacy of psychological
or psychoanalytical interpretation.56 The present study has nothing further
to add to this scholarship. However, some conditions, including synaes-
thesia, have been associated with artistic or professional creativity. Some
limited surveys of the links between schizotypy and creativity, specifically
with respect to poets and visual artists, have also identified a relationship

55
See Colin Trodd’s discussion of the responses of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, Visions of
Blake: William Blake in the Art Word 1830–1930 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2012) pp. 375–378. Trodd cites Richard Garnett, William Blake: Painter and Poet
(1895) p. 75.
56
Representative studies include, L.A. Duncan-Johnstone, A Psychological Study of William
Blake (London: Psychology Guild, 1945) and W.P. Witcutt, Blake: A Psychological Study
(London: Hollis & Carter 1945); George Wingfield Digby, Symbol and Image in William
Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957); Daniel Majdiak and Brian Wilkie, ‘Blake and Freud:
Poetry and Depth Psychology,’ Journal of Aesthetic Education 6 (1972) pp. 87–98; Morris
Eaves, ‘Postscript: Blake’s Abnormal Psychology,’ Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 9 (1976)
pp. 121–122; Diane Hume George, Blake and Freud (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1980); David Punter, ‘Blake, Trauma and the Female,’ New Literary History: A Journal of
Theory and Interpretation 15 (1984) pp. 475–490; Brenda Webster, Blake’s Prophetic
Psychology (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Elaine Kauvar, ‘The Sorrows of
Thel: A Freudian Interpretation of The Book of Thel,’ Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 6
(1985) pp. 174–185; Jerry Caris Godard, Creating: William Blake Anticipates Freud, Jung
and Rank (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985); Edward F. Edinger, Encounter
with the Self: A Jungian Commentary on William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job
(Toronto: Inner City Book, 1986); Barbara Frieling, ‘Blake at the Rim of the World: A
Jungian Consideration of Jerusalem,’ Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 8 (1987)
pp. 211–218; Tilottama Rajan, ‘(Dis)figuring the System: Vision, History, and Trauma in
Blake’s Lambeth Books,’ William Blake: Images and Texts, Robert N. Essick et al. (ed) (San
Marino: CA: Huntington Library, 1997); June Singer, Blake, Jung and the Collective
Unconscious (York Beach: Nicolas Hays Inc., 2000); Mark Lussier, Blake and Lacan (Studies
in nineteenth-century British literature, 25) (New York; Frankfurt: Lang, 2008); Patrick
Menneteau, ‘William Blake and the dark side of the Enlightenment: toward a reassessment
of the Jungian contribution,’ Serge Soupel, Kevin L. Cope, Alexander Pettit (eds), The
Enlightenment by Night: essays on after-dark culture in the long eighteenth century (New York:
AMS Press, 2010) pp. 307–342.
18 D. WORRALL

with synaesthesia but no connection has yet been made to Blake, and cer-
tainly not within this book.57 Synaesthesia’s coincidence with autism is
discussed briefly in Chap. 9. The more general physiologies of Blake’s
‘visions’ are discussed in Chap. 2.
Writing in 1852, Crabb Robinson remembered that Blake said ‘the
most strange things in the most unemphatic manner, speaking of his
visions as any man would of the most ordinary occurrence.’58 Despite the
reassuring conventionality of such social interactions, modern critics have
largely adopted a strategy of avoidance when engaging with the possibility
of assigning a phenomenology to Blake’s ‘visions.’ Setting aside the sub-
stantial critical debate about his psychology, his ‘visions’ have only been
tardily engaged with by scholars. G.E. Bentley Jr.’s The Stranger from
Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (2001), the standard biography,
other than recording their most notable incidence, deflects any analysis of
their possible phenomenology by assigning them to ‘Enthusiasm,’ the
term used to described eighteenth-century religious movements charac-
terized by exuberant outpourings of Christian fervour, influentially con-
nected to Blake by Jon Mee.59 Robert N. Essick’s ODNB entry of 2005
refers to his ‘visions’ only indirectly.60 The absence of substantial academic
and institutional elucidation of his ‘visions’ also includes the captions and
catalogues of the major museum exhibitions. On the other hand, John
Higgs’ William Blake vs. The World (2021) aimed at a broadly non-­
academic market, although without the citations that would have made it
more helpful, at least takes the ‘visions’ as sustained aspects of his life and
discusses them without avoidance.61 Nevertheless, where critical comment
has been present, recognizable critical paradigms have emerged.

57
Nettle, Daniel, and Helen Clegg. “Schizotypy, creativity and mating success in humans.”
Proceedings. Biological sciences vol. 273,1586 (2006): 611–615. doi:10.1098/
rspb.2005.3349; Daniel Nettle, Schizotypy and mental health amongst poets, visual artists,
and mathematicians, Journal of Research in Personality 40 (2006) pp. 876–890.
58
BR(2) p. 695, underlining in Bentley.
59
G.E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger From Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) pp. 21, 382; Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William
Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
60
Robert N. Essick, ‘Blake, William (1757–1827),’ Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2005 [http://www.oxforddnb.
com/view/article/2585, accessed 21 Aug 2017.
61
John Higgs, William Blake vs The World (London: Orion Publishing Co, 2021)
pp. 14–20.
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

Laura Quinney’s, William Blake on Self and Soul (2009), and Leo
Damrosch’s, Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake
(2015), are indicative of current critical practice, insofar as it exists at all.
In a context where directly engaging with Blake’s ‘visions’ is rare, very
commendably Damrosch has a two-page subsection called ‘Visions.’ His
comments are worth quoting at some length to demonstrate the limits of
critical discussion in the early twenty-first century:

Blake continued to see actual visions throughout his life and to draw inspira-
tion from them. They were not hallucinations—he understood that other
people couldn’t see them when he did—but he definitely perceived them as
vividly as if they were physically present. This phenomenon is known as
eidetic vision, thought to be common in children and often persisting in
artistic adults. It generally entails the mental revival of images that were
once actually seen, and many images in Blake’s art, though he thought of
them as visionary, can indeed be traced to prints and paintings with which
he was familiar. They share the aesthetic code of romantic classicism …62

Damrosch’s description presents several difficulties. The most fundamen-

tal is that it offers no explanation for Blake’s verbal auditory ‘visions.’
However, according to this account, Blake’s ‘Visions’ definitely ‘were not
hallucinations’ although ‘other people couldn’t see them when he did.’
This seems to make them delusions. That Blake had visual delusions can
be easily dismissed.
Blake would have failed current cognitive tests for visual delusion,
mainly on the basis that he overwhelmingly functioned normally in his
society on a day-to-day basis (no face recognition problems, for example).63
Contemporaries who met him in person reported abstraction or ­eccentricity
but not dysfunction. In December 1825, even the sceptical Crabb
Robinson recorded, ‘when he is not referring to his Visions he talks sensi-
bly & acutely.’64 Recollecting a meeting with him around 1816, to discuss

62
Leopold Damrosch, Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015) p. 39.
63
P.R. Corlett, ‘Delusions,’ Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Second Edition), edited by
V.S. Ramachandran (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2012) pp. 667–673. For a wider dis-
cussion, see Richard Dub, ‘Delusions, Acceptances, and Cognitive Feelings,’ Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 94 (2017) pp. 27–60. P.R. Corlett, J.R. Taylor, X.J. Wang,
P.C. Fletcher and J.H. Krystal, ‘Toward a neurobiology of delusions,’ Progress in Neurobiology
92 (2010), pp. 345–369.
64
BR(2): p. 425.
20 D. WORRALL

‘“the minor poems of Milton,”’ in 1836 the bibliographer Thomas

Frognall Dibdin (who had bought a copy of Songs of Innocence), mildly
recalled him as ‘the amiable but illusory Blake.’65 Damrosch’s citing of
‘eidetic vision’ has no particular explanatory power because the term is
normally used as a label for designating images requiring further differen-
tiation between externally derived (exoptic) percepts and internally derived
(entoptic) percepts.66 Nevertheless, there is a substantial, if inconclusive,
history to the usage of this term, some of it linked both to Romanticism
and to synaesthesia.67 That ‘eidetic’ images are ‘common in children,’ as
Damrosch asserts, is something which might, for example, support hallu-
cinatory content in the childhood focus of Songs of Innocence (1789).
However, their presence—although a peripheral debate—has been both
claimed and denied by paediatric clinicians.68 The first paper on eidetic
imagery (in 1924) simply involved showing, and then removing, pictures
in front of children and measuring what degree of the image persisted in
the child’s memory as a kind of after-image.69 Except as a trace of a visual
hallucination, Blake’s The Ancient of Days, for example, can scarcely be an
afterimage of anything except of itself. Indeed, as far as Blake being
unconsciously ‘visionary’ is concerned (‘many images in Blake’s art,
­
though he thought of them as “visionary” … can … be traced to prints
and paintings with which he was familiar’), this seems to suggest that the
works he claimed as most inspired by ‘my visions’ were also the most
derivative (E 531). Contrarily, Robert Hunt, one of the few people known

65
BR(2): p. 327.
66
The term ‘eidetic’ has some currency in discussions of synaesthesia, J. Glicksohn,
‘Synesthesia,’ Encyclopedia of Creativity (Second Edition), edited by Mark A. Runco and
Steven R. Pritzker (San Diego: Academic Press 2011) pp. 403–408. See also with respect to
aphantasia and hyperphantasia, Pearson, J. The human imagination: the cognitive neurosci-
ence of visual mental imagery. Nat Rev Neurosci 20, 624–634 (2019). https://doi.
org/10.1038/s41583-019-0202-9.
67
Kevin T. Dann, “Sensory Unity Before the Fall: Synaesthesia, Eideticism, and the Loss
of Eden.” Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 94–119.
68
Herbert A. Schreier, ‘Hallucinations in Nonpsychotic Children: More Common Than
We Think?’ Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 38 (1999)
pp. 623–625; R. McGee, S.W.R. Poulton, ‘Hallucinations in nonpsychotic children [Letter
to the Editor], Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 39 (2000),
pp. 12–13.
69
Allport, G.W. (1924), Eidetic Imagery. British Journal of Psychology. General Section, 15:
99–120. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1924.tb00168.x.
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

to have attended the 1809 exhibition, wrote a hostile review in The

Examiner journal declaring that the pictures were the products of ‘an
extravagant imagination.’70 Damrosch and Hunt cannot both be right.
While the influences of contemporary artists such as Henry Fuseli and
John Flaxman are intermittently evident in his work (what Damrosch
locates as Blake’s generic place in ‘romantic classicism’), he seems to be
most popularly valued by the public today precisely because he seems the
least derivative and most extraordinary of artists. It is at these points where
it is most common for critics to reach for endorsements declaring Blake to
be ‘visionary.’ Laura Quinney’s book is typical of this strategy of avoidance
by endorsement. Quinney frequently uses the words ‘vision’ and ‘vision-
ary’ to simultaneously explain and evaluate: ‘Visionary power brings the
world alive, healing the rift between subject and object … The speakers of
the Songs of Innocence have a pastoral relation to Nature, not a visionary
one[.] Visionary power is an achievement of the mature soul, a product of
thought and experience.’71 Quinney presents Blake as a ‘visionary’ with-
out ‘visions.’ Neither Damrosch nor Quinney set out to falsify Blake, these
were the terms he used himself, but the possibility of there being a recov-
erable phenomenology for his ‘visions’ is never explored even though crit-
ics regularly credit his work as extraordinarily ‘visionary.’
Such lacunae abound. Despite taking its title from a phrase in A
Descriptive Catalogue, Tate Britain curator Martin Myrone’s Seen in My
Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures (2009), which reproduces a
scholarly edition of the text, never mentions what the ‘visions’ of ‘my
visions’ might have been (E 531). Similarly, Naomi Billingsley’s The
Visionary Art of William Blake: Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial
Imagination (2018) has little to say about Blake’s ‘visions,’ even though
discussions of the several versions of his Last Judgment paintings (‘The
Last judgment is one of these Stupendous Visions [.] I have represented it
as I saw it’) are central to what Billingsley calls Blake’s ‘theory—or
theology—of art’ (E 555).72 Less reductively, although with an agenda
directed at similarly explaining the complexities of ‘the hermeneutic of his
Christological “fourfold vision,”’ in an often insightful journal article,
70
BR(2): 282.
71
Laura Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009) p. 22.
72
Naomi Billingsley, The Visionary Art of William Blake: Christianity, Romanticism and
the Pictorial Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2018) pp. 1, 2, 147–149, 152–154,
156–157. There are several versions of this painting, not all extant, see Butlin: 639, 642, 645.
22 D. WORRALL

Jonathan Roberts offers some measure of direct discussion. However, in

common with Billingsley, Roberts contextualizes ‘visions’ straightfor-
wardly as hermeneutic or exegetical responses to Biblical texts, arguing
that ‘such visions may be autobiographical, but they are also inextricably
textual.’73 By adopting these viewpoints, the potential value of exploring
the phenomenological characteristics of his ‘visions’ is rendered irrelevant.
Today, most of Blake’s ‘visions’ are best understood as hallucinations,
although this was a term not in clinical use until Jean Étienne Dominique
Esquirol’s, Des Maladies Mentales (Paris, 1838). This obstacle would have
precluded him from conceptualizing his experiences within anything
approaching a structured framework of appropriate discourse. Today, ‘hal-
lucination’ is a non-judgemental, non-pejorative term and is used in this
book exclusively within a neurophysiological sense. It has not always been
like this. As the clinical neuroscientist Dominic H. ffytche notes, the con-
junction of two French papers on hallucinations in 1936 were particularly
instrumental in marking a ‘break with tradition … to distance visual hal-
lucinations from visual illusions, giving them a higher clinical status.’74
However, as he notes in another paper, ‘research into visual hallucinations
is fragmented and confusing’ and subject to imprecise definitions.75
Nevertheless, by following the neural correlates of visual and auditory hal-
lucinations, it is possible to benefit from a rapidly increasing body of
research.
Given the neural foundations of most of his hallucinations, Blake’s
‘visions’ were not only recurrent and with a possible lifetime longevity
(although manifesting in several forms), because they were routed through
early visual cortex, principally V1; they were part of his cognitive processes
and capable of the ‘visionary conception’ he described in the 1809 exhibi-
tion catalogue (E 541). As far as visual hallucinations in H. sapiens are
concerned, there is an evolutionary possibility V1 developed so as retain
maximum flexibility for prioritizing perceptual novelty while at the same
time remaining perceptually stable. Visual hallucinations may be a

73
Jonathan Roberts, ‘William Blake’s Visionary Landscape near Felpham,’ Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 47 (2013) http://128.151.244.100/blakeojs/index.php/blake/arti-
cle/view/roberts472/roberts472html.
74
ffytche, Dominic H. “Visual hallucinatory syndromes: past, present, and future.”
Dialogues in clinical neuroscience vol. 9,2 (2007): 173–189. https://doi.org/10.31887/
DCNS.2007.9.2/dffytche.
75
Dominic H. ffytche, ‘Visual hallucinations and the Charles Bonnet syndrome,’ Current
Psychiatry Reports, 7 (2005) pp. 168–179.
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

by-­product of these mutually exclusive demands on V1.76 The neural cor-

relates of these settings between flexibility and stability permit ‘temporally
and spatially oscillating hallucinations’ to occur.77 In other words, the
capacity to intermittently hallucinate is an expression of the evolutionary
exigencies of retaining a near-optimal relationship between flexibility and
stability within V1.
Fortunately, Blake’s written statements help clarify his actual artistic
practice. It was to accompany a planned update of the 1809 catalogue that
Blake wrote his Notebook manuscript, ‘Additions to Blakes Catalogue of
Pictures &c’ (1810). These remarks, part polemic, part descriptive, were
intended to accompany one of several versions of a painting known as The
Last Judgment or A Vision of the Last Judgment.78 In the course of these
remarks he wrote, ‘The Last Judgment is one of these Stupendous
Visions[.] I have represented it as I saw it[.]’ (E 555, my italics). These
‘Additions’ are amongst the most extended comments he ever made about
the creative role of his ‘visions.’ Blake unequivocally declares these paint-
ings originated in ‘Visions’ he ‘saw.’ His other statements from the same
manuscript are perhaps less straightforward but display a high degree of
semantic sophistication. He went on to explain that ‘The Hebrew Bible &
the Gospel of Jesus are not Allegory but Eternal Vision’ but also added
that ‘Vision or Imagination is a Representation of what Eternally Exists.
Really & Unchangeably’ (E 554). That is, the Bible is not an origin of
‘Vision’ in the active sense of ‘visions,’ but a secondary construal, actually
‘a Representation’ or remediation of ‘what Eternally Exists,’ something
which now requires ‘Imagination’ to grasp. His artistic practice, the basis
of his creativity, was to culturally contextualize the entoptic images of his
visual hallucinations. That is, he found corroboration (‘a Representation’)
of them, secondarily, in the texts of the Bible. This puts him at variance,
for example, with Dorothy Gott, his exact prophetic contemporary, who
also experienced visions and whom he may have met by the end of 1789
(discussed in Chap. 3). For example, he writes that ‘Fable or Allegory is

76
Thomas Charles Butler, Marc Benayoun, Edward Wallace, Wim van Drongelen, Nigel
Goldenfeld and Jack Cowan, ‘Evolutionary constraints on visual cortex architecture from the
dynamics of hallucinations,’ PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America] 109 (2012) pp. 606–609.
77
H. Henke, P.A. Robinson, P.M. Drysdale, P.N. Loxley, ‘Spatiotemporally varying visual
hallucinations: I. Corticothalamic theory,’ Journal of Theoretical Biology, 357 (2014)
pp. 200–209.
78
Butlin: 639–648.
24 D. WORRALL

Seldom without some Vision [John Bunyan’s] Pilgrims Progress is full of

it’ but it is clear from this that Pilgrims Progress did not originate his
‘visions’ (E 554). He wrote that ‘The Hebrew Bible & the Greek Gospel
are Genuine Preservd,’ but these are secondary textual derivations, pre-
cisely ‘Genuine’ but ‘Preservd.’ On the other hand, the ‘Stupendous
Visions’ which originated the Last Judgment paintings were things he
actively ‘saw.’ It matters very much that Blake was referring to a painting
when he wrote, ‘The Nature of my Work is Visionary’ (E 555).
These are finely sophisticated (even philosophical) distinctions. If our
credulity is stretched it is perhaps not surprising to find that he also
thought himself ill-fitted to contemporary aesthetics. As he declared about
contemporary aesthetic theory, ‘The Nature of Visionary Fancy or
Imagination is very little Known,’ with him finding ‘the things of
Vegetative & Generative Nature’ preferred to ‘ever Existent Images.’79
The aesthetic and cognitive demands seem to be extraordinary, almost
impossible. How can we know ‘the Eternal nature & permanence of …
ever Existent Images’ (E 555)? Or, to put it another way, he thought that
‘ever Existent Images’ are ‘Visionary’ and part of a distinctive, non-­
generative, non- morbid, ‘Eternal nature.’ But what are ‘ever Existent
Images?’ And how could they have ‘permanence’?
In the case of his visual hallucinations, the likeliest candidates for the
neurophysiology of the entoptic visual percepts he referred to throughout
his life as ‘visions,’ and the source of those ‘ever Existent Images,’ are the
Klüver form-constants discussed in Chap. 4.80 Their long-term legacy left
an aesthetic and conceptual preference for mirror symmetry in his visual
art, discussed in Chap. 9. However, it is worth reiterating that their ent-
optic reality within his visual field gave Blake every reason to affirm their
perceptual presence. As mentioned above, Crabb Robinson, who had sev-
eral lengthy conversations with him, took away the impression that ‘His

79
For Blake’s aesthetics, see Daniel Schierenbeck, ‘“Sublime Labours”: Aesthetics and
Political Economy in Blake’s Jerusalem,’ Studies in Romanticism 46 (2007), pp. 21–42;
Peter Otto, ‘Politics, Aesthetics, and Blake’s “bounding line,”’ Word & Image 26 (2010)
pp. 172–185); Mike Goode, ‘The Joy of Looking: What Blake’s Pictures Want,’
Representations 119 (2012) pp. 1–36.
80
On ‘entoptic,’ the current OED definition is not entirely satisfactory, ‘relating to the
appearance of the different internal structures of the eye,’ ‘ento-, prefix.’ OED Online.
March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/62905?redirecte
dFrom=entoptic (accessed March 22, 2015). Even in current scientific literature at the peer-­
reviewed journal article level, the word ‘entoptic’ is sometimes misspelled.
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

paintings are copies of what he sees in his Visions.’ Writing in 1830, Allan
Cunningham corroborated the same basic features of his ‘visions,’ ‘the
pictured forms which swarmed before his eyes assumed, in his apprehen-
sion, the stability of positive revelations.’81
Klüver form-constants are capable of being induced by several agents,
including the migraine aura suggested as early as 1909 as being present in
Blake’s designs (discussed in Chaps. 2 and 5).82 However, it is worth reit-
erating the significant caveat that Blake may also have experienced several
variants of synaesthesia (discussed in Chaps. 6, 7 and 8). Synaesthesia is an
atypical condition (not a disorder) with well-known visual and auditory
manifestations, and probably has neural correlates. Blake’s synaesthesia
cannot be reliably dated before 1819 but there is the possibility of an
onset as early as c. 1789.
By contrast, Klüver patterns may have been encountered by Blake no
later than his beginning his apprenticeship training from 1772 as a copper-­
plate engraver. The Bohemian anatomist and physiologist, Jan Evangelista
Purkinje (Purkinĕ) (1787–1869), discussed in Chap. 5, used the near-­
parallel engraved lines of copper-plate prints to induce the first experimen-
tally observed visual hallucinations. Purkinje’s trials, using himself as the
subject, were conducted in the late 1810s or early 1820s. While he is
unlikely to have heard of Purkinje’s work, the methods he used would also
have been available to Blake. Indeed, such hallucinations may have been
largely unavoidable during his working life as a commercial engraver.
Paradoxically, he may even have taken steps to avoid or minimize unwanted
visual hallucinations while working at engraving and etching. My under-
standing of the demands of commercial copper-plate engraving, the basis
of Blake’s career as a book illustrator, were informed by a visit in 2006,
just before it closed, to probably the world’s last surviving professional
engraving workshop at the Spode Factory in Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire,
where their reproductive technologies were based on transfer printing
from line engraved copper plates onto ceramics (Chap. 5). If this analysis
is correct, it means Blake would have had an unavoidable, career-long,
exposure to objects known to trigger some types of visual hallucination.

81
BR(2): p. 636.
82
For a useful introduction to migraine and migraine aura, with illustrations, see I. F
Gutteridge and B.L. Cole, ‘Perspectives on migraine: Prevalence and visual symptoms.’
Clinical and Experimental Optometry, 84 (2001), pp. 56–70.
26 D. WORRALL

Blake’s capacity for self-diagnosing or understanding his hallucinations

would have been limited. As mentioned above, the first use of the word
‘hallucinations’ in a clinical sense did not begin until after Blake’s death,
in Jean Étienne Dominique Esquirol’s, Des Maladies Mentales, considerées
sous les rapports médical, hygienique et médico-légal (Paris, 1838). Esquirol
was reaching towards a neural or cortical basis for hallucinations: ‘halluci-
nation is a cerebral or mental phenomenon … produced independently of
the senses.’83 Quite remarkably, he not only proposed that hallucinations
(as with migraine aura) can have multiple sensory manifestations, connect-
ing them to the older terminology of ‘visions’; he also suggested they were
cognitive in nature, being ‘functional’ and embodied in ‘ideas and notions:’
‘Who would dare to say, visions of hearing, visions of taste, visions of
smell? And yet, the images, ideas and notions, which seem to belong to the
functional alteration of these three senses, present to the mind the same
characters, have the same seat, that is to say, the brain, are produced by the
same causes, and are manifest in the same maladies as hallucinations of
sight,—as visions.’84 That is, by 1838 Esquirol was aware that hallucina-
tions might present across several sensory modes and emanate from the
cortex. Even so, ‘hallucinations,’ as an appropriate terminology for
describing these phenomena, was only gradually developing towards the
end of Blake’s life. Crabb Robinson, following a meeting with him in
February 1826, a year before his death, wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth
telling her about Blake’s ‘constant hallucinations.’85
Perhaps the best way of introducing the complexity of Blake’s ‘visions’
is to look at the beginning of his illuminated book in relief and white line
etching, Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion. Printed from one
hundred separate copper plates with hand colouring, it is perhaps the cul-
mination of his lifetime’s efforts in this medium. He began the composi-
tion of Jerusalem no later than 1804 (the date etched on its title page) and
had finished a range of proofs by 1807 (although he did not definitely
complete it before 1818). On plate 4, his words declare, in a strikingly
coherent and compressed fashion, the cognitive processes by which he
composed Jerusalem. He wrote, ‘This theme calls me in sleep night after

83
[J.] E. Esquirol, Mental Maladies: Treatise on Insanity, trans. E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia:
Lea and Blanchard, 1845) p. 106.
84
[J.] E. Esquirol, Mental Maladies: Treatise on Insanity, trans. E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia:
Lea and Blanchard, 1845) p. 110, italics in original.
85
BR(2): p. 437.
 1 INTRODUCTION 27

night, & ev’ry morn / Awakes me at sun-rise, then I see the Saviour over
me / Spreading his beams of love, & dictating the words of this mild
song’ (E 146). These words imply a cluster of hallucinatory inducers. The
range of hallucinatory agencies referred to in this passage include the hyp-
nagogic (in the phrase, ‘This theme calls me in sleep night after night’) and
the hypnopompic (in the phrase, ‘& ev’ry morn / Awakes me’). Today,
the prevalence in the population of hypnagogic (falling into sleep) and
hypnopompic (waking from sleep) hallucinatory states is much better
understood.86 However, what may be primarily determinable as a visual
hallucination (‘I see the Saviour’) also exhibits itself as simultaneously
embedded within the modality of a verbal auditory hallucination (‘dictat-
ing the words,’ ‘This theme calls me’) (my italics). The command mode,
which is noticeable here, is sometimes indicative of psychosis. To some
extent, these modalities have been recognized before. S. Foster Damon’s
William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (1947), devoted an entire chap-
ter to ‘Spirits’ and their ‘Dictation,’ perceptively realizing that they
resulted from ‘hypnoidal’ states between sleeping and waking, although
couching much of this insight as an aspect of Blake’s ‘Ineffable Secret.’87
Interest in what are now known as entoptic images is not new in Blake
studies except that, as remarked above, the term previously used was
‘eidetic.’ In 1970, Morton D. Paley gave an intelligent summary of eidetic
imagery in Blake with reference to E.R. Jaensch’s early twentieth-century
theories, but argued from a psychological perspective explicitly ruling out
hallucination.88 Paley writes that Jerusalem is an example of ‘“autistic
thinking,”’ a terminology open to easy misinterpretation although he also
reminds us, very presciently, that ‘Blake was not speaking figuratively

86
M.M. Ohayon, ‘Prevalence of hallucinations and their pathological associations in the
general population,’ Psychiatry Res, 997 (2000), pp. 153–164; Simon R. Jones, Charles
Fernyhough and David Meads, ‘In a dark time: Development, validation, and correlates of
the Durham hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations questionnaire,’ Personality and
Individual Differences 46 (2009) pp. 30–34.
87
S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (New York: Peter Smith,
1947) pp. 10, 196–211. Foster Damon’s, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of
William Blake (1965), received updating editions in 1988 and 2013, both edited by
Morris Eaves.
88
The founding work is E.R. Jaensch, Eidetic Imagery and Typological Methods of
Investigation, trans. Oscar Oeser (London: Kegan Paul, 1930). See also, Bo H. Lindberg,
‘William Blake’s visions and the Unio Artistica,’ Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis
(Stockholm) 5 (1970) pp. 141–167.
28 D. WORRALL

when he said he saw visions.’89 However, as Paley acknowledges, a more

physiologically based approach had been tentatively discussed some years
earlier.
The art historian Joseph Burke’s 1964 essay on ‘The Eidetic and the
Borrowed Image: An Interpretation of Blake’s Theory and Practice of
Art,’ included extracts from a letter written to Burke from Nobel Prize
co-winner, Sir John Eccles (1903–1997). Burke seems to have asked
Eccles whether Blake was subject to ‘eidetic’ visual imagery, a condition
whose symptoms are the perception of recurring images after the initial
stimuli has been removed (now also known as palinopsia, a neurologically
related disorder).90 Burke’s theory was that Blake’s possible palinopsia was
caused by exopthalmic goitre, a thyroid disease one of whose symptoms is
bulging eyes. Burke may have been thinking of Blake’s appearance (indeed
with bulging eyes), in the sculptor and phrenologist, James Deville’s, well
known 1823 plaster life-mask, referred to above (it was also cast in bronze
in 1953).91 Eccles’ reply to Burke’s query, reproduced apparently partially
verbatim, demurred from a diagnosis but he wrote, ‘“To me there seems
to be no real mystery about eidetic imagery from the neurophysiological
point of view.’” This is strong confirmation that neurophysiological phe-
nomena, as opposed to assumed psychological disorders, are a rewarding
line of inquiry. Burke had a significant summarizing insight: ‘The optical
reality of the vision involved no act of credence on Blake’s part, because
the eidetic image is actually seen. Nor did he confuse his visions with the
appearance of material objects.’92 The ‘eidetic image,’ of course, is a per-
cept within the eye linked to the visual cortex (Eccles had reminded Burke
of this) and, in that sense, ‘actually seen’ although the issue about the

89
E.R. Jaensch, Eidetic Imagery and Typological Methods of Investigation: their importance
for the psychology of childhood … Translated from the second edition by Oscar Oeser (London:
Kegan Paul & Co, 1930); Morton Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the
Development of Blake’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) pp. 201–206. On the pos-
sibility of Blake’s autism, see below, Chap. 9.
90
Confusingly, the older term ‘eidetic’ has sometimes recently been used to describe pal-
inopsia (after-image) type events, marking a return to early twentieth-century usage, e.g.
Allport, G.W. (1924), Eidetic Imagery. British Journal of Psychology. General Section, 15:
99–120. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1924.tb00168.x.
91
James Deville, William Blake, plaster cast of head, 1823, NPG 1809; bronze casting,
1953, NPG 1809a, National Portrait Gallery, London.
92
Joseph Burke, ‘The Eidetic and the Borrowed Image: An Interpretation of Blake’s
Theory and Practice of Art,’ Frantz Philipp and June Stewart (eds.) In Honour of Daryl
Lindsay: Essays and Studies (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1964) pp. 110–127, 116.
 1 INTRODUCTION 29

degree of ‘credence’ or belief which Blake placed in these ‘visions,’ and the
extent to which his perception of ‘material objects’ remained unmodified
by hallucinations, is a different matter.
To understand the physiological background of Blake’s ‘visions,’ it is
important to set out, as far as it is possible with a historical subject, the
status of his general health, particularly where this might have a bearing on
his susceptibility to visual hallucinations, illusions or delusions. Apart from
the possibility of intermittent migraine with aura, the occurrence of hal-
lucinations in visual modalities does not imply any significant disorder or
impairment in his visual field. He may have taken steps to adjust his sight
for aging. Seymour Stocker Kirkup recalled him copying (the copy of) the
Laocoön statue at the Royal Academy, c. 1815, wearing ‘his spectacles up
side down … he says they were made on purpose to be worn so … revers-
ing the spectacles assisted him, as it raised them, the convexity resting
upon his nose—he said it was better so than a double concave as they
sometimes are.’93 An eccentric appearance notwithstanding, this shows
Blake quite reasonably modifying his sight within a range of adjustments
he could easily implement. When Samuel Palmer met him (in the same
place) in May 1824, he recalled that ‘He was short-sighted’ but that ‘He
wore glasses only occasionally.’ Palmer also twice referred to ‘the promi-
nence of his eyes’ and that his ‘eyes [were] prominently set.’94 There is a
possibility that he had the exophthalmia referred to by Eccles. This is a
condition where characteristic bulging eyes are signified by them appear-
ing to be outside of the orbits of the eye and accompanied by retracted
eyelids. Such symptoms are consistent with the 1809 Thomas Phillips por-
trait in the National Portrait Gallery, London, and much more so in the
Anonymous Portrait of William Blake (1802?) aged about 45, now in a
private collection (discussed further in Chap. 7). A comparison between
the Anonymous Portrait and modern textbook photographs exemplifying
exophthalmia reveals an uncanny resemblance. Exophthalmia is a thyroid
condition which, in 30%–60% of cases, goes into spontaneous remission
during adolescence meaning that, if he did have it, Blake would not neces-
sarily have suffered any adult consequences.95

93
BR(2): p. 290.
94
BR(2): 390.
95
Manuela Stoicescu, Chapter 2 – Patient Faces, Editor(s): Dr Manuela Stoicescu, General
Medical Semiology Guide Part I (Academic Press, 2020) pp. 21–79. See Fig. 2.1.1.
‘Exophthalmia.’
30 D. WORRALL

A pair of contemporary iron-framed spectacles in the Fitzwilliam

Museum, Cambridge, traditionally associated with Blake at the time of his
death, were dispensed within a normal prescription range for correcting
short sight.96 Samuel Palmer recalled him being ‘short-sighted.’97 The late
Tate Britain curator, Robin Hamlyn, referencing the spectacles and the
close work required for engraving, also suggested ‘he was “moderately”
myopic … his near vision was much sharper than his distance vision, so
close work would have come more naturally to him.’ Incidentally, Hamlyn
also provides a useful examination of the directions of natural light in the
houses he worked in (also comparing them to light preferences amongst
his more successful contemporaries). He notes that ‘During his working
life Blake’s studio or workroom light came from all points of the compass.’98
All of these factors reduce the possibility that his ‘visions’ were visual illu-
sions or visual delusions arising from the misinterpretation of shadows or
unusual light sources.
Would Blake in the eighteenth century have been aware of the Klüver
form-constant visual hallucinations (discussed in Chap. 5) not categorized
or defined until the 1920s?
That he recognized a distinction between different forms of visual per-
ception, and the degree of his conviction in doing so, is nowhere made
clearer than in his poem ‘Auguries of Innocence,’ where he wrote, ‘We are
led to Believe a Lie / When we see not Thro the Eye’ (E 492). Or, as he
put it elsewhere, no one would ‘Question a Window concerning a Sight I
look thro it & not with it’ (E 566). For Blake, to look ‘Thro the Eye’
meant seeing ‘visions’ mapped onto his retina arising from the cognitive
environment of V1 consistent with Cowan’s model of entoptic perception
which ‘treats V1 as a cortical retina.’99 Looking ‘Thro the Eye,’ renders it
inclusive of the entoptic ‘visions’ he was subject to, signalled from V1.
Looking ‘with’ the eye, on the other hand, reduces visual perception to

96
G.E. Bentley, Jr. with the assistance of Keiko Aoyama, ‘William Blake and His Circle: A
Checklist of Publications and Discoveries in 1995,’ Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 29
(1996) pp. 131–165.
97
BR(2): 390.
98
Robin Hamlyn, ‘William Blake at Work: “Every thing which is in Harmony,”’ Joyce
H. Townsend and Robin Hamlyn (eds.) William Blake: The Painter at Work (London: Tate
Publishing, 2003) pp. 12–39, pp. 24–25.
99
Jack D. Cowan, ‘Geometric visual hallucinations and the structure of the visual cortex,’
Daniel Collerton, Urs Peter Mosimann, Elaine Perry (eds.) The Neuroscience of Visual
Hallucinations (2014) chapter 10, pp. 217–253.
 1 INTRODUCTION 31

‘a Window’ onto ‘a sight,’ exoptic images framed and narrowed by a phys-

ical window in a physical wall.
Whatever agency triggered Blake’s Klüver-type visual hallucinations, he
shared the same neuroanatomy as the rest of H. sapiens. Blake may have
been considered eccentric or even mad, but he did not stand outside of his
species. His neuroanatomy was transhistorical, the same as yours or mine
(and unlikely to be gendered).100 One of the earliest recorded accounts of
what seem to be Klüver form-constants (induced by light deprivation)
occurs in the Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, a work written in 1651 (‘a man
shall in the dark, (though awake) have the Images of Lines, and Angles
before his eyes’).101 If it seems counter-intuitive that Blake’s paintings are
similarly based on his perception of geometric patterns of ‘Lines, and
Angles,’ one should pause and read his ‘Public Address’ (c. 1809–10), a
manuscript intended to accompany his tempera, Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and
the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on their Journey to Canterbury (c. 1808):
‘They say there is no Strait Line in Nature this Is a Lie like all that they say,
For there is Every Line in Nature … Now Gentlemen Critics how do you
like this[?] You may rage but what I say I will prove by Such Practise &
have already done so that you will rage to your own destruction’ (E
575).102 On a second reading, it is important to notice that Blake’s defiant
affirmation that there are ‘Strait’ lines in nature is accompanied by the
disclosure that ‘I will prove by Such Practise & have already done so.’
When applied to literary poetics, repeat patterning has been argued as
demonstrating the existence of underlying universal or archetypal forms.
The most influential exposition of this proposition is Northrop Frye’s
Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947), a work hugely influ-
ential for a generation of post-war North American literary scholars. As
one critic put it, ‘Frye was likely the most pattern-oriented critic ever to

100
For a counter view, see Larry Cahill, Chapter 10 – Sex Influences Exist at All Levels of
Human Brain Function, Editor(s): Marianne J. Legato, Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine
(Third Edition) (Academic Press, 2017) pp. 121–128.
101
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth
Ecclesiasticall and Civill (1651) p. 6.
102
Robert N. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1983) Cat. No. XVI, pp. 61–89; Dennis Read, ‘The Context of Blake’s
Public Address: Cromek and the Chalcographic Society,’ Philogical Quarterly 60 (1981)
pp. 69–86.
32 D. WORRALL

work in English literature.’103 However, Fearful Symmetry does not dis-

cuss the phenomenology of Blake’s ‘visions.’
In 1977 W.J.T. Mitchell noted Blake’s ‘tendency to a rigid rectilinear
style of parallels, right angles, and vertical-horizontal structures,’ even
assigning a grammar of the eye and the ear to circle and spiral forms.104
Of course, Thomas Hobbes saw geometrical entoptic percepts long
before either Blake or Mitchell. However, examining visual motifs mainly
in the illuminated books, in 1978 Mitchell noted that ‘Abstract linear
forms such as the vortex or the circle … are repeated so systematically [in
Blake’s illuminated books] that they suggest a kind of pantomimic body-
language, a repertoire of motifs.’105 The vortex (as a spiral) and the circle
(in its cobweb or tunnel formation), it will be argued here, are two of the
four Klüver form-constants although, understandably, not assigned by
Mitchell to neurological causes. Despite lacking a sufficient neurobio-
logical model, Mitchell accurately describes the creative mechanisms at
work: ‘Blake’s “synaesthetic” pictorial style is not simply produced by
linearism per se, but by the construction of specific linear motifs in accor-
dance with what Blake understood as the structural dynamics of our
sensory openings.’106 Although absent a neurophysiological model suf-
ficient to explain the underlying causes of these phenomena, Mitchell’s
is a good approximation of what seems to happen in Blake’s creativity
(although Blake’s synaesthesia is now understood as a more specialist
category than he allows).
The primary research question posed in this book is to ask whether
Blake’s ‘visions’ had a distinct phenomenology capable of being differenti-
ated from other possible causes, including psychological pathologies? The
issue of whether Blake’s ‘visions’ had a psychological basis, rather than in
discrete areas of the cortex, is redundant since the neural correlates of
mind and consciousness have yet to be established even though the

103
John Ayre, ‘Frye and Pattern,’ ESC: English Studies in Canada 37 (2011) pp. 9–15.
104
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Style as Epistemology: Blake and the Movement toward Abstraction
in Romantic Art.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 16, no. 2 (1977) pp. 145–164.
105
W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978) p. 37.
106
W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978) p. 74. On Blake’s synaesthesia, see my Chap. 7.
 1 INTRODUCTION 33

project’s possibility was first announced by Christof Koch and joint Nobel
Prize winner, Francis Crick, as far back as 1990.107
The Introduction has set out the status of the critical reception of
Blake’s ‘visions’ and outlines the problems, and some potential solutions,
associated with their investigation. Chapter 2 examines the physiology of
Blake’s ‘visions,’ beginning with one of the best-known episodes in 1800
which, paradoxically, turns out to have been ‘Scheerer’s phenomena,’ the
occurrence of real (not hallucinatory) visual images and first identified in
1924. The chapter then turns to some long-neglected correspondence in
the British Medical Journal (BMJ) of 1909 which suggested that Blake’s
art revealed the presence of fortification spectra, the classic entoptic phe-
nomena of migraine aura. Chapter 3 discusses Blake’s working through of
issues about perception in the 1780s as he tried to reconcile the phenom-
enology of his ‘visions’ while dealing with a post-bereavement hallucina-
tion of his deceased brother, Robert, and the perceptual challenges of
mirror-writing, the basis of the relief-etched printing method of the illu-
minated books. Chapter 4 introduces Klüver form-constants, visual hal-
lucinations with neural correlates on V1. The traces of their distinctive
geometrical outlines are amongst the most identifiable in his art and in the
illuminated books. Chapter 5 discusses the range of possible agencies of
induction of Klüver form-constants hallucinations. These include migraine,
electrotherapy, flickering light and, finally, engraving (the first objective
experiments recording visual hallucinations used the printed lines of
engravings). Chapters 6, 7 and 8 deal with synaesthesia, with Chap. 6
being introductory. Blake’s experience of several variants of synaesthesia is
not extraordinary. On account of their occurrence to him in late life, there
is good evidence available from the records of people who met him after
his emergence from a period of professional neglect and personal isolation.
Overall, the most significant feature of the variants of synaesthesia he
experienced is that they were triggered by graphemes in verbal auditory
modes and, in some modes, would have been seen by his outside of his

107
Crick, Francis, and Christof Koch. “Towards a neurobiological theory of con-
sciousness.” In Seminars in the Neurosciences, vol. 2, pp. 263–275. Saunders Scientific
Publications, 1990. For the debate, see Daniel Revach, Moti Salti, Expanding the discus-
sion: Revision of the fundamental assumptions framing the study of the neural correlates
of consciousness, Consciousness and Cognition, 96 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
concog.2021.103229; Ilya A. Kanaev, Evolutionary origin and the development of con-
sciousness, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 133 (2022) 104511, https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.12.034.
34 D. WORRALL

body. Chapter 9 acts as a conclusion but also indicates that Blake’s experi-
ence of visual hallucinations left a long-term legacy in his visual art in the
form of an underlying preference for vertical bilateral symmetry, a feature
visible in the compositional choices he made.
Overall, the answers to the research questions posed is that the phe-
nomenology of Blake’s ‘visions’ can be identified and assigned with dis-
tinctive neurophysiologies. None of the visual or verbal auditory
hallucinations or conditions he experienced represent any type of signifi-
cant disorder, neither are they unduly rare.
 CHAPTER 2

The Physiology of Blake’s Hallucinations

The underlying physiological characteristics of Blake’s ‘visions’ fall into

several types and were experienced in both auditory and visual modes. Far
from treating them with suspicion or fear, he seems to have welcomed
them. No doubt, taken over a lifetime, their gradual emergence helped
sustain his belief in the special nature of his artistic calling. Whether he
thought of them as one single continuum of ‘visions’ or as several different
types is difficult to know but it seems likely that, as a painter, he would
have especially valued those occurring in visual modalities. As far as this
chapter is concerned, two initial types of visual hallucinatory experience
can be identified as distinctive enough to demonstrate something of their
phenomenological diversity. Of course, these are far from being the only
‘visionary’ phenomena he experienced within his visual field. While one
was transient, perhaps referring to only a single moment in Felpham,
Sussex, in 1800, the other may have been the source of a set of stimuli
which persisted across his entire lifetime.

Scheerer’s Phenomena
What has been regarded as Blake’s most extended description of ‘a Vision’
is likely to have been his chance encounter with a particularly transient set
of atmospheric conditions. The bright percepts he saw one day near the
seashore in Felpham were almost certainly ‘Scheerer’s phenomena,’ the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 35

Switzerland AG 2024
D. Worrall, William Blake’s Visions, Palgrave Studies in Literature,
Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2_2
36 D. WORRALL

entoptic sight of the eye’s blood cells seen against bright sunshine. A par-
ticular combination of atmospheric and meteorological circumstances,
added to his own highly excited initiation into a bright October sky and
seascape at Felpham, far from his native smoky London, was unlikely to
have reoccurred with quite the same impact it did in his first impression-
able weeks living on the south coast of England. He did not repeat this
description.
Blake’s account of an individual ‘vision’ occurs in a poem beginning,
‘To my Friend [Thomas] Butts I write,’ which was enclosed in a letter to
his friend and patron dated 2 October 1800 (E 712–13).1 On the face of
it, the evidence of the poem appears at first to make it a likely candidate for
confirming a universal phenomenology for all Blake’s ‘visions.’ However,
the clue may be in how it begins, ‘I write / My first Vision of Light’ (E
712, my italics). As Christopher Rowland has commented, while ‘Blake
rarely describes his visions in detail,’ this poem is one such instance.2 This
is certainly the most extended verbal description of a vision within his
canon. Not least, it also has the rare feature of being fully locatable to a
precise geographic and temporal moment. Unlike other of Blake’s ‘visions,’
in this case the context for the event he describes can be determined with
great accuracy. Jonathan Roberts has an illuminating discussion of an
exchange of letters, of which this poem is a part, written during a spate of
correspondence between William and Catherine Blake, Thomas Butts and
John and Anna Flaxman just before, and just after, the Blakes’ arrival in

1
The poem begins:

To my Friend Butts I write

My first Vision of Light
On the yellow sands sitting
The Sun was Emitting
His Glorious beams
From Heavens high Streams       5
Over Sea over Land
My Eyes did Expand
Into regions of air … (E 712–13)

2
Christopher Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2010) p. 133.
 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BLAKE’S HALLUCINATIONS 37

Felpham in the late summer or early autumn of 1800.3 The interpretation

of the events presented here is indebted to Roberts’ essay.
The poem was written by Blake in Felpham and enclosed in a letter to
Anna Flaxman in London, on 2 October 1800. William and his wife,
Catherine, had just arrived in Felpham to live under the patronage of the
established poet, William Hayley.4 They stayed there three years through
what proved to be an exasperating set of relationships and incidents, not
least because this area of the coast underwent numerous Napoleonic inva-
sions scares with Blake eventually put on trial for sedition. However, none
of this was evident or imminent at the time of their arrival. Instead, Blake
may have been in a heightened state of spiritual, sensory and artistic aware-
ness. He wrote to John Flaxman when he got there on 23 September
1800, ‘Felpham … is more Spiritual than London[.] Heaven opens here
on all sides her golden Gates.’ Writing to another patron, Thomas Butts,
in late September he was noticeably absorbed in the sensory feast of his
new rural environment by the sea, ‘the sweet air & the voices of winds
trees & birds & the odours of the happy ground makes it a dwelling for
immortals.’ For good measure, he added, ‘A roller & two harrows lie
before my window. I met a plow on my first out at my gate the first morn-
ing after my arrival & the Plowboy said to the Plowman “Father The Gate
is Open”’ (E 711).5 This deceptively allegoric anecdote is filled with imag-
ery drawn from the craft of engraving. The ‘plow’ is the burin, the ‘roller’
the inking ball and the ‘harrows’ references to the toothed or grooved
grounding tools used to abrade copper printing surfaces in the mezzotint
process.6
The most likely phenomenological basis of this ‘vision’ is that it was an
isolated experience of a phenomenon known as ‘flying corpuscles’ or leu-
kocytes. These are percepts of a mainly vascular origin producing what is
known as ‘Scheerer’s phenomena’ (or blue-field entoptic phenomena)
after the ophthalmologist, Richard Scheerer (1887–1982), the first person

3
The principal letters Roberts discusses are, Mrs. Blake to Mrs. Flaxman, 14 Sept. 1800 (E
709); Blake to Flaxman, 21 Sept. 1800 (E 710); Blake to Butts, 2 Oct. 1800 (E 712–13) and
Butts to Blake, Sept. 1800, Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), The Letters of William Blake 3rd ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) pp. 25–7.
4
G. E. Bentley, Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2001) pp. 202–266.
5
BR(2): p. 99.
6
Victoria and Albert Museum, Tools and Materials Used in Etching and Engraving
(London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1904) Nos. 59, 62.
38 D. WORRALL

to describe the individual flashes of light made visible against blue back-
grounds in 1924 (perhaps using the blue-field entoscope he had invented).7
One paper reports it as like ‘seeing tiny bright spots that rapidly move in
squiggly lines, especially when looking into the bright clear blue sky or an
open field of snow.’8 If this is correct, it was a naturally occurring by-­
product of seeing the bright blue sky and open seascape at Felpham in late
September or early October 1800. Roberts’ paper, without apparently
realizing these implications, gives an excellent account of Blake’s physical
position and the likely lighting conditions on the Felpham seashore. Since
Blake’s poem can be fairly precisely dated, it is significant that he never
repeats or expands this account. For him it was a fleeting phenomenon
without the neural drivers which would have made it persist or become
recurrent. By the time he wrote the poem, he may have already realized it
was a phenomena dependent on transitory conditions of light and bright-
ness, probably amplified by reflections from the sea. This may be why he
calls it his, ‘My first Vision of Light’ (my italics).
Nevertheless, the poem is a rich source of information about his
‘visions,’ not least because the very specific, very special, circumstances
demonstrate that, although it is likely to have been an individually isolated
experience, it formed part of a continuity of hallucinatory susceptibilities.
The poem’s narrative describes a ‘Vision of Light’ involving a conscious,
but specifically visual, flight or voyage. This takes him from the where he
was ‘On the yellow sands sitting,’ to an ascent ‘Over Sea over Land,’ dur-
ing which time, he writes, ‘My Eyes did Expand / Into regions of air /
Away from all Care.’ In this distinctively visual ‘Vision,’ he perceives a
heightening of Newton’s theory of corpuscular or particle light rays, see-
ing ‘In particles bright / The jewels of Light / Distinct shone & clear,’
and in each of these ‘particles’ or ‘jewels,’ he ‘gazed’ on ‘a Man / Human
formd.’ The visual aspects of the ‘Vision’ are continuously emphasized as
is the absence of any corresponding physical or material stimuli in the
external visual field (‘My Eyes more & more / Like a Sea without shore /
Continue Expanding / The Heavens commanding / Till the Jewels of
Light / Heavenly Men beaming bright / Appeard as One Man’). These

7
Richard Scheerer, ‘Die entoptische Sichtbarkeit der Blutbewegungen im Auge und ihre
klinische Bedeutung,’ Klinische Monatsblätter für Augenheilkunde 73 (1924) pp. 67–107.
8
Göran D Hildebrand, ‘Chapter 109—My little girl tells me she sees strange things,’ Creig
S. Hoyt and David Taylor (eds.) Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus (Fourth Edition)
(London: W.B. Saunders, 2013) pp. 1010–1017.
 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BLAKE’S HALLUCINATIONS 39

percepts seem to be well-defined, self-luminous, entoptic images which

‘shone,’ ‘bright,’ ‘Distinct … & clear.’ Towards the poem’s end, a verbal
and generalized auditory modality is added. Blake perceives the sounds of
a benign presence (‘Soft he smild / And I heard his voice Mild’) vocaliz-
ing (‘Saying’) words to him which specifically promise a recognizably
Georgic pastoral security (‘This is My Fold’). In his letter to Butts, Blake
had already referred to ‘the voices of winds trees & birds’ but this idea of
a pastoral haven is made even more vivid by comparing it to a threatening
outside world which also manifests audibly, ‘On the Mountain around /
The roarings resound / Of the lion & wolf.’ Crucially, the poem ends by
diminishing the verbal auditory modality of the hallucination (‘And the
voice faded mild’) before returning to a visual hallucination with notice-
able cognitive insight, ‘I remaind as a Child / All I ever had known /
Before me bright Shone’ (E 712–13, my italics).
The poem confirms much of what Blake had already written in corre-
spondence about his recent experience of an abundance of hallucinatory
percepts in both visual and auditory modalities which he associated with
his move from London to Sussex, a place where ‘Heaven opens here on all
sides her golden Gates.’ In a letter to John Flaxman on 21 September
1800 he reported that, in Felpham, the ‘voices of Celestial inhabitants are
more distinctly heard & their forms more distinctly seen’ (E 710, my ital-
ics). The ‘jewels of Light’ Blake twice refers to in the poem, and which
appeared to him ‘In particles bright,’ have conventionally been under-
stood as allusions to Newton’s theory of the particle or corpuscular physi-
cality of light in the Opticks (1704), a work rapidly adopted into English
poetry.9 However, it is also conceivable that the percepts Blake saw in his
visual field were ones he associated with an eighteenth-century belief
about physical light produced by the eye.10 Blake may be referring to
beliefs still then in circulation about this idea.
While Newton’s Opticks had deftly avoided making a definitive state-
ment about their physiology, experiments by Giovanni Battista Morgagni
(1682–1771), later replicated by Georg August Langguth (1711–1782),
and then further expanded by Jan Purkinje towards the end of Blake’s life,

9
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s Opticks and the Eighteenth
Century Poets (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946).
10
O.J. Grüsser, M. Hagner, ‘On the history of deformation phosphenes and the idea of
internal light generated in the eye for the purpose of vision,’ Documents in Ophthalmology 74
(1990), pp. 57–85.
40 D. WORRALL

demonstrated that ocular deformation is the most likely cause of types of

bright percepts seen within the visual field, so rendering the internal light
theory obsolete. To what extent information about these discoveries was
available to non-scientific readers such as Blake is not known. What Blake
knew, if anything, about these developments is unclear but, whatever his
understanding of their scientific origin, his description of a ‘Vision of
Light’ with ‘particles bright,’ is also broadly consistent with modern
accounts of deformation phosphenes which have been described as ‘irreg-
ular large bright spots of light, finely structured moving light grains … and
stationary bright stars.’11 Phosphenes are an unlikely agency in this par-
ticular case because we have the benefit of Blake’s poem which sets up very
comprehensively the local environmental and atmospheric conditions.
While phosphenes are less plausible candidates for this particular ‘vision,’
monocular pressure from the fingers also produces single spots or grains
of light while binocular pressure produces similar percepts but often inter-
leaved with complex chequerboard or lattice forms. These Klüver-like
forms were first described by Christopher W. Tyler and are present in
Blake’s art no later than An Allegory of the Bible, c. 1780–1785 (discussed
in Chap. 4).12 Although the percepts themselves have not received much
investigation, the production of pressure-induced deformation phos-
phenes is sufficiently reliable to have been advocated for use as a self-­
monitoring mechanism for glaucoma patients.13 That is, this is a reliable
and simple (if uncomfortable), method for Blake to have used to induce
some types of visual hallucination, if he cared to try it.
At the level of ‘particles bright,’ the exact constituents of the phenom-
ena are difficult to categorize. However, unlike phosphenes (which ulti-
mately derive from V1), what Blake describes in the poem are likely to
have been real images, real objects. These percepts are leukocytes (white
blood cells), entoptic phenomena caused by the interruption of red blood
cells within the visual field in conditions of bright blue light. That is, these
are real images of real objects (blood cells) in the capillaries of the eye.
They are not hallucinations. One research paper describes them as a

11
O.J. Grüsser, M. Hagner, ‘On the history of deformation phosphenes and the idea of
internal light generated in the eye for the purpose of vision,’ Doc. Ophthalmol. 74 (1990)
pp. 57–85.
12
Christopher W. Tyler, ‘Some new Entoptic Phenomena,’ Vision Research 18 (1978)
pp. 1633–639.
13
B. Fresco, ‘A new tonometer—the pressure phosphene tonometer: clinical comparison
with Goldman tonometry,’ Opthalmology, 105 (1998), pp. 2123–2126.
 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BLAKE’S HALLUCINATIONS 41

‘normal perception of moving stars or small lights, particularly when an

individual looks at a bright field of snow or blue sky.’14 Leukocytes flow in
the capillaries of the eye and produce entoptic perceptions of flashes of
light under certain circumstances. They are not directly neurally propa-
gated but are the result of the vascular system’s interaction with the under-
lying neurology of vision. They are normal responses of the eye and do not
require any other forms of induction other than blue light (such as the
sky) in the visual field. Late twentieth-century children report their
Scheerer’s phenomena as ‘when I look at the sky, I see things.’ They have
been described by clinicians as ‘bright spots, fixed in location but appar-
ently moving along an unvarying track, that are seen when viewing a clear
sky during the day.’15 One neuro-opthalmology textbook describes them
as the ‘normal perception of moving stars or small lights, particularly when
an individual looks at a bright field of snow or the blue sky.’16 To reiterate,
they are real images, not hallucinations.
To be more precise, sometimes also known as ‘flying corpuscles,’ the
phenomena occurs when red blood cells flow along the eye’s capillaries
between the leukocytes. The red blood cells are rendered visible on the
photoreceptors of the retina, an effect enhanced when looking at a clear
blue sky in good light.17 Blood haemoglobin is optimally observable by
the retina when set against a deep blue light and has increased visibility to
the viewer as an entoptic percept, the classic conditions for Scheerer’s phe-
nomena.18 Their origin is consistent with Blake’s ‘Vision of Light … The
Light of the Morning’ which occurred under an implicitly blue sky when,
‘The Sun was Emitting / His Glorious beams / From Heavens high
Streams’ (E 712). Their movement across the eye (in short, slightly curv-
ing, paths) is also synchronized to the rhythm of the heartbeat. It may be
this feature, of synchrony with the heartbeat that gave Blake the
14
Grant T. Liu, Nicholas J. Volpe, Steven L. Galetta, ‘CHAPTER 12—Visual hallucina-
tions and illusions, Editor(s): Grant T. Liu, Nicholas J. Volpe, Steven L. Galetta, Neuro-
Ophthalmology (Second Edition) (London: W.B. Saunders, 2010) pp. 393–412.
15
John D Wright, William P Boger, ‘Visual Complaints From Healthy Children, Survey of
Ophthalmology, 44 (1999) pp. 113–121.
16
Grant T. Liu, Nicholas J. Volpe, Steven L. Galetta (eds.), Visual Hallucinations and
Illusions, in Liu, Volpe, and Galetta’s Neuro-Ophthalmology (Third Edition) (London:
Elsevier, 2019) pp. 395–413.
17
Michael Loebl and Charles E. Riva, ‘Macular Circulation and the Flying Corpuscles
Phenomenon,’ Ophthalmology 85 (1978) pp. 911–917.
18
Richard Scheerer, ‘Die entoptische Sichtbarkeit der Blutbewegungen im Auge und ihre
klinische Bedeutung,’ Klinische Monatsblätter für Augenheilkunde 73 (1924) pp. 67–107.
42 D. WORRALL

impression that ‘each was a Man / Human formd’ and that ‘they beckond
to me.’ One paper describes how, ‘Against a bright, diffuse illumination an
entoptic phenomenon is observed of numerous bright particles that move
in a flowing manner with synchronous rhythmic acceleration that corre-
sponds to the cardiac cycle.’ These movements also produce the percep-
tion of a bright entoptic flash: ‘the leukocyte produces an entoptically
perceived bright flash as it traverses the capillary in front of the photore-
ceptor by interrupting the red blood cell columns.’19 These ‘flying cor-
puscles,’ appearing to Blake as entoptic percepts in his visual field would,
at the very least, fulfil the criteria of having apparent movement ‘Over Sea
over Land.’ Their movement in time with his own heartbeat not only sug-
gests the powerful impact of the ‘vision’ of Scheerer’s phenomena, but
also that he was only mildly anthropomorphizing, imagining ‘each was a
Man / Human formd.’
How much of this Blake understood, it is difficult to be sure. Certainly,
when he came to write the illuminated book in relief-etching, Milton a
Poem, not thought to have been begun earlier than 1804 after his perma-
nent return to London from Felpham in 1803, he gave a special role for
the visionary power of arterial blood. In Milton’s poetics, Blake folds
together the physiological and the temporal: ‘Every Time less than a pul-
sation of the artery / Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years
/ For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great / Events of
Time start forth & are conceived in such a Period / Within a Moment: a
Pulsation of the Artery’ (E 127). There could not be a better description
of the expansion of time ‘Within … a Pulsation of the Artery’ synchro-
nized with Blake’s heartbeat and ultimately related by him to the ‘particles
bright’ of the poem sent to Thomas Butts. However, of even greater
moment is his clear description of a ‘visionary’ moment in the same poem,
‘every Space larger than a red Globule of Mans blood. / Is visionary: and
is created by the Hammer of Los / And every Space smaller than a Globule
of Mans blood. opens / Into Eternity’ (E 127). Blake is quite specific that
the ‘red Globule of Mans blood’ is both ‘visionary,’ and creative, ‘For in
this Period the Poets Work is Done.’ Perhaps the most remarkable thing
about the identification made here is that, if the ‘Vision of Light’ Blake
wrote about in the poem to Butts is correctly identified as Scheerer’s

19
Stephen H. Sinclair, Madelynn Azar-Cavanagh, Keith A. Soper, Ronald F. Tuma and
Havey N. Mayrovitz, ‘Investigation of the Source of the Blue Field Entoptic Phenomenon,’
Investigative Opthalmology & Visual Science 30 (1989) pp. 668–673.
 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BLAKE’S HALLUCINATIONS 43

phenomena, then Milton can be demonstrated as a continuation or recol-

lection of that originating experience. Jan Purkinje’s contemporary experi-
ments to stimulate visual hallucinations through digital pressure (which
produced vascular-induced phosphenes of bright lights), included his
looking at the sun through his fingers to cause flickering light.20 It is pos-
sible Blake at some time in his life stumbled on this method of phosphene
induction (which are true hallucinations) as a practical means of generat-
ing something approximating to the Scheerer images he experienced in
Felpham in 1800.
There also has to be taken into account the general hallucinatory envi-
ronment Blake seems to have experienced while he spent the three years
between 1800 and 1803 in Felpham, one which he recalled encompassed
other ‘visionary’ states known to be conducive to his creativity. Blake’s
reference, in a letter to Butts dated 25 April 1803, that ‘none can know
the Spiritual Acts of my three years Slumber on the banks of the Ocean
unless he has seen them in the Spirit or unless he should read My long
Poem descriptive of those Acts,’ has conventionally been taken as an early,
pre-completion, reference to either Jerusalem or Milton. The ‘Slumber on
the banks of the Ocean’ has been taken as simply a reference to the ennui
of the patronage of Hayley, a misuse of Blake’s time and artistic talent.
However, what has not been understood before is that Blake’s ‘Slumber,’
and the clear direction that ‘Spiritual Acts’ (near tautologically) can be
accessed ‘in the Spirit,’ may actually describe the hypnagogic or hypno-
pompic hallucinatory states of their conception, that is, in ‘Slumber’ (E
728). Fittingly, this letter to Butts included a reassurance that, having now
removed himself from Felpham, he declared to his friend that he could
now ‘carry on my visionary studies in London’ (E 728).
Unfortunately, it is difficult to equate this ‘Vision of Light’ with
Roberts’ contextualizing of the poem as an ‘inextricably textual’ response
to the Bible.21 As mentioned above, Scheerer’s phenomena are not par-
ticularly rare, as the modern children who report them simply say, ‘when I

20
Nicholas J. Wade and Josef Brožek, Purkinje’s Vision: The Dawning of Neuroscience
(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001) p. 65; Dominic H. ffytche, ‘The hodol-
ogy of hallucinations,’ Cortex 44 (2008) pp. 1067–1083.
21
Jonathan Roberts, ‘William Blake’s Visionary Landscape near Felpham,’ Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 47 (2013) http://128.151.244.100/blakeojs/index.php/blake/arti-
cle/view/roberts472/roberts472html, Accessed 18 November 2017.
44 D. WORRALL

look at the sky, I see things.’22 Roberts is right, however, in drawing atten-
tion to a previously overlooked pencil and watercolour drawing known as
Landscape Near Felpham (c. 1800).23 This pictures, in the foreground, a
boat or canoe which Roberts links to another blue light source in the sin-
gularity of the poem’s final lines which declares, ‘Such the Vision to me /
Appeard on the Sea’ (E 713, my italics). What one can be sure about is
that, when Blake was ‘On the yellow sands sitting’ (and again, Roberts’
commentary is useful), he was very near the sea (the English Channel is
about 500 metres from the centre of the village of Felpham). Under some
situations, even in Britain, but perhaps most favourably on a sunlit late
September or early October morning, the sea looks blue. In combination
with the sky, a blue sea would have enhanced the visibility of leukocytes as
entoptic percepts within Blake’s visual field.
If this interpretation of Blake’s poem is correct, it may help explain why,
as commentators such as Rowland and Roberts have identified, this poem
remains his unique written description of a ‘Vision.’ The special conjunc-
tion of late September or early October English weather together with a
blue sky, made the leukocyte ‘flying corpuscles’ of Scheerer’s phenomena
suddenly highly noticeable when he was confronted, probably for the first
time, by the Sussex sea and bright sandy shoreline landscape. These formed
the basis of his ‘Vision of Light’ at Felpham. Familiarity and less conducive
atmospheric conditions thereafter may have made this specific entoptic
experience subsequently either less vivid or less personally remarkable.
Taken together, there are good neurophysiological and vasogenic rea-
sons why, as Blake puts it, ‘Such the Vision to me / Appeard on the Sea,’
as a mixture of the effects of leukocyte producing bright entoptic flashes
as it crosses the eye’s capillaries together with the eye’s difficulty in pro-
cessing short wave blue light (E 713). As Robin Hamlyn comments, at
that time Blake was particularly exposed to the ‘effects of light on colour’
because he was then living in a cottage in Felpham ‘that faced almost
directly north-south.’ Hamlyn concludes, ‘There seems little doubt Blake’s
time there influenced his handling of colour … showing his heightened

22
John D Wright, William P Boger, ‘Visual Complaints From Healthy Children, Survey of
Ophthalmology, 44 (1999) pp. 113–121.
23
Jonathan Roberts, ‘William Blake’s Visionary Landscape near Felpham,’ Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 47 (2013) http://128.151.244.100/blakeojs/index.php/blake/arti-
cle/view/roberts472/roberts472html; Butlin: 368. Accessed 18 November 2017.
 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BLAKE’S HALLUCINATIONS 45

responses to this coastal light.’24 Of course, nothing about these percepts,

which only he saw, is clear cut or definite but the conjunction of good
weather, the proximity of the sea, a heightened disposition to give cre-
dence to evidence of the ‘visions’ he so clearly valued for his engraving
(the Plow, the Roller and the Harrows), all suggest that ‘a Vision of Light,’
was a transient phenomenon, although—perhaps paradoxically—a set of
real images and not hallucinatory.

Migraine Aura
Similarities between the phenomenology of migraine aura and Blake’s
Ancient of Days (1794) and Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826), works
widely separated across his lifetime, were first suggested by the Bristol
Royal Infirmary consulting surgeon, George Munro Smith (1856–1917)
in 1909 and published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).25 Even
G.E. Bentley Jr.’s annual bibliography for Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly,
did not catch up with a citation for Munro Smith until 2013.26 The signifi-
cance of his insights has been mislaid. Munro Smith was following
Professor Thomas Lauder Brunton, Royal College of Surgeons, whose
Hallucinations and Allied Mental Phenomena (1910) was based on his
article in the Journal of Mental Science of April, 1902. Lauder conjectured
that engravings in Gustave Doré’s edition of [Dante Alighieri] L’ Inferno …
Colle figure di G. Doré (Parigi, 1861) ‘have a striking similarity in form to
the zigzags seen in sick headache.’27 At the turn of the nineteenth century,
the evolving vocabularies of ‘sick headache’ and migraine, as well as their
vivid symptoms, were extremely topical and this is what Munro Smith’s
interest probably reflects. The neurophysiology of migraine aura is dis-
cussed more extensively in Chap. 5.

24
Robin Hamlyn, ‘William Blake at Work: “Every thing which is in Harmony,”’ Joyce
H. Townsend and Robin Hamlyn (eds.) William Blake: The Painter at Work (London: Tate
Publishing, 2003) pp. 12–39, p. 25.
25
G. Munro Smith, ‘Literary Notes,’ British Medical Journal 2 (11 September
1909) p. 710.
26
G.E. Bentley, Jr., with the assistance of Hikari Sato and Li-Ping Geng, ‘William Blake
and His Circle: A Checklist of Publications and Discoveries in 2012,’ Blake/An Illustrated
Quarterly 47 (2013). 10.47761/biq.114.
27
Thomas Lauder Brunton, Hallucinations and Allied Mental Phenomena (London:
Adlard and Son, 1910) p. 28.
46 D. WORRALL

The possibility that Blake experienced migraine aura takes us right back
to the most reliable record of ‘his first vision’ which must have occurred c.
1766. Although gathered posthumously by his first biographer, Alexander
Gilchrist, this is the only surviving account, ‘On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich
Hill) it is, as he will in after years relate, that while quite a child, of eight
or ten perhaps, he has his first vision. Sauntering along, the boy looks up,
and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every
bough like stars.’28 As well as the potential for movement implied by
‘angelic wings,’ ‘bespangling’ suggests they looked like ‘small glittering
objects’ (OED). Of course, one must discount for these not being Blake’s
own words verbatim, but—as Munro Smith surmised in 1909—the anec-
dote appears to describe migraine aura.29 As evidence of migraine aura,
Gilchrist’s description of Blake’s first childhood vision accords very well
with the (also childhood) experience of the author and clinical neurolo-
gist, Oliver Sacks. His first experience of migraine aura also happened in
childhood, at the age of three or four: ‘I was playing in the garden when a
shimmering light appeared to my left, dazzlingly bright. It expanded,
becoming an enormous arc stretching from the ground to the sky, with
sharp, glittering, zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors.
Then behind the brightness came a growing blindness, an emptiness in the
field of vision, and soon I could see almost nothing on my left side. I was
terrified ….’30 Sacks’ account is a classic description of a migraine aura
accompanied by transient scintillating scotoma (‘a shimmering light,’
‘glittering’), fortification spectra (‘sharp … zigzagging borders’) followed
by a negative corona (‘an emptiness in the field of vision’).31 Identifying
Blake’s ‘first vision’ as migraine with aura is made far easier because (as
with Sacks) his presentation of symptoms are classic, particularly in the
context of the phenomenological types known to manifest in children.32
28
BR(2): p. 10, citing Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake … A New and
Enlarged Edition (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880) 2 Vols. Palmer’s account is simpler:
‘When very young Blake used to go out for walks in the country & would frequently come
home & describe the angels he had seen in the trees,’ BR(2): p. 10.
29
A method for the calibrating descriptions of migraine aura is given in, M.K. Eriksen, LL
Thomsen, and J Olesen, ‘The Visual Aura Rating Scale (VARS) for Migraine Aura Diagnosis,’
Cephalalgia 25 (2005) pp. 801–810.
30
Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (London: Picador, 2012) p. 122.
31
The term ‘fortification’ to describe this type of migraine aura originates in a paper by
John Fothergill (1712–1780), see below.
32
Surya N. Gupta, Vikash S. Gupta and Nirali Borad, ‘Spectrum of migraine variants and
beyond: The individual syndromes in children,’ Brain and Development 38 (2016) pp. 10–26.
 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BLAKE’S HALLUCINATIONS 47

As one study concludes, ‘Migraine aura without headache is a recogniz-

able benign migraine syndrome of late childhood.’33 While some of Sacks’
work has been questioned on the grounds of a degree of fictionality in
attributing symptoms to verifiable human subjects, his Migraine:
Understanding a common disorder (University of California Press, 1970)
has been endorsed as ‘an impressive text on a fascinating topic.’34 It is
certainly possible Sacks’ descriptions of his own migraine auras are aggre-
gated from other peoples’ migraine symptoms but the accuracy of the
description of their phenomenology is not in doubt.
As far as migraine aura’s relevance to Blake is concerned, extracts of
correspondence from Munro Smith were published in abridged form,
with illustrations, in the ‘Literary Notes’ section of a 1909 issue of BMJ.35
Munro Smith later reported that he had discussed the connections between
Blake and migraine aura in a paper read to the Bristol Scientific Club in
February 1901, meaning that knowledge about this matter had been in
the public domain for several years.36 Although the BMJ seem to have
truncated Munro Smith’s original correspondence, he wrote that, ‘Whilst
examining some of the drawings of William Blake I was much struck by
the irregular zizzag outline which is present in several of them, notably in
one called “The Ancient of Days,” and in two or three illustrations to[sic]
the Book of Job.’ With respect to Illustrations of the Book of Job, Munro
Smith called attention to ‘the fortification-like angles and lines’ in both
plate 3 (The Destruction of Jobs Sons) and plate 11 (Job’s Evil Dreams).37
Two weeks later, Charles H. Melland (1872–1953), a physician at Ancoats
Hospital, Manchester, contributed a letter to the BMJ headed ‘William

33
M.I. Shevell, ‘Acephalgic migraines of childhood,’ Pediatric Neurology 14 (1996),
pp. 211–215. Acephalgic migraines are migraines without headache.
34
Haan J, Kaptein AA, ter Meulen BC, ‘Oliver Sacks and Migraine,’ Cephalgia (2017)
37(10): 990–997. DOI: 10.1177/0333102416663460.
35
For late nineteenth-century interest in migraine, see Katherine Foxhall, ‘Making Modern
Migraine Medieval: Men of Science, Hildegard of Bingen and the Life of a Retrospective
Diagnosis,’ Medical History 58 (2014): 354–374.
36
G. Munro Smith, ‘William Blake’s Drawings,’ British Medical Journal, 2 October 1909,
p. 1012.
37
‘Literary Notes,’ British Medical Journal 2 (11 September 1909) p. 710; titles for the
Illustrations of the Book of Job plates are taken from attributions in Andrew Wright, Blake’s
Job: A Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) pp. 12–14, 30–31; Munro Smith’s
slight grammatical error (‘illustrations to,’ rather than ‘illustrations of,’ in Blake’s original)
almost certainly means that he was consulting Lawrence Binyon’s Illustrations to the Book of
Job published by Methuen in 1906.
48 D. WORRALL

Blake’s Drawings,’ generally supporting the feasibility of Munro Smith’s

observations on ‘the zigzag features … based on the “fortification figures”
seen in the migraine aura.’38
What may have particularly struck Munro Smith were illustrations from
a work he cites, Edward Liveing’s On Megrim, Sick-Headache, And Some
Allied Disorders: A Contribution to the Pathology of Nerve-Storms (1873).
Liveing, Assistant Physician to King’s College Hospital, London, deployed
an older, non-specific, vernacular term for head pain, a good demonstra-
tion of how a limited understanding of the condition still persisted in the
latter half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Liveing himself was
reaching towards a quasi-neural causation positing periodic discharges of
nervous energy of the type then thought to be related to epilepsy.39 Liveing
had also reproduced in an appendix some fascinating illustrative plates
from Airy’s 1870, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
paper.40 One of these plates (whether taken from Airy or from Liveing is
not clear) was reproduced in Munro Smith’s BMJ article.41 Munro Smith
described it as ‘a prodoma of migraine,’ and linked it directly to two of
Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, plates 3 (The Destruction of Job’s
Sons) and plate 11 (Job’s Evil Dreams), the latter of which was repro-
duced in the BMJ article.42 Munro Smith may also have had in mind one
particular marginal illustrative line drawing (not in Airy) reproduced in
On Megrim and provided by a ‘Mr. B’ (a 21-year-old in 1863), showing
an entoptic shape produced following a perception of a ‘white (luminous?)
[sic] object … close to the eye’ which was then replaced by ‘a half ring
formed by serrated lines of prismatic colours.’43 The spiky, horizontal
semi-circle of the figure featured in Liveing’s book echoes those in plate 3
of Blake’s Job and it may have been these particular features of the

38
Charles H. Melland, ‘William Blake’s Drawings,’ British Medical Journal 2 (25
September 1909) pp. 919–920.
39
M.J. Eadie, ‘The pathogenesis of migraine—17th to early 20th Century understand-
ings,’ Journal of Clinical Neuroscience 12 (2005) pp. 383–388.
40
Katherine Foxhall notes that Liveing had attended Airy’s Royal Society paper, ‘Making
Modern Migraine Medieval: Men of Science, Hildegard of Bingen and the Life of a
Retrospective Diagnosis,’ Medical History 58 (2014): 354–374.
41
One of the plates was also available in Thomas Lauder Brunton’s article in the April
1902 issue of the Journal of Mental Science and is also reproduced in, Hallucinations and
Allied Mental Phenomena (London: Adlard and Son, 1910).
42
‘Literary Notes,’ British Medical Journal 2 (11 September 1909) p. 710.
43
Edward Liveing, On Megrim, Sick-Headache, And Some Allied Disorders: A Contribution
to the Pathology of Nerve-Storms (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1873) pp. 11–12.
 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BLAKE’S HALLUCINATIONS 49

phenomenology of migraine that Munro Smith identified as present

in Blake.
Did Blake have the debilitating headaches normally associated with
migraine? As will be outlined below, in both children and adults, migraine
aura can occur both with and without headache although, if proven, the
presence of paroxysmal headache in Blake increases the overall probability
that he experienced the phenomena described here.
The principal query raised by Munro Smith’s communication to the
BMJ also seems to have involved the journal’s editorial concern about
whether Blake had headaches. Perhaps treating the matter with a degree
of scepticism, or simply carrying out conscientious peer review, the BMJ
asked the bibliographical expert, Henry B. Wheatley (1838–1917), ‘who
very kindly took much interest in the inquiry,’ to search for references to
headaches in Blake.44 Wheatley diligently read the standard biography,
Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor ignotus’ (1863), and
reported back that no headaches were recorded. However, as Melland
quickly responded in the BMJ’s next issue, ‘it must be remembered that
the characteristic visual phenomena [of migraine] may be present in some
persons without the subsequent headache,’ a point promptly reinforced by
Munro Smith: ‘As it is by no means unusual to get these “teichoptic” pre-
monitions without the headache, the absence of evidence that William
Blake suffered from migraine is, as Dr. Melland says, of no importance.’45
In this respect, Blake may have been the same as Oliver Sacks (‘I was
lucky to be one of those people who got only the aura without the head-
ache’) whose experiences are detailed below.46 Again, the scientific litera-
ture supports this assumption. One literature review in 2017 states baldly,
‘Not all typical migraine aura episodes are followed by or associated with
migraine headache.’47 The 1998 Framingham migraine study, concluded
that ‘Late-life-onset transient visual phenomena similar to the visual aura

44
J. D. Lee, ‘Wheatley, Henry Benjamin (1838–1917),’ Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/
38397, Accessed 18 May 2017].
45
Charles H. Melland, ‘William Blake’s Drawings,’ British Medical Journal 2 (25
September 1909) pp. 919–920; G. Munro Smith, ‘William Blake’s Drawings,’ British
Medical Journal 2 (2 October 1909) p. 1012.
46
Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (London: Picador, 2012) p. 123.
47
Schankin, C. J., Viana, M. and Goadsby, P. J., ‘Persistent and Repetitive Visual
Disturbances in Migraine: A Review,’ Headache, 57 (2017): 1–16.
50 D. WORRALL

of migraine are not rare and often occur in the absence of headache.’48
This assessment was verified by another comparable study, by a different
team, in 2014.49 An earlier Japanese survey found that 69.4% of their sam-
ple had never consulted a physician about their migraine.50 If he had suf-
fered headache, some traditional herbal remedy may have been sought.
The herb, feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium L.), has recently been shown
to possibly have some limited, but measurable, alleviating effect.51 On the
other hand, around 10% of migraine attacks are reported as accompanied
by sexual arousal, something probably reassuring for both Blake and
Blakeans everywhere.52
So, did Blake have headaches?
Blake’s visual art repeatedly shows, almost as a signature motif across
his entire career, head-clutching human figures in anguish and pain.
Similar expressions or gestures of head pain in paintings can be found in
Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson’s Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience
From Within (2008) which draws on a sample of around 900 paintings
entered into a series of pharmaceutical company sponsored Migraine Art
competitions between 1981 and 1987.53 Podoll and Robinson collated
evidence from 562 pieces of art produced by 459 artists. Of the selections
in the book drawn from the competitions (now in the Migraine Art
Collection), 22 paintings show the hands-to-head posture in one form or
another.54 Of the c. 550 images on the Migraine Action Art Collection

48
Christine A.C. Wijman et al., ‘Migrainous Visual Accompaniments Are Not Rare in Late
Life: The Framingham Study,’ Stroke 29 (1998) pp. 1539–1543. Of course, Blake’s is not
late-life onset.
49
Kiratikorn Vongvaivanich, Paweena Lertakyamanee, Stephen D Silberstein, David W
Dodick, ‘ Late-life migraine accompaniments: A narrative review,’ Cephalalgia (2015)
35(10): 894–911, 10.1177/0333102414560635.
50
F. Sakai and H. Igarashi, ‘Prevalence of Migraine in Japan: A Nationwide Survey,’
Cephalalgia 17 (1997) pp. 15–22.
51
B. Wider, M.H. Pittler and E. Ernst, ‘Feverfew for preventing migraine,’ Cochrane
Database of Systematic Reviews 2015, Issue 4. Art. No.: CD002286. DOI:
10.1002/14651858.CD002286.pub3, Accessed 13 January 2020.
52
Ali Gorji, ‘Spreading depression: a review of the clinical relevance,’ Brain Research
Reviews 38 (2001), pp. 33–60. Gorji cites E. Del Bene, C. Conti, M. Poggioni and F. Sicuteri,
‘Sexuality and headache,’ Advances in Neurology 33 (1982) pp. 209–214 and J.M. Pearce,
‘Is migraine explained by Leao’s spreading depression?’ Lancet 2 (1985) pp. 763–766.
53
For the background to the competitions, see Marcia Wilkinson and Derek Robinson,
‘Migraine Art,’ Cephalalgia 5 (1985) pp. 151–157.
54
Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson, Migraine Art: The Experience From Within (Berkeley,
CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008), Figs. 16, 17, 18, 57, 60, 61, 71, 78, 79, 81, 98, 103, 105,
113, 118, 120, 139, 143, 155, 275, 282, 285.
 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BLAKE’S HALLUCINATIONS 51

database, 71 are tagged by the editors as in a ‘Holding head’ posture.55 If

Blake suffered migraine with aura, then the probabilities suggested by
Podoll and Robinson and the Migraine Action Art Collection, imply he
would have incorporated its pathological symptoms into his creativity.
Podoll’s 2006 systematic study of migraine aura in paintings by 450 mod-
ern artists demonstrated that only 21% of paintings by ‘famous’ (Podoll’s
word) artists known to have had migraine betrayed no evidence of its
pathology. Yet, of artists who were, contrarily, deliberately asked to paint
their migraine, only 3% of paintings showed no objective evidence of its
known phenomenology. ‘This suggests that in such cases the transforma-
tions occurring between migraine experiences and the making of the
migraine-inspired arts may have been so complex as to veil or render
“invisible” the original sources of artistic inspiration, that is, the signs and
symptoms of migraine.’56 That is, practising artists without awareness of
their susceptibility to migraine or its usual phenomenology may still rep-
resent migraine auras in their paintings.
While Blake is circumscribed by often restricting himself to using the
clothed and unclothed human body as his principal means of expression,
often in settings devoid of perspective or pictorial depth, his recourse to
head-clutching motifs is noticeable. This gesture is visible as early as the c.
1785 watercolour, Job, his Wife and his Friends: The Complaint of Job.57
Some of the best known, and most perplexing, examples of this motif
occur in the Large Colour Printed Drawings, Lamech and His Two Wives
and The House of Death (all 1795), the former existing in two impressions
and the latter in three.58 Lamech, who is the Bible’s second murderer
(after Cain), clutches his head in anguish while, in The House of Death, a
figure compresses his or her head or ears with palms of hands.

55
See, for example, Female adult, Woman’s Head with Collage Zigzags (1985), Migraine
Action Art Collection, Reference: SA/MAR/453, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/
hs24rdfz Accessed 14/08/2023. At the time of writing, The Migraine Art Collection is
being re-catalogued by the Wellcome Trust, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/
caav4wtp.
56
Klaus Podoll, ‘Migraine Art in the Internet: A Study of 450 Contemporary Artists,’
F.Clifford Rose (ed.) The Neurobiology of Painting: International Review of Neurobiology 74
(2006) pp. 89–107.
57
Butlin: 162, recto; Tate Britain.
58
Butlin: 297, 298; Tate Collection; Collection of Robert N. Essick; Butlin: 321, 322,
Tate Collection; Fitzwilliam Museum.
52 D. WORRALL

Such gestures proliferate in the illuminated books to the extent that

anyone turning to them will find several in nearly every work. Sometimes
preliminary sketches can be linked to finished designs, helping establish
that such images were planned and not spontaneous. In the tiny intaglio
etched book, For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793), plates 2 and 3
(in Blake’s numbering), such images include two head-clutching males,
titled ‘Earth’ and ‘Air.’ Both can be traced back to drawings in his
Notebook.59 In some of the illuminated books the persistence of the motifs
is striking. There is a conspicuously head-clutching male figure surrounded
by flames in a full-plate design to The Book of Urizen (firmly dateable to
1794) in association with a second full-page design of another head-­
clutching male (plates 6 and 15).60 In the Book of Urizen alone there are at
least four other head-clutching figures in plates 4a; 7; 17; 23 and plate 17
of Copy B.61 Similarly, in America a Prophecy (1793), a head-clutching
figure (on the ground) at the bottom of plate 6 is followed by one on plate
7 (in mid-air). Another sequence is found in Europe a Prophecy (1794)
where a plunging, head-clutching, figure precedes a head-clutching male
figure who rises up pictured in a plate which itself directly precedes a plate
showing a winged, gowned, female, angel-like figure who clutches the
back of her head with both hands (plates 3[4]; 4[5]; 5[6]).
Head-clutching figures have been noticed before by critics. David
V. Erdman’s influential Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954) connects
those in Europe as a narrative about the travails of kingship (which, of
course, included decapitations) in the aftermath of the French Revolution
of 1789–1793.62 The motif also crops up in unexpected, barely visible,
places. Detlef W. Dörrbecker, the editor of The Song of Los (1795), a poem
divided into two subsections, ‘AFRICA’ and ‘ASIA,’ diligently found that
the relief-etched ‘upper curve of the “S” in “ASIA” shows a

59
David V. Erdman, with Donald K. Moore, The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic
and Typographic Facsimile (New York: Readex Books, 1973, revised edn, 1977) N93, N94.
Erdman describes the figures as, respectively, ‘using his arms partly to clutch his anxious
head,’ and ‘Pressing his forehead with clenched hands,’ p. 29.
60
The William Blake Archive editors write of the first image, ‘he clutches his head,’ and of
the second, ‘He … holds his hands vertically to his head and perhaps over his ears.’ [accessed
27/04/2017].
61
For the different copies, see David Worrall (ed.), William Blake: The Urizen Books
(London: William Blake Trust/Tate Gallery, 1995).
62
David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1954, 3rd revised edn, 1977) pp. 204–206.
 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BLAKE’S HALLUCINATIONS 53

“head-­clutching figure”’ nestling in it.63 On occasion the link between

head-­clutching and pain is unambiguously confirmed by Blake. In a sepa-
rate impression of The Book of Urizen plate 6 (which was probably printed
no later than 1796 but to which detailed finish was added, c. 1818), he
provided the caption, ‘“I sought Pleasure & found Pain” / “Unutterable.”’64
Of the group of images referred to above, one of the most striking is
The Book of Urizen plate 15 which shows a figure (possibly female) press-
ing both hands against head or ears and with the whole image apparently
showing veins of blood linking this figure to a large red globe.65 The same
gesture is repeated in the figure in The House of Death. One of the pallia-
tives Liveing reported as already in use by the 1870s to alleviate migraine
pain was digital compression of the carotid artery (which runs up the side
of the neck) at the level of the thyroid cartilage, that is, under the jaw. He
also reported a technique of wrapping a cloth around the neck to constrict
this artery, similarly to provide temporary relief.66 Recent research on arte-
rial compression for relieving migraine attacks has demonstrated the feasi-
bility of reviving such therapies.67 The balance of argument between
vasogenic and neurogenic causation (the Cortical Spreading Depression
(CSD) discussed in Chap. 5, for example) in migraine is still hotly con-
tested and cannot be discarded as irrelevant to Blake’s symptoms, particu-
larly as compression therapies may have been self-administered as a
palliative he chanced upon.68
At the least, some parts of Blake’s work in late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century Britain may mark the longevity and popular

63
Detlef W. Dörrbecker, William Blake: The Continental Prophecies (London: Tate Gallery
Publishing, 1995) p. 315.
64
Reference T13002, Tate Britain, London.
65
David Worrall (ed.), William Blake: The Urizen Books (London: William Blake Trust/
Tate Gallery, 1995) pp. 42–44.
66
Edward Liveing’s On Megrim, Sick-Headache, And Some Allied Disorders: A Contribution
to the Pathology of Nerve-Storms (1873) pp. 309–10.
67
Y. Hmaidan, C. Cianchetti, ‘Effectiveness of a prolonged compression of scalp arteries
on migraine attacks,’ Journal of Neurology 6 (2006) pp. 811–12; Carlo Cianchetti, Maria
Elisabetta Cianchetti, Tiziana Pisano, Yousef Hmaidan, ‘Treatment of migraine attacks by
compression of temporal superficial arteries using a device,’ Medical Science Monitor 15
(2009) pp. 185–188.
68
A.A. Parsons, P.J.L.M. Strijbos, ‘The neuronal versus vascular hypothesis of migraine
and cortical spreading depression,’ Current Opinions in Pharmacology 3 (2003), pp. 73–77;
Peter J. Goadsby ‘The vascular theory of migraine—a great story wrecked by the facts,’
Brain 132 (2009) pp. 6–7.
54 D. WORRALL

distribution of the vasogenic theory. The role of arterial blood and its con-
nection to the visual hallucinations of migraine aura as an aspect of this
poet and artist’s creativity also requires consideration.
The Book of Urizen (1794) marks the beginning of Blake’s particular
contemplation of the role of blood in his creation myths including blood’s
role in human creativity. It has long been recognized that The Book of
Urizen is an alternative account of Biblical creation, with this illuminated
book being Blake’s own satirically misplaced or parodic book of the
Genesis narrative born out of the contemporary refutations of religion
energetically debated in post-French Revolution Britain. In Blake’s substi-
tution, blood has a founding role in that a ‘globe of life blood’ (rather
than Adam and Eve manufactured by God on the sixth day) ‘trembled /
Branching out into roots’ to grow Blake’s alternative Eve, whom he names
Enitharmon (16: 1–2). While there are cognates with normal birth pains,
in this new version of creation, it is accompanied by ‘Fibres of blood, milk
and tears: / In pangs,’ a reference to ‘Fibres’ as the eighteenth century’s
terminology for the vessels combining the vascular and nervous systems
which has been particularly studied by Hisaoy Ishizuka with reference to
Blake (16: 4–5).69
The centrality of blood as the beginning of creation or creativity was
developed much further in Milton a Poem (1804–1811) where he wrote,
‘Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery / Is equal in its period &
value to Six Thousand Years / For in this Period the Poets Work is Done:
and all the Great / Events of Time start forth & are conceived in such a
Period / Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery’ (E 127). This is
complex poetry but, if it is the case that the visual hallucinations of
migraine aura contributed to Blake’s poetic creativity, then the role of
blood is foundational in that the ‘pulsation[s] of the artery’ he cites may
have had a relationship with the pain of migraine headache and the com-
pression palliatives recorded by Liveing as in use by the 1870s.70 In short,

69
Hisaoy Ishizuka, ‘The Elasticity of the Animal Fibre: Movement and Life in
Enlightenment Medicine,’ History of Science 44 (2006) pp. 435–68; ‘Enlightening the Fibre-
Woven Body: William Blake and Eighteenth-Century Fibre Medicine,’ Literature and
Medicine25 (2006) pp. 72–92; ‘“Fibre Body”: The Concept of Fibre in Eighteenth-century
Medicine, c. 1700–40,’ Medical History 56 (2012) pp. 562–584.
70
Andrew H. Ahn, ‘On the Temporal Relationship between Throbbing Migraine Pain and
Arterial Pulse,’ Headache 50 (2010) pp. 1507–1510; Afira F. Mirza, et al., ‘Is There a
Relationship between Throbbing Pain and Arterial Pulsations?’ The Journal of Neuroscience
32 (2012) pp. 7572–7576.
 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BLAKE’S HALLUCINATIONS 55

Blake’s visual art (and some of his poetry) exhibits some of the pathologi-
cal symptoms of migraine such as an acute awareness of the head as a site
of pain and an awareness of blood’s role in propagating that specific pain.
It may be objected that Blake uses head-clutching simply as part of a
visual grammar for conveying general categories of anguish or discomfort,
and that such images are generally distributed throughout Blake’s art and
poetry and do not particularly designate a pathology of migraine. However,
this does not falsify the claim made here about migraine. Migraine is not
exclusively associated with the head or with head pain. Some type of aura
is associated with up to 38% of migraine cases.71 Of the auras, 99% are
visual (located in the head) but there can also occur, simultaneously or as
deferred phenomena in further sets of general impairments: 40% somato-
sensory (bodily sensations), 18% motor and 20% speech difficulties.72
Analysing the 562 paintings in their sample, Podoll and Robinson dis-
criminate ‘Visual Disturbances’ (that is, in the head) separately from bodily
sensations. They grouped ‘Abnormal Bodily Sensations’ (or cenesthopa-
thies) into a disparate, sporadically recurrent set of migraine phenomena
evidenced in the paintings they studied. These they collated in two tables
of ‘pain-related body awareness illustrated in 133 Migraine Art [Collection]
pictures.’ They then further subdivided them as sensations of limited (or
localized) body pain sensation, pain sensations of pressure as well as pull-
ing, movement and constriction or strangulation.73 Most of these catego-
ries occur in images found in The Book of Urizen: plate 3 (movement—human
figure in fire); plate 5 (strangulation—serpent round body); plate 5
­(constriction—bent-over in fire); plate 7 (constriction—skeleton in foetal
position, head-clutching); plate 8 (pressure—figure holding up earth);
plate 10 (constriction—figure chained); plate 15 (pressure—head-­
clutching); plate 19 (constriction—figure chained round chest); plate 20
(constriction—manacled figure in foetal position); plate 26 (constric-
tion—figure trapped in netting). In short, there is ample evidence for the

71
Kelman, L. The aura: A tertiary care study of 952 migraine patients. Cephalalgia 2004;
24: 728–734.
72
J.M. DeLange and F.M Cutrer, ‘Our Evolving Understanding of Migraine with Aura,’
Current Pain and Headache Reports 18 (2014): 453, 10.1007/s11916-014-0453-0.
73
Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson, Migraine Art: The Experience From Within (Berkeley,
CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008) pp. 85–146; Tables 6.4 and 6.5. See also, N. Lukianowicz,
‘“Body image” disturbances in psychiatric disorders,’ British Journal of Psychiatry 113
(1967) pp. 31–47.
56 D. WORRALL

presence of headache and other bodily pain types associated with migraine
presented in Blake’s art, possibly with a clustering in the 1790s.
Given the absence of reliable medical diagnoses until the 1870s, and
with the consequent difficulty that Blake’s contemporaries were unable to
differentiate migraine symptoms as a distinctive phenomenon, the evi-
dence for his migraine aura cannot be anything other than circumstantial.
Nevertheless, human figures in his art showing pain within the categories
mentioned above, in this case in works dating from the 1790s, continued
to proliferate particularly in the illuminated books until the end of
Blake’s life.
If the idea of concurrent modalities of migraine aura occurring in com-
bination with Klüver geometric hallucinations seems troubling, it is con-
sistent with the hodological model of hallucinations proposed by Dominic
H. ffytche (hallucinations do not originate from changed activities within
specific brain areas—the ‘topology’ argument—but from altered connec-
tions between specific brain areas, that is, the brain ‘hodology’ argument).74
The attractiveness of a migraine aura theory as a probable neurophysiol-
ogy for some of Blake’s ‘visions’ is that: they are entoptic percepts experi-
enced within the visual field; they are luminous and visible whether the
eyes are open or closed or in a darkened room; they have a known preva-
lence amongst the general population; a known range of phenomenologi-
cal characteristics; they can occur in both childhood and late life; they are
recurrent; they are non-morbid and they have no long-term effect on
motor ability. In short, migraine aura produces recurrent, reversible visual
hallucinations without morbidity.75 Though mislaid for over a century,
Munro Smith’s intervention was significant. It means that by 1909 some-
one had made an explicit link between Blake and migraine ‘fortification
figures’ and had published on it in the BMJ.
Perhaps the most significant thing about ‘Scheerer’s phenomena’ and
migraine aura is they are both naturally occurring visual percepts, anoma-
lous real images in the first case and hallucinatory products of neural

74
Dominic H. ffytche, ‘The hodology of hallucinations,’ Cortex 44 (2008) pp. 1067–1083;
Rowena Carter, Dominic H. ffytche, ‘On visual hallucinations and cortical networks: a trans-
diagnostic review,’ Journal of Neurology 262 (2015) pp. 1780–1790.
75
Some research suggests migraine is linked to central nervous system disorder, Todd J
Schwedt and David W Dodick, ‘Advanced neuroimaging of migraine,’ The Lancet Neurology
8 (2009) pp. 560–568. For the dangers of stroke, see Markus Schürks, Pamela M. Rist,
Marcelo E. Bigal, Julie E. Buring, Richard B. Lipton, Tobias Kurth Tobias, ‘Migraine and
cardiovascular disease: systematic review and meta-analysis,’ BMJ 2009; 339: b3914.
 2 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BLAKE’S HALLUCINATIONS 57

activity on V1 in the latter case. If a migraine aura episode can be accred-

ited to the Peckham Rye event of c. 1766, then his migraine is likely to
have accompanied him throughout his life, even if only intermittently.
However, the impact of events he clearly classified, as in the Peckham Rye
case, as ‘visions’ would have been cumulative. Even if his initial experience
of ‘Scheerer’s phenomena’ in 1800 never occurred again (and his celebra-
tion of it in the poem suggests it had not occurred before), it seems likely
he would have understood it as on a continuum of his experiences of
‘visions,’ including not least the post-bereavement hallucination of his
deceased brother, Robert, discussed in Chap. 3.
 CHAPTER 3

Perceiving More than Perception

The Eye’s Mind and Blake for Babes

Given that, by c. 1766, Blake had experienced ‘his first vision’ of ‘bright
angelic wings bespangling … like stars,’ and, by c. 1809, in middle age, he
was writing confidently that his paintings were based on ‘Stupendous
Visions,’ affirming that ‘I have represented it as I saw it,’ it is not surpris-
ing that, at some stage, he would have needed to formulate explanations
(if only for himself) of the phenomena he was encountering and how they
impacted on his creative practice (E 554–5).1 In short, he needed to arrive
at a working theory of perception congruent with his lived experience of
‘visions’ and, of equal urgency, he needed to incorporate it into his art if
he was to express their power and impact.
The principal vehicle for this formulation was the tiny illuminated book,
in relief and white line etching with colour printing, There is No Natural
Religion (c. 1788–1794), a work usually associated with another book in
illuminated printing from the same period, All Religions are One.2 These

1
BR(2): p. 10.
2
For an introduction to There is No Natural Religion, see Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick,
Joseph Viscomi (eds.), William Blake: the Early Illuminated Books (London: Tate Gallery
Publishing, 1993) pp. 21–25. For greater detail, see Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of
the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) pp. 198–232. The discussion
which follows in this chapter is indebted to their work.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 59

Switzerland AG 2024
D. Worrall, William Blake’s Visions, Palgrave Studies in Literature,
Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2_3
60 D. WORRALL

two works mark the beginning of an extraordinary phase in Blake’s use of

the relief-etching method, the printmaking process by which he produced
the greatest number (by title) of illuminated books in the comparatively
short time of the six years between 1789 and 1795.3 The moment of this
development coincided with what might be described as the sudden conver-
gence of two perceptual burdens or challenges. One was accidental, the
intervention of a personal tragedy. Anxiety arising from the death of his
brother, Robert, in October 1787 resulted in at least one post-­bereavement
hallucination. Post-bereavement hallucinations are good indicators of levels
of increased anxiety, whether qualitatively negative, or, as seems more likely
in this case, positive and beneficial in their eventual meanings. The second
phase of this development were the increased perceptual burdens arising as
a result of his expanding skills as a printmaker. This episode, also dateable to
c. 1788, included the cognitive adaptation necessary for him to become flu-
ent in mirror-writing, an unavoidable requirement of the relief-etched
method and the very basis of the poetry in the illuminated books.
As far as his ‘visions’ were concerned, alongside a continuing engage-
ment with a contemporary political and social context, soon to be absorbed
in reacting to the implications of the French Revolution, the major chal-
lenges Blake faced at the end of the 1780s was how to integrate into his
art and poetry his experience of perceiving more than perception. This is
the apparent paradox he framed in There is No Natural Religion (Series b),
‘Mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception. he
percieves[sic] more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover’ (E 2). For
anyone who thought that ‘perceptions are not bounded … by … percep-
tion,’ developing a functional theory of perception would always be a
major issue, encompassing as it did a negotiation of self-identity. This was
not just a problem about how to describe his ‘visions’ in writing but also
how to represent their meaning visually. In addition, building on his print-
making skills, he also sought to invent a method of combining text and
design within his novel etching process called relief-etching.
These problems converged towards the end of the 1780s, initiating
what one might call major creative challenges or, even, perceptual bur-
dens. Aged 23 in 1780, he had married Catherine Boucher in 1782 and

3
The illuminated books Blake produced 1789–1795 are namely, Book of Thel, Songs of
Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of
Albion, America A Prophecy, Europe A Prophecy, The Book of Urizen, The Book of Los, Ahania
and The Song of Los. For their editions of printing, consult Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea
of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), Appendix, pp. 376–81.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 61

then ran a print-selling partnership with James Parker which lasted only
between 1784 and 1785. During this time, amongst other commissions,
he had significant jobs engraving eight plates for The Novelist’s Magazine
in 1782 and seven for Joseph Ritson’s enduringly important A Select
Collection of English Songs (1783).4 He also exhibited four drawings at the
Royal Academy exhibition in 1785 (‘some lunatic, just escaped from the
incurable cell of Bedlam’) and by 1788 had a commission to engrave two
plates for the successful print-seller John Raphael Smith.5 The points of
convergence for the challenges to his engraving and artistic career,
although principally having to do with the structural socio-economic con-
straints of being an ex-apprentice engraver in a London art market domi-
nated by oil painters, came into sharp focus when he began to develop the
relief-etching process. An anecdote captured by Gilchrist from an unknown
source, concerning the 1785 Royal Academy dinner which Blake attended,
records the President, Sir Joshua Reynolds, challenging him, having
‘doubtless heard strange accounts of his interlocutor’s sayings and doings,
“I hear you despise our art of oil painting.” “No, Sir Joshua, I don’t
despise it; but I like fresco better.”’6 The path of divergence, trailed by the
‘strange accounts’ reaching Reynolds, was already taking him away from
the conventions of contemporary fine art and towards watercolour ‘fresco’
and the printmaking skills of his apprenticeship.
The relief-etching technique Blake developed produced a printing sur-
face on a copper-plate combining text and design as if it were a stereotype,
the contemporary term for a cement casting made from a letterpress where
normally separated printing surfaces of text and design were integrated
onto a single new plate.7 Hitherto, the only viable commercial methods
had involved keeping production of letterpress text and engraved images
separate, involving extra labour and technical costs. As late as the 1760s,
the crude results of experimentation with a ‘new Bloc-Print’ by Adam
Toppin of York, using woodcut plates combining text and image on a
single printing surface, give some idea of the difficulties, yet desirability, of

4
Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations: A Catalogue and Study
of the Plates Engraved by Blake after Designs by Other Artists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
pp. 30–35.
5
BR(2): pp. 33, 39–40, 48.
6
BR(2): p. 40.
7
The fullest account is, Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
62 D. WORRALL

achieving a breakthrough innovation.8 Blake aimed to integrate text and

illustration in one fluent etching process. The attraction of being able to
combine text and design on a single copper-plate made sense for someone
apprentice-trained and able to take advantage of his twin gifts of striking
illustration and unusual poetic skill (a facility already declared in his—let-
terpress printed—Poetical Sketches of 1783). When formed into small edi-
tions of highly finished books capable of having their constituent plates
re-sequenced and re-ordered through addition, subtraction, masking, and
the reversal of colour palettes, together with the possibility of making art-
ist’s proofs for connoisseur collectors, Blake thought he had identified a
small but distinctive market, separate from both the affluent clients of the
oil painters and the print-seller publishers sought out by engravers and
their customers.9 Relief-etching of images did not require cognitive or
perceptual skills much different from the mixed method of dot and loz-
enge engraving and intaglio etching used by most printmakers who sup-
plied the London book trade. However, mirror-writing in quantities larger
than merely confirming the details of engraver, printer and place and date
of publication, was a different matter, adding a further perceptual burden
which increased with the amount of poetry he wanted to include on each
copper plate.
Mirror-writing, discussed further below, was far from being an insur-
mountable obstacle, but it is appropriate to count it amongst the percep-
tual challenges he faced by the end of the 1780s. Chief amongst these was
his decision to place a high value on the transient ‘visions’ he had become
subject to, beginning no later than c. 1766. As a result, defining, even if
for his own satisfaction, the nature of perception was something he decided
to negotiate in his illuminated books, starting with There is No Natural
Religion and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. These were amongst the
first titles he produced using the relief-etched method. Particularly for
There is No Natural Religion, Blake’s prioritization of the problems of
perception is a noticeable feature of these early works in the illuminated
method. To understand how Blake could plausibly explain that ‘percep-
tions are not bound by organs of perception,’ it is useful to look at two
occasions when he engages with the nature of the thresholds between

8
David Bindman, ‘The English Apocalypse,’ Francis Carey (ed.), The Apocalypse and the
Shape of Things to Come (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 2000) pp. 208–269.
9
David Worrall, ‘Illuminated Books,’ William Blake in Context, ed. Sarah Haggarty
(Cambridge University Press, 2019) pp. 35–42.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 63

‘visions,’ the basis of his artistic practice, and what he readily recognized
as ‘the material world’ (E 2, 60). Amongst the solid surfaces Blake worked
with throughout his life as a visual artist, included canvas, millboard, ivory,
wooden panel, copper and paper for his supports or, when working at
etching or engraving, producing printing surfaces made from copper
plates or wooden blocks. These presented not only the normal range of
challenges of opacity, tractability and resistance, but also, because he often
asserted that the originating stimuli arose from things seen during entop-
tic ‘visions’ or hallucinations, the percepts he claimed to experience could
not be verified by reference to exoptic stimuli or material objects.
Two particular works from the 1780s reveal his creative responses to
the difficulties of presenting or explaining to others how and why ‘percep-
tions are not bounded … by … perception.’ A moment picturing dramatic
hesitancy between reality and the feasibility of hallucination is caught in
one of Blake’s earliest paintings, a work which, unusually for this period of
his life, can be precisely dated. One of Blake’s 1785 Royal Academy draw-
ings, Joseph making himself known to his brethren, seems to capture a
moment not only dramatic, but also one where Joseph’s brothers are
uncertain (and afraid) as to his identity, whether it is an illusion or the real-
ity of the brother they sold into slavery. His portrayal of this revelatory
moment was immediately remarked as the work of ‘some lunatic,’ far
removed from its conventional status as a parable of endurance and for-
giveness.10 In a second example, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
written at the end of the 1780s, Blake famously wrote that ‘If the doors of
perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite’
(E 39). Despite being taken up by Aldous Huxley and 1960s counter-­
culture, it ought to alert our attention to the possibility of the awkward-
ness of its literalness. This conceptual problem is unresolved yet, oddly,
ignored by critics. Why ‘doors of perception’ (my italics)? He does not say,
as he might so easily have done, ‘If the windows of perception were
cleansed.’ This is despite his already using a similar formulation for revela-
tion, ‘the clear windows of the morning,’ in his poem ‘To Spring,’ in his
juvenile collection, Poetical Sketches (1783, E 408). Instead, ‘doors of per-
ception,’ seems to reference something solid, routinely opaque and even
draws attention to itself as such. How often does one clean a door?
Declaring the ‘doors of perception … cleansed’ did not solve the prob-
lem of communicating what, in 1809, he clarified as ‘visionary

10
BR(2): p. 33.
64 D. WORRALL

conception,’ although by then he had clearly discovered a more suitable

discourse for embodying his sense that his ‘visions’ were cognitive events.
Eventually Blake would arrive at a more modulated discourse to describe
his ‘visions.’ The ‘eye’s mind’ thesis of twenty-first-century neuroscience
supports the view that his ‘visions’ were subject to continuous cognitive
development, just as he claimed when he wrote that art and poetry were
the products of ‘visionary contemplations,’ ‘intellectual vision’ and ‘vision-
ary conception’ (E 540, 542, 757). Blake’s art and poetry were, quite lit-
erally, cognitively embodied in the neurophysiology of the ‘visions’ that
produced them. Once one appreciates that Blake’s ‘visions’ had this cogni-
tive dimension because of their location in visual cortex, the rationale for
his career-long insistence on their integrity makes sense. However, on
account of the impact of the unorthodox physiologies of his ‘visions,’
physiologies he could not have fully understood, sooner or later Blake
would necessarily encounter points of crisis when he contemplated their
nature and how these fitted into the increasingly rationalist, empirically
based, society of Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. These
reached a critical moment when they became not just episodes requiring
critical self-analysis, although this took place, but were accompanied by
the emotional burdens arising from the death of his brother, Robert in
1787, an event which coincided with his wish to perfect a relief-etching
process capable of integrating text and design on a single plate.
Ironically, convincing his contemporaries about the integrity of his
‘visions’ and the perceptual physiologies underlying them, is not so distant
removed from how that same problem exists today, a time when Blake is
repeatedly portrayed as a ‘visionary’ without ‘visions,’ or, at least, not the
sort of ‘visions’ Samuel Palmer readily recognized and who, ‘thought they
were seen as real objects by his outward eyes and as such painted.’11
However, the further one looks back, the less timid, cautious or perhaps
self-conscious, critics were about taking Blake’s claims about his ‘visions’
at their face value. A productive route is to look at older traditions of Blake
studies, perspectives pre-dating Frye and Mitchell.
Anthony Blunt’s, The Art of William Blake (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1959), was largely an extension of his remarkable 1943
wartime essay, ‘Blake’s Pictorial Imagination,’ published in the Journal of

11
BR(2): p. 729.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 65

the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.12 Surprisingly, it remains one of

only a handful of books entirely devoted to the corpus of Blake’s visual art.
However, his chapter in The Art of William Blake, ‘Vision and Execution
in Blake’s Painting,’ was not a re-hash of the 1943 piece but contained
some new, noticeably uncompromising, remarks about vision: ‘The artist,
that is to say, does not study the material world for its own sake but regards
it as a series of symbols behind which lies truth … The painter must, there-
fore, not concern himself with visible appearances but with the eternal
truth lying behind them.’13 Perhaps mirroring his own highly covert life as
a Soviet spy, Blunt’s rather prosaic style masks a sympathetic insight into
Blake’s ability to look into another world.14 The flat integrity of these lines
seems to harmonize with Blake’s own claims about his ‘visions.’ Providing
a riposte to sections of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses on Art (1778),
Blake specifies exactly what Blunt describes; that his art is a literal copying
out of the determinate outline of visions: ‘Vision is Determinate & Perfect
& he [the artist] Copies That without Fatigue Every thing being Definite
& determinate’ (E 646). Blunt understood Blake’s ‘Vision’ to be ‘Definite
& determinate,’ perhaps even copied directly, ‘For Blake, therefore, the
creation of a work of art starts with a sharply defined vision which has to
be recorded in the clearest possible manner.’15
Going back even further to around 1923, Thomas Wright of Olney
(1859–1936), the founder of the second William Blake Society in 1912,
wrote a fascinating private theatrical for children called Blake for Babes. It
was apparently intended for performance before the Society’s President,
Charles Wyndham, 3rd Baron Leconfield (1872–1952), then the owner
of the Petworth House Last Judgment (1808).16 Although often over-
looked today, Wright is a considerable figure in early Blake studies. His
two volume, Life of William Blake (1929), drew on his friendship with
William Muir, an early member of the Society and a significant early

12
Anthony Blunt, ‘Blake’s Pictorial Imagination,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 6 (1943) pp. 190–212.
13
Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake: No 12, Bampton Lectures in America Delivered
at Columbia University 1959 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) pp. 25–6.
14
Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London: Macmillan 2001).
15
Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake: No 12, Bampton Lectures in America Delivered
at Columbia University 1959 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) p. 30.
16
Butlin: 642.
66 D. WORRALL

facsimilist of the illuminated books.17 Of even greater significance for the

biography of Blake is that Wright’s Life stands as first informant that his
‘parents attended the Moravian Chapel in Fetter Lane.’18 The rediscovery
in the first decade of the twenty-first century of this aspect of Blake’s fam-
ily background, and his probable awareness of the global mission of the
Moravians (anti-slavery, Anglo-German, fixated on Christ’s wounds, theo-
logically ecumenical), requires a rebalancing of biographical assumptions
about him, not least to discard the ubiquitous designation that his parents
were Dissenters.19 Wright was an important figure, someone with a degree
of knowledge about Blake not automatically routed through Alexander
Gilchrist’s perspectives in his, Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor ignotus’ (1863).
Blake for Babes has a cast which included not only Wright himself but
also child performers (‘Hazel: With dimples and shimmering golden curls,
Age 6 / Tony: Her sturdy brother. Age 4’). The chief interlocutor is the
Secretary of the Society, Wright himself (‘White haired’). Blake for Babes is
sometimes whimsical, sometimes ironic. There is a cat called ‘Urizen’ and
a sheepdog called ‘Fuzon’ (one of the more obscure Blakean mythological
characters) and, at the end, the Secretary promises, ‘When there is another
wet day I will explain to you Tiriel, Vala, Jerusalem, and the other
Prophetic Works … but for the rest of this morning we will … give our-
selves up to the breathless excitement of minnow catching.’20 However,
the play also provides a disarmingly clear (if somewhat overly didactic)
introduction to the poet and his works.
At one point in Blake for Babes, when Blake’s ideas about the limita-
tions of the human senses are discussed, the Secretary corrects Hazel (who
says there are five senses): ‘No, Hazel, six. We are Blakeans you know, and
have therefore in addition to touch, sight, taste, smell and hearing, the gift
of perceiving with the inner eye—the eye of the mind.’21 Wright empha-
sizes a cognitive function in this sixth sense, ‘It is the power not only to
invest objects with a glory which matter of fact minds do not perceive, but

17
Keri Davies, ‘William Muir and the Blake Press at Edmonton,’ Blake/An Illustrated
Quarterly, 27 (1993) pp. 14–25.
18
Thomas Wright, Life of William Blake (Olney: Thomas Wright, 1929) 2 vols. Vol. 1 p. 2.
19
Keri Davies and Marsha K. Schuchard, ‘Recovering the lost Moravian history of William
Blake’s family,’ Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly, 38 (2004), 36–43.
20
Thomas Wright, Key to Blake. Blake for Babes. A popular illustrated Introduction to the
Works of William Blake (Olney, Bucks: Thomas Wright, 1923) pp. 6, 9, 20, 35.
21
Thomas Wright, Key to Blake. Blake for Babes. A popular illustrated Introduction to the
Works of William Blake (Olney, Bucks: Thomas Wright, 1923) p. 12.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 67

also to lay hold of their inner meaning, in other words to see with the
inner eye of the mind.’22 Quite noticeably, this cognitive ability of ‘perceiv-
ing with the inner eye,’ approximates to processing ‘inner meaning,’ using
the ‘inner eye … of the mind’ (my italics). Unexpectedly, Blake for Babes
comes very close to suggesting that there is a place in the brain where
visual images function cognitively independently of the senses but routed
through mind.
As Wright may have been aware, his view was consistent with the
description of Blake’s visions reported by Frederick Tatham as early as c.
1832: ‘He always asserted that he had the power of bringing his
Imagination before his minds[sic] Eye, so completely organized & so per-
fectly formed & Evident, that he persisted, that while he copied the vision
(as he called it) upon his plate or canvas, he could not Err; & that error &
defect could only arise from the departure or inaccurate delineation of this
unsubstantial scene.’23
At the very least, in the 1920s Wright—who had some degree of spe-
cialist knowledge about his subject—was more comfortable with discuss-
ing Blake’s ‘visions’ than many twenty-first-century critics. But Blake for
Babes’ statements about the distinctly cognitive ‘gift of perceiving with the
inner eye—the eye of the mind,’ also approximates to Dominic H. ffytche’s
helpful suggestions about the neuroscience of the hallucinating brain: ‘If
we use the folk terminology of a mind’s eye (the inner space in which we
consciously experience visual imagery), activity in specialized visual cortex
could be conceived as the eye’s mind. In the eye’s mind, visual experience
becomes related to mind.’24 ffytche’s deceptively simple re-formulation
allows us to reconceptualise more readily how visual hallucinations, propa-
gating from sites in V1 and early visual cortex, are cognitively functional.
They do this by virtue of their connectivity across cortical sites in this
group, enabled by their power of processing, rather than by their location.
As ffytche puts it, there is evidence of ‘co-localization of perceptual and
non-perceptual activity within individual cortical areas.’25

22
Thomas Wright, Key to Blake. Blake for Babes. A popular illustrated Introduction to the
Works of William Blake (Olney, Bucks: Thomas Wright, 1923) p. 14.
23
BR(2): p. 673.
24
Dominic H. ffytche, ‘The Hallucinating Brain: Neurobiological Insights into the Nature
of Hallucinations,’ Fiona Macpherson and Dimitris Platchias (eds.) Hallucination: Philosophy
and Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2013) pp. 45–63.
25
Dominic H ffytche, ‘Neural codes for conscious vision,’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6
(2002) pp. 493–495.
68 D. WORRALL

ffytche’s underlying neurobiological model is that of the hodological

(connectivity emphasized) rather than topological (site emphasized)
account of brain. To arrive at this understanding of visual images (exopti-
cal and entoptical) cognitively processed, he cites several precursor experi-
ments for the ‘eye’s mind’ argument, such as those conducted by Semir
Zeki and colleagues. One of these found that V5 received conscious per-
cepts of motion without them having first passed through V1.26 Other
experiments have found that visual areas of the brain could be excited by
invisible stimuli and their orientation predicted.27 The methodology of
later, ‘binocular rivalry,’ experiments are discussed further below.
Remarkably, in the 1920s, Thomas Wright even seems to have under-
stood something of the difficult, but integrated, role of cognitive insight
embodied in visual perception.28 He emphasizes to Hazel that the sixth
Blakean sense can ‘invest objects with a glory which matter of fact minds
do not perceive,’ a setting out of different layers of cognitive order associ-
ated with an ‘inner-eye’ distinct from ‘sight.’ In short, what ffytche help-
fully abbreviates as the ‘eye’s mind,’ is also described by Wright as a ‘lay[ing]
hold of … inner meaning … with the inner-eye of the mind,’ a location of
perception similarly capable of a cognitive function where the ‘inner-eye’
produces ‘inner meaning.’ In keeping with Blake’s claims to John Linnell
and Henry Crabb Robinson about the ubiquity in the species of the capac-
ity for ‘visions,’ Wright even—perhaps somewhat patronizingly—reminds
Hazel that, ‘You yourself have the sixth sense in a small way.’29
Different though they are in their disciplinary backgrounds, Blake for
Babes, as much as ffytche’s proposal of the ‘eye’s mind,’ assists the re-­
positioning of hallucinations—or ‘visions,’ as Blake would have it—within
the experience of a non-judgemental empirical mainstream of human

26
J. L. Barbur, J. D. G. Watson, R. S. J. Frackowiak and S. Zeki, ‘Conscious visual percep-
tion without VI,’ Brain 116 (1993) pp. 1293–1302.
27
K. Moutoussis and S. Zeki, ‘The relationship between cortical activation and perception
investigated with invisible stimuli,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences United
States of America 14 (2002) pp. 9527–9532; John-Dylan Haynes and Gerain Rees,
‘Predicting the orientation of invisible stimuli from activity in human primary visual cortex,’
Nature Neuroscience 8 (2005) pp. 686–691.
28
The neurobiological connections between perception and consciousness are still debated;
Lionel Naccache, ‘Chapter 18—Visual Consciousness: A “Re-Updated” Neurological Tour,’
The Neurology of Consciousness (Second Edition), Steven Laureys, Olivia Gosseries and Giulio
Tononi (eds.) (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2016) pp. 281–295.
29
Thomas Wright, Key to Blake. Blake for Babes. A popular illustrated Introduction to the
Works of William Blake (Olney, Bucks: Thomas Wright, 1923) p. 14.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 69

behaviour.30 As referred to above, he wrote, ‘I question not my Corporeal

or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning
a Sight I look thro it & not with it’ (E 566). As far as Blake’s visual hal-
lucinations are concerned, this means looking ‘thro’ ‘& not with’ the eye.
There is evidence from the 1780s that Blake’s concerns about his facul-
ties of visual perception had become an increasing preoccupation. In part,
some of this was stimulated by his encounters with others who formed
part of artisan and religious subcultures active on the peripheries of
London’s skilled trades and sharing a self-proclaimed background in
‘visions.’ One of them was the copper-plate printer, William Bryan.31
Although there is no evidence they ever met, they shared an almost coin-
cident engagement with—followed by a mutually vigorous repudiation
of—Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), a Swedish mystic with a circle of
followers in London. It is significant that Bryan’s vision took place when
he was deeply immersed in the process of printing from a copper plate,
‘The 23d of the month called January, 1789, in the morning, having made
all things ready for my work, which was then copper-plate printing, I
found a stop in my mind to go on with it. Waiting a little, I took some
paper to wet for another plate, but found the same stop: then I perceived
that it was of the Lord.’32 On the basis of the vision he immediately left his
home and set out for Avignon, France, in search of other groups holding
similar outlooks. In 1789 Blake was also beginning to engage with
Swedenborg. He and his wife, Catherine, both attended a Swedenborg
conference that year in East Cheap, London. At this event, they are likely
to have met Dorothy Gott (who was signed into the conference register

30
The Episcopalian minister and religious dance advocate, William Norman Guthrie
(1868–1944) provides a remarkably open-minded discussion of Blake’s visions (‘Visions? Let
us stop to consider’), ‘William Blake: Poet and Artist,’ The Sewanee Review 5 (1897)
pp. 328–348.
31
David Worrall, ‘William Bryan, Another Anti-Swedenborgian Visionary Engraver of
1789,’ Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 34 (2000) pp. 14–22. See also, the Collected Letters
of Robert Southey project, https://romantic-circles.org/editions/southey_prophecy/
HTML/people, Accessed 18/10/2021.
32
William Bryan, A Testimony of the Spirit of Truth, Concerning Richard Brothers (London:
J. Wright, 1795) p. 21.
70 D. WORRALL

along with the Blakes).33 Gott was already a female prophet and author of
the extraordinary, The Midnight Cry, “Behold, the Bridegroom comes!” Or,
An Order from God To Get Your Lamps Lighted, Otherwise you must go into
Darkness (1788). She had experienced, and wrote about, her visual and
auditory hallucinations (‘this light enlarged the Scriptures … things
appeared as a scene, and a voice, as plain as if the book laid before me’).34
By 1793, Blake had adopted a similarly female prophetic mode for himself,
most notably in his illuminated book in relief-etching, Visions of the
Daughters of Albion but also, two years later, in the sibyl-like female ora-
tor, ‘Eno aged Mother,’ on the frontispiece to The Book of Los (1795) (E
90). William Bryan, and perhaps more notably, Dorothy Gott, may have
strengthened in Blake a sense of community amongst London’s artisan
classes (Bryan’s copper-plate printer trade was allied to Blake’s trade as
reproductive engraver; Gott had kept a tavern), providing a sense of infor-
mal community, identity and, most importantly, a shared belief in the
value and integrity of ‘visions.’
Swedenborg’s writings had a measurable impact. He was mentioned
several times in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789–1790) but also
referenced much later in A Descriptive Catalogue as a ‘visionary’ and the
subject of Blake’s (untraced) The spiritual Preceptor, an experiment Picture,
displayed in the 1809 exhibition.35 The painting may have last been seen
around 1818 by Caroline Gordon, daughter of Blake’s Swedenborgian
patron, Charles Augustus Tulk, when she recalled a picture of ‘children in
the spiritual world.’36 Blake affirmed that the specific subject was ‘taken
from the visions of Emanuel Swedenborg’ (E 546). Such was Blake’s
repudiation of him in The Marriage, it is easy to underestimate the longev-
ity of his interaction with the reputation of a figure who continued to
attract a contemporary following and, whether he liked it or not, acted as
a point of comparison. The poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had
­borrowed C.A. Tulk’s copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience in

33
David Worrall, ‘William Blake, the Female Prophet and the American Agent: The
Evidence of the Swedenborgian Great East Cheap Conference,’ in Blake and Conflict, eds.
Jon Mee and Sarah Haggarty (Houndmills, 2009), 48–64; David Worrall and Nancy Jiwhon
Cho, ‘William Blake’s Meeting with Dorothy Gott: The Female Origins of Blake’s Prophetic
Mode,’ Romanticism 6:1 (2010) pp. 60–71.
34
Dorothy Got, The Midnight Cry, “Behold, the Bridegroom comes!” Or, An Order from God
To Get Your Lamps Lighted, Otherwise you must go into Darkness (1788) p. 26.
35
Butlin: 600. Butlin notes it as a tempera, ‘Untraced since 1809.’ BR(2): p. 335
and 335n.
36
Blake did not meet C.H. Tulk until 1816; BR(2): p. 326.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 71

1818, immediately declared Blake ‘a man of Genius—and I apprehend, a

Swedenborgian.’37 Certainly, in A Descriptive Catalogue Blake straightfor-
wardly refers to Swedenborg as ‘this visionary,’ someone whose works ‘are
well worthy the attention of Painters and Poets,’ admonishing his fellow
painters, ‘O Artist! you may disbelieve all this, but it shall be at your own
peril’ (E 546). Whatever the painting looked like, Blake seems to have
been aware that Swedenborg’s lack of credibility was becoming uncom-
fortably mixed up with his own poor standing as an artist. Writing in 1867,
Seymour Stocker Kirkup (1788–1880), who met Blake several times in the
antique drawing rooms at the Royal Academy between 1810 and 1816,
and a late convert to spiritualism himself, continued to ‘disbelieve’ Blake’s
‘visions’ comparing him to the long-dead Swedish mystic (‘The great
defect in Blake & Swedenborg was that there was no testimony—only
their word … I therefore thought Blake mad & neglected him’).38
The paired equivalence of Blake with Swedenborg, made more compli-
cated by the repudiation starkly set out in The Marriage as early as 1789,
was clearly commonplace even in his own lifetime, but it is important to
reset the balance of their joint credibility and undo the kind of critical
disabling practised by Kirkup. An important journal article by psycholo-
gists, Simon R. Jones and Charles Fernyhough, marks the first modern
attempt to reassess Swedenborg’s hearing of spirit voices, placing him
within an extensive category of people subject to ‘hallucinations without
mental disorder.’39 Their study carefully disaggregates and sequences
developments in Swedenborg’s hallucinations over time, noting that they
became more visually concentrated and, along with suggestions of his
hypnogogic and hypnopompic states, suggest that he controlled his respi-
ration to aid their induction, something which cannot be ruled out as a
practice of Blake might have easily adopted (although no evidence exists
to suggest it). Jones and Fernyhough repudiate previous retro-pathologies
which suggested schizophrenia and epilepsy, largely on the grounds of his
continuing social functionality, despite documenting Swedenborg’s
‘visions’ as including ‘angelic voices,’ ‘fiery lights,’ ‘visions when my eyes
were closed,’ ‘speak[ing] with those who are in hell,’ ‘interior sight’ and
an elaborate incident when ‘A single satan was once permitted to ascend

37
BR(2): p. 336.
38
BR(2): p. 292.
39
Simon R. Jones and Charles Fernyhough, ‘Talking back to the spirits: the voices and
visions of Emanuel Swedenborg,’ History of the Human Sciences 21 (2008) pp. 1–31.
72 D. WORRALL

out of hell, together with a woman, and come to the house where I was.
As soon as I perceived them I shut the window, but entered into conversa-
tion with them through it.’ If, despite all this, Swedenborg can be placed
into a modern ‘hallucinations without mental disorder’ category, then so
can Blake.
However, what impelled William and Catherine to attend the East
Cheap conference may not have been their seeking after doctrinal align-
ment (The Marriage systematically trashes Swedenborg) but quite possibly
the social and fraternal motivations of finding points of contact or com-
parison with others who claimed to have experience of visions. Whether by
accident or design, given the nature of a small conference held over three
days, he almost certainly would have run into Dorothy Gott at the confer-
ence. Ex-maid, ex-Quaker, admonished by the Society of Friends for ‘dis-
orderly walking’ but also a female prophet who had already published The
Midnight Cry, “Behold, the Bridegroom comes!” Or, An Order from God To
Get Your Lamps Lighted, Otherwise you must go into Darkness (1788)
detailing her visions, Gott would have been an extraordinary contact.40
The conviviality of the conference (the delegates periodically adjourned to
a tavern in Abchurch Lane), with its sprinkling of Scandinavian delegates,
may even have inspired Blake’s impish decision to parody Swedenborg (‘I
then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung … ?’ E 39). Coming to terms with
what may have seemed to him, at first, anomalous percepts in Peckham
Rye (not to mention the recent post-bereavement hallucination of his
brother, Robert—discussed below) it may have meant that, for the first
time, he was able to radically distinguish his own experiences from socially
cognate people with similar ‘visionary’ capacities. Gott, Bryan and Blake,
were all part of a specific, if very divergent, network of contemporary
London artisans, all surviving at the same moment on the fringes of
London’s dynamic cultural environment but, of them all, only Blake was
both artist and poet.
Although Bryan and Gott were motivated by their very focussed reli-
gious beliefs, and became activists in their causes, despite the commonality
of their ‘visions’ and their spatial and temporal convergence in the late
1780s, Blake was not drawn to their particular types of enthusiasm.

40
‘Disorderly walking’ was fraternizing outside the Quaker faith. ‘Marrying out,’ marrying
outside of the Quaker faith, was the ultimate taboo. Much like Moravian practices, such
actions would normally precipitate a visit from other members of the congregation to give
advice and guidance.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 73

However, that Blake placed a high value on his ‘visions,’ but treated them
as normal experiences rather than aberrations is corroborated by John
Linnell, an important patron from 1818 onwards (he commissioned
Illustrations of the Book of Job). He wrote that ‘Blake claimed the posses-
sion of some powers only in a degree that all men possessed and which
they undervalued in themselves.’41 However, just at the point when he
recognized Swedenborg as a potentially important precursor, and had
attended the conference of his London followers with his wife (and prob-
ably met Dorothy Gott), he was also increasingly encountering the cogni-
tive and perceptual demands of turning his long formal apprenticeship
into a career as a commercial engraver and printmaker. In the eighteenth
century, creating an etching or line-engraving from a copper-plate print-
ing surface meant creating illusions of depth and space by co-ordinating
the disposition of parallel lines on copper printing plates. By the time he
was beginning to make the illuminated books, starting c. 1788, the impact
of his craft on his perception was profound, filled with implicit meanings
cognate with Gott and Bryan, but lacking their proselytizing religious
impulse. Noticeably, Bryan’s ‘stop’ came at the precise moment when he
was printing from a copper plate, dampening the paper to go into the
press; Gott’s ‘visions’ appeared during writing. As with Blake, the act of
writing potentially linked her to God through spiritual dictation, ‘When I
sit down to write [from Scripture], it appears but a few sentences; but …
it enlarges as I wrote[sic]: for I never know what I have wrote till I read it.’42
In the late 1780s Blake was busily involved with developing his etching
process that could incorporate illustrative designs integrally with text on a
copper plate. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1780–1790) he
explained this process in a much-debated anecdote about, ‘printing in the
infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal,
melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid’
(plate 14, E 39). That is, within the context of the relief-etched method,
‘melting … [copper] surfaces away,’ was done with acid, a dissolving of
solid metal. The usual way of explaining this passage is, indeed, to associ-
ate it with Blake’s perfecting the relief-etched method, a process suitable
at least for short print runs, certainly sufficient for the number of copies of
The Marriage he printed (only 12, not all with the same sets of plates).

41
BR(2): pp. 341–2.
42
Dorothy Got, The Midnight Cry, “Behold, the Bridegroom comes!” Or, An Order from God
To Get Your Lamps Lighted, Otherwise you must go into Darkness (1788) p. 92.
74 D. WORRALL

Although his references to ‘printing in the infernal method, by corro-

sives,’ alludes to the acid of the etching process, and while Blake’s specific
relief-etching process used brushes to paint on a resistant coating to write
the text, most contemporary commercial etching used an etching needle,
intaglio, to remove an acid resistant coating on the copper plate before
bathing it in ‘corrosives’ to remove unwanted metal and to produce a
printing surface.43 Engraving, an entirely different process, required sharp,
hand-held, tools to physically removal metal in a form of chiselling action,
making a groove that ends with an upward flick to finish the line. It is
generally acknowledged that engraving requires a much greater degree of
co-ordination and control, so much so that it has now rarely used by mod-
ern artists and unlikely to be encountered in a contemporary gallery. Even
after the removal of metal by incision, both etching and engraving required
the copper plate to be perfectly level. Raised bumps and dips in the copper
surface do not print out. Inspection of the actual copper plates used in his
engraving, as well as the prints on paper made from them, reveals normal
or normal-to-high levels of adjustment and recalibration while he pro-
duced them (burnishing the fronts and knocking-up the backs of the
plates with a hammer). Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826), for which the
complete set of copper plates is extant in the British Museum, was entirely
produced by the engraving process, a formidable showcase for Blake’s
engraving talent, but it still required targeted knocking-up with a hammer
from the back to correct misjudged engraved lines.44
These two complementary, but distinct, methods of printmaking
require the removal of metal. That is, either dissolving metal with acid (in
the case of etching) or removing it by incision in the case of engraving.
Within Blake’s craftsmanship, as with all printmakers working from copper
plates at that time, the removal of metal was the only visually reproductive
method of ‘displaying the infinite which was hid.’ As mentioned above,
the orthodox way of explaining this passage is to associate it with Blake’s
discovery of the relief-etching method, an acid-based technique used to
produce The Marriage. The rationale for engaging with the background
of complex structures of perception and hallucinatory validation, not least
within the fraternal context of ‘visions’ suggested by Bryan and Gott, is

43
Blake probably used nitric acid possibly weakened with salt of ammonia, Joseph Viscomi,
Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) pp. 78–81.
44
Mei-Ying Sung, William Blake and the Art of Engraving (London: Pickering &
Chatto, 2009).
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 75

that, in the case of Blake in the late 1780s, it coincided with a significant
episode of post-bereavement sibling grief which, in turn, coincided with
the perceptual challenges of developing the printmaking technique which
produced the illuminated books in the 1790s.

The Post-bereavement Hallucination of Robert

The development of relief-etching discussed above is associated with an
anecdote about Blake’s ‘visions’ related by J.T. Smith, writing in 1828.
This concerns the hallucinatory appearance to him of his deceased brother,
Robert (1762–1787), who is said to have unfolded to him the process of
relief-etching. Of course, while such hallucinatory events may appear
quirky or, more likely, greeted with a scepticism consonant with attribu-
tions of Blake’s insanity, the death of a sibling was bound to have had a
profound effect on him. In our own times, the societal impact, clinically
and economically, particularly of the deaths of spouses, has prompted
improved research dedicated to understanding the clinical aftermath of
these events and to determine the public facilities and expertise needed,
not just after the death of a loved one but also for all those involved with
the deceased’s final moments. Today, post-bereavement hallucinations are
considered so commonplace in the case of bereaved spouses that the prin-
cipal clinical concern is the duration of the occurrence of the hallucinatory
episodes.45
Blake’s connection to his younger brother seems to have been not only
deeply emotional but also unusually directly integrated into his art.
Perhaps as a part of what is now understood as a ‘continuing bonds’ model
of mourning (see below), the document now known as Blake’s Notebook
was first owned by Robert and was taken over by William after his death
and used for over 20 years.46 It was a tangible object that had been owned
by Robert but kept in use by William, implicitly valued by him as a memo-
rialization of a deceased sibling. Significant areas of the Blake canon derive
from the Notebook. William not only used it for illustrations preparatory to
the intaglio etched, For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793) but also

45
Anna Castelnovo, Simone Cavallotti, Orsola Gambini, Armando D’Agostino, ‘Post-
bereavement hallucinatory experiences: A critical overview of population and clinical stud-
ies,’ Journal of Affective Disorders, 186 (2015) pp. 266–274.
46
David V. Erdman, with Donald K. Moore, The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic
and Typographic Facsimile (New York: Readex Books, 1973, revised edn, 1977).
76 D. WORRALL

returned to it (stitching in new leaves), c. 1809–1810, to write new com-

mentaries, including the piece now known as the ‘Public Address’ and for
revisions to the Canterbury Pilgrims descriptions written subsequent to A
Descriptive Catalogue (1809). It also contains drafts of poems later
included in Songs of Experience (1794). Crucially for our understanding of
William’s valuation of it, the Notebook contained several drawings by
Robert, including one where William’s verses were carefully entered onto
the leaf so as to avoid his brother’s drawing of three druidical figures.47
Martin Butlin makes a direct connection between Robert’s Oberon and
Titania Reclining on a Poppy (before 1788) in the Notebook and William’s
c. 1790–1793 watercolour of the same scene (known as Oberon and
Titania on a Lilly) and plate 5 of The Song of Los (1795).48 Whatever the
truth of their relationship, William’s long-term use of the Notebook pro-
vided a continuing material point of connection with his deceased brother
and a context for what seems to have been a major, multi-modal, post-­
bereavement hallucination of Robert, c. 1787–1788.
For our knowledge about Robert’s death, Smith remains the primary
source. Smith wrote that, ‘Blake, after deeply perplexing himself as to the
mode of accomplishing the publication of his illustrated songs, without
their being subject to the expense of letter-press, his brother Robert stood
before him in one of his visionary imaginations, and so decidedly directed
him in the way in which he ought to proceed.’ The process that Robert
(who died in February 1787) apparently went on to describe in these
‘visionary imaginations,’ was that of relief-etching. Robert communicated
to William that this was a process of taking ‘an impervious liquid … eating
the plain parts or lights away with aquafortis considerably below them, so
that the outlines were left as a stereotype.’49 Through a complicated pro-
cess of bibliographical inference, discussed below, the date of ‘Blakes
Original Stereotype … 1788’ was confirmed by him much later, in 1822
(E 272). Perhaps erroneously, Smith appears to refer to Songs of Innocence
(1789) as if it were the first illuminated book but the relief-etching process
described was used in all of them except for The Gates of Paradise
(1793/1818) and The Book of Los (1795). The removal of metal (‘with
47
Butlin: 201.1(5); 201.3(9); 201.5(13); 201.7(11); 201.9(7); 201.10(8).
48
Butlin: 245.
49
BR(2): p. 609. Alexander Gilchrist, in his William Blake: Pictor Ignotus (1863), gives a
slightly different version: ‘In a vision of the night, the form of Robert stood before him, and
revealed the wished-for secret …’ cited BR(2): pp. 43–44. Robert Blake was buried on 11
February 1787.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 77

aquafortis’), like the removal of material space and time, is an important

concept in Blake, certainly one linked to ‘visions,’ so it is significant Blake
relates that the revelation of the relief-etched method occurred during a
hallucinatory experience.
Post-bereavement hallucinations are common in psychologically nor-
mal people and well recorded in the scientific literature. However, although
there are quantitative studies dating back to 1894, inconsistencies and
unreliable definitions mean that the incidence of post-bereavement hallu-
cination can only be estimated as occurring in a wide 30%- 60% range of
bereaved spouses. Experiences of hearing a dead spouse occurred in
13%-50% of cases, with the frequency greatest (30%) in the first month
after death. Large gaps in statistical knowledge stem (quite understand-
ably), from subjects not choosing to come forward to report their experi-
ences.50 Post-bereavement hallucinations also sometimes include
felt-presence hallucinations of the type Blake had. Felt-presence hallucina-
tions have also been recorded as co-modality of migraine aura.51 On this
basis, although the currently available empirical data is of variable reliabil-
ity, Blake’s experience is only out of the ordinary in that the hallucination
is of a deceased brother rather than of a deceased spouse, the principal
focus of modern research in this area. As far as the significance of the con-
tent of the hallucination is concerned, in one study, ‘36% of people say
that the after-death communication has changed their life, 49% [said] that
it is important … Overall, therefore, this is a milestone in their existence.’52
One might similarly interpret that Blake’s post-bereavement hallucination
of Robert was a milestone event and, ultimately, one whose nature and
significance he wanted to express.
There are several things of interest in Smith’s anecdote. The first is that
it seems to have featured a visual hallucination (‘his brother Robert stood
before him’), suggesting proximity, but that this was concurrent with an

50
Anna Castelnovo, Simone Cavallotti, Orsola Gambini and Armando D’Agostino, ‘Post-
bereavement hallucinatory experiences: A critical overview of population and clinical stud-
ies,’ Journal of Affective Disorders 186 (2015) pp. 266–274.
51
Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson, Migraine Art: The Experience From Within (Berkeley,
CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008) p. 123.
52
Renaud Evrard, Marianne Dollander, Evelyn Elsaesser, Callum Cooper, David Lorimer,
Chris Roe, ‘Exceptional necrophanic experiences and paradoxical mourning: Studies of the
phenomenology and the repercussions of frightening experiences of contact with the
deceased,’ L’Évolution Psychiatrique, 86 (2021) Pages e1–e24: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
evopsy.2021.09.001.
78 D. WORRALL

accompanying verbal auditory modality (‘Robert … directed him’).

However, from Smith’s account, it is not clear whether this was through
speech or William hearing an interior voice. Implicitly, it was also a felt-­
presence hallucination (‘Robert stood before him’). In one survey of
(non-bereavement) hypnopompic and hypnagogic hallucinations, the
medium of communication of the felt-presence was principally verbal
auditory (not visual).53 The incompleteness and imprecision of Smith’s
account (which is second-hand, of course) is not unusual because the orig-
inal report that reached Smith may have derived from anecdotes them-
selves based on wariness or caution in reporting to others a post-bereavement
hallucination.54 For example, it does not specify where this event took
place, or even whether Blake was awake or asleep. In a study of specifically
hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, 12% of the subject sample
saw ‘a blurry human figure’ and 9% claimed they sensed a ‘“presence in
the room which I felt was aware of me too.”’ Interestingly, in that study
18% also heard their names called, a finding confirming verbal auditory
hallucinatory types and providing another example of concurrent multiple
hallucinatory modalities.55 Given that probably the majority of post-­
bereavement respondents report some type of hallucination, Blake’s expe-
rience of mourning does not suggest he was unusually maladaptive to his
brother’s death.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the hallucination is that this was a
communication from a hallucinatory percept representing a benevolent
presence (communicating to William a professionally valuable production
technique). Such a possibility may be at odds with current samplings. In a
2008 study, although the questionnaire asked the survey sample whether
they sensed, specifically, an ‘evil presence in the room’ (15%), no question

53
Simon R. Jones, Charles Fernyhough and David Meads, ‘In a dark time: Development,
validation, and correlates of the Durham hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations ques-
tionnaire,’ Personality and Individual Differences 46 (2009) pp. 30–34.
54
Matthew Ratcliffe, ‘Sensed presence without sensory qualities: a phenomenological
study of bereavement hallucinations,’ Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (2021)
pp. 601–616.
55
Simon R. Jones, Charles Fernyhough and David Meads, ‘In a dark time: Development,
validation, and correlates of the Durham hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations ques-
tionnaire,’ Personality and Individual Differences 46 (2009) pp. 30–34.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 79

was asked about perceptions of a benevolent presence.56 That is, modern

research reports nothing similar to the positive impulse of Blake’s lines in
Jerusalem (although evidently not a post-bereavement hallucination), ‘I
see the Saviour over me / Spreading his beams of love’ (E 146). Of course,
the felt-presence of Robert, the beloved younger sibling William had
tended in his final illness, can only be rationally construed as associated
with familial love. Gaps in modern research are noticeable. A significant
review of the scientific literature on post-bereavement hallucination did
not include sibling grief.57
Paradoxically, the evidence about bereavement—perhaps unconsciously
reflected in some of the survey questions referred to above—suggests that
the bereaved are either comforted by such hallucinations or, contrarily,
traumatized.58 In post-bereavement hallucinations, potential psychosis
would only need to be considered if the voice hearing was thought to have
emanated from someone not a close friend or relative. In Blake’s case, of
course, it was his brother. Nevertheless, while post-bereavement halluci-
nations are increasingly viewed as a normal part of mourning, bereave-
ment itself may also bring with it burdens of what has been termed,
‘attachment anxiety.’ This has to do with not only adjusting to loss but
also triggering in survivors’ anxiety avoidance, an inability or unwilling-
ness to express grief to others or to self, prolonging or resulting in mal-
adaptive mourning.59 In the similar, so-called continuing bonds model of
post-bereavement hallucination, a hallucinatory perception of the deceased
may bring comfort and help to act as a psychological benefit to situate
their death in the mind of the bereaved.60 However, depending on the

56
Simon R. Jones, Charles Fernyhough and David Meads, ‘In a dark time: Development,
validation, and correlates of the Durham hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations ques-
tionnaire,’ Personality and Individual Differences 46 (2009) pp. 30–34. A rationale for the
exclusion of the ‘benevolent’ question is noted and explained in the essay.
57
Anna Castelnovo, Simone Cavallotti, Orsola Gambini and Armando D’Agostino, ‘Post-
bereavement hallucinatory experiences: A critical overview of population and clinical stud-
ies,’ Journal of Affective Disorders 186 (2015) pp. 266–274.
58
Briana L. Root & Julie Juola Exline (2014), ‘The Role of Continuing Bonds in Coping
With Grief: Overview and Future Directions,’ Death Studies, 38:1, 1–8.
59
Wei Yu, Li He, Wei Xu, Jianping Wang, Holly G. Prigerson, ‘How do attachment
dimensions affect bereavement adjustment? A mediation model of continuing bonds,’
Psychiatry Research, 238 (2016) pp. 93–99.
60
Kamp, Karina Stengaard, Steffen, Edith Maria, et al., ‘Sensory and Quasi-Sensory
Experiences of the Deceased in Bereavement: An Interdisciplinary and Integrative Review,’
Schizophrenia Bulletin 46 (2020) pp. 1367–1381.
80 D. WORRALL

emphasis one chooses to read into it, some possibility of non-traumatic

anxiety might be inferred from Smith’s account—ultimately derived from
William, one assumes—that Robert ‘so decidedly directed him in the way
in which he ought to proceed’ (my italics). That is, Robert’s appearance
was associated by Blake with some element, if not of compulsion, then of
continuing responsibility towards his deceased sibling with William per-
haps taking on the burden of acting as the agent fulfilling the talent Robert
may have recognized in him, possibly including artistic talents Robert
shared and could not fulfil because of his decease.
The account given of Robert’s deathbed scene by his Victorian biogra-
pher, Alexander Gilchrist, is similarly valuable in giving further context for
such perceptual burdens. Although he had no known first-hand knowl-
edge of William, Gilchrist reports that Blake ‘affectionately tended
him[Robert] in his illness, and during the last fortnight of it watched
continuously day and night by his bedside, without sleep … with that
brother’s last breath, his own exhaustion showed itself in an unbroken
sleep of three days’ and nights’ duration.’ William’s ‘unbroken sleep of
three days’ and nights’ duration’ may itself contain the clue to his entrance
into hypnopompic or hypnagogic states sufficient to trigger post-­
bereavement hallucinations.
It is of Robert’s death that Gilchrist famously reported Blake’s own
vision at the deathbed: ‘At the last solemn moment, the visionary eyes
beheld the released spirit ascend heavenward through the matter-of-fact
ceiling, “clapping its hands for joy.”’61 Of course, such elation on the part
of Blake, as the survivor, might be an indicator of attachment anxiety
avoidance, that is, maladjustment to the death of his sibling by oversimpli-
fying the grieving process.62 It is certainly feasible that such intensity,
apparently accompanied by his own past hallucinatory experiences (date-
able perhaps to as early as c. 1766 and no later than c. 1785), suggests a
susceptibility or trigger mechanism for his post-bereavement hallucina-
tion. Demonstrating the continuing impact of the episode, the anecdote
seems to point directly to one of Blake’s illustrations Gilchrist would have
known well, ‘The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with
Life.’ This appeared in a letterpress edition as part of Blake’s designs

61
BR(2): pp. 43–4.
62
Wei Yu, Li He, Wei Xu, Jianping Wang, Holly G. Prigerson, ‘How do attachment
dimensions affect bereavement adjustment? A mediation model of continuing bonds,’
Psychiatry Research, 238 (2016) pp. 93–99.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 81

commissioned for Robert Cromek’s edition of Robert Blair’s popular

poem The Grave (1808).63
Of course, the circumstances and phenomena of the exact moments of
Robert’s death are not known. Within scientifically based studies, there is
anecdotal evidence of an occasional ‘transient surge of neurophysiological
activity usually indicative of cerebral arousal’ at the moment of death.
‘Visible evidence includes a fleeting smile, eye opening, gestures, shedding
of tears (lacrima mortis), and deathbed visions.’64 Both Smith’s and
Gilchrist’s accounts are consistent with theories of the impact of what is
now known as ‘conservation of consciousness’ emotions, feelings experi-
enced by those left behind on the death of a relative or someone close,
validating the deceased’s life, their example or teachings, endorsing them
as meaningful and worthy of being carried forward through the agency of
the survivor.65 It would not have been unusual for Robert’s final deathbed
moments to have been accompanied by such a noticeable burst of lucidity,
eyes open or talking, or it may simply be that William was particularly
focussed and attentive to his brother’s final breaths. The departing soul of
Robert, ‘“clapping its hands for joy,”’ might have been interpreted by
William as evidence of a continued consciousness endorsing his own ideas
of a spiritual afterlife, reassuring him of the comfort of death while also
confirming its reality.
Although post-bereavement hallucinations explain a great deal, permit-
ting a more structured emotional framework into which Blake can be situ-
ated in the late 1780s, it also requires some further consideration. As has
been noted above, William took over his brother’s notebook and added
substantially to its contents. Later in his career, Blake produced a whole
full-plate design enigmatically titled ‘Robert’ in his illuminated book,
Milton A Poem (1804–1811), so there can be little doubting the long-­
term continuation of his emotional connection with his dead brother. Of

63
Robert Blair, The Grave, A Poem, Illustrated by Twelve Etchings Executed by Louis
Schiavonetti, From the Original inventions Of William Blake (1808) p. 16. The designs are by
Blake but Robert Cromek, the publisher, commissioned another engraver, Louis Schiavonetti,
to do the engraving.
64
Michael Barbato, Greg Barclay, Jan Potter, Wilf Yeo, ‘The Moment of Death,’ Journal
of Pain and Symptom Management, 53 (2017) pp. e1–e3: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain-
symman.2017.03.003. Accessed 4 May 2019.
65
Cameron M. Doyle, Kurt Gray, ‘How people perceive the minds of the dead: The
importance of consciousness at the moment of death,’ Cognition, 202 (2020), 1043,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104308.
82 D. WORRALL

course, a minimalist interpretation of Smith’s anecdote about the relief-­

etching method might be that it was simply professional obfuscation con-
cerning a technique Blake had laboriously developed and wished to
maintain as an exclusive innovation. This would make it consonant with
contemporary painters’ anxieties about secret formulas for luminous
colouring such as the so-called Venetian Secret, a hoax in which the artist
Benjamin West was caught up in the 1790s.66 However, the things known
today about post-bereavement hallucinations, such as sudden electrical
surges in the brains of persons moments from death, testify to the complex
and still poorly understood interactions between the scene at the deathbed
and the surviving friends, family and other carers.
Implicitly, the felt-presence post-bereavement hallucination of Robert
by William probably took place between his death in February 1787 but
before 1789 (William antedated his ‘Original Stereotype’ of the relief-­
etched method to ‘1788,’ E 272). Experiences of felt-presence hallucina-
tions, because they usually appear in multiple modalities (verbal, auditory
and visual) have been noted as good predictors of a general personal dis-
position towards hallucinations.67 Coming towards the beginning of
Blake’s creative career, certainly at the beginning of his production of illu-
minated books, this experience may have had a profound effect on his life,
validating his belief in the significance of all subsequent hallucinatory types
he became subject to because, as it may have appeared to him, their mani-
festation was endorsed by his continuing bond with his deceased sibling,
Robert. Or, as he put it with devastating accuracy in Milton a Poem, the
work which included the ‘Robert’ plate, ‘every Natural Effect has a
Spiritual Cause, and Not / A Natural: for a Natural Cause only seems, it
is a Delusion’ (E 124).

66
Julie Lavorgna, Angus Trumble and Mark Aronson, Benjamin West and the Venetian
Secret (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2008).
67
Lucretia Thomas, Lénie Torregrossa, Renate Reniers, Clara Humpston, Exploring mul-
timodal hallucinations and disturbances in the basic and bodily self: A cross-sectional study
in a non-clinical sample, Journal of Psychiatric Research, 143 (2021) pp. 144–154.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 83

There Is No Natural Religion: Perception

and Perceptual Burdens

Whatever the true nature of the Robert ghost anecdote and the unfold-
ing of the relief-etched technique, there is yet another issue to be dis-
cussed concerning the attention he needed to give, c. 1788, on mastering
the processes he would use to produce the illuminated books and how
this was linked to his cognitive development. In All Religions are One,
but also visible in There is No Natural Religion, there is evidence of
Blake starting to learn to write backwards. All Religions are One plates 3
and 7 would be good places to examine Blake’s struggle with freehand
mirror-writing. In plate 3, for example, the letter ‘r’ is almost never
formed the same twice and the words, ‘faculty which,’ collide (E 1).
That is, Blake composed the illuminated books in mirror-writing, start-
ing on the right-hand side of the copper plate and writing, ‘inside out,’
from right to left. Not only would mirror-writing have been used to sign
his commercial plate commissions, it would also have been used for all
the relief-etched books, including the scripts written intaglio for The
Gates of Paradise and The Book of Los. One can easily see that he made
great strides in the calligraphic fluency of this mode of expression within
the date range of c. 1788–1795. His mirror-­writing probably also implies
some degree of distinct perceptual and cognitive challenge (but whether
emanating from mainly motor or mainly neural perceptual mechanisms
is uncertain), a challenge which would also have increased in step with
his transition from childhood to adult literacy.68
Blake’s post-bereavement sibling grief and its coincidence with his
increased activity perfecting both relief-etching and the mirror-writing it
necessitated, was accompanied by his efforts at increasing the output of
illuminated book titles in the 1790s. Produced between 1788 and 1794,
There is No Natural Religion is a crucially timed intervention. Given that
Blake’s encounter with hallucinatory ‘visions’ occurred very early in his
life, no later than c. 1766, it is perhaps not surprising that by c. 1788,
coinciding with his post-bereavement hallucination of Robert (c.
1787–1788), he devoted an entire work to deliberating about perception.
Given Blake’s specific circumstances, the absence of a point of reflection

68
G. D. Schott, ‘Mirror-writing: neurological reflections on an unusual phenomenon,’ J
Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 78 (2007) pp. 5–13.
84 D. WORRALL

about the nature of perception discussed in his writings at this time would
have been both unusual and remarkable.
There is No Natural Religion was conceptually and experientially cen-
tral to Blake’s development in the late 1780s. It served as both an experi-
mental platform for his techniques of relief-etching and printing (including
colour printing) but also showed him as a self-reflexive philosopher, test-
ing his theories of how religious belief interacted with human perception.
Its syllogistic structure, even if taken on its own, demonstrates how com-
mitted Blake was to the self-interrogation of his working practices in order
to arrive at considered intellectual positions concerning perception. It
contains within it the key statement explaining his openness to entoptic
and verbal auditory hallucinatory images: ‘Mans perceptions are not
bound by organs of perception, he percieves[sic] more than sense (tho’
ever so acute) can discover’ (E 2). Having ‘perceptions’ that ‘percieve …
more than sense,’ bordering on tautology, is a good description of hallu-
cination as well as, arguably, synaesthesia. Although it will be discussed
more extensively in Chap. 6, an influential paper by Julia Simner, one of
Britain’s leading scientists studying synaesthesia, is revealingly entitled
‘Beyond perception: synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon.’69
After its multiple iterations in There is No Natural Religion, it could hardly
be clearer that ‘perception’ is at the centre of Blake’s thinking in the late
1780s. It was also possibly the first of the illuminated books to combine
relief-etched design and text produced by mirror-writing. This tiny book
(sometimes referred to by critics as a tractate) is where he first formulated
his ideas about the boundaries of perception.
By comparison with the extreme bibliographical challenges posed by
There is No Natural Religion, discussed below, what is sometimes missed
is the sheer audacity of its title. To understand what is going on, the key
term to focus on in the title is ‘Natural’ and to compare this with what he
wrote some 15 years later in Milton A Poem in 2 Books (1804–1811), ‘…
every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause, and Not / A Natural: for a
Natural Cause only seems, it is a Delusion’ (E 124). This can be para-
phrased and reformulated in a number of ways: (1) causation is spiritual
(2) material effects have spiritual causes (3) it is delusional to think natural
effects have natural causes. Efforts to curate a cogently rationalized reli-
gion were the very basis of the European Enlightenment. Considered
from these perspectives, There is No Natural Religion could be more
appropriately retitled ‘There is Only Spiritual Religion.’

69
Julia Simner, ‘Beyond perception: synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon,’
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11 (2007) pp. 23–29.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 85

There is No Natural Religion provides both an explanation and an

exploration of Blake’s understanding of perception. As referred to above,
his clearest statement in There is No Natural Religion Series (b) is that,
‘Mans perceptions are not bound by organs of perception, he percieves[sic]
more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover’ (E 2). Its bibliographic
position is complex but, since so much of the evidence surrounding Blake’s
‘visions’ seems to converge in the 1780s, its status needs to be detailed.
The ‘Series (b)’ designation needs some explanation (although the thrice
repeated emphasis on ‘perception’ in this sentence is clear enough). There
is No Natural Religion has been re-structured by its modern editors into
two series, Series (a) and Series (b), both of which share the same title
page (‘THERE / is NO / NATURAL / RELIGION’), but nothing else.
Series (a) is a sequence of ‘extreme Lockean propositions’ followed by
Series (b) which parodies them. In All Religions are One and There is No
Natural Religion, ‘Blake exaggerates (and thereby parodies) their [Bacon
and Locke’s] method by forcing it even closer to a syllogistic sequence of
propositions and deductions reminiscent of Euclidian geometry.’70 Of all
the illuminated books, it is the one which most specifically and thoroughly
engages with the nature of human perception as a philosophical and reli-
gious question. For example, when set against the opening syllogism of
Series (a), ‘I[.] Man cannot naturally Percieve[sic]. but through his natural
or bodily organs,’ the anti-Lockean perspective of Series (b) becomes
much clearer, ‘Mans perceptions are not bound by organs of percep-
tion’ (E 2).
With plate impression image size not much bigger than a large postage
stamp (c. 4.5cm × 5.2cm), the evolution of its 11 plates is bibliographi-
cally daunting and not entirely capable of definitive description. There is
No Natural Religion exists in only six complete copies (although all of
them lack proposition ‘III’—it has a syllogistic structure), namely copies
A-D, G and M plus copy L which is incomplete. Its date has been assigned
to c. 1788 on the basis of a series of arguments which start, perhaps coun-
terintuitively, with Blake’s two plate illuminated book in relief-etching,
The Ghost of Abel composed in 1822. At the end of The Ghost of Abel Blake
etched onto the plate, ‘1822 W Blakes Original Stereotype was 1788’ (E
272). This has been taken to mean that the relief-etching technique Blake
used to make The Ghost of Abel (the ‘Original Stereotype’) was invented,
or first used, by him in 1788. A bibliographic leap backwards is then made
to look, principally, at the stylistically earliest extant works Blake produced

70
Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, Joseph Viscomi (eds.), William Blake: the Early
Illuminated Books (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1993) pp. 28, 31.
86 D. WORRALL

by this process, namely The Book of Thel, Songs of Innocence (both helpfully
dated by having etched onto their title pages, ‘1789’) and The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, which has an inked date inserted onto plate 3 of Copy
F as ‘1790.’ However, the set of papers on which There is No Natural
Religion is printed probably derives from a batch Blake also used for the
similarly sized, All Religions are One (c. 1788), which includes a leaf
unambiguously watermarked ‘1794 / I Taylor.’ Once different palettes of
inks are taken into account (which define different editions of printing),
and are considered alongside the evidence of the paper, the best conjec-
ture is that Blake printed copies A-D, G and M of There is No Natural
Religion in 1794 and Copy L in 1795.
As modern editors are probably aware (although it nowhere seems to
be stated), a potential weakness inherent in this theory of production is
that it supposes 100% survival of all of Blake’s titles in relief-etching. This
supposition provides the basis for dating All Religions are One and There
is No Natural Religion as the objects referred to in 1822 by Blake’s phrase,
‘W Blakes Original Stereotype was 1788.’
It is this complex bibliographic status which makes There is No Natural
Religion straddle an almost unfeasibly lengthy continuum of conception
and production, between 1788 and 1794. That is, Blake may have etched
some of the plates in 1788 but not printed them until 1794 (or, at least,
no impressions of earlier printings are known). This spread of dates (ante-
dated by the ‘1822’ declaration of ‘1788’) is important because it broadly
covers the most significant phase of Blake’s production of illuminated
book titles, the basis on which the bulk of his specifically literary reputa-
tion is founded. By far the easiest way to grasp this is to look at the
Appendix spread of dates of printing included in Joseph Viscomi’s Blake
and the Idea of the Book (1993). The best way to describe it is that, after
1795, Blake completely stopped producing new book titles in illuminated
printing until he made proofs of parts of Jerusalem the Emanation of the
Giant Albion in 1807 and printed three copies of Milton A Poem in 2
Books in 1811.71

71
Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993), Appendix, pp. 376–81. In 1796 Blake printed masked impressions from pre-
existing illuminated books to make up A Small Book of Designs and A Large Book of Designs
as well as printing further copies of Songs of Innocence and/or Songs of Experience in 1802
and 1804.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 87

As mentioned above, it is the opening syllogism of Series (b) which

declares Blake’s position about perception most fully: ‘I[.] Mans percep-
tions are not bound by organs of perception, he percieves[sic] more than
sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover’ (E 2). This opposes the equivalent
syllogism in Series (a): ‘I[.] Man cannot naturally Percieve[sic]. but
through his natural or bodily organs’ (E 2). Blake’s formulation that man,
‘percieves more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover,’ conclusively
rules out the five physical senses as routes to ‘being Infinite.’ What replaces
the senses in his Series (b) ‘Conclusion’ is ‘the Poetic or Prophetic charac-
ter,’ the qualities he also calls ‘the Poetic Genius which is every where
call’d the Spirit of Prophecy,’ in All Religions are One (E 1, 3). It may be
these features of ‘Poetic or Prophetic character,’ which imply the merging
power of synaesthesia, the bringing together of disparate sensory modali-
ties, the ability to ‘percieve … more than sense … can discover,’ discussed
in Chap. 6. This ‘Prophetic character’ or ‘Spirit of Prophecy,’ is linked to
the Biblical prophets which, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, have
also become parodies of hallucinatory percept: ‘The Prophets Isaiah and
Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them … Isaiah answer’d. I saw no
God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses
discover’d the infinite in every thing’ (12, E 38). ‘Finite organical percep-
tion’ is inadequate but through synaesthesia it might be argued, ‘my senses
discover’d the infinite in every thing.’ Although The Marriage’s extreme
satirical parody format is clear (the one-to-one spiritual communications
of theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg, are probably Blake’s target), it
should not mask the significance of The Marriage’s generic departure
from the syllogistic structure employed in All Religions are One and There
is No Natural Religion.
The remains of Blake’s deployment of syllogistic structures are its frag-
mentary continuations in The Marriage. Such an example is afforded by
‘The voice of the Devil’ section of The Marriage which mirrors There is No
Natural Religion by having three numbered propositions countered by
‘the following Contraries to these are True’ (E 34). The syllogistic break
in The Marriage marks out a new generic direction but There is No Natural
Religion may have been formative of that break. Blake’s generic choice of
syllogistic argument for All Religions are One and There is No Natural
Religion was his personal means of exploring ideas about perception at a
time when he had already experienced the Peckham Rye hallucinations of
c. 1766 and the more recent post-bereavement hallucination of Robert, c.
1787–1788. By c. 1785, as will be discussed in Chap. 4, the first evidence
88 D. WORRALL

of Klüver form-constants was appearing in his visual art. These encounters

with anomalous perceptual experiences would have had an urgency for
him by the mid- to late-1780s.

Mirror-writing
As far as Blake’s level of accomplishment at mirror-writing is concerned,
such testimonies as are extant about this facility date from the period after
1810. In 1811, Blake’s friend and patron, George Cumberland, wrote to
The Journal of Natural Philosophy implying that writing (or reading and
writing) ‘backwards’ ‘demanded the talents of a Blake, who alone excels in
that art.’72 Much later, John Linnell commented on ‘The most extraordi-
nary facility … attained by Blake in writing backwards … with a brush
dipped in a glutinous liquid,’ the liquid being the resist which would not
be attacked by acid during the etching process.73 The cognitive virtuosity
needed is not as great as one might imagine although it should be remem-
bered that Blake encountered it fairly early in life and as part of a profes-
sional career practice.
Alexander S. Gourlay has traced in detail Blake’s very varied attempts to
successfully sign his name using mirror-writing in drypoint on his com-
mercial book illustrations of the 1780s. Gourlay also notes that, by the
early 1790s, Blake had evolved a rather more fluent intaglio mirror-­writing
technique that coincides with, or may be the outcome of, the concurrent
demands of his extension of his professional practice as an engraver and
the mirror-writing required by the relief-etched illuminated books, a move
aimed at taking advantage of his talent as a poet. However, if Blake really
did have what Linnell testifies as ‘The most extraordinary facility … in
writing backwards,’ Gourlay’s preference for the term ‘retrographic’ to
describe this practice understates the perceptual challenges accompanying
the increased volume (and perhaps rapidity) of writing the illuminated
books, which is better accommodated under the term, ‘mirror-writing.’74
‘Mirror-writing’ is in current clinical usage precisely because it concerns a
perceptual problem of the visual system rather than an elective of

72
George Cumberland, ‘Hints on various Modes of Printing from Autographs,’ Journal of
Natural Philosophy XXVIII (1811) pp. 56–59, Cumberland’s italics.
73
BR(2): p. 609.
74
Gourlay, Alexander S. “Blake Writes Backward.” Huntington Library Quarterly, 80
(2017) pp. 403–21.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 89

alternative graphic direction. Even a cursory glance at the 100-plate ver-

sion of Jerusalem reveals how his crowded texts relate to reproducing, in
volume, the challenging asymmetry of writing the letters of the English
alphabet, backwards. A further complication relevant to all discussions of
Blake’s mirror-writing is that, as argued in Chap. 6, there is evidence that,
no later than 1794, he had experienced at least one episode of grapheme
related synaesthesia. The significance of this finding is that grapheme letter
forms (their shapes) trigger the concurrent percepts of synaesthesia.75 The
significance of these cognitive developments is that they seem to have
coincided. His mirror-writing at the end of the 1780s, which involved the
lifting of the adult suppression of erroneously right-to-left writing, coin-
cided with Blake’s susceptibility to grapheme triggered synaesthesia aris-
ing from the shapes, as well as the sounds and meanings, of alphabet letters.
Joseph Viscomi, who has reproduced Blake’s printmaking techniques
in considerable detail using copper plates, wrote that, provided one is
using the right combination of writing instruments and inks, ‘writing
backwards is only slightly more difficult than writing forwards.’76 My own
understanding of mirror-writing has benefitted greatly from a journal arti-
cle by the clinical neurologist, G.D. Schott.77 Phenomenological research
into this area (which rarely mentions Blake) dates back at least as early as
the 1890s with F.J. Allen’s pertinent observations that mirror-writing is
associated with childhood, can persist into adulthood and that the ability
to write mirror script does not usually confer any improved ability to read
it.78 While mirror-writing is a normal phase in childhood, any lasting abil-
ity in adulthood (although it may by then be considered a disorder if
persistent) is impacted by entry into literacy. So too is mirror image recog-
nition. There are a number of cognitive intricacies resulting from this con-
junction of childhood and mirror-writing/mirror image recognition
which have specific relevance to Blake.
As part of his professional life as a commercial engraver he would have
acquired sophisticated skills in creating the mirror images on the copper

75
Noam Sagiv, Julia Simner, James Collins, Brian Butterworth, Jamie Ward, ‘What is the
relationship between synaesthesia and visuo-spatial number forms?,’ Cognition, 101 (2006)
pp. 114–128.
76
Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993) p. 23 and ‘Chapter 7: Writing the Text,’ pp. 57–60.
77
G. D. Schott, ‘Mirror-writing: neurological reflections on an unusual phenomenon,’ J
Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 78 (2007) pp. 5–13.
78
F. J. Allen, ‘Mirror-writing,’ Brain 19 (1896) pp. 385–387.
90 D. WORRALL

etched or engraved printing surfaces necessary for eighteenth-century

methods of reproductive printmaking of visual images (a left-facing head
in a portrait oil painting required a right-facing etched or engraved copper-­
plate image, for example). The ability to discriminate and comprehend
mirror images (enantiomorphy) is intersected by a number of cognitive
demands, all of which are likely to have been amplified in Blake’s case.
Enantiomorphic ability, for example, can be compromised or enhanced by
a range of factors including the plane of orientation of objects but also by
the individual’s state of forwardness in acquiring literacy.79
Unlike today’s artist printmakers, he learned his etching and engravings
skills on an entirely commercial basis during his apprenticeship in the busy
workshop of James Basire (1730–1802), master engraver, an indenture
which began on the 4 August 1772 and lasted until 1779.80 The paradigm
of the artist printmaker, and its lack of current purchase on commercial
image reproduction, have been noted by Morris Eaves: ‘Today it is diffi-
cult to explain the cultural role of a Basire or a Woollett because methods
of reproduction more efficiently coordinated with the printer’s press and
painter’s palette replaced engraving as Blake knew it. The craft now sur-
vives largely, if marginally, as a minor vehicle for “original” work in the
“graphic arts” tier of the “fine arts” departments of art schools and
universities.’81 After his apprenticeship ended he completed 19 book illus-
tration commissions before the end of 1789, the cut-off date by which it
is known he had acquired sufficiently accomplished mirror-writing skills in
relief-etching to produce All Religions are One (1788–1794), There is No
Natural Religion (1788–1794), Songs of Innocence (1789), The Book of
Thel (1789) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789–1790). Some of
the post-apprenticeship commercial commissions meant he was working
at a fairly rapid pace since they called for the production of multiple plates.

79
T. Fernandes and R. Kolinsky, ‘From hand to eye: the role of literacy, familiarity, grasp-
ability, and vision-for-action on enantiomorphy,’ Acta Psychologica, 142 (2013) pp. 51–61.
80
Michael Phillips (ed.), William Blake: Apprentice and Master (Oxford: Ashmolean,
2014). See also Richard Goddard, ‘Drawing on Copper’: The Basire Family of Copper-Plate
Engravers and their Works (Maastricht, 2017); Lucy Peltz, ‘Basire, Isaac (1704–1768),’
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct
2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1619, accessed 11 Jan 2016].
81
Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) p. 188.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 91

The commission for Joseph Ritson’s three volume, Select Collection of

English Songs (1783), required nine plates, for example.82
The significance of these conditions is that, while he probably experi-
enced a normal entry into literacy (although according to Frederick
Tatham writing c. 1832, ‘he despised restraints & rules, so much that his
Father dare[d] not send him to School’) this was quickly followed, at the
age of around 15, by a suddenly increased demand to produce mirror
visual images on copper plates at Basire’s.83 As a child, c. 5 to 6 years of
age, he would have been in childhood’s natural state of mirror-invariance
(lack of recognition of left-right orientation), a link broken during his
entry into literacy.84 Normal childhood reversals of Latin script (e.g. writ-
ing ‘dab’ for ‘bad’) would have been suppressed. Contrarily, when he
became an apprentice at Basire’s, he would have needed to acquire suffi-
cient mirror-writing skills to at least sign his own name, in reverse, at the
lower left-hand corner of the plate (to print out on the right-hand side)
together with the standard declaration of his engraving contribution (usu-
ally the conventionally abbreviated form, ‘sculpsit’).85
Certainly, by the end of the 1780s, although the processes would have
begun during his apprenticeship, he would have become aware of increased
perceptual and motor demands around letter orientation. In most cases
where mirror-writing occurs as a syndrome in healthy people, mirror-­
writers with dominant right-handedness can often mirror write with their
left hand. Although the principal drivers are motor rather than perceptual,
normal (left to right) writing in adults often involves the suppression of
natural left-handedness (a common cultural imperative). Along with that
comes the suppression of childhood’s natural mirror-writing ability.
The mirror-writing he developed in order to take advantage of his new
process of relief-etching, c. 1788, would not only have challenged the
natural preferences for aesthetic and cognitively preferred symmetrization

82
Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations: A Catalogue and Study
of the Plates Engraved by Blake after Designs by Other Artists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
pp. 34–35.
83
BR(2): p. 664.
84
Rebecca Treiman, Jessica Gordon, Richard Boada, Robin L. Peterson & Bruce
F. Pennington, ‘Statistical Learning, Letter Reversals, and Reading,’ Scientific Studies of
Reading, 18:6 (2014) pp. 383–394.
85
Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations: A Catalogue and Study
of the Plates Engraved by Blake after Designs by Other Artists (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991) p. 4.
92 D. WORRALL

which occurs in H. sapiens but also have been confounded by his fluent
reading and writing of the Latin script in an alphabet which is principally
asymmetric. As well as the evidence from his signing of commercial copper
plates, that Blake continued tackling mirror-writing in the early 1780s, a
few years after his apprenticeship ended, is evidenced, as Michael Phillips
notes, from the manuscript of the incomplete (or unfinished) burlesque
with spoken and singing roles, An Island in the Moon (c. 1784). This
document (only dateable by internal evidence) shows at least one attempt
at writing his surname in mirror-writing. This experiment also occurs in
the context of an isolated reference (there is a page or more missing) to
‘Illuminating the Manuscript,’ as well as a character in the burlesque who
announces, ‘I would have all the writing Engraved instead of Printed,’
both good descriptions of the processes he would develop later in the
decade (E 465).86
None of this would normally matter very much except that Blake is
very unusual in that, simultaneously, by virtue of his apprenticeship as an
engraver, and his subsequent careers as (again, simultaneously) commer-
cial engraver and artist-printmaker, he was encountering the challenges of
making a living in professions where mirror-imaging images, and mirror-­
imaging writing, featured prominently, probably on an almost daily basis.
As Paul Holdway, a member of the Spode Factory’s last team of engravers
in the first decade of the twenty-first century, reminds us, ‘all engravers’
work is so detailed that it is usually undertaken with the aid of a magnify-
ing glass.’87
The term ‘directional apraxia’ as been assigned to cover disorders or
delayed fluency in achieving normal writing orientation yet, of course, the
deliberate mirror-writing required for his profession forced Blake to
encounter exactly that route.88 Unfortunately as far as the visual side of
Blake’s profession was concerned, enantiomorphic ability is similarly com-
promised by literacy.89 In other words, the more Blake read and wrote, the

86
Michael Phillips, William Blake: Apprentice & Master (Oxford: Ashmolean, 2014)
Figs. 79–80.
87
David Drakard and Paul Holdway, Spode: Transfer Printed Ware 1784–1833, A New,
Enlarged and Updated Edition (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2002) p. 47.
88
Sergio Della Sala and Roberto Cubelli, ‘Directional apraxia: A unitary account of mirror-
writing following brain injury or as found in normal young children,’ Journal of
Neuropsychology, 1 (2007) pp. 3–26.
89
T. Fernandes and R. Kolinsky, ‘From hand to eye: the role of literacy, familiarity, grasp-
ability, and vision-for-action on enantiomorphy,’ Acta Psychologica, 142 (2013), pp. 51–61.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 93

less able he was to comprehend mirrored visual images. Nevertheless,

mirror-writing in healthy subjects may, at times, encompass surprising
degrees of facility, almost certainly beyond that reached by Blake. ‘The
first quantitative study of skilled deliberate mirror-writing’ took as its sub-
ject, ‘K.B.,’ a contemporary German academic, who ‘can write forward or
backward, vertically upright or inverted, with the hands acting alone or
simultaneously.’90 There is no suggestion Blake could do this.
Although we have the testimonies of Cumberland and Linnell to draw
on, together with the evidence of our own eyes in examining the text of
the illuminated books in facsimile or as digitized images, while one cannot
be sure of his level of fluency, it is possible to reconstruct some of the chal-
lenges to his perceptual and motor skills he is likely to have encountered.
It is worthwhile briefly analysing literacy’s impact on cognitive interac-
tions with symbolic alphabets such as Latin based English. Literacy
requires perceptual and motor strategies to cope with the high levels of
asymmetric disorder in writing’s signifying systems. While 11 letters are
symmetrical (A, H, I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X, Y), the majority of the others
(12) are right-facing (B, C, D, E, F, G, K, L, P, Q, R, and S) while two (J
and Z) are left-facing. Furthermore, some of these right-facing letters also
have a vertical stem and appendages which seem to face right (b, f, K P, R,
t etc). Lower case letters are even more complicated with a, d, g, j, y, z
being (arguably) left-facing.91 Left-facing characters such as these, because
of a left perceptual bias in left-to-right reading systems such as Latin script,
are decoded faster by the brain because the left side of Latin characters
bear the most complex information required for decoding.92 When mirror-­
writing Latin script, this added a further perceptual burden for the main-
tenance of writing accuracy. Although the standardization of English
spelling was still a work in progress during Blake’s lifetime, the word ‘per-
cieves’ in There is No Natural Religion is a tantalizing reminder that,
whether deliberately or in error, putting the ‘i’ and the ‘e’ into this less

90
Robert D. McIntosh, Natascia De Lucia and Sergio Della Sala, ‘Mirror man: A case of
skilled deliberate mirror-writing,’ Cognitive Neuropsychology 31 (2014) pp. 350–366.
91
Jean-Paul Fischer and Anne-Marie Koch, ‘Mirror-writing in typically developing chil-
dren: A first longitudinal study,’ Cognitive Development, 38 (2016) pp. 114–124.
92
Helena Miton, Olivier Morin, ‘Graphic complexity in writing systems,’ Cognition 214
(2021) 104771, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104771.
94 D. WORRALL

orthodox position drew attention to the faculty (perception) his book was
exploring (E 2).93
Blake’s challenge, imposed on himself because of the necessity of re-­
adapting for his illuminated books at the end of the 1780s the skill sets he
had already acquired at Basire’s in the 1770s, was to produce fluent visual
mirror images and fluent mirror-image text despite the degrees of percep-
tual asymmetry encountered in the process. For visual mirror-image
decoding, the 180 degree lateral plane reversal of a u to an n graphic shape
does not matter, but the mirror-image reversal of a b to a d in Latin text
matters a lot.94 With Blake, some of these perceptual complications of the
break from childhood mirror-invariance crops up in unexpected places.
Recent research on directionality in mirror-writing, quite unexpectedly,
prompts a reminder of a debate of some vintage in Blake studies about
leftward and rightward variant serifs on his relief-etched letter ‘g.’ In the
late 1780s or early 1790s, Blake used both a left- and right-facing serif on
the relief-etched letter ‘g.’ In 1969 the eminent scholar and editor David
V. Erdman, advocated using Blake’s ‘g’ variants as a dating indicator.95 A
right-facing serif on ‘g,’ for example, is visible in the words ‘glee,’ ‘songs,’
‘sight’ and so on in the ‘Introduction’ plate to Songs of Innocence (whose
title page is firmly etched ‘1789’). By the time of the ‘Introduction’ plate
to Songs of Experience (which was never issued separately from Innocence
and had its own individual title page etched, ‘1794’), the serif had become
left-facing. The ‘“g”-Hypothesis’ (Erdman’s term) for dating was system-
atically refuted by Joseph Viscomi in 1992.96 While the weight of evidence
lies with Viscomi, anyone looking at The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(Copy F is dated in pen by Blake on plate 3, ‘1790’) will notice that while
the plate (plate 2) headed ‘The Argument’ has the right-facing ‘g’ serif as
does plate 3, plate 4 (which begins, ‘The voice of the Devil’) has a left-­
facing ‘g’ while the very next plate, plate 5, returns to a right-facing ‘g’
serif. These may refer to different dates of etching for the plates but,

93
‘Percieves’ does not seem to be Blake’s preferred spelling. For other uses of ‘percieves’
and ‘percieved’ see E 35, 109, 133, 193 and 578. For ‘perceive’ and ‘perceives’ see E 592,
604 (twice), 608 (twice), 647, 750 and 751.
94
Gibson, Eleanor J. et al. ‘A developmental study of the discrimination of letter-like
forms.’ Journal of comparative and physiological psychology 55 (1962): pp. 897–906.
95
David V. Erdman, ‘Dating Blake’s Script: The “g” Hypothesis,’ Blake Newsletter 3
(1969) pp. 8–13; ‘Dating Blake’s Script: A Postscript,’ Blake Newsletter 3 (1969) p. 42.
96
Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993) pp. 234–40.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 95

whatever happened, they were clearly approximately coincident within the

date range, c. 1789–1790.
Much of this is beyond immediate resolution. As Viscomi demonstrates
throughout Blake and the Idea of the Book, Blake is working within the
exigencies of using his home-produced ink and writing pens (or brushes)
for relief-etching, sometimes using only post-card sized copper plates, and
always writing within areas inevitably crowded with designs, not to men-
tion the rest of his text. However, what may still be a remarkable question
is why he bothers at all with the redirection of a serif? Even though he was
new to relief-etched mirror-writing, both forms printed crisply without
being clogged by ink. Few would want to make a judgement whether one
is aesthetically more pleasing than the other.
Given the presence of mirror-writing in the An Island in the Moon man-
uscript, c. 1784, the possibility cannot be ruled out that the left- and
right-facing ‘g’ serif dateable to c. 1788–1793, is a residual directional
apraxia (in the sense that this can manifest itself as a condition in healthy
subjects).97 If so, this apraxia was obviously both minor and short-lived
since Blake rapidly became, as Cumberland and Linnell later testified, a
fluent mirror-writer.
Was Blake conscious of orthographic directionality while writing the
illuminated books during this period?
A startlingly clear expression of Blake’s awareness of this is the title page
to The Book of Urizen (1794). On this plate the aged, bearded, Urizen
figure squats on two tablets of stone apparently writing (or drawing)
simultaneously with both hands. Given The Book of Urizen’s title page, and
that mirror-writing is often reported as associated with left-handedness, it
is feasible Blake wrote his normal script (left to right) with his right hand
but developed fluency writing mirror-writing with his left hand.98 One of
the earliest reports of mirror-writing cites the example of contemporary
telegraphists who could tap out Morse code with one hand while simulta-
neously mirror-writing notes with the other.99 This picture, since it

97
Sergio Della Sala and Roberto Cubelli, ‘Directional apraxia: A unitary account of mirror-
writing following brain injury or as found in normal young children,’ Journal of
Neuropsychology, 1 (2007) pp. 3–26.
98
V.G. Angelillo, N. De Lucia, L. Trojano, D. Grossi, ‘Persistent left unilateral mirror-
writing: A neuropsychological case study,’ Brain & Language, 114 (3) (2010), pp. 157–163.
99
Mills, C. K. Mirror-writing. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 19 (1894)
pp. 85–91.
96 D. WORRALL

unambiguously shows someone writing using both hands simultaneously,

might reference such modes.
There is a further piece of evidence which makes Blake’s consciousness
of his handedness in writing quite explicit. Around 1796, apparently at the
request of the artist Ozias Humphry, Blake took several of the plates from
his illuminated books, colour-printed their images, masked out their text,
and gathered them into three sets known as A Large Book of Designs and
A Small Book of Designs, the latter printed in two copies (with varied
plates). In the second copy of A Small Book of Designs he included an
impression of The Book of Urizen title page with a new inscription, in pen,
‘“Which is the Way” / “The Right or the Left”’ (E 673, which does not
include Blake’s quotation marks).100 As so often, the inscription is gnomic
and may have been simply prompted by Humphry requesting some kind
of commentary, but nevertheless, at the very least this impression demon-
strates that Blake was aware that the subjects of left and right orientations
were implicit in the design.
Whatever else it is about, The Book of Urizen is also a narrative about the
restriction of perception in the post-lapsarian world. In a less systematic
way to There is No Natural Religion, it is a continuation about Blake’s
ideas about perception although, in this case, newly elevated to myth. It
presents a counter-narrative to the Genesis story in a version where the
newly created human race realize that, ‘No more could they rise at will /
In the infinite void, but [were] bound down / To earth by their narrow-
ing perceptions’ (E 83). This ‘narrowing [of] perceptions’ is accompanied
by ‘The Net of Religion,’ a Klüver lattice form-constant also pictured on
plate 28 (E 82). This convergence of perceptual types should not be too
surprising since, from his apprenticeship days onwards, Blake inhabited a
professional environment which both required, and supported, him to
have an advanced enantiomorphic ability. Mirror-writing, from ‘Blake
sculpsit’ onwards, was a natural development. On this account, the precise
details or role of the ‘g’ serif and There is No Natural Religion’s dating do
not matter too much because they are both coincident with perceptual
changes about which Blake was clearly conscious.
Although a naturally gifted facility is possible, it does not look likely to
have happened entirely smoothly in Blake’s case. Apart from the examples
suggested above about All Religions are One, Joseph Viscomi makes the
point that the roman script he had recently developed in There is No

100
Butlin: 261.1.
 3 PERCEIVING MORE THAN PERCEPTION 97

Natural Religion is very similar to that used in Songs of Innocence (1789).101

There are some intriguing possibilities.
The poem Blake sets as the ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Innocence com-
prises a sustained commentary on the entry into writing. A child on a
cloud (‘On a cloud I saw a child’) hears a ‘Piper’ ‘Piping songs of pleasant
glee’ until the child tells the speaker to ‘write / In a book that all may
read.’ When the child ‘vanish’d from my sight /… I made a rural pen, /
And I stain’d the water clear, / And I wrote my happy songs’ (E 7).
Blake’s tropes convey very vividly the irreversibility of writing and how it
is accompanied by the loss of innocence and spontaneity. A casualty of
literacy is that childhood mirror-invariance (reading d and b as equivalent
graphemes) is compromised. One survey found that 52% of children aged
3–8 wrote their names in mirror form, an echo of their original mirror-­
invariance.102 As G.D. Schott observes in his influential study, the loss of
the mirror-writing facility which is a notable feature of childhood can
sometimes be overcome in adulthood, ‘the left-handed tendency and
accompanying mirror-writing …[can] become suppressed, only to re-­
emerge when this suppression is overcome.’103
As far as conclusions are concerned, the best that may be said is that
mirror-writing is probably cognitively and perceptually more complicated
than it appears. For Blake, the challenges were doubled because his com-
promised enantiomorphic ability in processing the mirror-writing of the
illuminated books was also accompanied by the professional necessity of
producing engraved mirror visual images for his commercial book illustra-
tions. Whether he experienced any level of stress while striving to become
adept at these techniques is not known but there is evidence that clinically
measurable raised anxiety can trigger mirror-writing although this is
thought to arise more from temporary motor control impairment than
from perceptual causation.104
Blake’s acquisition of the technique of relief-etching, c. 1788, suppos-
edly through a full felt-presence post-bereavement hallucination,

101
Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993) p. 190.
102
J.M. Cornell, ‘Spontaneous mirror-writing in children,’ Canadian Journal of Psychology
39 (1985) pp. 174–79.
103
G. D. Schott, ‘Mirror-writing: neurological reflections on an unusual phenomenon,’ J
Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 78 (2007) pp. 5–13.
104
Sergio Della Sala, Clara Calia, Maria Fara De Caro & Robert D. McIntosh, Transient
involuntary mirror-writing triggered by anxiety, Neurocase, 21 (2015) pp. 665–673.
98 D. WORRALL

necessitated that he return to the mirror-writing of early childhood and do

more of it than just signing his name on his commercial engraving com-
missions even though, as Alexander S. Gourlay shows, this was challenging
enough.105 His minor directional apraxia, originally precipitated (as with
many other children) by his entry into literacy, may be evidenced in the c.
1784 An Island in the Moon manuscript. In the very first illuminated
books, c. 1788–1793, it was revealed again by the wayward left-right ori-
entation of the ‘g’ serif. However, few would disagree that, whatever else
the Songs of Innocence are about, they are overwhelmingly concerned with
re-connecting with childhood perspectives. It may be that in his return in
the late 1780s to the mirror-writing of his childhood, Songs of Innocence
was coincident with lifting this specific suppression of adulthood.
Or, to put it another way, Songs of Innocence was the outcome of dis-
tinct cognitive challenges to Blake’s motor and perceptual processes
brought about by the requirement at the end of the 1780s to produce the
mirror-writing needed for relief-etched copper plates. Songs of Innocence,
The Book of Thel and, quite possibly, other early poems may be considered
wholly or in part the outcomes of laments for his lost childhood mirror-­
invariance, the compromising entry into literacy that both enabled, and
yet denied, original innocence.

105
Gourlay, Alexander S. “Blake Writes Backward.” Huntington Library Quarterly 80
(2017), pp. 403–21.
 CHAPTER 4

Klüver Form-constants

This chapter aims to restore the ‘visions’ to Blake’s ‘visionary’ art by intro-
ducing a novel method for assigning the incidence in his paintings and
illuminated books of the presence of one specific type of visual hallucina-
tion, the four form-constants of hallucinatory patterns identified by exper-
imental psychologist Heinrich Klüver (1897–1979). They are the most
likely candidates for the most easily traceable examples of Blake’s originat-
ing visual ‘visions.’ As Klüver summarized them in 1942, ‘The author’s
analysis of the hallucinatory phenomena … yielded the following form-­
constants: (a) grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chess-
board; (b) cobweb; (c) tunnel, funnel, alley, cone, or vessel; (d) spiral.
Many [hallucinatory] phenomena are, on close examination, nothing but
modifications and transformations of these basic forms’.1 As discussed in
the Introduction, Klüver’s discoveries were eventually confirmed by trac-
ing the origins of the four hallucinatory patterns back to the neural archi-
tecture of V1, demonstrated in two stages by Ermentrout and Cowan

1
Heinrich Klüver, ‘Mechanisms of Hallucinations,’ Terman and Merrill (eds.), Studies in
Personality (New York: Mc-Graw-Hill, 1942) pp. 175–207.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 99

Switzerland AG 2024
D. Worrall, William Blake’s Visions, Palgrave Studies in Literature,
Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2_4
100 D. WORRALL

(1979) and Bressloff and Cowan, et al., (2001).2 Klüver form-constant

visual hallucinations, with their distinctive geometric shapes, can be found
located in the compositional choices Blake made in his visual art, and
sometimes in his poetics, making them amenable to easy identification.
These patterns were seen by Blake on his retina, signalled from V1, self-­
luminous within his visual field, eyes open or eyes closed and always in
these same four configurations (although, as Klüver commented, some-
times in overlapping amalgamation). What remains in his visual art are the
outline traces of these shapes or, as he put it in The Ghost of Abel (1822),
‘Nature has no Outline: but Imagination has’ (E 270). Not least, their
repetition in Klüver’s stable configurations, what Blake described as ‘ever
Existent Images,’ resulted in his long-term preference for symmetrical
composition discussed in Chap. 9 (E 555).
The principal requirement for identifying the phenomenology of
Blake’s ‘visions’ is that the percepts should be comprised of ‘ever Existent
Images’ outside of ‘Generative Nature’ (E 555). In A Descriptive Catalogue
he was just as uncompromising, stressing that his ‘visions’ lay beyond what
is normally understood as being encompassed by natural stimuli, ‘The
Prophets describe what they saw in Vision as real and existing … A Spirit
and a Vision … are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that
mortal and perishing nature can produce’ (E 541). Blake’s lifetime of
repeated assertions that he experienced ‘visions’ validates the search for
their traces within his visual art. This is not to say that geometrical com-
positions, symmetries, flattened perspectives, eclectic symbolism and other
features common to both eastern and western visual art are exclusive to
Blake. However, Blake is unusual in repeatedly claiming that his visual art
specifically originated in ‘visions,’ and that he had a lifetime susceptibility
to ‘visions,’ so it is perhaps not unexpected to find that manifestations of
these phenomena are located in compositional choices in his paintings and
drawings. While Blake had other types of visual ‘visions,’ including the
percepts triggered by synaesthesia discussed in Chaps. 6, 7, and 8, the
Klüver form-constants evident in his visual art were replicated by him in
his visual art and poetics on account of their incidence on his retina,

2
G. B. Ermentrout and J.D. Cowan, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Visual Hallucination
Patterns,’ Biological Cybernetics 34 (1979) pp. 137–150; Paul C. Bressloff, J.D. Cowan,
M. Golubitsky, P.J. Thomas, M. Wiener, ‘Geometric visual hallucinations, Euclidean sym-
metry and the functional architecture of striate cortex,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London, Biological Sciences B 356 (2001) pp. 299–330.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 101

signalled from his V1. These visual hallucinations are not particularly rare.
The physiologies of their production are discussed in Chap. 5 and all have
some degree of prevalence across the population. In December 1825,
Crabb Robinson, talking directly to Blake at his home in Fountain Court,
off the Strand, reported that, ‘Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he
had had from early infancy—He thinks all men partake of it—but it is lost
by not being cultivd.’3 Crucially, if Crabb Robinson’s records of his con-
versations with Blake are correct, he spoke of a ‘faculty of Vision,’ not a
state of mind or a religious or philosophical turn. He also unmistakably
insisted that ‘all men partake of it.’ Given the evidence presented below
related to his visual art, the most plausible candidate for the source of ‘ever
Existent Images,’ ‘that all men partake of,’ species-wide on account of
their neural correlates, are the four sets of visual hallucination form-­
constant geometric patterns identified by Klüver.
There are good evolutionary reasons why we do not hallucinate yet also
good evolutionary reasons why our neural architecture retains the capacity
to do just that. In a 2012 paper on evolutionary constraints on the neural
processing of optical vision, the authors describe ‘V1’s most striking long-­
range features—patchy excitatory connections and sparse inhibitory con-
nections—are strongly constrained by two requirements: the need for the
visual state to be robust and the developmental requirements of the orien-
tational preference map.’4 That is, V1 is required to encompass the almost
mutually exclusive demands of stability combined with flexibility. The
requirement to rapidly process and rationalize visual information through
V1 runs in parallel with the evolutionary progress of the species. At the
very least, Blake’s visual hallucinations of the Klüver type are good indica-
tors that he had a normal, healthy, V1 unimpaired by neurological disor-
der or dysfunction.
Blake’s paintings, including designs in the illuminated books, suggest
that he experienced Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations beginning
no later than 1793 and possibly as early as c. 1780. They have ‘ever
Existent’ permanence because these ‘Images’ only appear in these four
geometric patterns, the four form-constants of Klüver’s original taxonomy
(although they often appear in amalgamation with each other). They are
comprised of geometrically patterned phosphenes perceived as

3
BR(2): p. 428.
4
Thomas Charles Butler, Marc Benayoun, Edward Wallace, Wim van Drongelen, Nigel
Goldenfeld and Jack Cowan, ‘Evolutionary constraints on visual cortex architecture from the
dynamics of hallucinations,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012)
pp. 606–609.
102 D. WORRALL

self-luminous entoptic hallucinations in the visual field.5 Crucially, Klüver

form-constant visual hallucinations have neural correlates. They are not
psychological entities. Although their correlation with V1 was not demon-
strated until after his death (in the two papers by Ermentrout and Cowan
and Bressloff and Cowan, et al.), Klüver was at pains to differentiate the
cortical from the psychological.6 Their distinctive geometric shapes, visible
in his normal visual field, enable the reliable identification of their presence
in Blake’s visual art as evidence of his original ‘visions.’ He would, exactly
as he claimed, have been looking ‘thro’ the eye and seen them because
they were on his retina. They were not an exoptic ‘Sight’ of external stim-
uli as if located beyond a ‘Window’ but were entoptic images seen
‘thro’ the ‘visions’ located on his retina. (E 566). Their trace in the paint-
ings, drawings and in the designs of the illuminated books allows an asso-
ciation to be made between their occurrence and the origins of his creative
processes. Although they have no verbal auditory modality, Klüver form-­
constants were one of several phenomena he called ‘visions.’ The patterns
of Klüver visual hallucinations, are amongst the most easily recognizable
entoptic percepts in Blake’s art.
What follows are five ‘worked’ examples of individual pictures, from c.
1780 to c. 1820, together with a survey of some of the illuminated books
up to 1795, indicating the traces of Klüver form-constants left on these
works as compositional choices. In some of these examples, an association
is also made between the presence of the Klüver percepts and their detailed
historical social contexts. This is done by way of demonstrating that the
methods of analyses employed here are not mutually exclusive. The iden-
tification of different kinds of hallucinatory phenomena in Blake’s works is
not incompatible with general historicism, one of the more dominant
critical methodologies of the last three decades.
Gallery-goers will be able to find their own examples of Klüver patterns
in Blake’s art but the chapter will begin by examining An Allegory of the
Bible (c. 1780–1785), one of the earliest of his watercolours and possibly
the first to show traces of Blake’s original hallucinatory percepts. If the

5
Phosphenes (from the Greek phos, light and phainain, to show) are entoptic flashes of
light propagated from V1.
6
G. B. Ermentrout and J.D. Cowan, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Visual Hallucination
Patterns,’ Biological Cybernetics 34 (1979) pp. 137–150; Paul C. Bressloff, J.D. Cowan,
M. Golubitsky, P.J. Thomas, M. Wiener, ‘Geometric visual hallucinations, Euclidean sym-
metry and the functional architecture of striate cortex,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London, Biological Sciences B 356 (2001) pp. 299–330; Heinrich Klüver, ‘Mescal
Visions and Eidetic Vision,’ The American Journal of Psychology 37 (1926), pp. 502–515;
Hunt, William A. “Heinrich Klüver: 1897–1979.” The American Journal of Psychology, 93
(1980), pp. 159–161.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 103

analysis of this drawing is correct, it would set the earliest date for the
influence of Klüver-type hallucinations in his art, implying that all subse-
quent parts of Blake’s visual corpus need to be re-examined to locate
traces of the ‘visions’ he thought central to his painting. The discussion
will then move to one of Blake’s most iconographically powerful images,
Jacob’s Dream (or Jacob’s Ladder), c. 1799–1807, now in the British
Museum, London. The next picture to be discussed will be The Penance of
Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church (c. 1793) now in Tate Britain, London, a
work displayed by him in the 1809 exhibition, the show where he main-
tained some of the pictures were based on things ‘seen in my visions.’
Although it may seem an unlikely candidate for inclusion in the 1809
exhibition, it also contains dissident cultural encodings which have not
been recognized before but which made it consonant with the pictures
from ‘visions’ he was showing to the public. The issue about whether
Blake was aware of Klüver’s patterns over a hundred years before Klüver
classified them will then be discussed with reference to Miltons Mysterious
Dream (c. 1816–1820), an illustration forming part of a series relating to
John Milton’s poem, Il Penseroso (1631). Even taken on its own, this is a
remarkable milestone in the history of the classification of visual hallucina-
tions. The chapter will then discuss similar form-constants in, Epitome of
James Hervey’s “Meditations Among the Tombs,” c. 1820–1825, another
Tate Britain painting, along with a brief account of how this picture might
be set within a specific historical and cultural context. This is followed by
a section indicating the extent of the incidence of Klüver patterns in the
illuminated books of the early to mid-1790s. The significance of this par-
ticular date range is that, as can be seen in Viscomi’s tabulation of his
output in Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), it marks a high point in
Blake’s printing and production of new illuminated book titles, perhaps
not least because they coincided with a period of political upheaval in
Britain in the aftermath of the French Revolution and outbreak of war
with France in 1793.7 In short, the illuminated books, particularly of the
early 1790s, demonstrate a remarkable expansion in his incorporation of
Klüver-type form-constants into his visual art.

7
Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993), Appendix, pp. 376–81.
104 D. WORRALL

Example One: An Allegory of the Bible

(c. 1780–1785)
The earliest, if perhaps one of the most initially aesthetically disappointing,
of Blake’s early graphite, ink and watercolour drawings referencing Klüver
form-constant visual hallucinations is the one now titled (not chosen by
Blake), An Allegory of the Bible (c. 1780–1785) (Fig. 4.1).8 It is regularly
on display at Tate Britain but was not included in the 1978 or 2001 Blake
exhibitions although it featured in the 2019 show. A problem with the
current appearance of An Allegory of the Bible is that, as investigated by
Noa Cahaner McManus and Joyce H. Townsend at the conservation sci-
ence department at Tate Britain, parts of it have faded considerably. It has
‘lost red lake [pigment] from the background to the arched screen in the
middle portion and its appearance is now dramatically changed, with the
unaltered pattern of the foreground dominating.’9 A considerable mea-
sure of accommodation for sympathetic retro-reconstruction needs to be
made when viewing the picture today.
Butlin makes the comment that, in comparison to similar early works,
‘it is considerably less accomplished than … works of the late 1780s and
was presumably painted earlier.’10 It may have been produced in associa-
tion with another pencil and wash drawing titled (again, not titled by
Blake) A Soul at the Door of Paradise, with which it shares some stylistic
similarities (c. 1780).11 Neither of these images has received much critical
attention. However, Christopher Rowland in Blake and the Bible (2010)
registers An Allegory of the Bible’s importance by giving it a careful descrip-
tion. He places it broadly within an exegetical context concerning the holy
written word, emphasizing the significance of the opened Bible in the
picture’s background and examining the role of spirituality implicitly
inherent in holy texts. According to Rowland, the picture reminds us that
‘the book is never an end in itself, never the object of devotion, for one

8
Butlin: 127.
9
Noa Cahaner McManus and Joyce H. Townsend, ‘Watercolour Methods, and Materials
Use in Context,’ Joyce H. Townsend and Robin Hamlyn (eds.) William Blake: The Painter
at Work (London: Tate Publishing, 2003) pp. 61–49, 75.
10
Butlin: 127. Butlin records its only public showing as being at the Burlington Fine Arts
Club in 1876.
11
Butlin: 131, recto.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 105

Fig. 4.1 William Blake, An Allegory of the Bible, c.1780–1785, graphite, ink and
watercolour on paper, Tate Britain
106 D. WORRALL

must look through it, with it, and, indeed, beyond it, back to the reality in
which one lives.’12
An Allegory of the Bible is based around a Klüver form-constant of a
combined tunnel and lattice form type. It is revealing to compare it with a
much-reproduced drawing by David Sheridan (1943–1982) made after a
drug-induced hallucination and reproduced in R.K. Siegel and
M.E. Jarvik’s 1975 journal article, a standard point of reference in the cur-
rent scientific literature for sampling these hallucinations and their adher-
ence to the classifications set out earlier by Klüver.13 Another helpful
picture is one known as Untitled (1985), a balcony scene painted by an
under 16-year-old woman in the East Midlands region of the United
Kingdom as part of the Migraine Art competitions of the 1980s.14 In this
painting, a chequer-patterned tiling is edged with a trellis railing (showing
the lattice form-constant) with the scene having considerable depth (the
tunnel form-constant) as it looks out onto a Mediterranean-type town-
scape. An Allegory of the Bible and the female under 16-year-old’s Untitled
are consistent with migraine aura operating as a co-modality of Klüver
form-constant hallucinations.15
The interpretation of An Allegory of the Bible proposed here is that the
composition is a combination of two Klüver form-constants which repeat
the shapes seen in Blake’s original hallucinations. Although Blake had no
option but to fix his design as a static artefact (a painting), the current
neuroscience finds it difficult to describe the differentials of depth, colour
and motion in Klüver’s patterns whose stabilities of pattern formation

12
Christopher Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2010) p. 232.
13
Reproduced in R. K. Siegel and M. E. Jarvik, ‘Drug-Induced Hallucinations in Animals
and Man,’ in R. K. Siegel and L. J. West (Eds.), Hallucinations (New York, NY: John Wiley
& Sons, 1975) pp. 117 & unnumbered page [Color Plate 6] following p. 146).
14
Unnamed artist, Holiday Scene with Aura (1985) Migraine Art Collection, Reference:
SA/MAR/342 https://wellcomecollection.org/works/j9zw39qv [Accessed
14/08/2023] At the time of writing, The Migraine Art Collection was in being re-cata-
logued by the Wellcome Trust, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/caav4wtp. See also,
Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson, Migraine Art: The Experience From Within (Berkeley,
CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008) Figure 254. Podoll and Robinson give her age as
13, p. 207.
15
For chequerboards as a migraine co-modality, see Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson,
Migraine Art: The Experience From Within (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008)
pp. 206–08.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 107

originally made them so attractive for analysis.16 Blake’s Allegory of the

Bible may have been the outcome of a ‘vision’ or hallucination which had
considerable depth, colour and motion but which is only partially repre-
sented in the painting. Unfortunately, along with the colour of the Tate
painting being depleted, one can see he also struggled to portray depth
although his groups of static and physically moving human figures may
suggest the dynamic contents of his original hallucination.
It may also be important that Blake depicts a double formation of a
Klüver tunnel form-constant and a lattice form-constant. The double sets
of tiled floors in the picture, traces of the original lattice form-constant,
are represented horizontal to their axis, contrasting with two sets of four,
treaded, rising steps on the picture’s (rather weak) vertical axis. These
ensure that the background of the picture is, pictorially, a raised space. The
rising steps, emphasized by the figure walking down them, as well as the
other figures seated or standing on different levels of their treads, lead the
eye into a Klüver tunnel form-constant, higher, and further away in the
background than in the foreground. The pattern of the floor tiles and the
(now faded) diamond patterned tracery are the markers of a Klüver lattice
form-constant which dominated the original hallucination.17 Significantly,
this visual hallucinatory pattern was repeated in The Penance of Jane Shore
in St. Paul’s Church, c. 1793 (and its precursor sketch of c. 1779), dis-
cussed below, a work he went on to exhibit in his 1809 show. The opened
book (which one assumes to be the Christian Bible) seems to lie beyond
the tracery, radiating light, and is emphasized by the arching curve of the
diamond-shaped tracery or windows. With its chequerboards and tunnel
pattern, a Figure reproduced in Christopher W. Tyler’s important 1978
journal article on entoptic phenomena approximates quite noticeably to
An Allegory of the Bible but particularly on account of Tyler’s (c. 1970s
acculturated) description of ‘blank t.v. screens’ (superimposed patterns of
phosphenes) which uncannily replicate the shapes of the opened Bible in
Blake’s picture.18 These rectangular blank spaces in Tyler’s Figure, seem to
provide an evidential basis, located in the known phenomenology of

16
Tanya I. Baker and Jack D. Cowan, ‘Spontaneous pattern formation and pinning in the
primary visual cortex,’ Journal of Physiology-Paris 103 (2009) pp. 52–68.
17
Heinrich Klüver’s subjects described the lattice form-constant as a ‘fretwork … or chess-
board design,’ Heinrich Klüver, Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1966) p. 22. Klüver’s italics.
18
Christopher W. Tyler, ‘Some new Entoptic Phenomena,’ Vision Research 18 (1978)
pp. 1633–639.
108 D. WORRALL

­hosphene patterned visual hallucinations, for the source of the two

p
opened pages of the book featured in the background which Blake saw in
his original ‘vision.’
Like a revelatory event, both Blake’s meaning and the cognitive devel-
opment he made from his original ‘vision’ becomes clear. If the Bible
originated in divine revelation or ‘vision,’ the visual hallucinations Blake
adapts in An Allegory of the Bible echo that original revelation, verifying
the spiritual foundations of the holy text and implicating the artist’s shar-
ing of that revelation (very much as Christopher Rowland has described).
These twin Klüver visual hallucinations, would have been seen by him
within his normal visual field, self-luminous, eyes open or eyes closed.
They are Blake’s simulacra for the Bible’s original status as ‘Vision.’ In this
picture, what he called ‘vision’ can now be identified as having originated
in his cognitive development arising from a precise phenomenology of
neural signals from V1 mapped onto his retina and adapted according to
his aesthetic preferences, cognitively prioritizing its shapes to conform to
the originary hallucinatory event. With the drawing bearing the trace of
one of his earliest ‘visions,’ the Klüver patterns he saw verified the Bible’s
‘Genuine Preservd’ authority. In short, for the first time, it is now possible
to identify in An Allegory of the Bible, what were probably Blake’s first
representations of ‘ever Existent Images,’ stable and permanent because
recurring only in the same form-constant geometric patterns, self-­
luminous, eyes open or eyes closed, and seen by him directly within his
visual field (E 555).
If Butlin’s date range is correct, he would have been between 23 and
28 years old at this point. He had not yet attended the Swedenborg con-
ference at which he may have met Dorothy Gott, the contemporary pro-
phetic author who, by the spring of 1789, had already written about her
own vision of the Bible perceived as a hallucinatory book (‘this light
enlarged the Scriptures … things appeared as a scene, and a voice, as plain
as if the book laid before me’).19 By circumstances of their social conjunc-
tion, even if not actualized in a face-to-face meeting (although the 1789
Swedenborg conference facilitated such contact), then based upon their
occupation of this precise strata of London’s contemporary prophetic
milieu, both of them had ‘visions’ of an opened Bible. It is certainly plau-
sible he retained An Allegory of the Bible in his collection, tentative though

19
Dorothy Got, The Midnight Cry, “Behold, the Bridegroom comes!” Or, An Order from God
To Get Your Lamps Lighted, Otherwise you must go into Darkness (1788) p. 26.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 109

its composition was, because it reminded him that his own ‘visions’ pre-
ceded those of Gott and recalled the heady atmosphere of the prophetic
and apocalyptic days of late 1780s London shortly after he completed the
painting.
The significance of establishing that An Allegory of the Bible is based on
two Klüver form-constants lies in its very early date, possibly as early as c.
1780 on Butlin’s dating. This means that Blake’s use of hallucinations as a
part of his creativity is present right at the beginning of his career as a
visual artist. Apart from drawings made for his apprenticeship master,
James Basire, or his Royal Academy student pieces, there are only 10
extant pictures that Butlin attributes with possible dates earlier than 1780
(but one of which is The Penance of Jane Shore drawing, discussed below).
Although these neurologically generated patterns do not dominate Blake’s
compositions at any point in his career, they derive from the phenomenol-
ogy of visual hallucinations. If the earliest visual record of these form-­
constants in Blake’s art appears no later than, c. 1785, the greater part of
the corpus of Blake’s visual output, including the illuminated books
included (discussed separately, below), then they need to be re-scrutinized
for the presence in the traces of the Klüver form-constant visual hallucina-
tions which were origin of some of the ‘visions’ he declared as the sources
of his art.

Example Two: Jacob’s Ladder (c. 1799–1807)

Those with even a cursory knowledge of the range of Blake’s images will
probably know his pen and watercolour drawing, Jacob’s Dream, exhibited
first at the Royal Academy in 1808 (c. 1805, British Museum) (Fig. 4.2).20
A year after the Royal Academy exhibition (where it remained unsold),
Blake retitled it Jacob’s Ladder, a ‘Drawing,’ and showed it at his exhibi-
tion off Oxford Street in 1809. At some point, probably during Blake’s
lifetime, it was acquired by Blake’s long-term patron, Thomas Butts. Its
status as one of Blake’s rare Royal Academy pictures, its place in the 1809
exhibition and the reliability of its provenance makes this a significant
composition. It was for his 1809 exhibition that Blake’s wrote in the

20
Blake inscribed onto the painting the Biblical reference, ‘Genesis XXVIII c. 12v.’ The
Bible text reads, ‘And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it
reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it’);
Butlin: 438.
110 D. WORRALL

Fig. 4.2 William Blake, Jacob’s Ladder, or Jacob’s Dream c.1799–1807, pen, grey
ink and watercolour on paper, British Museum
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 111

Descriptive Catalogue (1809) accompanying the show, that he painted

from ‘wonderful originals seen in my visions’ (E 531). Far less tentative
than An Allegory of the Bible, Jacob’s Ladder is ‘Exhibit A’ in the evidence
for Blake’s incorporation of Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations. It
offers perhaps the clearest example of the presence of two of Klüver’s
form-constants in Blake’s work. It is also one of his most striking images.
Although a recent essay by Jonathan Roberts (see below) is an excep-
tion, the picture has attracted limited critical attention. It was not dis-
cussed in David Bindman’s, Blake as an Artist (1977) or Christopher
Heppner’s Reading Blake’s Designs (1998), still the two most substantial
monographs on Blake’s visual art. Perhaps the most pertinent comment is
that of Anthony Blunt in 1959 who described the spiral stairs as ‘a com-
plete novelty in the iconography of this subject.’21 In this case, the agent
of the originating hallucination can be fairly confidently traced. For Jacob’s
Ladder, Blake inscribed the exact Bible location of the Genesis text directly
onto the border of the picture. For the Royal Academy exhibition cata-
logue, it was captioned ‘Vide Genesis, chap. Xxviii, ver.12.’22 The Bible
text says that Jacob ‘lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed …,’
dreaming of ‘a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to
heaven,’ from which dream ‘Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said,
Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.’ However, this is not a
case of Blake’s painting imitating the contents of the scriptural text but
quite the reverse. Blake has recognized the historical Jacob’s experience as
a hypnopompic (waking from sleep) visual hallucination of the type he had
probably experienced himself many times, not least as announced at the
beginning of Jerusalem, a work he had begun in 1804 (‘This theme calls
me in sleep night after night, & ev’ry morn / Awakes me at sun-rise, then
I see the Saviour over me …/ dictating the words of this mild song’ (E
146). Emerging from a hypnopompic hallucinatory state, which mirrored
the example of ‘Jacob awaked out of his sleep,’ created this specific Klüver
form-constant self-luminous shape in his visual field, here revealing the
pattern of the original visual hallucination as a trace.
Jacob’s Ladder is dominated by an image of a symmetrical spiral stair-
case, apparently made of stone, on which are seen ‘the angels of God
ascending and descending on it,’ as referred to in the Bible’s Genesis

21
Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake: No 12, Bampton Lectures in America Delivered
at Columbia University 1959 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) p. 37.
22
Butlin: 438.
112 D. WORRALL

xxviii.12. The stairs rise in at least two vertical revolutions. Near the top,
the stairs enter and disappear into a circle of radiating, broad, spoke-like,
bars of light, representing the entrance into heaven. The two composi-
tional structures in the picture are a spiral and a funnel or tunnel, con-
forming to two of the four form-constants described by Klüver. That is,
Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder is a compositional assembly or amalgamation of two
Klüver form-constants, the spiral and the tunnel/funnel. As Blunt com-
ments, in the history of representations of this subject, Blake’s spiral stair-
case is unique.
There are good neurophysiological reasons why spiral forms may have
been adopted by Blake for this work, particularly if enhanced by experi-
ences of visual hallucination. The perception of the orientation of optical
objects, principally through their edges or contours, is a crucial function
of V1. Spiral forms, lattices and cobwebs have distinct edges and contours
facilitating fluent visual perception. The processes of decoding these sig-
nals by the cortex are only beginning to be understood, offering the theo-
retical prospect of being able ‘read-out the detailed contents of a person’s
mental state.’23 The discrimination of spiral and radial forms, two out of
Klüver’s four form-constants, in Jacob’s Ladder are foundational to visual
perception on account of their structural role in V1. Recent research has
detected a radial orientation bias in early visual cortex, including V1. That
is, radial edges (such as those represented by the spokes of light in Jacob’s
Ladder) are processed by the cortex more fluently than other shapes. One
paper claims that there is ‘evidence for an enhanced sensitivity to radial
orientations in human perception,’ arguing that the evidence is so ‘robust’
that ‘a radial bias may be neurally fundamental.’24 Again, such a neuro-
physiology appears to be consistent with ffytche’s observation that there is
‘co-localization of perceptual and non-perceptual activity within individ-
ual cortical areas.’25 That is—although the inference is my own—the
choice of dominant Klüver pattern spiral and radial structures in Blake’s
Jacob’s Ladder, provides a good demonstration of V1’s cognitive role and
implies Blake had insight into his visual hallucinations.

23
Y. Kamitani and F. Tong, ‘Decoding the visual subject and subjective contents of the
human brain,’ Nature Neuroscience 8 (2005) pp. 679—685.
24
Yuka Sasaki, Reza Rajimehr, Byoung Woo Kim, Leeland B. Ekstrom, Wim Vanduffel and
Roger B.H. Tootell, ‘The Radial Bias: A Different Slant on Visual Orientation Sensitivity in
Human and Nonhuman Primate,’ Neuron 51 (2006) pp. 661–670.
25
Dominic H. ffytche, ‘Neural codes for conscious vision,’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6
(2002) pp. 493–495.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 113

Evidence from the Migraine Art competitions of the 1980s may also be
helpful. Jacob’s Ladder can be correlated with an Untitled (1981) picture
by a 20-year-old female artist living in the South West of England which
shows a migraine attack with a spiral staircase with people walking up the
stairs along with (not evident in Blake’s painting) a characteristic lattice
Klüver form-constant and migraine aura zigzag fortification spectra.26
Although this anonymous artist may have seen Blake’s watercolour in a
photograph or on exhibit, of course, her painting claimed to be an authen-
tic response to her experience of migraine.
Spiral forms have an important status in Blake’s art and poetry.27 As
part of an explanation of ‘the hermeneutic of his Christological “fourfold
vision,”’ Jonathan Roberts has offered an elegant discussion of Jacob’s
Ladder by setting it in the context of poems Blake enclosed in letters sent
to friends in London at their time of their departure from London and
arrival in Felpham, Sussex, in early October 1800.28 This was only about
two weeks before he wrote the ‘Vision of Light’ poem discussed in Chap. 2.
Although it is difficult to equate the picture with Roberts’ contention that
this picture is an ‘inextricably textual’ response to the Bible, he makes an
important connection between a poem Blake enclosed in one of these let-
ters, ‘To my dear Friend Mrs Anna Flaxman,’ and an image which seems to
allude to (what would later become), the spiral structure of the Jacob’s
Ladder painting.29 In this poem, written from Hercules Buildings,
Lambeth, on 14 September 1800, about two weeks before they set out for
Sussex, Blake refers to ‘Sweet Felpham’ where ‘The Ladder of the Angels
descends thro the air / On the Turret its spiral does softly descend / Thro
the village then winds at My Cot i[t] does end,’ (the Turret was a feature
of Hayley’s house, E 708–09, my italics).30 The emphasis on the descent

26
Migraine Action Art Collection, Unnamed artist, Black and White Abstract Face with
Lighting, Stairs, Checkerboard and People (1981), Reference: SA/MAR/37. https://well-
comecollection.org/works/jbb6kkz3. Accessed 16 September 2023; The Migraine Art
Collection is currently being re-catalogued by the Wellcome Trust, https://wellcomecollec-
tion.org/works/caav4wtp. Accessed 16 September 2023.
27
For spirals derived from religious and scientific texts Blake might have known, see
Newman, Marsha. “‘Milton’s Track’ Revisited: Visual Analogues to Blake’s Vortex in the
‘Law Edition’ of Boehme.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2004, pp. 73–93.
28
Butlin: 368.
29
Jonathan Roberts, ‘William Blake’s Visionary Landscape near Felpham,’ Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 47 (2013) http://128.151.244.100/blakeojs/index.php/blake/arti-
cle/view/roberts472/roberts472html. Accessed 18 September 2023.
30
Tracing a ‘Christological theory of art,’ Naomi Billingsley makes a similar connection
between the poem for Anna Flaxman and Jacob’s Ladder, The Visionary Art of William Blake:
Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2018) p. 94.
114 D. WORRALL

of a kind of ‘spiral’ divine creativity in this poetic image provides an impor-

tant correlate for the role of the Klüver form-constant patterns at what was
a significant moment in Blake’s artistic life.
For the first time, Jacob’s Ladder and one of Blake’s literary poetic
images (taken from the letter to Anna Flaxman), can be reliably associated
with the cognitive outcome of a specific type of visual hallucination (in this
case, Klüver spiral form-constants) or what he later called, in an attempt to
describe the experience of V1’s cognitive capacity, a ‘Vision … seen by the
[Imaginative Eye]’ (E 554).

Example Three: The Penance of Jane Shore in St.

Paul’s Church—A Drawing
Given his ideas about the ‘permanence of … ever Existent Images,’ and
the opportunity of the 1809 exhibition to demonstrate how these ideas
had been put into artistic practice (all within the constraints of apparently
having room for only 16 paintings), it would be unusual if there were any
non-‘visionary’ paintings included in a show whose contents had been
explicitly defined as including pictures inspired by ‘wonderful originals
seen in my visions.’ With Blake claiming in A Descriptive Catalogue to
‘having been taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies, and
patriarchates of Asia,’ painting a picture based on an episode in medieval
English history was hardly outlandish (E 531). Exhibiting The Penance of
Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church, a watercolour of c. 1793, in 1809 allowed
him to claim the longevity of his ‘visions,’ confirming their ‘permanence’
in his creativity (Fig. 4.3). Affirming that ‘the productions of our youth
and our mature age are equal in all essential points,’ Blake claimed in A
Descriptive Catalogue that the painting gave him ‘a reward … such as the
world cannot give’ (E 550). Butlin notes his evident ‘pride’ in showing
it.31 Although in this case the evidence of his ‘visions,’ one of the four
Klüver form-constant patterns, is only a minor compositional feature, Jane
looks directly at it.
The historical episode the drawing is based on is an incident in the life
of Elizabeth Shore [née Lambert], known as Jane (d. 1526/27?), a con-
troversial royal mistress forced in 1483 to do public penance in St. Paul’s
church (the building pre-dating the Wren cathedral built on the same
site). Penance ordeals required wearing a garment (typically a kyrtle or
31
Butlin: 69.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 115

Fig. 4.3 William Blake, The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church c.1793,
ink, watercolour and gouache on paper, Tate Britain

sheet) exposing underclothes, bare legs and feet and carrying a staff or
candle.32 With the exception that the candle is a lighted taper, these are all
present in Blake’s picture. Blake claimed in A Descriptive Catalogue that
‘This Drawing was done above Thirty Years ago,’ a dating which might
plausibly relate it to a somewhat weaker (Butlin calls it ‘tentative’) version

32
In Thomas More’s account, she was ‘out of al array save her kyrtle only,’ see Horrox,
Rosemary. “Shore [née Lambert], Elizabeth [Jane] (d. 1526/7?), royal mistress.” Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography. 23. Oxford University Press. Date of access 14 Jan. 2022,
https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/
odnb-9780198614128-e-25451; Rowan, D. F. “Shore’s Wife.” Studies in English Literature,
1500–1900, vol. 6, no. 3 (1966), pp. 447–64; Wall, Wendy. “Forgetting and Keeping: Jane
Shore and the English Domestication of History.” Renaissance Drama, 27 (1996),
pp. 123–56.
116 D. WORRALL

of the same subject forming part of a history series he was working on, c.
1779, that is, ‘Thirty Years ago’ (E 550).33 However, as Butlin writes, ‘it
seems probable, despite the difficulties’ (of dating) that the 1809 exhib-
ited version of The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church was the one
Blake listed in his Notebook as part of an abortive c. 1793 English history
series where it appears as ‘15 The Penance of Jane Shore’ (E 672). That is,
the 1809 exhibited Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church was not
‘above Thirty Years’ old but more like 16. Butlin, noting this discrepancy,
indicates Blake’s ‘somewhat cavalier’ attitude to dates but fixes its date of
conception nearer to the c. 1793 project.
Today, obscuring its place in an exhibition at least partially aimed at
supporting his claims about ‘The Artist having been taken in vision’ to see
their originals, is the unforgiving nature of its paint surface (E 531). The
media surface of The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church shows a
degree of translucence or deterioration. As well as flaking particles of
paint, layers of indigo under Prussian blue on the central male figure with
the red cloak only show up with infra-red false colour photography but,
much more obviously to the eye, it also suffers from what the conservation
scientists Piers Townshend and Joyce H. Townsend describe as ‘a pretin-
aceous coating like glue, which Blake probably applied as a protective
varnish.’34 The consequent loss of lustre, however carefully restored, may
have deflected attention away from the luminosity of Jane Shore herself,
barefooted, déshabillé, carrying a lighted taper surrounded by armed men
in the middle of one of the foremost church buildings in Britain.
Analysing Blake’s Jane Shore in more detail brings to the surface an
array of recondite meanings. Blake’s background included a childhood
exposure to the influence of a mother who had adopted the Moravian
faith, a likely meeting in 1789 with the ex-Quaker female prophetic vision-
ary author, Dorothy Gott, and a contemporaneous flirtation with the
Swedenborgianism later vehemently repudiated in The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell (1789–1790). The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church, a
painting depicting the public parading of a female penitent, allegedly the
victim of her own sexuality, contains carefully coded cultural meanings. In

33
For the series, see Butlin: 51–70. The private collection Penance of Jane Shore is now in
the British Museum (Butlin: 67).
34
Piers Townshend and Joyce H. Townsend, ‘The Conservation of a Large Colour Print:
Satan Exulting Over Eve,’ Joyce H. Townsend and Robin Hamlyn (eds.) William Blake: The
Painter at Work (London: Tate Publishing, 2003) pp. 100–107.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 117

this picture, these cultural encodings are presented in combination with

traces of the original Klüver form-constant ‘vision’ which inspired it. In
other words, it is fully consonant with dissident versions of history arising
from the ‘visions’ he claimed characterized other pictures in the 1809
exhibition and which he had also explored in the early 1790s when he
painted it.
Blake’s departure from the conventional iconography of Jane Shore is
remarkable. If, as Butlin suggests, the c. 1793 ‘15 The Penance of Jane
Shore’ version listed in the Notebook is the one exhibited in 1809, then he
noticeably rejected most contemporary visual portrayals of the historical
Jane Shore (although actress Sarah Siddons’ theatrical version in 1780s
revivals of Nicholas Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) may be
another matter).35 Blake’s portrayal of Jane Shore almost fully covered in
a kyrtle and chemise undergarment, is iconographically untypical. The
public, if they were familiar with eighteenth-century prints, would mainly
have seen her semi-naked. No authenticated likeness exists but most con-
temporary images, basing themselves on a University of Cambridge
source, portrayed her bare breasted or with a transparent diaphanous che-
mise showing her breasts and nipples. The most elegantly produced of
these is Francisco Bartolozzi’s stipple engraving, Jane Shore, 1 February
1790. In Blake’s picture, the kyrtle and chemise is an encoding of naked-
ness confirmed by her bare legs and feet but also by its distancing from
prints such as Bartolozzi’s. Such encodings mean that it fits comfortably
within the symbolism of seventeenth-century Quaker activist protests of
‘going naked for a sign.’36 These were peaceful, prophetic, interventions,
acted out in churches and in the streets, practised by both men and
women, naked (or else constructively naked through partial or déshabillé
dressing), warning the clergy that they would be overthrown, literally
unclothed or defrocked.
While all this suggests Blake’s encounter in 1789 with the ex-Quaker
Dorothy Gott entailed a larger absorption of her prophetic tradition than
previously thought, at the other end of the scale, Blake’s Moravian mother,

35
See, Michael Tyson, etching, Jane Shore from an Original Picture in the Provost’s Lodge
at King’s College Cambridge, probably eighteenth century, NPG D24096; unknown artist
and engraver, Jane Shore, mezzotint, probably eighteenth century, NPG D24098 and several
others, National Portrait Gallery, London.
36
Carroll, Kenneth L. “Early Quakers And ‘Going Naked As A Sign.’” Quaker History, 67,
Friends Historical Association, (1978), pp. 69–87; John Miller, A Suffering People’: English
Quakers and Their Neighbours c. 1650-c. 1700, Past & Present 188 (2005) pp. 71–103.
118 D. WORRALL

Catherine, would have been aware of the intricate—if severe—dress codes,

even for girls, followed by sections of her church.37 That is, contemporary
female clothing signified. Bare foot and with her undergarments showing,
Blake’s Jane Shore is symbolically naked to do her penance yet simultane-
ously empowered because of the encodings of her clothing’s anticlerical
meaning. Contemporary print images confirm nakedness as Jane’s status,
hinting that the painting carries such encodings. Her lighted taper also fits
into seventeenth-century Quaker prophetic activism. Carrying a candle in
daylight to signify the darkness of others was exemplified in the much re-­
told example of Richard Sale, of Hoole, near Chester, who in 1655 carried
to ‘those persecuting Priests and People a Lonthern and Candle, as a Figure
of their Darkness.’38 In Quaker symbolic dissidence, carrying a lighted
candle at noon indicated surrounding spiritual darkness. Consonant with
the currency of such encodings within contemporary prophetic idioms,
two years after the 1809 exhibition, Dorothy Gott published The Noon
Day Sun, a Revelation from Christ to Dispel the Night of Apostacy (1811).
Demonstrating the continued currency of these meanings embedded in
Blake’s painting, an 1821 stipple engraving of Jane Shore shows her bare
breasted out of doors in broad daylight complete with her lighted taper
(with the unmistakable twin towers of Westminster Abbey erroneously in
the distance).39
Although originating in seventeenth-century Quakerism, the prophetic
symbolism of Jane’s iconography was coincident with Blake’s usage. Five
years before he painted the c. 1793 version of The Penance of Jane Shore,
Gott had published The Midnight Cry, “Behold, the Bridegroom comes!” Or,
An Order from God To Get Your Lamps Lighted, Otherwise you must go into
Darkness (1788), both Blake and Gott converging in their use of this pre-
cise prophetic idiom. It is plausible Blake even had the opportunity to
discuss such iconography with Gott at the 1789 Swedenborg conference
they both attended. This precise prophetic idiom is even alluded to in his
Descriptive Catalogue remarks on the painting where he employs a parallel
metaphor for his rejection by authorities ‘who pretend to encourage art.’

37
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. “‘A Church-Going People Are a Dress-Loving People’: Clothes,
Communication, and Religious Culture in Early America.” Church History, vol. 58, no. 1,
1989, pp. 36–51.
38
George Fox, Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, Christian
Experiences and Labour of Love … George Fox (fifth edition) (1694) p. 240.
39
Edward Scriven, after Walter Stephens Lethbridge, Jane Shore, 1821, stipple, National
Portrait Gallery, London, NPG D19938.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 119

In his commentary, he enigmatically explains his fortitude in response to

rejection, when ‘he has every night dropped into his shoe, as soon as he
puts it off, and puts out the candle, and gets into bed, a reward for the
labours of the day such as the world cannot give’ (E 550). The temporal
‘night’ and the discarded ‘shoe’ align him with Jane’s barefoot status, his
snuffing ‘out the candle’ positioning him in a spiritual light ‘the world
cannot give.’ While, of course, Blake’s principal message shows her quietly
resistant to the coercive authorities crowding round her in the form of
helmeted men armed with halberds and pikes, the painting is deeply
embedded in the prophetic rhetoric of the late 1780s and 1790s and fully
consonant with the ‘visions’ he insisted inspired other paintings in the
1809 exhibition.
If these encodings of Blake’s Jane Shore are correct, then it puts The
Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church within prophetic idioms much
closer to the equally sexually dissident, Oothoon, of Visions of the Daughters
of Albion (1793), and coinciding with similar agencies of prophetic decla-
ration embodied in America a Prophecy (1793) and Europe a Prophecy
(1794). In the frontispiece to The Book of Los (1795), the fully clothed
prophetic mother, Eno, sings her prophecy. If, to use Butlin’s term, Blake
was proud of this picture, and it was conceived in his ‘visionary’ prophetic
mode of the 1790s, the question may be asked, have his ‘Visions’ left phe-
nomenological traces in this picture? Did it derive from things ‘seen in my
visions’? Looking generically dated by 1809, if not jarring, why did Blake
include this picture in an exhibition apparently intended to showcase
paintings featuring his exclusively ‘visionary’ talents?
One of the most striking features of The Penance of Jane Shore in St.
Paul’s Church is the curious emphasis on the alternating black and white
floor paving of rectangular or square stones. This feature is also evident in
the c. 1779 drawing although it is a much simpler sketch with fewer fig-
ures.40 Across this pavement sweep a muddle of people, including Jane
herself walking out her penance. In Blake’s picture they seem channelled
down a double classical columned passageway (rather than through the
Gothic, pre-Wren, church). Within this pictorial space the viewing per-
spective onto the rectangular paving stones at the front contributes a
remarkable area of pictorial definition within a context of what David
Bindman calls an otherwise ‘crowded group of heads.’41

40
Butlin: 67.
41
David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977) p. 24.
120 D. WORRALL

As to what happens as far as the viewer’s perception is concerned,

Christopher Heppner describes very well problems of this kind of use of
pictorial space, noting that in The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s
Church, Blake ‘places the viewpoint very high, so that the implied vanish-
ing point is above the frame of the design.’42 Heppner also cites the rele-
vance of Henry Fuseli’s warning about using a too high perspective which,
‘“from want of keeping, the horizontal line becomes a perpendicular, and
drops the distance on the foreground; the more remote groups do not
approach, but fall or stand upon the foremost actor.”’43 The huddling of
characters into the foreground in The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s
Church, and the viewer’s uncertainty about the origin of the crowd behind,
certainly appears to be a problem Fuseli understood, but which Blake dis-
regarded and Heppner deftly describes. Despite Fuseli’s warnings, Blake
‘drops the distance on the foreground.’ This helps explains why the very
well-defined paving stones at the front of the painting dominate and con-
trast with the uncertainty and muddle of the situation in the background.
The best phenomenological description of the visual hallucinatory per-
cepts whose traces are visible in The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s
Church, is tessellopsia (from the Greek-derived Latin word tessera, a small
tile used in mosaics). This is a classification of a variant visual hallucination
coined in 1999 by Dominic H. ffytche and colleagues within a clinical
context. Theirs is a re-formulation of Klüver-type patterns to better suit
the visual hallucinations of persons with degrees of sight loss. Other
descriptors of their perceptual phenomenology include brickwork and tiles
but their neural patterns of angular geometries are essentially modifica-
tions of the fortification spectra associated with migraine aura.44 That is,
the well-defined paving stones in this picture are variants of the Klüver
chequerboard or lattice form-constant. Long before ffytche, using the

42
Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998) pp. 215–216.
43
John Knowles (ed.), The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Esq. M.A.R.A. (1831) 3 vols,
Vol II, p. 239, quoted in Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998) p. 216.
44
D. H. ffytche, R. J. Howard, The perceptual consequences of visual loss: `positive’
pathologies of vision, Brain, 122 (1999) pp. 1247–1260; A. M. Santhouse, R. J. Howard,
D. H. ffytche, Visual hallucinatory syndromes and the anatomy of the visual brain, Brain,
123, (2000) pp. 2055–2064; Clare L. Fraser, Christian J. Lueck, Chapter 17—Illusions, hal-
lucinations, and visual snow, Editor(s): Jason J.S. Barton, Alexander Leff, Handbook of
Clinical Neurology, Elsevier, 2021 vol 178 Pages 311–335.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 121

simple method of moving his fingers in a grid pattern in front of a bright

light source (sometimes the sun), Jan Purkinje in the late 1810s also
induced chequerboard patterns in the first experimental observations of
visual hallucination and produced an illustrative print to demonstrate what
he saw.45 A more recent paper by a neuroscientist with personal experience
of tessellopsia visual hallucinations caused by macular degeneration, notes
that such brickwork patterns may replicate the neuroanatomy of the
boundaries between V1 and V2 as well as, not least, activities in the brain
associated with dreaming.46 It may be that the differences between non-­
hallucinating and hallucinating visual perception are slender, possibly
affected by the impact of several pathologies or none.47 Indeed, as the
paper by Billock and Tsou referred to above suggests, a Turing reaction-­
diffusion model may be sufficient to explain some of the characteristics of
several pattern-forming types of visual hallucination.48
Chequerboard patterns (and stripes) are known triggers of migraine, a
condition Blake may have had since c. 1766–1768.49 They are also visible as
the residual trace of Blake’s original visual hallucination in the precursor
sketch known as The Penance of Jane Shore, drawn c. 1779.50 Working from
that original drawing of c. 1779, Blake produced The Penance of Jane Shore
in St. Paul’s Church of c. 1793 and, as Butlin suggests, proudly exhibited it
in 1809, no doubt to demonstrate the enduring capacity of ‘my visions.’
Consonant with Butlin’s dating of c. 1779, this would make The Penance of

45
Jan Purkinje, Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologie der Sinne [Observations and
Experiments Investigating the Physiology of Senses] (Prague, 1823). Best seen reproduced
in Carsten Allefeld, Peter Pütz, Kristina Kastner, Jiří Wackermann, Flicker-light-induced
visual phenomena: Frequency dependence and specificity of whole percepts and percept fea-
tures, Consciousness and Cognition, 20 (2011) pp. 1344–1362.
46
Burke W‘The neural basis of Charles Bonnet hallucinations: a hypothesis,’ Journal of
Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 73 (2002) pp. 535–541. For an evaluation of the work
of Burke and ffytche (et al.), see Femi Oyebode, ‘Charles Bonnet Syndrome.’ Psychopathology
of Rare and Unusual Syndromes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) pp. 69–81.
47
Tass P. ‘Sscillatory Cortical Activity during Visual Hallucinations.’ J Biol Phys. 1997 Mar
23 (1): 21–66.
48
Vincent A. Billock and Brian H. Tsou, ‘Elementary visual hallucinations and their rela-
tionships to neural pattern-forming mechanisms,’ Psychological Bulletin 138 (2012)
pp. 744–774; Turing, Alan. “The chemical basis of morphogenesis.” Bulletin of Mathematical
Biology 52 (1952): 153–197.
49
Shepherd, Aj. “Visual Contrast Processing in Migraine.” Cephalalgia, vol. 20, no. 10,
Dec. 2000, pp. 865–880. However, Burke (2002) suggests migraine spectra and tessellopsia
should be distinguished.
50
Butlin: 67.
122 D. WORRALL

Jane Shore consistent with a ‘Drawing … done above Thirty Years ago,’
marking it as the original of the c. 1793 version exhibited in 1809. The
implications are profound because, based on Butlin’s dating, this would
move the c. 1779 drawing of The Penance of Jane Shore into the category of
amongst the first evidences of ‘visions’ in Blake’s paintings, possibly even
preceding An Allegory of the Bible of c. 1780–1785. This pavement feature
noticeably echoes, along with its similarly strangely floating perspective
viewpoint, An Allegory of the Bible. The identification of such shapes may be
related to the ‘chequer worked filling in, in … rectangular patches’ reported
by Sir John Herschel to Hubert Airy as early as 1870 to describe the modali-
ties of (then still to be classified) migraine aura, or the ‘chequered’ or lattice
Klüver form-constants defined in 46 of the 397 migraine paintings exam-
ined by Podoll and Robinson in 2008.51 That is, if Blake experienced
migraine, the tessellopsia or the chequer/lattice patterns associated with its
aura would account for his experience (as would the simple flicker-induced
processes followed by Purkinje). These compositional features tell us a lot
about the consistency and stability of Blake’s perceptual experiences of
‘visons’ and how they present in his pictures.
The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church is of considerable impor-
tance because Blake chose to include it in an exhibition whose context, as
A Descriptive Catalogue reiterated, specifically emphasized pictures ‘seen
in my visions.’ At that time, one assumes Blake was choosing his best, or
most representative, work for exhibit. It is difficult to think The Penance of
Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church was an exception to this aim. Its inclusion
in the 1809 show is his implicit personal corroboration of ‘visions’ begin-
ning ‘Thirty Years ago.’ This may even place the c. 1779 version alongside
An Allegory of the Bible, c. 1780–1785 as evidence of the earliest ‘ever
Existent Images’ with hallucinatory origins in his painting and that he
chose to exhibit in 1809 for that reason. Otherwise, as Butlin has com-
mented, referring to the c. 1793 version, it is ‘in many ways amazingly
conservative for a work that I place in the early 1790s.’52 Placing it in the
1809 exhibition was a considered, even daring, statement about the lon-
gevity of his ‘visions’ whose hallucinatory origins have not previously been
51
Hubert Airy, ‘On a Distinct Form of Transient Hemiopsia,’ Philosophical Transaction of
the Royal Society of London 160 (1870) pp. 247–64; Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson,
Migraine Art: The Experience From Within (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008)
pp. 176, 201–212, Table 7.5.
52
Martin Butlin, ‘Thoughts on the 1978 Tate Gallery Exhibition,’ Blake an Illustrated
Quarterly 13 (1979) pp. 16–23.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 123

understood. Not least, the picture also shows how popular prophetic
movements, dateable back to the mid-seventeenth century, could be
incorporated directly into the moments of ‘Prophecy’ Blake announced in
the 1790s and re-exhibited again in 1809, proclaiming the timelessness of
‘my visions.’

Example Four: Milton’s Mysterious Dream c. 1816

No later than 1816 and his watercolour Milton’s Mysterious Dream, Blake
had identified, named and discriminated three out of the four form-­
constant visual geometrical hallucinatory types later classified by Klüver in
1926 (c. 1816, Morgan Library, New York).53 In a brief commentary writ-
ten to accompany Milton’s Mysterious Dream, Blake refers to the presence
in the picture of ‘Scrolls & Nets & Webs’ (E 685). These are the spiral,
lattice and cobweb percepts defined by Klüver nearly a hundred years later.
There is no conceivably relevant textual origin for ‘Scrolls,’ ‘Nets’ or
‘Webs’ in Milton’s poetic corpus.54 Their naming by Blake, c. 1816, is a
significant contribution towards understanding the cultural history of
visual hallucinations, confirming he had cognitive insight into those events
and was able to provide an accurate nomenclature and taxonomy.
Milton’s Mysterious Dream was the eleventh in a set of 12 particularly
magnificent pen and watercolours Blake produced, c. 1816–20, illustra-
tive of John Milton’s poems, L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso (1645).55
According to Blake’s commentary on them, the Milton passage he chose
to illustrate were the lines from Il Penseroso, ‘Entice the dewy featherd
Sleep / And let some strange mysterious dream / Wave on his Wings in
airy stream’ (E 685). Consonant with Jacob’s Ladder, his selection of a
‘Strange Mysterious dream’ drawn from the text of the poem may suggest
Blake’s Klüver-type percepts were the outcome of hypnagogic or hypno-
pompic induced hallucinations similar to those referred to in Jerusalem
(written no earlier than 1804).
The L’Allegro and Il Penseroso series demonstrate Blake’s art at the
height of his creativity. They are of special interest because they relate to
53
Butlin: 543.11.
54
The only matches are: ‘The Lord shall write it in a Scrowle’ (Psalm LXXXVII); Paradise
Lost XI: 586, ‘Rove without rein, till in the amorous Net;’ XII: 336, ‘Part good, part bad, of
bad the longer scrowle;’ Paradise Regained I:162, ‘Hearts after them tangl’d in Amorous
Nets.’ For ‘Webs’ or its synonyms, there are no matches.
55
Butlin: 543.1–12.
124 D. WORRALL

Milton, the poet whose dominant poetic presence had already been the
subject of the illuminated book in relief and white line etching, Milton a
Poem in 2 Books (1804–1811). Their provenance is fully traceable, having
been commissioned by Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts. Some of the draw-
ings bear the watermark ‘M & J Lay 1816,’ indicating the earliest possible
date for their execution (assuming, as looks stylistically likely, he painted
them as a group). They were sold onto the art market in 1853 as one lot
by Butts’ son, Thomas Butts Jr., and then passed through several hands
before arriving at the Morgan Library in 1949. It is conceivable Butts
requested the unusual set of descriptive commentaries (also held at the
Morgan Library), written in Blake’s hand on separate pieces of paper,
accompanying each picture in the series (E 682–86).
Critical opinion has not been particularly helpful in determining either
the painting’s compositional contents or its meaning. Butlin’s catalogue
raisonné entry for the L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso, lists and summarizes the
already considerable body of critical literature as it stood in 1981, com-
menting that it comprised often ‘contradictory, interpretations.’56 Of the
details considered here, John E. Grant obliquely notices the netting; Bette
Charlene Werner suggests the presence of a wider—if vaguer—symbolism
(‘the waters and nets of materiality’) while Stephen C. Behrendt, offering
one of the more nuanced perspectives on the series, simply characterizes
Milton’s Mysterious Dream as ‘far more intense, far less conventional’ than
the rest.57
However, it is the short additional descriptive commentary text which
is so remarkable: ‘Milton Sleeping on a Bank. Sleep descending, with a
Strange Mysterious dream upon his Wings of Scrolls & Nets & Webs
unfolded by Spirits in the Air & in the Brook around Milton are Six Spirits
of fairies hovering on the air with Instruments of Music’ (E 685, my ital-
ics). In the picture, a winged personified ‘Sleep’ swoops around the supine
and sleeping Milton, literally bearing on its ‘Wings … Scrolls & Nets &
Webs.’ Of these three shapes, the ‘Nets,’ Klüver’s lattice percepts, are the

56
Butlin: 543.11; the most detailed treatment of this set after 1981 is J.M.Q. Davies,
Blake’s Milton Designs: The Dynamics of Meaning (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press,
1993), pp. 113–152.
57
John E. Grant, “Blake’s Designs for L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, with Special Attention
to L’Allegro 1, ‘Mirth and Her Companions’”. Blake/ An Illustrated Quarterly 4 (1971)
pp. 117–134; Bette Charlene Werner. Blake’s Vision of the Poetry of Milton. Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 1986 p. 162; Stephen C. Behrendt. “Bright Pilgrimage: William
Blake’s Designs For L’Allegro and IL Penseroso.” Milton Studies Vol. 8 (1975), pp. 123–147.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 125

hardest to discern but the ‘Nets’ meshes (highlighted in black ink) reach
from two small soaring figures across to a single huddled figure in the
lower horizontal section of the picture, all borne on the back of Sleep’s
right-hand wing. On the same wing are the ‘Scrolls,’ that is, Klüver’s spiral
percepts. They are represented as the spiralled ends of what seems to be a
parchment associated with one long robed figure who touches it with
both hands, its folds enclosing a soaring man and woman. Scrolled ends of
garments also figure in the group circled in radiating spokes of light at the
top of the picture.
Of the third and final Klüver pattern shown in this composition, it is
this latter design, a lattice or cobweb form-constant, borne on the back of
Sleep’s left-hand wing, which dominates the picture, filling the uppermost
quadrant. Describing it simply as a ‘rainbow sphere,’ J.M.Q. Davies notes
‘It is a highly unusual motif.’58 Its status as (what seems to be) a depiction
of radiant light is, of course, consistent with the self-luminous qualities of
Klüver percepts. However, instead of its being a conventional symbol of
radiance, it forms a set of very distinct concentric circles, differentiated by
colour but noticeably radially segmented. This fits Blake’s description of
‘Webs.’ It is also a reminder, as with the spokes of light in Jacob’s Ladder,
that ‘a radial bias may be neurally fundamental’ to visual perception.59
That the picture contains three out of the four Klüver form-constants
brings Milton’s Mysterious Dream into phenomenological unity with the
details described in Blake’s commentary. That is, in this case, the phenom-
enology of the hallucinatory origins of his ‘visions’ can be grouped around
experiences of Klüver-type percepts. Their presence within the picture as a
compositional choice Blake made also assigns these phenomena with a
precise neurophysiology based on visual hallucinations. Indeed, Blake’s
text could hardly be less ambiguous: ‘Sleep’ brings ‘a Strange Mysterious
dream upon’ its ‘Wings,’ explicitly made up of ‘Scrolls & Nets & Webs,’
percepts the earlier Jacob’s Ladder picture suggests he had experienced no
later than c. 1805 but now, apparently, associated with Milton. Not least,
their deployment within an overtly secular illustration is a reminder that

58
J.M.Q. Davies, Blake’s Milton Designs: The Dynamics of Meaning (West Cornwall, CT:
Locust Hill Press, 1993), p. 146.
59
Yuka Sasaki, Reza Rajimehr, Byoung Woo Kim, Leeland B. Ekstrom, Wim Vanduffel and
Roger B.H. Tootell, ‘The Radial Bias: A Different Slant on Visual Orientation Sensitivity in
Human and Nonhuman Primate,’ Neuron 51 (2006) pp. 661–670.
126 D. WORRALL

Blake’s ‘visions’ were not exclusively artistically dedicated to his religious

beliefs.
Although it is not certain that the image of Milton depicted here refers
to the period after he lost his sight (he was completely blind by the age of
about 44), Blake may have surmised Klüver’s self-luminous patterns could
be perceived by the blind (in the same way that Milton’s contemporary,
Thomas Hobbes, knew they were visible in the dark).60 One might specu-
late that self-luminous hallucinations held a special fascination for an artist
who held the blind Milton in such high esteem. Whether this is the case or
not, in what was clearly a complex response to Il Penseroso, ‘Scrolls & Nets
& Webs’ make little other narrative sense except for their phenomenologi-
cal unity within the range of the Klüver hallucinations inspiring
Blake’s design.
It is even possible to speculate about the possible inducers of his hal-
lucinatory state. Blake’s picture is of Milton’s … Dream, and this is prob-
ably the clue. Although one cannot be certain, the subject suggests the
three Klüver form-constants arose during either a hypnagogic induced
hallucination (percepts experienced in the transition from waking to sleep-
ing) or a hypnopompic induced hallucination (percepts experienced in the
transition from sleeping to waking). In a 2008 study of specifically hypna-
gogic and hypnopompic hallucinations drawn from two cohorts of stu-
dents at a British university, 85% of the sample claimed some experience of
these double hallucinatory states.61 Either of these agencies would accord
well with the phenomenology of visual hallucination, not least in Hobbes’
description of how ‘a man shall in the dark, (though awake) have the
Images of Lines, and Angles before his eyes.’62 Whether Blake was some-
how empathizing with Milton and mirroring his own fictive projection of
his personal character is plausible but beyond the scope of this study.

60
A.E. Krill, H.J. Alpert and A.M. Ostfield, ‘Effects of a hallucinogenic agent in totally
blind subjects,’ Archives of Opthalmology 69 (1963) pp. 180–185.
61
Simon R. Jones, Charles Fernyhough and David Meads, ‘In a dark time: Development,
validation, and correlates of the Durham hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations ques-
tionnaire,’ Personality and Individual Differences 46 (2009) pp. 30–34.
62
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth
Ecclesiasticall and Civill (1651) p. 6.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 127

Example Five: Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations

Among the Tombs”
About 12 years after Jacob’s Ladder, as Martin Butlin noted in 1981, ‘The
spiral composition was developed in the Epitome of James Hervey’s
“Meditations Among the Tombs”’ (c. 1820–1825).63 The subject of the pen
and wash drawing refers to the much reprinted, Meditations among the
Tombs. In a letter to a Lady (1746), by James Hervey (1714–1758), a
Church of England minister in Weston-Favell, Northamptonshire.64
Compositionally, it can be described as a latent companion-piece to Jacob’s
Ladder but whose meaning it inverts. Once one grasps that Hervey had a
reputation as an obdurate Calvinist, the meaning of the painting becomes
much clearer.
It is easy enough to read the narrative of Epitome of James Hervey’s
“Meditations Among the Tombs” because, unusually, Blake painted cap-
tions straight onto the picture. One at the top of the painting reads, ‘God
out of Christ is a Consuming Fire’ (E 691). This was the key message he
wanted to convey about Hervey, that an idea of God divorced from the
healing ministry of Christ devastates the world. ‘Hervey,’ labelled as such,
and standing with his back to the viewer at the bottom of the picture, is
led into a ‘visionary’ world by two guardian angels who point him the way.
The spiral staircase will be the means of his ascent to God. In other words,
the picture demonstrates the extent to which Blake’s primary episode of a
Klüver-type hallucination was processed and acculturated in ways specific
to the complex religious ideologies of eighteenth-century Britain. Given
the nature of Hervey’s severe Christian doctrine, Blake’s picture may also
constitute the first satirical use of visual hallucinations of the Klüver type.
By using the stable, species wide, presentation of Klüver visual hallucina-
tions as the basis of the picture’s composition, Blake can make a profound
point about the reality of the eternal world and the available visionary
alternatives to Hervey’s theology.
Pictorially, a stone-like spiral staircase dominates the composition and
becomes the principal visual structure ordering much of the design.
Similarly, beams of light (and fire) mark the second, tunnel or funnel
63
Butlin: 438, 770. For clarity, I have italicized Butlin’s entry.
64
Rivers, Isabel. “Hervey, James (1714–1758), Church of England clergyman and writer.”
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23. Oxford University Press. Accessed 14 Jan. 2022,
https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/
odnb-9780198614128-e-13113.
128 D. WORRALL

form-constant. Whether Blake experienced a specific episode of Klüver

form-constant hallucination for Epitome is not especially relevant because,
of course, their role in his cognitive processes of creativity was established
with Jacob’s Dream. Although subsequent experiences of visual hallucina-
tion cannot be ruled out, he may have simply developed a design idea he
had used before and which seemed to him to validate his ’visionary’ fac-
ulty. His ability to adapt or re-adapt the form-constant origins of his visual
art makes this picture particularly valuable because the Epitome facilitates
the observation of the broader historical contextualization of his experi-
ence of neural cognitive processes and their creative and cultural
deployment.
Here, the spiral staircase is Gothicized perhaps because Blake is explor-
ing its vertical bilateral symmetries, something akin to what David
Bindman (following the Victorian biographer, Alexander Gilchrist) calls
Blake’s ‘Gothicized Imagination,’ marking a distinctive, creative, attempt
to aesthetically modulate the Klüver form-constants inherent in its struc-
ture.65 However, what cannot be in doubt is that this painting also explores
liminal states between life, death and eternity, all major themes through-
out Blake’s work. Unusually, whether prompted by Thomas Butts (its first
owner) or at his own initiative, Blake painted caption texts onto several
parts of the painting. Hervey stands at bottom centre, dressed in black, his
back to us (helpfully captioned by Blake, ‘Hervey,’ above his left shoul-
der). In the approximate centre of the picture Christ radiates shafts of light
(the second form-constant), with Noah above. Above Noah, is God.
Above them both are the captions, ‘God out of Christ is a Consuming
Fire,’ ‘MERCY’ and ‘WRATH,’ the Calvinist creeds Blake thought appro-
priate to Hervey (E 691). As Butlin comments, ‘fire … fills much of the
upper part of the picture,’ presumably parodying Hervey’s severe modula-
tion of Christ’s radiant light. In this example, Blake’s elaboration of the
Klüver form-constant pattern which structures the composition is anno-
tated with extremely precise references to Enlightenment concerns about
Christian belief and faith.
The Epitome offers a particularly rich example of Blake at work, creat-
ing meaning from entoptic spiral geometric patterns but with the picture
also filled with separate visual information and allusions, some of it

65
David Bindman, ‘Blake’s “Gothicized Imagination” and the History of England,’
William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes (eds.) Morton D. Paley and Michael
Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 29–49.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 129

captioned by the artist and presenting a rare example of his literally label-
ling what he means. In the lower right quadrant is a picture of a soaring
mother and child, captioned by Blake, ‘Sophronia died in Childbed’ (E
691). The reference to Sophronia comes from a passage in Hervey’s suc-
cessful two volume collection printed after Meditations among the Tombs.
In a letter to a Lady and titled, Meditations and Contemplations (1746), in
whose first volume was located the section called, ‘Meditations among the
Tombs,’ Hervey refers to liminal states between life, death and eternity as
if they are real, existing and actual, perhaps making it difficult today for us
to truly comprehend his meaning, or even be sympathetic towards it. In
the ‘Meditations,’ in an episode redolent of the what would later be
termed the Burkean sublime, a visitor is taken to the tomb of ‘Sophronia;
who died in Child-bed.—How often does this Calamity happen! The
Branch shoots; but the Stem withers. The Babe springs to Light; but She
that bare Him, breathes her last. She gives Life, but (O pitiable
Consideration!) gives it at the Expence of her own; and becomes, at once,
a Mother, and a Corpse.—Or else, perhaps, She expires in severe Pangs, and
is Herself a Tomb for her Infant.’66 In Blake’s painting, both Sophronia
and her baby are pictured flying upwards, surrounded by the lettering of
their caption.
Even more surprising, is tantalizing evidence of a potential link back to
the ‘marriage hearse’ phrase of ‘London’ in Songs of Experience (1794) (E
27). On the right of Epitome, Blake vertically captions above Sophronia,
another young woman, soaring upside down, grasping at a young man
who looks up at her and labelled, ‘She died on her Wedding Day.’ In the
Meditations Hervey tells the story, not of a wife but a husband. In his
lugubrious style, ‘the Bride-maids, girded with Gladness, had prepared the
Marriage-Bed,’ but on the wedding day the bridegroom dies and lies
‘stretched in the gloomy Hearse … followed by a Train of Mourners.’67
Such a switching of genders may simply mark an opportunity afforded by
Blake’s neat visual incorporation of another female figure co-opted to join
the other women in the picture who include, female angels, a ‘Virgin,’
‘Widow,’ ‘Mother’ and, of course, Sophronia. In Epitome, Blake’s decision
66
James Hervey, Meditations and Contemplations, fourth edition, (1749) 2 vols. Vol
1, p. 32.
67
James Hervey, Meditations and Contemplations (1748), fourth edition, 2vols vol 1
pp. 23–24; Paul Miner, in a footnote, draws attention to the passage but does not make the
link to the Epitome, “Blake’s London: Times & Spaces.” Studies in Romanticism, 41 (2002)
pp. 279–316.
130 D. WORRALL

to emphasise Sophronia’s fate stresses the risks of maternal death in child-­

birth but also the more positive visual declaration of Hervey’s text that,
‘The Babe [still] springs to Light.’ In this way the ‘visionary’ developmen-
tal nature of Blake’s original hallucinatory experiences are made manifest,
based on the stable geometric Klüver form-constants and then evolving
into powerful cultural messages about the rigidity of religious zealotry. If
Blake’s first Klüver-type visual hallucinations started c. 1780–1785, by the
time he came to work on, Epitome (c. 1820), he would have realized these
‘visions’ were persistent and manifested in a limited number of patterns.
By c. 1816 Blake had already defined three out of the four Klüver form-­
constants in Miltons Mysterious Dream, by the time he came to Epitome, as
with Jacob’s Dream, he had found an appropriate compositional form in
which to embed the ‘ever Existent Images’ of these visual hallucinations.
This embedded message about eternity is a function not only of Klüver
spiral form-constant but also of the picture’s contrasting Gothic features
(a Gothic tracery ornamented altar stands in bottom foreground) where
vertical bilateral symmetry once again stands out as a major organizational
feature of the composition. Klüver commented on how symmetry in hal-
lucinatory types were particularly stood out in the responses of his survey
groups: ‘As regards the distribution of the colors, forms or configurations
in the field of vision, most observers emphasize the symmetry of the
phenomena.’68
In short, one is struck by the sheer economy of Blake’s incorporation
of this (easily identifiable) visual hallucinatory type incorporated within an
axis of simple vertical bilateral symmetry. Although not painted until c.
1820, these continuities of a visual theme of a ‘spiral composition,’
together with bilateral vertical symmetry, makes it cognate with the pic-
tures which can be dated at least as early his group of 1808 Royal Academy
exhibits (see Chap. 9). Such repetitions emphasise how those hallucina-
tory experiences, deriving from Blake’s V1, were endowed with insight
and were both cognitive and developmental.
Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations Among the Tombs” has features
which make it particularly valuable for analysis. Whether at the request of
Butts or of his own volition, Blake captioned many of the figures within
the painting, attributing them not only with names but also with ethical
qualities. These elements leave less room for ambiguity. Secondly, the

68
Heinrich Klüver, Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1966) p. 26.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 131

position of the historical Hervey can be recovered and assigned with a very
precise location within the often-unpredictable nuances of eighteenth-­
century Christian religious culture. Although hardly a household name
even during his own lifetime, his background can be traced with some
precision. The figure who is the subject of Epitome of James Hervey’s
“Meditations Among the Tombs” can be located within precise social com-
munities potentially revealing how Blake’s creativity related to his entoptic
visions and his theological perspective on Hervey. On this occasion Blake’s
responses can even be traced across the timeline of his own intellectual
development. He made a fleeting allusion to another text by Hervey, cit-
ing his Theron and Aspasio; Or, A Series of Dialogues And Letters (1755),
in his incomplete manuscript dramatic satire, An Island in the Moon (c.
1784). This is one of his earliest pieces of writing and certainly his earliest
autograph manuscript (E 456).
Nearly 40 years after An Island in the Moon, Blake had obviously con-
tinued to read or remember Hervey’s Meditations and Contemplations.
He knew it well enough to be able to extract the Sophronia episode as
something he wanted to comment on in his painting. Indeed, the picture
is unusual for Blake in that it encapsulates, in one visual image, his entire
attitude towards the very specific type of religion Hervey represented. His
contemporary biographer called him ‘Calvinistic,’ adding that he was one
of the ‘Marrow Theologians,’ a reference to a now recondite doctrinal con-
troversy about Calvinism’s priority of faith over repentance.69 Another
biographer commented, more straightforwardly, that when some men
were condemned to death in nearby Northampton in 1755, he addressed
them in a pamphlet but ‘not so much as once mentioned Repentance to
them.’70 The first owner of the Epitome, was Thomas Butts, an important
commissioner of Blake’s Bible illustrations. It is possible it was specially
commissioned by him.71 There is even a possibility that Blake associated
Hervey with the English Midlands movement of Moravianism which

69
A Collection of the Letters Of the late Reverend Hervey, A.M. Rector of Weston Favell, in
Northamptonshire … To which is prefixed, An Account of his Life and Death (Dublin: 1775) 2
vols. Vol 2. p v; D. C. Lachman, The Marrow controversy, 1718–1723: an historical and theo-
logical analysis (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1988).
70
John Brown, Memoirs of the Rev. James Hervey, A.M. Late Rector of Weston-Favel:
Containing an Account of his Religious Principles, Experience and Conduct (Edinburgh:
1806) p. 25.
71
Butlin: 376–526; David Bindman, William Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977)
pp. 117–30.
132 D. WORRALL

swept the region in the 1740s, gathering up his mother, Catherine Wright,
into its faith, perhaps even reaching her place of birth, Walkeringham,
Nottinghamshire.72 Despite their Calvinist rigour, Hervey’s doctrines
were so inimical to the conventional bounds of the church that he was
considered at various times, as well as a Calvinist, an Antinomian, an
Arminian and someone ‘in the habits of intimacy with … all Dissenting
Ministers.’73 It is, therefore, not surprising that one of the early histories
of the Moravians in England, reports that, Thomas Cartwright of
Culworth, Northamptonshire, a convert to Moravianism, was allowed by
Hervey to attend worship at his church in Weston-Favell in 1744.74
The purpose of mentioning these potential connections to the Epitome
is to convey, albeit at a minimal level, something of the historical complex-
ity of the social context into which Blake’s painting can be situated. The
unpredictable nuances of less conventional areas of early eighteenth-­
century English Midlands Christian ministry can now be set against the
relative simplicity of the Klüver spiral form-constant which structures its
composition. As far as the Epitome’s meaning is concerned, it is now much
easier to see that Blake is diminishing the status of the extreme Calvinist,
James Hervey, and building up the positive cognitive opportunities offered
by entoptic religious ‘vision.’ With his back to us in the picture, Hervey is
led into a defamiliarized world, a new state of entoptic visionary realities
into which he is ushered by two angels directing him towards the cogni-
tive prospects of (for him) a new and enlightened vision of Christianity.
Sophronia’s death, a story Hervey himself chose to narrate, is no longer a
tale of terrifying predicaments, but an image literally floated amongst
Blake’s entoptic ‘visions.’
Indeed, with all their complexities, The Penance of Jane Shore in St.
Paul’s Church and his Epitome of Hervey all provide a rich body of evi-
dence about how an artist’s perception of Klüver entoptic form-­constants,
verified as being connected to V1 by Ermentrout and Cowan, et al., and
Bressloff and Cowan, et al., can be placed within precise historical contexts
of European Enlightenment. While Blake’s Moravian link to Hervey is

72
Keri Davies and Marsha K. Schuchard, ‘Recovering the Lost Moravian History of
William Blake’s Family,’ Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 38 (2004) pp. 36–43.
73
John Brown, Memoirs of the Rev. James Hervey, A.M. Late Rector of Weston-Favell:
Containing an Account of his Religious Principles, Experience and Conduct (Edinburgh,
1806) pp. 44–5, 129, 173.
74
Anon, A Short Sketch of the Work Carried On by the Ancient Protestant Episcopal Moravian
Church in Northamptonshire (Leeds: Goodall and Suddick, 1886) p. 3.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 133

speculative (not to say, esoteric), a virtue of this type of methodology is

that it exemplifies how social communities can become correlates for con-
sidering the role of entoptic visions in art. Of course, the real message of
Blake’s Epitome was directed at the brand of religious doctrine Hervey
expounded. Through its compositional structure the picture shows that
Hervey’s spiritual journey is towards a new personal state of vision or
altered consciousness. With Hervey unmistakably labelled by Blake as
‘Hervey,’ he is shown an entoptic reality, a spiritual dimension of religious
narrative (from wrath to mercy, for example), all shaped by the Klüver
form-constants at the origin of Blake’s own cognitive processes of debat-
ing and challenging Hervey’s views. In its pictorial narrative, implicitly
accompanied by a touching act of forgiveness, Hervey is directed towards
the rejuvenating ‘visions’ Blake saw, teaching him to re-use the ‘visionary’
faculty ‘He thinks all men partake of it—but it is lost by not being cultivd.’75
Or, as he put it in Jerusalem, ‘The Visions of Eternity, by reason of nar-
rowed perceptions, / Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix’d
into furrows of death’ (E 198).

Example Six: The Illuminated Books (up to 1794)

Perhaps because the illuminated books were privately produced enter-
prises exploiting his printmaking skills for the admiration of affluent,
socially and politically progressive bibliophiles, it may not be surprising
Klüver form-constant patterns occur frequently in these works.76 They
form a more exclusive, less public, mode of artistic output than his paint-
ings aimed at the Royal Academy. Given his experience with the 1785
show, he may have felt more secure exhibiting his ‘visions’ through prints
presented as books. At any rate, traces of the geometric patterns of his
Klüver ‘visions’ proliferate in them to such a degree that the discussion
here is limited to just four titles issued up to 1795. That Blake used recur-
rent patterns in the illuminated books is not a new idea. In 1978
W.J.T. Mitchell observed that ‘Abstract linear forms such as the vortex or
the circle … are repeated so systematically that they suggest a kind of
75
BR(2): p. 428.
76
Rebekah Bliss (1749–1819), who may have bought a copy of Songs of Innocence and For
Children: The Gates of Paradise by the end of the 1790s, was affluent enough to also have
acquired an extensive library of fine printed books and manuscripts, Keri Davies, ‘Mrs Bliss:
a Blake Collector of 1794,’ (eds.) Steve Clark and David Worrall, Blake in the Nineties
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999) pp. 212–230.
134 D. WORRALL

pantomimic body-language, a repertoire of motifs.’77 The vortex and cir-

cle approximate to two of the four Klüver form-constants (although they
are not assigned by Mitchell to neurological causes). Of course, these neu-
ral patterns sometimes appear decoratively although, in such cases, they
may still be aesthetically selected echoes of entoptic percepts first seen in
the ‘visions’ he claimed as integral to his art.78
It is possible to collect an editorially consistent and prior endorsed
range of results for Klüver-type shapes in the illuminated books by using
the visual motif search engine within The William Blake Archive. The facil-
ity is now (since c. 2020) slightly less easy to use because, arguably, it does
not gather so readily cumulatively tagged ‘hits’ in explicit totals. However,
its principal virtue for the present study was that the Archive’s editors had
independently deliberated and agreed descriptors to match the images
they decided Blake’s works presented. By using an online ‘tick-box,’ it was
possible to find out how often, for example, ‘spiral’ shapes had been
tagged in Blake’s visual art and then to collate them using the ‘Search
Images’ facility of BlakeArchive.org. The results are both surprising and
complicated.
The number of distinct ‘spiral’ picture features logged by the editors
(Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi), when restricted just
to the illuminated books in relief and intaglio etching produced between
c. 1788 and 1795, amounted to 67.79 The definition of these features as
spirals, as well as the location in Blake’s illuminated books of the patterns
known to be characteristic of the three other form-constants, of course, is
not a property of the present writer but that of the editorial decisions of
The William Blake Archive.
Of those to be discussed here, the findings are as follows. In America a
Prophecy (1793) there are at least 8 different spirals, each of them poten-
tially capable of being designated as Klüver form-constants. Perhaps the
most striking is on plate 7 which has a cone-shaped spiralling serpent,
standing on its tail, dominating the composition (which also includes an
apparent revolutionary tribunal judging and condemning a hunched up

77
W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1978) p. 37.
78
The foundational account of neural entoptic patterns in visual art is J. D. Lewis-Williams,
T. A. Dowson, et al., ‘The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art
[and Comments and Reply]’ Current Anthropology 29 (1988), pp. 201–245.
79
BlakeArchive.org Search http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/search.html visited 6
November 2015.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 135

human figure to be forced through the tunnel of a serpent’s spiral folds).

The judicial ensemble and serpent spiral is obscure. Such a judgement and
punishment scene may possibly refer to the political fractures in British
society and national identity which occurred as a result of the American
War of Independence in the late 1770s and early 1780s (whose events are
alluded to several times in the poem). Equally, it may refer to the Terror
of the French Revolution of the early 1790s. Reprising critical debate
about its meaning up to 1995, and providing the plate’s most extensive
commentary, America’s latest editor, Detlef Dörrbecker, rightly remarks
on its ‘reduction of the conventional pictorial pattern which has given rise
to the contradictory interpretations in modern Blake criticism.’ As he
describes this particular detail, a ‘tormented figure is plunging headlong
into a funnel or vortex, that is formed by the seven coils … of a hissing
serpent that rises from the flames.’80
The America plate 7 feature, a spiral of ‘coils’ in a ‘funnel or vortex’
shape according to Dörrbecker, invokes two of Klüver’s form-constants.
Klüver wrote, quoting verbatim from reports in his survey sample, that ‘A
third important form-constant is the spiral … there appears a brown spi-
ral, a wide band, revolving madly around its vertical axis.’81 Although not
illustrated in his book, the description of a ‘brown spiral, a wide band,
revolving madly around its vertical axis,’ would certainly be consistent
with Blake’s unusual image in America plate 7. The human figure,
described by Dörrbecker as ‘plunging headlong into a funnel or vortex,’ is
consistent with what Klüver later (incorporating feedback from his volun-
teers) described at length as, ‘A second form-constant … designated by
terms [such] as tunnel, funnel, alley, cone or vessel. To illustrate: “Sometimes
I seemed to be gazing into a vast hollow revolving vessel” … “the field of
vision is similar to the interior of a cone the vertex of which is lying in the
center of the field directly before the eyes (or vice versa)” … [a] “vision of
a tunnel in copper-brown color … lines seem to converge in the infi-
nite” … “deep beautiful perspectives … growing into the infinite …” “I
was standing in a very long and wide tunnel.”’82 By contrast, given the
complexities of plate 7, America plate 4 has merely a spiral-shaped piece of
80
Detlef W. Dörrbecker, William Blake: The Continental Prophecies (London: Tate Gallery
Publishing, 1995) pp. 155–57.
81
Heinrich Klüver, Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1966) p. 23.
82
Heinrich Klüver, Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1966) p. 23.
136 D. WORRALL

foliage (with its vegetable roots visible) edging the left-hand side of the
page. Of course, it may be argued that while one is meaningful, the other
is merely decorative but, whatever the intention, the basic shape is domi-
nant. That is, a limited range of visual motifs (here spiral and funnel forms)
are visually modulated or repeated within the work. Whatever their
intended meaning, the proliferation of form-constants is noticeable in
these books.
Europe a Prophecy (1794) presents another series of Klüver form-­
constants. Their presence is so clear that it is best to identify them briefly
sequentially, before moving to a discussion. Although pre-dating Klüver’s
work, Munro Smith’s 1909 BMJ article drew attention to the phenome-
nological similarities of migraine aura fortification spectra (which are
known to include Klüver form-constants) and Europe’s more famous fron-
tispiece print, The Ancient of Days (plate 1). While it is not claimed here
that Klüver form-constants necessarily influenced The Ancient of Days, it
will be argued that the Europe title page (plate ii), and Europe plate 10 are
based upon spiral Klüver form-constants and Europe plate 13, based on
cobweb Klüver form-constants. Consonant with Munro Smith’s claims
about The Ancient of Days, the known phenomenological variants of
migraine aura would certainly provide a plausible neurophysiological basis
for the Klüver form-constants located in Europe.
The William Blake Archive tagged nine Europe plates for ‘spiral’ and
‘web’ features and their synonyms.83 Of these, some are functionally deco-
rative although, of course, this is because their decorative role imitates the
originating visual hallucinations Blake experienced. In Europe, spirals
which appear to be functionally decorative include the calligraphic flourish
at the end of the ‘Y’ of ‘Prophecy’ (E 61) but other examples seem
intended to convey meaning.
The first Klüver form-constant is the title page (plate ii, E 60), which is
dominated by a single motif of a coiled serpent. Only a piece of foliage in
the foreground and the suggestion of low-rising hills in the background
provide other visual elements in a starkness of composition best seen in
Copy H, the uncoloured Houghton Library copy. In most copies, this
plate is preceded by The Ancient of Days print which acts, as in book mak-
ing convention, as a frontispiece. As to the iconographic tradition in which
this plate might be said to stand, Dörrbecker, summarizing scholarship up

83
BlakeArchive.org Search http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/search.html, visited 8
November 2015.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 137

to 1995, concludes that ‘not just in Blake, but in British late eighteenth-­
century culture in general the meaning of all serpent imagery was nothing
if not ambiguous.’84 The explanation of its meaning comes in the next
spiral Klüver form-constant in Europe, plate 10 (in some copies numbered
by Blake as plate ‘9,’ but occurring as plates 11 and 13 in others), which
shows a vertical, spiral-shaped serpent, standing on its tail, taking up the
entire left-hand margin of the page and ending with a crested head radiat-
ing fire. Again, Dörrbecker is the plate’s most extensive commentator.85
The poetry on plate 10 is concerned with a loss of revelation replaced
through the intermedial presence of an ‘ancient temple serpent-form’d’ (E
63). The spiral form-constant, accessed by Blake through one of his
‘visions,’ may be aimed at indicating the potential distortion or corrup-
tion of a founding hallucinatory revelation. However, as Dörrbecker hints,
much of the serpent symbolism in Blake is a communicative dead-end. Its
connection to the Biblical story of Satan and its pervasiveness amongst the
cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, as Jacob Bryant discovered, made
it a cumbersome symbol.
The final form-constant in Europe is not only much clearer, it was taken
up by Blake with some vigour, and rather more successfully, as a contin-
uum of images and symbols referring to concepts at the heart of his cul-
tural and ideological positions about contemporary society. This cognitive
usage of visual hallucinations provides another fascinating example for
how a poet and artist responded to the experience of Klüver’s entoptic
percepts. Pictured across much of Europe plate 12[15] is a large cobweb,
fairly naturalistically rendered, accompanied by at least five spiders and
several other insects. This is the ‘cobweb figure’ hallucinatory percept iden-
tified by Klüver and, as discussed above, also a prominent feature of
Milton’s Mysterious Dream.86 As with the editorial team of The William
Blake Archive, Podoll and Robinson were independent assessors of the
images presented to them. Cobwebs are percepts identified in some forms
of epileptic hallucination as a neural disturbance of the cortex (although,

84
Detlef W. Dörrbecker, William Blake: The Continental Prophecies (London: Tate Gallery
Publishing, 1995) pp. 168–74.
85
Detlef W. Dörrbecker, William Blake: The Continental Prophecies (London: Tate Gallery
Publishing, 1995) pp. 194–196.
86
Heinrich Klüver, Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1966) p. 22. Klüver’s italics.
138 D. WORRALL

as noted above, there is no evidence Blake had this disorder).87 In the late
twentieth century, Klüver’s lattice and cobweb form-constants proved
particularly difficult to correlate mathematically with V1. Cowan, writing
in 2014, stated that it took him and his colleagues from 1979 to 1993 to
work out the mathematics of their geometry.88 Extrapolation of these per-
cepts from evidences in illustrations, partially based on the hand-drawn
cobweb percepts of the hallucinating subjects interviewed by Klüver, can
also be seen in a Figure reproduced in a journal article by Jean Petitot.89
Of course, Blake would return to this cobweb form-constant no later than
1816 for Milton’s Mysterious Dream. One of the more striking things
about this design is that Europe plate 12[15] demonstrates Blake’s willing-
ness to give dramatic articulation to this percept. In addition to the cob-
web with spiders, clearly pictured at bottom right of the Europe plate is a
reclining, huddled human figure, hands together in prayer or entreaty and
tightly bound or wrapped in a net, the characteristic indicator of the lattice
Klüver form-constant included in his original ‘vision.’
The uncoloured (save for touches of grey wash) Copy H of Europe
demonstrates very clearly that these shapes were made as relief-etched out-
lines on the plates and were not added later (although in most copies of
Europe Blake strengthened with ink the lines binding the netted human).
As a decorative echo, the lattices of a fragmentary cobweb with spider are
also shown as an interlinear figure in Europe plate 13. This detail is prob-
ably meant simply to enrich the depiction of the gaoled and manacled
human figure in the prison scene which dominates the design for that
plate, with the scene itself perhaps alluding to the suspension of Habeas
Corpus between May 1794 and July 1795.
The presence in Europe plate 12[15] of both the cobweb picture and
the netted human provides a significant example of Blake’s creative use of
hallucinatory percepts. Moreover, these designs have a bearing on the
development of a specific strand of Blake’s poetics. Their presence marks a
distinction between the neural correlates of visual hallucination and the

87
P. Tass, ‘Cortical pattern formation during visual hallucinations,’ Journal of Biological
Physics 21 (1995), pp. 177–210.
88
Jack D. Cowan, ‘Geometric visual hallucinations and the structure of the visual cortex,’
Daniel Collerton, Urs Peter Mosimann, Elaine Perry (eds.) The Neuroscience of Visual
Hallucinations (London: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2014) chapter 10, pp. 217–253, cited on
p. 228. DOI: 10.1002/9781118892794.
89
Jean Petitot, ‘Neurogeometry of neural functional architectures,’ Chaos, Solitons &
Fractals 50 (2013) pp.75–92, Fig. 2.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 139

role of their cognitive environment in V1. ‘The Net of Religion’ develops

as a particularly effective metaphor in Blake’s work, with nets easily com-
prehensible as symbols of repression or captivity yet also directly linked to
the characteristic phenomenology of a particular visual percept experi-
enced in his ‘visions.’ From cobweb to net, the allusive symbolism is easily
capable of extension and adaptation. Indeed, as one traces Blake’s devel-
opment of these images, it is easy to see how adapting the ‘net’ of his lat-
tice form-constant percept solved the expressive problem of following-up
the spiral images America had initially explored. The serpent-like meaning
of the spiral form-constants Blake laboured with had become, as
Dörrbecker argues, confusingly embedded in eighteenth-century mytho-
logical lore and not readily capable of picturing anything in everyday life.
‘Nets of Religion,’ on the other hand, are much more strikingly memo-
rable on account of their association with snares and traps. For the first
time, it is now possible to trace how some of Blake’s ‘visions,’ in their
original visual hallucinatory modes, promoted the development of a par-
ticular poetics, in this example, strikingly linked to his perspectives on
contemporary religion.
This strand of imagery appears to have received a heightened stage of
development in the poetic narrative of the illuminated book in colour
printed relief-etching, The Book of Urizen (1794). Enitharmon’s strategy
in Europe (and European history) to ‘Spread nets in every secret path,’ has
already been alluded to but in The Book of Urizen Blake provides a much
more challenging direction in projecting an alternative to the Genesis
story of creation (E 62). The incorporation of Klüver form-constants into
its poetics makes The Book of Urizen not only an alternative narrative to
Genesis but also one which alludes to an alternative basis for revelation,
one ultimately validated by his own experience of the visual hallucinations
he called ‘my visions.’
By following the development of Klüver images over a single phase of
Blake’s productivity, one can follow the intricacies of how The Book of
Urizen was part of an informal mini-cycle of illuminated books, the so-­
called Urizen books, produced during the mid-1790s and including The
Book of Los (1795) and The Book of Ahania (1795).90 Collectively they
form a re-examination of different types of ‘visionary’ or revelatory experi-
ence linked to an immediate political context. As far its historical moment

90
David Worrall (ed.), William Blake: The Urizen Books (London: William Blake Trust/
Tate Gallery, 1995).
140 D. WORRALL

is concerned, The Book of Urizen can be placed as one of many contempo-

rary responses and reactions to Tom Paine’s book, The Age of Reason
(1794), a title which hints at a source for Blake’s punning ‘Urizen,’ with
the poem’s reiterated couplet, ‘And a first Age passed over, / And a state
of dismal woe,’ repeated across seven ages in a parody of the Genesis cre-
ation myth (E 75). Paine’s Age of Reason, published the year after the start
of the war with France in 1793, reflected—or even created—a fractured
political ideology amongst radically minded British intellectuals. Although
more accurately deistical, The Age of Reason was widely perceived as athe-
istic. Paine had been held in high esteem by British radicals for his much
reprinted and excerpted, The Rights of Man (1792). He had been fortu-
nate to escape arrest for sedition for his Rights of Man: Part Two (1792)
and Letter Addressed to the Addressers, on the Late Proclamation (1792).
However, The Age of Reason, which Paine wrote in Paris, seems to have
arrived as an unexpected incursion into the beliefs of his political sympa-
thizers in London.
Paine’s rational deism was difficult to accept for those holding deep
Christian beliefs about the veracity of divine revelation and the resurrec-
tion. For Blake, what must have seemed an ideological volte-face by Paine
(although Paine had simply not much pronounced on religion before), led
to a personal ideological crisis which was typical of many in his socially
aspirant, manually skilled but politically disenfranchised, class. In a bril-
liant essay Jerome J. McGann has argued that Paine’s Age of Reason
prompted Blake to rethink what contemporary Biblical commentators, in
particular Alexander Geddes (1737–1802), had written about the Bible’s
textual authority as consecutive texts derived from divine revelation.91 His
occasional titling of the work as The [First] Book of Urizen may indicate
that Blake projected further books as a series (although none survive or
are known to have been printed), but it more probably alludes to canoni-
cal books of the Bible with The Book of Urizen competing with their
authority by setting up a counter-canon. Whatever he planned, The Book of
Urizen ends with a created material world held captive, self-enslaved by
‘narrowing perceptions,’ memorably pictured in plate 28 (E 83).
Developmentally, the cobweb and netted figure of Europe plate 12[15],
foreshadow the ‘spiders web’ and ‘Net of Religion’ in The Book of Urizen.

91
Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Idea of an Indeterminate Text: Blake’s Bible of Hell and Dr.
Alexander Geddes,’ Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986) pp. 305–24.
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 141

These provide fascinating examples of Blake’s cognitive processing of

Klüver’s hallucinatory percepts and their transformation into poetry.
It is worth tracing how Blake attaches verbal poetic meanings to these
entoptic visual images:

6. … A cold shadow follow’d behind him [Urizen]

Like a spiders web, moist, cold, & dim
Drawing out from his sorrowing soul
The dungeon-like heaven dividing.
Where ever the footsteps of Urizen
Walk’d over the cities in sorrow.
7. Till a Web dark & cold, throughout all
The tormented element stretch’d
From the sorrows of Urizens soul
And the Web is a Female in embrio
None could break the Web, no wings of fire.
8. So twisted the cords, & so knotted
The meshes: twisted like to the human brain
9. And calld it. The Net of Religion. (25: 8–21, E 82)

In a perhaps unexpected twist, Blake’s utilization of Klüver form-­constant

in his poetics does not celebrate visual hallucinations but, on the contrary,
describes their debasement, perhaps prompted by the ‘dark & cold’ envi-
ronment of wartime Britain in the 1790s. In a remarkable development of
the entoptic images he had experienced, the ‘spiders Web,’ a ‘Web dark &
cold,’ becomes a ‘Net’ of ‘narrowing perceptions.’ Suggesting their close
alliance within V1’s architecture, Podoll and Robinson treat ‘nets’ as a
subgroup of web forms.92 Still retaining their symmetrical stability, one
percept changes into a ‘Web,’ or ‘a Female in embrio,’ and another into a
‘Net of Religion.’ Although the Klüver visual hallucinations (what Blake
calls in The Book of Urizen, ‘the dark visions of Los’) have become accul-
turated, gendered and assigned with a religion, they noticeably still retain
the integrity of their form-constant patterns (E 78). In the case of The
Book of Urizen, the Klüver cobweb and lattice form-constants of Blake’s
original ‘visions’ are modified into their abstractions, a ‘Web dark & cold’
and a ‘Net of Religion,’ both indicative of ‘narrowing perceptions.’

92
Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson, Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience From Within
(Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008) pp. 203–04.
142 D. WORRALL

What makes The Book of Urizen remarkable is the sophistication with

which, by 1794, Blake has made the corruption (‘the dark visions’) of
Klüver form-constants consonant with the ‘narrowing perceptions’ he was
sensing in the repressive political atmosphere of contemporary Britain.
The degree of Blake’s cognitive insight into his visual hallucinations dem-
onstrates how non-pathological hallucinations can be incorporated into
highly creative and philosophically analytical forms. The Urizen books
offer a rare opportunity to trace the development and cognitive assimila-
tion of hallucinatory percepts into a discourse of social commentary and
poetics set against a backdrop of revolution and war.
The Book of Urizen, Ahania and The Book of Los, are all to some degree
responses to the ideological trauma Paine’s book precipitated amongst
radical writers and intellectuals. Viewed with the hindsight of the Urizen
books, Blake’s An Allegory of the Bible drawing, for example, shows how
early he was querying the Bible’s textual authority and supplementing it
with his own experience of ‘visions’ originating in those entoptic images
which appeared within his visual field in forms, much as Samuel Palmer
claimed, as self-evidently tangible. The last one to be examined here, The
Book of Los, which exists as a single copy, is another of the works from this
cycle which incorporated his perception of Klüver patterns. The book’s
precise provenance is confirmed by its publication location and date
inscribed in intaglio etching ‘LAMBETH / Printed by W Blake 1795.’ In
a remarkable design, The Book of Los plate 3 exhibits all four Klüver form-­
constants (viz. (a) tunnels/funnels (b) spirals (c) lattices and (d) cobwebs/
concentric circles), all of them almost certainly linked to the phenomenol-
ogy of migraine aura.
The broad aim of The Book of Los, as with The Book of Urizen, is to ques-
tion or satirize the authority of Genesis by offering an alternative narrative
of creation. It is plausible that the incorporation of traces of his revelatory
‘visions’ were a direct response to the deism of Paine, Blake’s own affirma-
tion of a spiritual world Paine’s Age of Reason had repudiated. At the least,
The Book of Los plate 3 offers an opportunity to observe how these worked
in his creative imagination. The four Klüver form-constants in The Book of
Los plate 3 are all elaborations of the intaglio etched word, ‘LOS.’ Its ellip-
tically shaped ‘O’ contains a picture of a bearded male who holds an open
book (or two inscribed tablets) resembling traditional renditions of the
decalogue. From this ‘O’ flows a lattice or net (colour printed in green),
which also extends behind the bearded figure, looking like the beginnings
of a concave/convex covering or roof (under the upperside of the ‘O’),
 4 KLÜVER FORM-CONSTANTS 143

but also reaching forward to support to two supine figures, one male, one
female, who lie directly on the lattice work. The flow of the lattice suggests
a funnel or vortex reaching to these reclining figures yet is itself also shaped
into the partially radiant shape of a cobweb. The intaglio etched letter ‘S’
of the word ‘LOS’ ends in a spiral. The decorative aspects of augmenting
the word, ‘LOS,’ seem to be virtually sui generis with its extraordinary
design showing clearly the presence of the four Klüver form-constants
which were present at its inception.
It is even possible to assign a probable physiology at the origins of
Blake’s visual hallucination. One paper produces a fascinating visualization
of a scotoma with hallucinations of the Klüver lattice form-constant type
which is helpful in defining the compositional contents of The Book of Los
plate 3 and how they might relate to migraine aura.93 The migraine feature
illustrated is an elliptically shaped, double hemifield scotoma. The
authors note that it is visible with eyes open or closed and may decrease in
size or appear up to four times larger than shown. The lattice form mani-
fests within the scotoma. Their illustration is consistent with Sacks (1992)
and Podoll and Robinson (2008), suggesting that some migraine with
aura episodes exhibit Klüver form-constant features.94 These designs con-
tained within the intaglio etched word ‘LOS’ of plate 3, also direct us back
towards An Allegory of the Bible (c. 1780–1785). The opened book or
twin tablets held by the bearded human crouched within the ‘O’ of ‘LOS,’
mirrors the opened book in An Allegory of the Bible. The contexts of both
works suggest that their meanings are connected to debates about Biblical
authority, perhaps specifically the authority of the Bible in its written form
distinct from its possible spiritual meaning. Both pictures provide evidence
of the two Klüver form-constants of lattice and tunnel shapes. The steps
and tiled floor which dominated An Allegory of the Bible foreshadow the
lattice or chequered floor on which the two male and female reclining
human figures rest in The Book of Los vignette.
Once one makes the connections between these designs as actualiza-
tions of the visual hallucinations Blake called his ‘visions,’ it becomes

93
Markus A. Dahlem, Rudolf Graf, Anthony J. Strong, Jens P. Dreier, Yuliya A. Dahlem,
Michaela Sieber, Wolfgang Hanke, Klaus Podoll, Eckehard Schöll, ‘Two-dimensional wave
patterns of spreading depolarization: Retracting, re-entrant, and stationary waves,’ Physica
D: Nonlinear Phenomena 239 (2010) pp. 889–903. Fig. 9.
94
Oliver Sacks, Migraine [1970], revised edition (Berkeley: University of California,
1992) pp xvi, 280–85; Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson, Migraine Art: The Migraine
Experience From Within (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008) pp. 175–214.
144 D. WORRALL

easier to see that they are both not just simply validations or interrogations
of the Bible but also, as with the figure of Hervey captioned in Epitome of
James Hervey’s “Meditations Among the Tombs,” supplements recording
the insights afforded by his ‘visions’ and marking his distance from con-
temporary religious and political doctrine. Not least, Blake’s ability, visible
in the traces of Klüver form-constants left in the illuminated books of the
early 1790s, to experience hallucinations yet retain an exceptionally high
degree of social functionality was a facility repeated in his late life in his
conversations with Crabb Robinson (discussed in Chap. 8), when he
spoke to him about Voltaire, Socrates and blasphemy while apparently
experiencing episodes of synaesthesia. As with all the examples discussed
in this chapter, Blake’s hallucinatory types, in their several variations,
occurred across his life and across his artistic output. The presence of
‘visions’ in his paintings and poetics, and even his general discourse,
now needs to be reassessed from the beginning.
 CHAPTER 5

The Induction of Klüver Visual

Hallucinations

Determining the triggers, neurological, sensory or physical, for Blake’s

‘visions’ cannot be done with complete accuracy. In Blake’s case the
absence of a diary, journal or an extensive written correspondence dis-
tances him from being a subject completely capable of full historical retro-­
diagnosis. Nevertheless, this chapter will discuss visual hallucinatory types
in conjunction with a consideration of their likely agencies of induction
since some of them may have had a historical specificity unlikely to be
paralleled today. It should be remembered throughout that ‘Hallucinations
in psychologically normal individuals provide a valuable route to studying
the neural mechanisms of visual awareness.’1 The natural agency of
‘Scheerer’s phenomena’ has been discussed in Chap. 2 along with Munro
Smith’s assigning of migraine aura to some of Blake’s images in 1909.
Naturally occurring agencies may also include some triggers of migraine,
such as photophobia, which appear to be reported by Blake’s contempo-
raries J.T. Smith and Allan Cunningham (both of whom, of course, would
not have been able to access a vocabulary capable of arriving at a diagnosis
of migraine). William may also have indulged in the popular contempo-
rary electrical therapies known to have been used by Catherine Blake, c.
1800–1804. Finally, this chapter will discuss hallucinations caused by

1
Frances Wilkinson, Auras and other hallucinations: windows on the visual brain, Progress
in Brain Research, 144 (2004) pp 305–320.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 145

Switzerland AG 2024
D. Worrall, William Blake’s Visions, Palgrave Studies in Literature,
Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2_5
146 D. WORRALL

prolonged exposure to engraved lines on copper plates or the prints taken

from them (‘Parallellinienfeld in einem Kupferstiche’), a method of induc-
tion used during the first scientifically recognized experiments recording
visual hallucinations. Unsurprisingly, such methods of induction have long
been superseded and forgotten much like the trade of copper-plate
engraver that Blake followed.
Research papers on visual hallucinations commonly rehearse for readers
the several modes of the inducement of the geometric type of visual hal-
lucination.2 Particularly good descriptions of neurally based hallucinatory
triggers or inducing agents are given by Vincent A. Billock and Brian
H. Tsou.3 These agents include (apart from migraine with aura), hypnago-
gic (falling into sleep) and hypnopompic (waking from sleep) states
together with light deprivation and flickering light.
Some agents of induction look impossible or unlikely. To conduct his
controlled experiments, from the 1920s onwards, Klüver mainly used
mescaline as the inducing agent.4 It gave a predictable induction suitable
for experimental settings using volunteer subjects. This substance would
not have been available to Blake.5 There is some evidence tobacco usage
can bring about Altered Consciousness States which may include the per-
ception of Klüver-type patterns.6 Whether Blake smoked tobacco is not
known but it is not necessary to suggest artificial agencies. Straightforward
concentrated meditation can induce shimmering sparkles and bright rays
of light and should not be ruled out, particularly if experienced in

2
A good starting point is, Paul C. Bressloff, J.D. Cowan, Martin Golubitsky, Peter
J. Thomas, Matthew C. Wiener, ‘What Geometric Visual Hallucinations Tell Us about the
Visual Cortex,’ Neural Computation 14 (2002) pp 473–491.
3
Vincent A. Billock and Brian H. Tsou, ‘Elementary visual hallucinations and their rela-
tionships to neural pattern-forming mechanisms,’ Psychological Bulletin 138 (2012)
pp. 744–774.
4
Heinrich Klüver, ‘Mescal Visions and Eidetic Vision,’ The American Journal of Psychology,
37 (1926), pp. 502–515.
5
For Jonathan Roberts’ account of ingesting Lophorphora Williamsii, cactus peyote, the
plant basis of mescaline, while reading Blake, see Blake. Wordsworth. Religion (London:
Continuum, 2010) pp 41–47.
6
Christine S. VanPool, ‘The Signs of the Sacred: Identifying Shamans using Archaelogical
Evidence,’ Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28 (2009) pp 177–90.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 147

conjunction with transient hypnagogic or hypnopompic states.7 However,

although this book has stressed migraine aura and Klüver-type percepts,
the chapter will look more widely at a range of entoptic photons (basic
units of light), including neurally generated phosphenes. Since light is a
basic foundation for human consciousness, it not surprising a visual artist
would want to examine and reflect upon such phenomena.
However, it is worth remembering that Blake insisted on the ubiquity
of his ‘visionary’ faculty. He did not claim his capacities were unique, or
even rare, but were generally distributed across the population. The far
from credulous painter, John Linnell, an important patron from 1818
onwards and the person who commissioned the Illustrations of the Book of
Job (1826), wrote that ‘Blake would occasionally explain unasked how he
believed that both [John] Varley & I could see the same visions as he saw
making it evident to me that Blake claimed the possession of some powers
only in a degree that all men possessed and which they undervalued in
themselves.’8 This sentiment was repeated by Crabb Robinson in 1852
(‘of this gift of Vision, he did not boast of it as peculiar to himself; All men
might have it if they would’).9 And again by Blake’s first biographer,
Alexander Gilchrist, in 1863: ‘As Blake truly maintained, the faculty for
seeing such airy phantoms can be cultivated.’10
These comments suggest he thought of his ‘visions’ as naturally occur-
ring phenomena, experiences not requiring artificial intervention. He
probably called them ‘visions’ not only because he wanted to communi-
cate using an older, more traditional, terminology which also included
voice hearing but also because the visual types appeared on his retina,
directly within his visual field through retino-cortical mapping. Of course,
because V1 is a part of the cortex it is also a cognitive environment for
images. With uncanny accuracy, Blake likened them to a ‘Vision … seen by
the [Imaginative Eye] of Every one’ (E 555, italics and square brackets in
E). That is, the faculty of ‘Vision’ is cognitive (because ‘Imaginative’),

7
Christine S. VanPool, ‘The Signs of the Sacred: Identifying Shamans using Archaelogical
Evidence,’ Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28 (2009) pp 177–90; Lindahl, Jared
R. et al. “A Phenomenology of Meditation-Induced Light Experiences: Traditional Buddhist
and Neurobiological Perspectives.” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2014): 973. PMC. Web. 25
July 2015. https://doi.org/110.3389/fpsyg.2013.00973.
8
BR(2): pp 341–2.
9
BR(2): 700, underlining in Bentley.
10
BR(2): p 321.
148 D. WORRALL

neurologically identical across the species and capable of being ‘seen by …

Every one.’ At the very least, such sentiments about his understanding of
the general distribution and prevalence of a ‘visionary’ faculty implies he
considered it a condition rather than a disorder.

Migraine Aura
In the case of his earliest visual hallucinations, discussed in Chap. 2, the
position is fairly simple. Blake dated, and even geographically located his
first migraine aura-like episodes to Peckham Rye when he was ‘a child, of
eight or ten,’ which would have been around 1766.11 Klüver form-­
constants are a known co-modality of migraine aura and can be grouped
within the geometric patterns structured from phosphenes formed by that
disorder.12 As one commentator puts it with respect to the Ermentrout
and Cowan (1979) and Bressloff and Cowan, et al., (2001) models, ‘some
of the patterns their network generates are strongly reminiscent of aura
components.‘13 ‘Web shapes’ and ‘spiders webs’ motifs show up as eight
examples defined and categorized in Podoll and Robinson’s Migraine
Art, with their case history of sources identifying such percepts dating as
far back as W.R. Gower’s paper on migraine of 1895.14 The specific agent
of induction for Blake’s childhood experience of migraine, if Munro
Smith’s identification is correct, was the transit of a migraine Cortical
Spreading Depression (CSD) on his V1 and its retino-cortical mapping.

11
BR(2): p 10, citing Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake … A New and
Enlarged Edition (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880) 2 Vols.
12
H. Henke, P.A. Robinson, P.M. Drysdale, Spatiotemporally varying visual hallucina-
tions: II. Spectral classification and comparison with theory, Journal of Theoretical Biology,
357 (2014) pp 210–219.
13
G. B. Ermentrout and J.D. Cowan, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Visual Hallucination
Patterns,’ Biological Cybernetics 34 (1979) pp 137–150; Paul C. Bressloff, J.D. Cowan,
M. Golubitsky, P.J. Thomas, M. Wiener, ‘Geometric visual hallucinations, Euclidean sym-
metry and the functional architecture of striate cortex,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London, Biological Sciences B 356 (2001) pp 299–330; Frances Wilkinson, Auras
and other hallucinations: windows on the visual brain, Progress in Brain Research, 144
(2004) pp 305–320.
14
Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson, Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience From Within
(Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008) pp 201–204, Figs. 242, 244, 245. The citation
is to W.R. Gowers, ‘Subjective visual sensations,’ Trans Ophthalmol Soc UK 15 (1895)
pp. 1–38.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 149

The term ‘depression’ refers to neural activation on V1 (which is why it

is painful) caused by waves of polarized and depolarized neural activity
travelling across this area of the cortex. A characteristic zigzag arc of phos-
phenes, forming fortification spectra, appears in the visual field, directly
replicating the shape of the indentation. The first usage of the term ‘forti-
fication’ to describe the spectra’s characteristic zigzag outline first occurred
during Blake’s lifetime in a paper by the Quaker physician and naturalist,
John Fothergill (1712–1780), entitled, ‘Remarks on That Complaint
commonly known under the Name of Sick Head-Ach[sic].’ A ‘Sick Head-­
Ach’ was the contemporary pathological description for migraine. Read to
the Select Society of Licentiates in 1778, Fothergill’s paper was printed
posthumously in 1784. Fothergill provides a good phenomenological
description: ‘the sick head-ach … begins with a singular glimmering in the
sight; objects swiftly changing their position, surrounded with luminous
angles, like those of a fortification.’15 His description of the spectra ends
there abruptly. Likely causes of migraine were thought to include dietary,
weather and vascular origins. Typically for the period, Fothergill thought
his episodes were brought on by buttered toast.
Although Hubert Airy in 1870 knew of Fothergill’s paper, he refers to
it only in passing.16 It seems unlikely Blake would have come across it
although he may well have heard about Fothergill on account for his sup-
port for slavery abolitionist Granville Sharp (1735–1813) and prison
reformer, John Howard (1726?–1790). Fothergill’s historical significance
was to have described how these entoptic percepts, with geometric lines
and shapes, angled at about 60° to each other, were characteristic of plan
views of Renaissance and Post-Renaissance military fortifications.
‘Fortification spectra’ has become the standard terminology. It was not
until the mid-twentieth century that two key papers correctly described
migraine’s neurological basis. The first was Karl S. Lashley’s 1941 pro-
posal that migraine propagates from V1.17 The second was the description

15
John Fothergill, The Works of John Fothergill, M.D. … with Some Account of His Life by
John Coakley Lettsom (1784) 3 vols., vol. 3 pp 603–4.
16
E.J. Eadie, ‘Hubert Airy, contemporary men of science and the migraine aura,’ Journal
of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh 39 (2009) pp 263–7.
17
Karl S. Lashley, ‘Patterns Of Cerebral Integration Indicated By The Scotomas Of
Migraine,’ Archive of Neurology & Psychiatry 46 (1941) pp 331–339. For the context, see
P.C. Tfelt-Hansen, ‘History of migraine with aura and CSD from 1941 and onwards,’
Cephalalgia 30 (2010) pp. 780–792.
150 D. WORRALL

of CSD in a 1944 paper by Aristides A.P. Leão.18 Significantly, this means

that Blake would have had no concept of either migraine’s neurological
origin or its pathological distinctiveness from other types of headache.
Under such circumstances, Munro Smith’s BMJ communication of 1909,
connecting migraine aura to Blake’s art, was an insight of considerable
significance.

Phosphenes and Light Induction

Migraine aura is far from being the only agency of induction capable of
triggering Blake’s ‘visions.’ Of potentially far-reaching importance are the
findings of Anupama Nair and David Brang that, ‘after ∼5 min of visual
deprivation, sounds can evoke synaesthesia-like percepts (vivid colors and
Klüver form-constants) in ∼50% of non-synesthetes.’19 In candle-lit and oil
lamp illuminated Georgian Britain, there would have been many daily
incidences of light deprivation accompanied by the sonic intrusion of
commonplace domestic and nieghbourhood sounds. Of course, such find-
ings are consistent with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), that ‘a man
shall in the dark, (though awake) have the Images of Lines, and Angles
before his eyes.’20 A degree of light deprivation may also be implicit in
Blake’s several declarations (referred to above) about apparently hypnago-
gic and hypnopompic hallucinations.
However, the phenomenology of both migraine aura and Klüver form-­
constants are composed of a wide group of percepts known as phosphenes.
These are the individual sparks of light and colour seen most readily
through a vascular induction method when, for example, pressure from
the fingers or hands is applied to the eyeballs. Assuming a neurobiological
origin, it is likely that most of his visual ‘visions’ were comprised of phos-
phenes (from the Greek phos, light and phainain, to show), entoptic
flashes of light propagated from V1. The neurophysiology of phosphenes
is based on differences between inhibitor and activator neurons signalled

18
Aristides A.P. Leão, ‘Spreading Depression of Activity in the Cerebral Cortex,’ Journal
of Neurophysiology 7 (1944) pp 359–390.
19
Anupama Nair, David Brang, ‘Inducing synesthesia in non-synesthetes: Short-term
visual deprivation facilitates auditory-evoked visual percepts,’ Consciousness and Cognition,
70 (2019) pp 70–79, see especially Fig. 1.
20
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth
Ecclesiasticall and Civill (1651) p. 6.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 151

from V1 and mapped onto the retina.21 They are the matrix of phenomena
forming the basis of most of the visual hallucinations propagated from V1.
Phosphenes occur naturally in migraine aura but are also capable of being
triggered by vascular or electrical mechanisms (again, such as digital pres-
sure on the eyeballs).22 Jearl Walker’s accessible introduction to their per-
ceptual diversity (abridged here), gives some idea of their reported
phenomenology: ‘shapes and colours that march and swirl across your
darkened field of view … a bright center surrounded by a dark ring and a
bright outer ring … a dark spot surrounded by a bright curved band …
bright, colored and constantly changing … fine quadrangles in regular
array, on which were either stars with eight rays, or dark or bright rhombs
with vertical and horizontal diagonals … complex mazes … bright blue or
red sparks … a dense network of bright lines on a dark ground … flicker-
ing … presumably because of the pulsation of blood.’23
Phosphenes make up the very materials of migraine aura’s scintillating
scotoma which, of course, is regularized into the patterns found in
CSD. Billock and Tsou have discussed ‘the blurry distinction between
phosphenes and Klüver forms.’ That is, phosphenes scaled up into clusters
adopt the same symmetries as Klüver form-constants and migraine fortifi-
cation spectra. As Billock and Tsou put it, ‘given the conceptual similarity
of the Ermentrout-Cowan model to a reaction-diffusion system [Turing,
1952], a unified model that tackles the sequential development of phos-
phenes, fortifications, and Klüver geometries within a single migraine
attack would be feasible … When phosphenes occur in large numbers
(polyopia), they are often arranged in the same geometries as Klüver
patterns.’24 This reiterates the assumption made in Chap. 2 that, while

21
Ermentrout GB, Cowan JD (1979): A Mathematical Theory of Visual Hallucination
Patterns. Biological Cybernetics 34:137–150; Bressloff, PC, Cowan JD, Golubitsky M,
Thomas PJ, Wiener M (2001): Geometric visual hallucinations, Euclidean symmetry and the
functional architecture of striate cortex. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London, Biological Sciences B 356: 299–330.
22
Mazzi, Chiara, Savazzi S, Abrahamyan A, Ruzzoli M (2017): Reliability of TMS phos-
phene threshold estimation: Toward a standardized protocol,” Brain Stimulation, Available
online 2 February 2017, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brs.2017.01.582.
23
Walker Jearl (1981): The amateur scientist: about phosphenes: patterns that appear
when the eyes are closed. Scientific American 244: 142–152.
24
Vincent A. Billock and Brian H. Tsou, ‘Elementary visual hallucinations and their rela-
tionships to neural pattern-forming mechanisms,’ Psychological Bulletin 138 (2012)
pp. 744–774.
152 D. WORRALL

migraine aura can be discriminated from Klüver form-constants, their

common propagation from V1 makes them share not only a similar neu-
rological configuration but, more crucially for a visual artist like Blake, a
similar perceptual phenomenology.
Something that might have a bearing on Blake’s visual art is that there
is some evidence migraine aura is perceived intensely coloured. One study
reported that 22.22% of migraine with aura subjects saw ‘brighter colours’
during migraine attacks with one respondent adding, verbatim, ‘“colours
get so bright that I feel they will attack me.”’25 The possibility that Blake
saw enhanced colours during migraine with aura or synaesthesia episodes
may be suggested in his satirical poem ‘To Venetian Artists.’ In this he
quips, ironically, ‘That God is Colouring Newton does shew’ (E 515).
Superficially this is a comment on Blake’s well-known views about the
unimaginative reception of the Opticks, but it may also be a straightfor-
ward endorsement that ‘That God is Colouring’ in the sense that colour-
ing is enhanced by spiritual ‘Vision.’ In his annotations to Sir Joshua
Reynolds’ Discourses on Art, Blake repeatedly repudiated Reynolds’ com-
ments on Venetian art (‘The Venetian and Flemish schools … owe much
of their fame to colouring,’ against which Blake scribbled, ‘because they
could not Draw’). In its place, Blake claimed precedence for ‘Inspiration
& Vision’ (E 646). It is possible, given the phenomenological characteris-
tics of migraine with aura, that Blake saw more vivid colours during these
episodes and increasingly came to associate them with God.26
The stories of Blake’s ‘visions’ gathered by his contemporaries must be
treated with a degree of caution but some of them seem to suggest a com-
mon trigger. The possible originating ‘vision’ behind Blake’s relief-­
etching, The Ancient of Days (1794), used as a frontispiece to his
illuminated book, Europe a Prophecy (1794), was recorded by one of his
earliest biographers. J.T. Smith, who knew Blake for about 40 years, but
who did not write about him until 1828, commented that the image,
‘Represents “The Ancient of Days,” in an orb of light surrounded by dark
clouds, as referred to in Proverbs viii.27, stooping down with an enor-
mous pair of compasses to describe the destined orb of the world.’ In a

25
M.B. Vincent and N. Hadjikhani, ‘Migraine Aura and Related Phenomena: Beyond
Scotomata and Scintillations,’ Cephalalgia 27 (2007) pp. 1368–1377.
26
For a recent study with contrary findings, see T.P. Jürgens, K Berger, A Straube,and L
Khil, ‘Migraine with aura is associated with impaired colour vision: Results from the cross-
sectional German DMKG headache study,’ Cephalalgia 35 (2015) pp 508–515.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 153

footnote, Smith added a fascinating detail about its conception: ‘He was
inspired with the splendid grandeur of this figure, by the vision which he
declared hovered over his head at the top of his staircase.’27
A muddled (although vividly written) parallel account by Allan
Cunningham, dateable to 1830 but specifically relatable to a vision of
Satan seems to record a similar—or even the same—moment of a ‘vision.’
Cunningham’s source may have come from personal or written contact
with J.T. Smith (above) or with Blake’s widow, Catherine. Cunningham’s
narrative adds several flourishes, not least by purporting to record Blake’s
words, verbatim: ‘“At last I saw him. I was going up stairs in the dark,
when suddenly a light came streaming amongst my feet, I turned round,
there he [Satan] was looking fiercely at me through the iron grating of my
staircase window. I called for my things—Katherine thought the fit of song
was on me, and brought me pen and ink—I said, hush!—never mind—this
will do—as he appeared so I drew him—there he is.” Upon this, Blake
took out a piece of paper with a grated window sketched on it, while
through the bars glared the most frightful phantom that ever man imag-
ined.’ There is nothing extant which can be identified as this picture and
The Ancient of Days is not usually thought of as a representation of Satan.28
Interestingly, Cunningham began his narrative by commenting, ‘Visions,
such as are said to arise in the sight of those who indulge in opium, were
frequently present to Blake,’ a frustratingly oblique reference as to whether
he did, or did not, use narcotics but also yet another corroboration of the
circulation of the idea amongst his contemporaries that ‘Visions … were
frequently present to Blake.’
Cunningham went on to describe how ‘Its eyes were large and like live
coals—its teeth as long as those of a harrow, and the claws seemed such as
might appear in the distempered dream of a clerk in the Herald’s office.
“It is the gothic fiends of our legends, said Blake—the true devil—all else
are apocryphal.”’29 This apparently verbatim record of Blake testimony
(‘“the gothic fiends of our legends”’) is noticeably acculturated, referenc-
ing the eighteenth-century gothic revival. Cunningham’s account sug-
gests a point of origin for the light source which illuminates the darkness
Blake was walking through (‘I was going up stairs in the dark’), a source
powerful enough to bathe Blake in its light (‘“a light came streaming

27
BR(2): p 620 and 620n.
28
Butlin catalogues the Satan drawing but lists it as untraced, Butlin: 694.
29
BR(2): p 651.
154 D. WORRALL

amongst my feet … through the iron grating of my staircase window”’).

Indeed, Satan ‘glared,’ the being’s appearance distorted (‘Its eyes were
large and like live coals—its teeth as long as … a harrow … claws … as
might appear in [a] … distempered dream’). Both Smith and Cunningham
agree that the vision was above Blake, ‘“I was going up stairs”’ (my ital-
ics). Cunningham also implies Satan was partially occluded because the
manifestation appeared from behind ‘the iron grating of my staircase win-
dow … through the bars’ (my italics).
There is much which can be drawn out of these testimonies. Blake
made his print of The Ancient of Days in 1794 but neither of the writers’
accounts dates earlier than 1828. Both writers concur that they are report-
ing a ‘vision,’ one which was implicitly without an external stimuli visible
to others, including Catherine. Noticeably, in Cunningham’s account,
‘Katherine’ misunderstands her husband, thinking this is a ‘fit of song,’
suggesting not only similar events had happened before but that the onset
of his visual hallucinations sometimes manifested at the onset of his lyrical
writing. This might be consistent with types of grapheme-triggered syn-
aesthesia resulting in Klüver-like form-constants reported by Nair and
Brang, referred to above. That is, under certain conditions of light depri-
vation and ambient sonic intrusion, any amount of verbal discussion
between William and Catherine about his being inspired to write might
have been enough to trigger a cross-modal episode, something akin to
synaesthesia, the subject of Chaps. 6, 7 and 8. In Nair and Brang’s experi-
ment, which challenges the convention of any distinction between synaes-
thesia and other hallucinatory types, the inducing graphemes were the
letters A-Z in Arial font which, under light deprivation conditions, trig-
gered Klüver-like entoptic percepts. The trial respondents described these
as ‘flashing lights,’ ‘a flash went off in my head,’ ‘a quick burst of light’
(the latter in a yellow ball). Nair and Brang argue that ‘(vivid colors and
Klüver form-constants)’ occur ‘in ~50% of non-synesthetes’ after around
five minutes of light deprivation. ‘These results challenge aspects of the
cross-activation model and suggest that synesthesia exists as a latent fea-
ture in all individuals, manifesting when the balance of activity across the
senses has been altered.’30 Such spontaneous visual sensations would be
consistent, not least, with the arguments presented in Chap. 7 about the

30
Anupama Nair, David Brang, ‘Inducing synesthesia in non-synesthetes: Short-term
visual deprivation facilitates auditory-evoked visual percepts,’ Consciousness and Cognition,
70 (2019) pp 70–79, see especially Fig. 1.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 155

Visionary Heads of c. 1819–1825, their night time induction and the con-
vivial noise of Blake meeting his friends.
That Blake had to hand ‘a piece of paper with a grated window sketched
on it,’ is also fascinating. This item could be a preparatory drawing, pos-
sibly one like his, Satan, Sin, and Death: Satan Comes to the Gate of Hell
(1808) which shows the figure of Death standing in front of the massive
horizontal and vertical iron bars of Hell’s gates visible through his trans-
parent body.31 Alternatively, it might simply have been a gridded piece of
paper Blake had lying around of the type he would have used in his com-
mercial (or even his own) reproductive engraving profession for transfer-
ring images from drawings to copper plates via a technique known as
‘pouncing.’ Such a gridded paper exists associated with a drawing prepara-
tory for a Jerusalem design.32 Klüver specifically names a ‘grating’ in his
list of terms to describe the lattice form-constant.33 In this case, the light
from the window (referred to by Cunningham) may have been sufficient
to trigger migraine, acting as a photophobic precipitant, one of the most
common of the migraine triggers. Alternatively, with Cunningham’s
description of an uncontrolled, partially occluded, ‘suddenly’ ‘streaming’
light, Blake’s vision may also have simply had ‘luminosity in the dark’
(because it was an entoptic image), a feature of migraine referred to as
early as Hubert Airy’s essay.34
While the evidence is far from conclusive, on the basis of Smith and
Cunningham’s testimony about this staircase vision, the event (or events)
they describe seem to be migraine aura episodes, the condition which seems
to have resulted in the Peckham Rye ‘vision’ of c. 1766. The ‘grating’ is
particularly significant because stripes and chequerboard patterns are
known to induce migraine.35 Again, in assessing this as credible evidence,
either way one must also discount for the misreporting of phenomena not
fully incorporated into the medical vocabularies of 1828 or 1830. An

31
Butlin: 536.2.
32
Butlin: 561, verso.
33
Heinrich Klüver, ‘One of these form-constants, for example, is always referred to by
terms such as grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard design,’ Mescal and
Mechanisms of Hallucinations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) p. 22. Klüver’s
italics.
34
Hubert Airy, ‘On a Distinct Form of Transient Hemiopsia,’ Philosophical Transaction of
the Royal Society of London 160 (1870) pp 247–64.
35
Shepherd, Aj. “Visual Contrast Processing in Migraine.” Cephalalgia, vol. 20, no. 10,
Dec. 2000, pp. 865–880.
156 D. WORRALL

interesting confounding of descriptive terms might have arisen with

Cunningham’s account of Blake’s hallucination of Satan having eyes ‘like
live coals—its teeth as long as those of a harrow, and … claws.’ Nearly
30 years later, Airy’s paper cited testimony about (what is now known as)
fortification spectra with its scintillating scotoma, which he described as
having a ‘serrated outline, with smaller teeth at one end than at the other,
its tremor, greater where the teeth are greater … its tinge of scarlet.’
‘Teeth’ are used several times in the paper to describe the phenomenon of
fortification spectra as Airy’s contemporaries struggled to collate and
identify what was obviously a widespread but poorly understood condi-
tion.36 The ‘teeth’ and ‘claws’ of Blake’s untraced Satan may reflect this
aspect of the aura, implying imagery consistent with the migraine aura
study whose participant reported not a Satanic entity but, ‘“colours … so
bright … I feel they will attack me.”’37
Blake may have recognized some of migraine’s triggers without, of
course, understanding what they were. The Ancient of Days picture of
Urizen in the sun suggests one of the frequently occurring triggers of
migraine: photophobia, discomfort caused by glaring light.38 Some
30%-60% of migraine episodes are triggered by glare.39 Of course, spiritual
light understood as a metaphor for religious revelation has a long history
in Christian poetics. Consistent with a visual hallucination including (what
may have been) pain and a potential source of glare is Crabb Robinson’s
1852 testimony of a meeting face-to-face with Catherine and William
when they were ‘speaking of his Visions she said—“You know, dear, the
first time you saw God was when You were four years old And he put his
head to the window and set you ascreaming[”].’40
The accounts of Cunningham, Smith and Crabb Robinson, like so
much else to do with reports of Blake’s ‘visions,’ may only signify that he
was occasionally subject to migraine attacks. However, whatever their

36
Hubert Airy, ‘On a Distinct Form of Transient Hemiopsia,’ Philosophical Transaction of
the Royal Society of London 160 (1870) pp 247–64, p 250.
37
M.B. Vincent and N. Hadjikhani, ‘Migraine Aura and Related Phenomena: Beyond
Scotomata and Scintillations,’ Cephalalgia 27 (2007) pp. 1368–1377.
38
Kathleen B. Digre and K.C. Brennan, ‘Shedding Light on Photophobia,’ Journal of
neuro-ophthalmology: the official journal of the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society
32 (2012) pp. 68–81.
39
A.J. Vincent, E.L. Spierings and H.B. Messinger, ‘A controlled study of visual symptoms
and eye strain factors in chronic headache,’ Headache 29 (1989) pp. 523–527.
40
BR(2): p 699.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 157

origin, he or Catherine thought them sufficiently significant to pass on

their occurrence as testimony to others who were interested in his ‘visions.’

Electrotherapy
In a fascinating but overlooked paper, the neuroscientist G.D. Schott in
the leading British medical journal, The Lancet, has specifically linked
Blake’s ‘falling star’ of Milton a Poem in 2 Books (1804–1811) to the con-
temporary physician John Birch’s electric healing therapies whose regi-
mens were known to both Blake and his wife, Catherine (E 110). John
Birch (1745–1815) had written of ‘electrical fluid’ being directed from an
electrical machine ‘in the form of a star’ and which Schott links to two
images in the illuminated book, Milton a Poem, a work Blake had begun,
c. 1804. Birch was a socially significant therapist, styling himself ‘Surgeon
Extraordinary to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, and one of the
Surgeons to St Thomas’s Hospital.’ As Schott notes, the publication of
Birch’s book, An Essay on the Medical Application of Electricity (1804),
coincides with the time Catherine Blake was trying Birch’s cure.41
Blake wrote to William Hayley in December 1804 telling him, ‘My wife
continues well, thanks to Mr Birch’s Electrical Magic,’ and claimed that
‘Electricity is the wonderful cause’ of reduced swelling in her legs (23
October 1804; 18 December 1804, E 756, 759). Blake’s patron, Thomas
Butts, also seems have known Birch because his son, Thomas, Jr., wrote in
his diary for 10 September 1800, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Blake, his brother [James,
1753–1827], and Mr. Birch came to tea.’42 This tea-party was six days
before William and Catherine left London for Felpham but it is possible
the Blakes had known Birch as early as the mid-1780s. At that time the
entymologist Henry Smeathman, living in Paris had written to William’s
long-time friend and patron, George Cumberland, in 1784 recommend-
ing he contact the ‘very ingenious Philosopher,’ ‘Mr Birch Surgeon in the
Strand.’43 Thanks to Angus Whitehead, our knowledge of Cumberland’s
role as an intermediary between Blake and London’s more orthodox

41
G.D. Schott, ‘William Blake’s Milton, John Birch’s “Electrical Magic”, and the “falling
star”,’ The Lancet 362 (2003) pp. 2114–2116.
42
BR(2): p 98.
43
BL Add Ms. 36494. Fol 288, Smeathman to Cumberland, 10 March Paris 1784.
158 D. WORRALL

medical world has recently been expanded.44 It is also useful to read

Schott’s essay in conjunction with information about other practitioners
and electrical machine makers active in London around that time.45 There
is good evidence of a number of networks of electro-mystical-therapeutic
sociabilities surrounding the Blakes and their London-based circle of
skilled artisanal craftsmen.46 Amongst others, the Blakes may already have
come across similar electrical therapies described by Richard Lovett and
the Methodist evangelist, John Wesley. 47
That the Blakes owned, or had access to, an electrical generation appa-
ratus is evident since they needed one to produce the therapies Birch
claimed as efficacious and which Catherine Blake clearly thought she ben-
efitted from. Gilchrist records about Catherine that ‘she, too, learned to
have visions; to see processions of figures wending along the river, in broad
daylight.’48 The notion that she ‘learned to have visions’ may indicate the
possibility of such an electro-medical interventions just as their movement
and evident luminous nature (‘figures … in broad daylight’) may suggest
phosphenes (my italics). Electrical knowledge and religious mysticism as a
species of showmanship have long been known to be interrelated but the
Blakes’ use of an electrical machine at home provides a domestic context
for such practices.49
Blake’s arrival in coastal Sussex, by default, meant that he needed to
write letters and his surviving correspondence for the years 1800–1803
has left a much better picture of his activities than is available for the 1780s
and 1790s. When they arrived, Blake wrote to John Flaxman in a

44
Angus Whitehead, “‘Went to See Blake – Also to Surgeons College’: Blake and George
Cumberland’s Pocketbooks,’ Blake in Our Time: Essays in Honour of G.E. Bentley, Jr., edited
by Karen Mulhallen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010) pp. 165–200.
45
Charlotte Sleigh, ‘Life, death and galvanism,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 29 (1998)
pp. 219–248; Paola Bertucci, ‘Sparks in he Dark: the attraction of electricity in the eigh-
teenth century,’ Endeavour 31 (2007) 88–93.
46
Marsha Keith Schuchard, ‘Blake’s Healing Trio: Magnetism, Medicine, and Mania,’
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 23 (1989) pp 20–30.
47
R. Lovett, The Subtil Medium prov’d: or, that Wonderful Power of Nature … which they
call’d sometimes Aether, But oftener Elementary Fire, verify’d. London, 1756; John Wesley,
The Desideratum: or, Electricity made Plain and Useful. London. 1760).
48
BR(2): p 321.
49
Simon Schaffer, ‘The Consuming Flame: Electrical Showmen and Tory Mystics in the
world of goods,’ John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods
(London: Routledge, 1993) pp 489–526.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 159

heightened state of sensitivity, ‘Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because

it is more Spiritual than London[.] Heaven opens here on all sides her
Golden Gates’ (E 710). On account of their journey being delayed by a
few days, Blake had written to his patron there, William Hayley, to reas-
sure him of his imminent arrival, stating, ‘My fingers Emit sparks of fire
with Expectation of my future labours’ (E 709). Passing sparks across
limbs of the body, even across people, as part of a showman’s act was well
known in the eighteenth century. At the very least, Blake would probably
have been aware of static electricity as the sources of such phenomena.50
As part of this general upsurge in the popularization of electricity, Birch
had already published A Letter to Mr. George Adams, on the Subject of
Medical Electricity (1791).51 Included in it was a letter on ‘Medical
Electricity’ providing a series of case histories of his treatments, including
an alleged resuscitation after a suicide in May 1789. A man had hanged
himself (with a silk handkerchief), was rescued and hurried to St. Thomas’
Hospital (where Birch worked), a Mr. Johnson, Jun. bled him and applied
electrical treatment. The man was ‘re-animated instantaneously by the
shock,’ his only memory of the hanging being ‘a pleasing sensation of
green fields (colours) before his eyes.’ However, by far the most significant
aspect of this particular case is that the man ‘recollected nothing till the
electric shock, which he described as balls of fire darting through his
eyes.’52 These ‘balls of fire darting through his eyes’ are good candidates
for being amongst the first recorded electrically triggered phosphenes.53
While only Catherine Blake’s ailments and electrical therapies are
recorded (William reported her ‘stiff-knee’d but well in other respects’ in
May 1804), she was reported by her husband as, ‘surprisingly recovered.
Electricity is the wonderful cause’ on 23 October 1804 (E 749, 756). It is

50
Paola Bertucci, ‘Sparks in the Dark: the attraction of electricity in the eighteenth cen-
tury,’ Endeavour 31 (2007) 88–93.
51
Adams’ Essay on Electricity had first appeared in 1785.
52
John Birch, A Letter to Mr. George Adams, on the Subject of Medical Electricity. London
(1791) pp 55–56.
53
See also, a female patient of Charles Le Roy, undergoing treatment for blindness by
electrotherapy, reported flashes of light, ‘Oú l’on rend compte de quelques tentatives que lon
a faites pour guérir plusieurs maladies par l’ectricité. Mémoires de Mathématique et de
Physique tirés des registres de cette Académie,’ Histoire de l′Académie royale des Sci. avec les
mémoires de mathématique et de Phys. tirés des registres de cette Académie, 2 (Paris, 1755),
pp. 60–98, cited in Philip M. Lewis, Jeffrey V. Rosenfeld, ‘Electrical stimulation of the brain
and the development of cortical visual prostheses: An historical perspective,’ Brain Research,
1630 (2016) pp 208–224.
160 D. WORRALL

perfectly feasible William tried the therapies himself. The Blakes’ three-­
year sojourn at Felpham, ostensibly under Hayley’s patronage, was a dif-
ficult time. Not only was William’s relationship with him awkward, in
1803 he had been put on trial (and acquitted) at the local assizes on a
charge of sedition following a fracas with one of the many dragoons sta-
tioned in the area readying for a French invasion. In the October 1804
letter, written to Hayley after their permanent return to London, he evi-
dences some degree of past psychological distress, claiming to ‘have
entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his station, whose annoyance has
been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life’ (E
756). The notion of a ‘Spectre’ (as in ‘spectrous Fiend’) has a number of
special meanings in Blake but, in this example, he is clearly referring to
some kind of recurrent mental health disability damaging his creative
life.54 What Blake is announcing, of course, is a period of recovery from
low spirits. In a letter of July 1800, he had referred to his ‘stupid
Melancholy’ (E 706–7).
It is possible Birch’s electrical therapies were not solely applied to
Catherine’s knees. Birch had used transcranial electrical shocks to treat
‘melancholy’ and, on the basis of his knowledge of Birch’s experiments, it
is not impossible Blake tried a crude form of Electroconvulsive Therapy
(ECT). Birch had, apparently successfully, used ECT in 1787 on an East
India Company porter who had been referred to him for assistance because
of being in ‘a state of melancholy’ (‘he sighed frequently … was inatten-
tive to every thing … his pulse weak and low’). Birch ‘passed six small
shocks through the brain in different directions.’ He had also tried, again
with apparent success, ‘passing shocks through the head’ of an (unnamed)
professional theatre singer as well as treating a 26-year-old man who had
‘a moping melancholy.’55 While there is no direct evidence suggesting
Blake self-administered ECT to overcome his ‘melancholy’ (the contem-
porary catch-all term for temporary depressive mental ill-health), the cou-
ple already possessed, or had access to, an electric generation machine for
Catherine’s therapy and they had both met Birch, a person pioneering
ECT and whose medical regimens they apparently both trusted and
followed.

54
The classic study is Morton D. Paley, “Cowper as Blake’s Spectre,” Eighteenth-Century
Studies 1 (1968) pp 236–52.
55
John Birch, A Letter to Mr. George Adams, on the Subject of Medical Electricity. London
(1791) pp 45–50.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 161

Flicker-Light-Induced Hallucinations
However, if the likelihood of Blake experiencing phosphenes during
electro-­therapy is slender, and the evidence—such as it is—is in any case
restricted to a date range of 1800–1804, the possibility that he experi-
enced visual hallucinations as a direct by-product of his work and training
as an engraver, is a possibility of much greater magnitude. The evidence
supporting this supposition comes in the early work of the Bohemian
(present day Czech Republic), anatomist and physiologist, Jan Evangelista
Purkinje (Purkinĕ) (1787–1869).56 In his doctoral dissertation at the
University of Prague in 1819, published in the German language in Prague
in 1823, Purkinje produced the first scientific report on flicker-light-­
induced phosphene pattern hallucination.57 Crucially, some of the experi-
ments Purkinje conducted, with himself as the subject of the experiment,
used the engraved lines of copper-plate prints to induce visual hallucina-
tions. Since the results of Purkinje’s experiments arose from looking at
either copper-plate prints or copper plates themselves, he would have
exposed himself to the same sets of conditions Blake encountered every
day of his working life as a printmaker.
The flicker-light-induced hallucinations Purkinje reported are related
to migraine aura and Klüver form-constant hallucinations as well as to
visual auras now associated with epilepsy and Ganzfeld-induced hallucina-
tions (percepts triggered by experiencing a completely homogenous visual
field—imagine the inside of a ping-pong ball).58 The phenomenon of flick-
ering, of course, is the characteristic signature known as ‘scintillating’ in
migraine aura. Recent military aerospace research has also become inter-
ested in flicker-induced hallucination types, as reflected in the work of
Billock and Tsou, apparently aimed at understanding fast, high altitude,

56
P. Schweitzer, ‘Profiles in Cardiology: Jan Evangelista Purkinje (Purkinĕ),’ Clinical
Cardiology 14 (1991) pp 85–86; Andrzej Grzybowski, and Krzysztof Pietrzak, “Jan
Evangelista Purkynje (1787–1869),” Journal of Neurology 261 (2014) pp. 2048–2050.
57
Jan Purkinje, Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologie der Sinne [Observations and
Experiments Investigating the Physiology of Senses] (Prague, 1823). An English translation
is included in Nicholas J. Wade and Josef Brožek, Purkinje’s Vision: The Dawning of
Neuroscience (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001). Subsequent references to
Purkinje use Wade and Brožek’s edition.
58
For an overview of their history and study, see Carsten Allefeld, Peter Pütz, Kristina
Kastner, Jiří Wackermann, ‘Flicker-light induced visual phenomena: Frequency dependence
and specificity of whole percepts and percept features,’ Consciousness and Cognition 20
(2011) pp 1344–1362.
162 D. WORRALL

military aviation.59 To be precise, the sets of experiments Purkinje con-

ducted, and which are assigned here as relevant to Blake, are not strictly
flickering-light-induced hallucinations (which seem to need a flicker rate
above 3hz—fast enough to be slightly uncomfortable to most people) but,
rather, afterimage visual effects. However, afterimages (which can have a
positive or a negative luminescence, sequentially) are probably retinal in
origin but processed in the cortex.60 Afterimages can also be produced by
digital pressure on the eyeballs.
Interestingly, Purkinje’s initial method for inducing the first recorded
flicker hallucinations was no more complicated than simply looking at the
sun between his own, moving, spread out, fingers.61 Like the ‘light …
streaming … through the iron grating’ of Blake’s staircase window in
Cunningham’s report, the flickering effect of obstructions in front of light
sources may be enough to cause photophobic hallucinations. However,
some of Purkinje’s experiments were based on staring at printed engrav-
ings, both stationary and moving.
Appended to Purkinje’s Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologie der
Sinne (Prague, 1823) is an (unfortunately, rather small), single etching
giving several examples of his entoptic percepts. This plate remains a fre-
quently cited, ground-breaking, representation of the phenomena, the
first recorded set of illustrations of visual hallucinations empirically derived.
Purkinje’s experiments, for the first time, defined the complexities of the
boundaries between objects and visual perception. Purkinje noticed that
while the spatial properties of objects observed do not change (although
they may be subjected to motion), the subjective percepts they provoke
alter. Or, as Blake put it in a posthumously recorded poem, ‘the Eye alter-
ing alters all’ (E 485). Although the phenomena Purkinje observed, dis-
cussed below, were not entirely based on flickering light experiments
59
Vincent A. Billock and Brian H. Tsou, ‘Neural interactions between flicker-induced self-
organized visual hallucinations and physical stimuli,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 104 (2007) pp 8490–8495.
60
For a discussion of the history and debate about afterimages, see Section 5 of Vahid
Salari, Felix Scholkmann, Ram Lakhan Pandey Vimal, Noémi Császár, Mehdi Aslani, István
Bókkon, ‘Phosphenes, retinal discrete dark noise, negative afterimages and retinogeniculate
projections: A new explanatory framework based on endogenous ocular luminescence,’
Progress in Retinal and Eye Research, 2017, ISSN 1350-9462, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
preteyeres.2017.07.001. Accessed 9 March 2021.
61
Nicholas J. Wade and Josef Brožek, Purkinje’s Vision: The Dawning of Neuroscience
(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001) p 65; Dominic H. ffytche, ‘The hodol-
ogy of hallucinations,’ Cortex 44 (2008) pp. 1067–1083.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 163

(although he clearly sometimes imposed motion against bright back-

grounds on the some of the objects he used), the 3+hz flicker rate which
induces flicker hallucinations is the same as the flicker rate of migraine aura
scintillating scotoma.62 An experiment where he used his fingers to inter-
rupt sunlight (and create a flicker effect) was followed by one where he
used a flickering candle flame to induce some of the patterns he reports,
including the hexagons and zigzag percepts shown in his single etching.63
It is likely zigzag percepts arise from the same neural signals on V1 as
those experienced in migraine aura.
In Blake’s remarkable formulation of the spiritual powers of etching, it
is the acids of the etching process which reveal ‘the infinite which was hid.’
Of course, etching is the basic process described in the illuminated book
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789–90): ‘But first the notion that
man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do,
by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salu-
tary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the
infinite which was hid’ (E 39). This description is foundational to under-
standing the primacy of his imagery drawn from the techniques of print-
making in the illuminated books, all of which used etching processes.
Blake’s physical exposure to etching and engraving processes are date-
able no later than 1772, the year he entered his apprenticeship. Unlike
today’s artist printmakers, he learned his etching and engravings skills on
an entirely commercial basis during his apprenticeship in the busy work-
shop of James Basire (1730–1802), master engraver, an indenture which
began on the 4 August 1772 and lasted until 1779.64 The paradigm of the
artist printmaker, and its lack of current purchase on commercial image
reproduction, has been noted by Morris Eaves: ‘Today it is difficult to
explain the cultural role of a Basire or a Woollett because methods of

62
Cordula Becker and Mark A. Elliott, ‘Flicker-induced color and form: Interdependencies
and relation to stimulation frequency and phase,’ Consciousness and Cognition 15 (2006)
pp 175–196.
63
Nicholas J. Wade and Josef Brožek, Purkinje’s Vision: The Dawning of Neuroscience
(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001) p 65. Fig. 2 in Purkinje (Prague, 1823).
64
Michael Phillips (ed.), William Blake: Apprentice and Master (Oxford: Ashmolean,
2014); For the family of Basire, see Richard Goddard, ‘Drawing on Copper’: The Basire
Family of Copper-Plate Engravers and their Works (Maastricht, 2017); Lucy Peltz, ‘Basire,
Isaac (1704–1768),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press,
2004; online edn, Oct 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1619, accessed 11
Jan 2016].
164 D. WORRALL

reproduction more efficiently coordinated with the printer’s press and

painter’s palette replaced engraving as Blake knew it. The craft now sur-
vives largely, if marginally, as a minor vehicle for “original” work in the
“graphic arts” tier of the “fine arts” departments of art schools and
universities.’65 In the years after his apprenticeship he completed 19 book
illustration commissions before the end of 1789, the cut-off date by which
it is known he had acquired sufficiently accomplished mirror-writing skills
in relief-etching to produce All Religions are One (c. 1788), There is No
Natural Religion (c. 1788), Songs of Innocence (1789) and The Book of
Thel (1789). Some of these commissions meant he was working at a fairly
rapid pace since they called for the production of multiple plates. The one
for Joseph Ritson’s three volume, Select Collection of English Songs (1783),
required nine plates, for example.66
Just taking the period 1788 to 1794 on its own, Blake produced a large
number of mixed method intaglio engraved and etched commercial prints.
These comprised 11 separate commissions, some of them requiring mul-
tiple plates. For example, 45 copper plates were required for Christian
Gotthilf Salzmann’s three volume, Elements of Morality (1791), but all of
them were returned to him again for re-working for the 1792 and 1793
editions when he added new lines of detail or emphasis as well as, not least,
probably re-cutting worn grooves.67
His life-long career as book illustrator necessitated working on copper
plates using this so-called mixed method of etching and engraving.
Copper-plate prints of the type he worked on commercially were made up
of a series of fine almost parallel lines whose varying distances created the
illusion of depth. Engravers worked in extremely close proximity to their
copper plates. Blake’s paradigms of engraving were the commercial prac-
tices he learned both as an apprentice at Basire’s and, subsequently, as a
self-employed engraver of commissioned book illustrations. One of the
last remaining professional intaglio and stipple copper engravers, working
into the twenty-first century, was Paul Holdway, one of a small team of
engravers employed by the Spode Factory, Stoke-on-Trent, in the

65
Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) p 188.
66
Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations: A Catalogue and Study
of the Plates Engraved by Blake after Designs by Other Artists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
67
Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations: A Catalogue and Study
of the Plates Engraved by Blake after Designs by Other Artists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
Cat. No. XXIII, pp 50–60.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 165

production of transfer printed ceramics, using techniques basically

unchanged since Blake’s day. I was privileged to meet Paul and his col-
leagues on a visit to the Engraver’s Workshop at the Spode Factory in
2006 before it closed (very probably the last surviving example in the
world). Photographs of the Engraving Team at work show very clearly the
working conditions which cannot have changed much since the eigh-
teenth century. Holdway has written that, ‘all engravers’ work is so detailed
that it is usually undertaken with the aid of a magnifying glass.’68 A pho-
tograph of a Spode apprentice at work shows not only the close proximity
to the copper plate required but also the engraver’s compasses lying to
hand, the signature motif of The Ancient of Days print.69
Spode Engravers’ Workshop practices, even in the twenty-first century,
were demanding. For stipple engraving, which Spode particularly favoured,
they used a hand-held punch in conjunction with a hammer for the matri-
ces of indentations required on the copper plate. Of this, Holdway writes,
‘Punching is very close work and could only be undertaken in good
daylight.’70 To these stresses made upon sight, one must also add dura-
tion. ‘A copper for a blue printed dinner plate with an all-over design … is
about two months’ work for an engraver. That for the largest dish would
take perhaps six months.’71 He is, of course, referring to normal office
hours, an eight-hour day worked five or six days a week.
There is even a possibility, as argued by Lane Robson and Joseph
Viscomi, that his late life was considerably discomforted, and his death
possibly hastened, by cumulative poisoning by copper fumes from etching
acid inhaled over many years.72 A 2005 study of migraine-affected artists
reported that studio-associated odours could be a trigger (26%) for
migraine attacks. Materials cited by respondents included turpentine, min-
eral spirits, oil paints and moist watercolours, albeit mainly odours

68
David Drakard and Paul Holdway, Spode: Transfer Printed Ware 1784–1833, A New,
Enlarged and Updated Edition (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2002) p 47.
69
‘Apprentice Engraver,’ Transfer Collectors’ Club https://www.transferwarecollec-
torsclub.org/annex/image-gallery/processes/processes-engraving-and-engravers/6-en-
hh/. Accessed 18/10/2021.
70
David Drakard and Paul Holdway, Spode: Transfer Printed Ware 1784–1833, A New,
Enlarged and Updated Edition (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2002) p 49.
71
David Drakard and Paul Holdway, Spode: Transfer Printed Ware 1784–1833, A New,
Enlarged and Updated Edition (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2002) p 49.
72
Lane Robson and Joseph Viscomi, ‘Blake’s Death,’ Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 30
(1996) pp 36–49.
166 D. WORRALL

connected with modern solvents. Their study is particularly interesting

because it demonstrates that through various techniques of avoidance,
deferral and intervention, migraine-prone artists are still able to continue
with their art (although the study was not able to investigate the personal
meanings of their art).73 However, it is Jan Purkinje’s use of engravings or
etchings as inducing agents for his experiments which is particularly
striking.

Engraving and Hallucinations

The importance of Purkinje’s findings for the purpose of this study is that,
among other types of induction, some of his reports involved him looking
closely and fixedly at the near-parallel lines of prints produced by impres-
sions on paper taken from copper etchings and engravings (‘Parallellinienfeld
in einem Kupferstiche’). Purkinje’s use of etchings or engravings to pro-
voke hallucinations, contemporaneous with Blake, makes Purkinje a par-
ticularly interesting analogue.
This is how Purkinje describes his basic type of experiment: ‘XV. For
some time I have noted an unclear glimmering when I looked steadily at a
field of parallel lines precisely engraved on a copper plate [print]. When I
move the page forward or backward or around a central point, the vision
reveals blurry streaks and the individual lines become undistinguishable.
When the lines are horizontal, the streaks are also horizontal but some-
what irregular. The vertical lines remain vertical, whereas in a field of con-
centric lines the shadowy segments move in a circle. For a long time I was
unable to interpret the phenomenon.’74 Purkinje’s report of ‘unclear glim-
mering,’ ‘blurry streaks,’ and ‘shadowy segments mov[ing] in a circle,’
appear to be flicker-light-induced phosphene afterimages caused by
‘mov[ing] the page forward or backward around a central point.’
To get some idea of what Blake might have seen as entoptic images
when he looked at engravings, one can turn to another of Purkinje’s

73
Randy M. Vick and Kathy Sexton-Radek, ‘Art and Migraine: Researching the
Relationship Between Artmaking and Pain Experience,’ Journal of the American Art Therapy
Association 22 (2005), pp 193–204.
74
‘Schon seit langer Zeit bemerkte ich wenn ich ein genau ausgefürtes Parallellinienfeld in
einem Kupferstiche fixirte,’ Jan Purkinje, Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologie der
Sinne [Observations and Experiments Investigating the Physiology of Senses] (Prague,
1823) p 112. Nicholas J. Wade and Josef Brožek, Purkinje’s Vision: The Dawning of
Neuroscience (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001) p 87.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 167

experiments: ‘If I fixate on the parallel lines of a sharply drawn engraving

for 15 to 20 seconds and then close the eye, there appears in the same
place a scintillation of undefined light and dark zigzag lines, which run like
waves through one another and perpendicular to the previous fixated
lines. This scintillation lasts for a slightly shorter time than the initial view-
ing … The principal requirement is that the lines must be very close to
each other.’75 Purkinje’s experiment of seeing areas of scintillating light
and ‘zigzag’ lines after looking at a ‘sharply drawn engraving’ (noticeably
not one given motion) suggests some intriguing possibilities. Assuming, as
has been argued here, Blake probably had early life onset of migraine with
aura, c. 1766, then his daily work as an engraver, beginning with his
apprenticeship in 1772, forced him to repeatedly experience the character-
istic zigzag percepts he also experienced in migraine. Indeed, Purkinje’s
experiments establish that Blake’s career spent etching and engraving is a
sufficient cause of these percepts. To these experiences can be added the
perceptual burden, particularly in engraving but also true of relief-etching,
of estimating depth and orientation as he worked around a copper plate,
incising engraved lines or estimating depth for the etching needle. These
factors can be quantified and are known to progress as straightforward
linear increases depending on the percentage of their variation from the
picture-plane. Incisions oriented nearest to 90 degrees away from the pic-
ture plane are perceived slowest, the fastest are those in line with the pic-
ture plane.76
Of course, he might have practised avoidance techniques in the work-
place but the effects would have had an impact because Blake engaged
with these processes all of his working life. While one must allow a mar-
ginal effect for their different physiologies, unless Blake was neurologically
different from Purkinje, given the same conditions they would have expe-
rienced similar entoptic percepts. The same visual events Purkinje experi-
enced would also have occurred to Blake, not just when viewing prints
closely (as he must have needed to do professionally), but also while etch-
ing or engraving lines on copper plates, with or without flickering candle-
light. Gazing intensely at near-parallel engraved lines, either printed or on
the plates, would have been part of Blake’s daily life as both artistic

75
Nicholas J. Wade and Josef Brožek, Purkinje’s Vision: The Dawning of Neuroscience
(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001) p 88.
76
Shepard, R. N. & Metzler, J. Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. Science 171
(1971) pp 701–703.
168 D. WORRALL

printmaker and commercial engraver. In follow-up experiments in the

1950s, perceptions of moving images (including rotating ‘chrysanthe-
mum’ shapes) were created by viewing radiating, parallel concentric and
linear sets of lines, confirming Purkinje’s findings.77 Further experiments
in the 1990s, accompanied by a literature review of the evidence, con-
cluded that these percepts were not likely to be caused by disrupted opti-
cal accommodation of the patterns but were more likely to have been
triggered by some imprecise area of the cortex, possibly involving V5.78
Producing ‘a field of parallel lines precisely engraved’ was Blake’s pro-
fessional occupation. He was apprenticed to it from his early teens. Images
made by engraving or intaglio etching were built up by creating differing
distances and angles between matrices of parallel lines. The basic tech-
nique was hatching and cross-hatching, the cutting of near-parallel lines
which intersected and crossed over other sets of near-parallel lines at an
acute angle. This formed a distinctive lozenge shape. The nearer together
the lines were cut, making the resulting lozenge shape smaller, the darker
the visual effect. Widening the gap between the lines and, consequently,
making the lozenges bigger, the lighter the effect. To add tone, one could
also put a dot (a flick of the engraving tool) in the middle of the lozenge.
Again, the nearer the dots to each other in their lozenges, the darker the
effect, the further apart, the lighter. It was through this means that engrav-
ers slowly, and laboriously, built up complex images of faces and hands
and, indeed, all the visual elements of the prints. That Blake learned these
techniques and employed its terminology, is shown in a remark he made
disparaging Thomas Stothard, a successful painter and engraver (who
Blake felt had plagiarized his Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims fresco): ‘… his
blundering blurs can be made out & delineated by any Engraver who
knows how to cut dots & lozenges’ (E 572). As will probably be clear by
now, these ‘lozenges’ are simply another acculturated description of the

77
Pirenne MH, Compbell FW, Robson JG, Mackay DM. Moving visual images produced
by regular stationary patterns. Nature. 1958 Feb 1;181(4605):362–3. https://doi.
org/10.1038/181362a0. Accessed 12 March 2021.
78
Mon-Williams, Mark, and John P. Wann. “An Illusion That Avoids Focus.” Proceedings:
Biological Sciences, vol. 263, no. 1370, The Royal Society, 1996, pp. 573–78; Cornelia
Fermüller, Robert Pless, Yiannis Aloimonos, Families of stationary patterns producing illu-
sory movement: insights into the visual system, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 264 (1997)
pp 795–806.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 169

lattice form-constants of visual hallucination defined by Klüver.79 Whether

in his visual hallucinations or in his day-to-day workshop practice, Blake
was never far away Klüver patterns.
There is a further complication to understanding the perceptual neuro-
physiology of cross-hatched lozenge engraving and etchings techniques,
and how engravers built up their images. It has only been comparatively
recently understood that matrices of grid-like shapes, when made into
visual art, are perceived and re-ordered by the brain into illusions of shape
(of a face, a hand etc.) according to their individual size and not by their
individual shape. Although the cross-hatched lozenge is the standard unit-
ized technique for eighteenth-century printmakers practising line engrav-
ing, it is the size—and not the shape—of each lozenge or cross-hatched
element which is crucial for perceptual re-assembly of each element into a
picture. These effects are known to be neural and not optical.80 Blake
would have dealt with the challenges posed by this in a pragmatic way,
something which clearly benefitted from the skills he learned and devel-
oped over a lifetime. While such perceptual challenges are not pathologi-
cally disruptive, line engraving clearly placed on its practitioners’ extra
burdens on visual acuity, manual dexterity and motor co-ordination.
It is not proposed that Blake’s planographic-prints-induced visual dis-
tortion or hallucination (although the prints themselves may contain evi-
dence of his cognitive responses to visual hallucination). For example, The
Song of Los (1795) plates 1, 2, 5 and 8 are printed by a planographic
method and The Book of Los (1795) plates 1–3 and 5 were printed from
their surfaces with only light etching for the outlines. Of course, all of
these works fall into the category of Blake’s mid-1790s prophetic mode,
with The Book of Los having for its frontispiece (plate 1) a depiction of,
Eno, a female prophetic character uttering her prophecy. There are
acknowledged difficulties of measuring neural responses to tonal qualities
in paintings.81 Noticeably, although Purkinje would no doubt have had

79
Heinrich Klüver, ‘One of these form-constants, for example, is always referred to by
terms such as grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard design,’ Mescal and
Mechanisms of Hallucinations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) p. 22. Klüver’s
italics.
80
Denis G. Pelli, ‘Close Encounters—An Artist Shows that Size Affects Shape,’ Science
285 (1999) pp. 844–846.
81
Andrew J. Parker, ‘Revealing Rembrandt,’ Frontiers in Neuroscience 8 (2014): 76.
PMC. Web. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2014.00076. Accessed 29 June 2015.
170 D. WORRALL

access to mezzotint engravings or other tonal types, he did not use them
for his experiments. No adequate methodology seems to exist, to date,
which might be employed for this type of analysis of the tonal properties
of prints. Current inquiries into painting and visual perception treat edges
and contours (usually discriminated into ‘soft’ or ‘hard’) as factors mobi-
lizing degrees of learned aesthetic response but the engraved or etched
lines of prints do not yet seem to have been considered.82
The ‘dots & lozenges’ techniques of eighteenth-century printmakers
produced thousands and thousands of edges (eight per lozenge, com-
prised of the inside and outside of each line), each of which the eye per-
ceives, compares to a ground and compiles into an image. The matrices of
parallel lines also offer quantifiable sets of thickness and frequency.
Hatching and cross-hatching have been proposed as possible determinants
for methods of face recognition in transposing freehand sketches into leg-
ible systems but, so far, without examining qualities such as line frequen-
cy.83 The extraction and analysis of lines and angles in images (principally
digitized) has also been proposed as projecting defined correlates with
human emotions but, again, without any consideration of the medium or
support (e.g. paper, canvas, etc.) in the case of non-digital imagery.84 This
is odd because the neural fundamentals of object recognition are under-
stood and can be calibrated.85 Potentially, the lines and edges of prints
produced by conventional etching and engraving afford excellent oppor-
tunities for understanding the neural role of edges and contours in visual
perception.
Finally, it may be asked whether any other contemporary commercial
engravers or printmakers experienced hallucinations?
The answer is that at least one of them did. This was the London
copper-­plate printer, William Bryan, the friend of the poet—and eventual
82
Gerald C. Cupchik, Oshin Vartanian, Adrian Crawley and David J. Mikulis, ‘Viewing
artworks: Contributions of cognitive control and perceptual facilitation to aesthetic experi-
ence,’ Brain and Cognition 70 (2009) pp. 84–91.
83
Mingjin Zhang, Jie Li, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao, ‘Recognition of facial sketch styles,’
Neurocomputing 149 (2015) pp. 1188–1197. Their Fig. 5 seems to use examples of hatching
and cross-hatching drawn from engraving although the commentary is confined to freehand
sketching.
84
Xin Lu, Poonam Suryanarayan, Reginald B. Adams, Jr., Jia Li, Michelle G. Newman and
James Z. Wang, `On Shape and the Computability of Emotions,’ Proceedings of the ACM
Multimedia Conference, pp. 229–238, Nara, Japan, ACM, October 2012.
85
Maximilian Riesenhuber and Tomaso Poggio, ‘Hierarchical models of object recogni-
tion in cortex,’ Nature Neuroscience 2 (1999) pp 1019–1025.
 5 THE INDUCTION OF KLÜVER VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 171

Poet Laureate—Robert Southey.86 Bryan has been referred to in the

Introduction and Chap. 3 on account of his proximity to Blake as another
person working in London’s printmaking trade, c. 1790, who shared an
affinity with the religious doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg, someone
whose visual and auditory hallucinations are well recorded. Although
Bryan seems not to have produced or issued prints in his own name, as a
commercial copper-plate printer he would have had some engraving skills,
certainly sufficient to effect small repairs or to level distorted plates he was
printing from (a typical use for Blake’s trope of ‘the Hammer of Los’).
From premises in Dorset Street, Marylebone, in the mid-1790s he was a
testifying follower of the prophet, Richard Brothers (self-styled ‘Prince of
the Hebrews’). He also seems to have had earlier links to a Swedenborgian
society in Avignon, France (although he later wrote a manuscript disavow-
ing Swedenborg). Emanuel Swedenborg, of course, was a significant fig-
ure for Blake, mentioned several times in The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell (1789–90) and referenced as a ‘visionary’ in A Descriptive Catalogue
(1809) as the inspiration for his (untraced) Spiritual Preceptor painting in
the accompanying exhibition (E 546).
Bryan’s accounts mainly evidence mixed modality visual and verbal
auditory hallucination. For example, he had one of these hallucinations
while walking on the road between Marlborough and Devizes in 1794:
‘the night was dark, there being no moon, and overcast so that no stars
could be seen, an astonishing light surrounded me, so that I could see in
a circle of about an acre all things round me, as if in the day time, I heard
a voice pronounce, in a very awful tone, the following words: “Woe to the
city of Bristol! the cry of innocent blood is against it: it shall be shaken, and
fall.”’ Bryan’s vision, in keeping with contemporary abolitionist senti-
ment, was politically inflected in being a declaration against what he knew
to be Bristol’s ‘traffic in slaves.’87
However, an earlier hallucination of a less clear type occurred when
Bryan was printing at his press: ‘The 23d of the month called January,
1789, in the morning, having made all things ready for my work, which
was then copper-plate printing, I found a stop in my mind to go on with
86
David Worrall, ‘William Bryan, Another Anti-Swedenborgian Visionary Engraver of
1789,’ Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 34 (2000) pp 14–22. See also, the Collected Letters
of Robert Southey project, https://romantic-circles.org/editions/southey_prophecy/
HTML/people. Accessed 18/10/2021.
87
William Bryan, A Testimony of the Spirit of Truth, Concerning Richard Brothers
(1795) pp 5–6.
172 D. WORRALL

it. Waiting a little, I took some paper to wet for another plate, but found
the same stop: then I perceived that it was of the Lord.’88 Whatever the
sensation of the presence (‘a stop’) Bryan experienced, dampening the
paper to prevent it tearing was a crucial stage in the printing process. That
he seems to have been about ‘to wet’ the paper ‘for another plate,’ implies
he would have recently given the new plate a final inspection. It was evi-
dently at this point of close contact Bryan had his vision. There were many
potential inducers for the visual hallucinations Blake experienced. On bal-
ance, it seems likely that he would have experienced most of them at one
time or another.

88
William Bryan, A Testimony of the Spirit of Truth, Concerning Richard Brothers
(1795) p 21.
 CHAPTER 6

Blake’s Synaesthesia

Introduction to Synaesthesia
There is another significant hallucinatory type which can be associated
with Blake: synaesthesia, the subject of intense research development over
the last 10 or 20 years.1 The word derives from the Greek roots syn, mean-
ing together, and aisthesis, meaning perception. As one foundational
introduction remarks, there is no one-size-fits-all type of synaesthesia.2
The first medically recognized description of synaesthesia appeared in a
doctoral thesis written in Latin in 1812 by Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs
(1786–1814).3 Blake is extremely unlikely to have been aware of it.

1
A good starting point is Julia Simner, ‘Defining Synaesthesia,’ British Journal of Psychology
103 (2012) pp. 1–15. There is an ongoing debate about whether the percepts of synaesthesia
can be classed as hallucinations, see Sagiv, N., Ilbeigi, A., & Ben-Tal, O. Reflections on syn-
aesthesia, perception, and cognition. Intellectica, 55 (2011) pp. 81–94. For a useful intro-
duction to synaesthesia and literary studies (but restricted to its implications for acts of
reading), see Rubery, Matthew. ‘The Confessions of a Synesthetic Reader’. Configurations,
vol. 28, no. 3, 2020, pp. 333–358.
2
Edward M. Hubbard, V.S. Ramachandran, ‘Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Synesthesia,’
Neuron, 48 (2005) pp. 509–520.
3
Jörg Jewanski, Sean A. Day & Jamie Ward, ‘A Colorful Albino: The First Documented
Case of Synaesthesia, by Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs in 1812,’ Journal of the History of the
Neurosciences, 18:3 (2009) pp. 293–303. Jewanski, Day and Ward’s article provides the first
English translation of the relevant parts of the thesis.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 173

Switzerland AG 2024
D. Worrall, William Blake’s Visions, Palgrave Studies in Literature,
Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2_6
174 D. WORRALL

Synaesthesia is a condition, not a disorder. As a review of the scientific

literature puts it, ‘it is not associated with obvious brain pathology or with
general cognitive dysfunction.’4 Synaesthesia does, however, involve
anomalous perceptual experiences. One study, putting forward ‘a provoc-
ative evolutionary hypothesis for synaesthesia,’ suggests that ‘synaesthetic
experiences may serve as cognitive and perceptual anchors to aid in the
detection, processing, and retention of critical stimuli in the world,’ that
is, it may have been retained in H. sapiens as an evolutionary benefit.5 As
the implications of Blake’s several modalities of synaesthesia have a signifi-
cant influence on what follows in this chapter, it should be remembered
that the current consensus is that ‘synaesthesia is neither imagination nor
is it metaphorical thinking, instead it has a neural basis.’6 This has a huge
bearing on literary critical practice. Although beyond the scope of this
book, in any writer, but perhaps particularly poets, what looks like a strik-
ing metaphor or vivid turn of phrase may have originated in synaesthesia.
As with all of Blake’s hallucinatory types, it has a neural and not a psycho-
logical basis.
Synaesthesia can be concisely described as when one set of sensations is
perceived and experienced as another set of sensory manifestations or, to
put it another way, a cross-modality of senses, a kind of sensory cross-­
talking. Hearing or reading the word ‘Tuesday’ might be perceived as
orange, tasting of chocolate, or musicalized into snippets of Johan Strauss’
Blue Danube waltz, depending on the active cross-modality of the senses.
Synaesthesia (such as the ability to conceptualize Tuesday as orange), as
suggested above, may have developed for evolutionary reasons, particu-
larly during the development of language.7 Synaesthesia is not confined to
the visual field.

4
Jamie Ward, Jason B. Mattingley, Synaesthesia: an Overview of Contemporary Findings
and Controversies, Cortex 42 (2006) pp. 129–136.
5
Brang, David, and V S Ramachandran. ‘Survival of the synesthesia gene: why do people
hear colors and taste words?’ PLoS biology vol. 9.11 (2011): e1001205. 10.1371/journal.
pbio.1001205. Accessed 2 February 2021.
6
Nicolas Rothen, Beat Meier, Jamie Ward, Enhanced memory ability: Insights from syn-
aesthesia, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 36 (2012) pp. 1952–1963.
7
V.S. Ramachandran and E.M. Hubbard, ‘Synaesthesia: A window into perception,
thought and language,’’ Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001) pp. 3–34.
 6 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA 175

Prevalence across all types is around 4%.8 Although it should be treated

with some caution with regard to definitions, one study found 24% of
synaesthetes were involved in the ‘artistic professions’ (as against 2%
amongst non-synaesthetes).9 Another survey found a higher than average
degree of prevalence specifically amongst artists and poets.10 However, as
a more recent study cautions, while ‘there is some indication that synaes-
thesia may be associated with artistic careers and hobbies; however, this
does not provide evidence of whether synesthesia is directly linked with
enhanced creativity.’11
Taken in total, synaesthesia occurs in around 63 modalities although
the number is gradually increasing as more types are identified.12 Julia
Simner calculates that ‘88% of synaesthesiae were triggered by language
units such as graphemes, phonemes, and words.’13 That is, ‘a large number
of synaesthetic variants are triggered by linguistic symbols (i.e. words).’14
Given these circumstances, the prominence of language in the proposi-
tions made here about Blake’s synaesthesia should not be remarkable.
Although the suggestion is my own, at the least, the underlying neuro-
physiological basis for having multiple sites or phases of hallucinatory syn-
drome is consonant with Dominic H. ffytche’s neurobiological model
which stresses a hodological (connectivity emphasized) rather than topo-
logical (site emphasised) account of brain.15 Or, as ffytche puts it

8
J. Simner J, C. Mulvenna, N. Sagiv, E. Tsakanikos, S.A. Witherby and C. Fraser,et al.,
‘Synaesthesia: The prevalence of atypical cross-modal experiences,’ Perception 35 (2006)
pp.1024–1033.
9
A.N. Rich, J.L. Bradshaw, J.B. Mattingley, ‘A systematic, large-scale study of synaesthesia:
implications for the role of early experience in lexical-colour associations,’ Cognition, 98
(2005) pp. 53–84.
10
See the subsection on ‘Artists, Poets and Synaesthesia’” in V.S. Ramachandran and
E.M. Hubbard, ‘Synaesthesia: A window into perception, thought and language,’’ Journal
of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001) pp. 3–34.
11
Chun, C.A. and Hupé, J.-M., ‘Are synesthetes exceptional beyond their synesthetic asso-
ciations? A systematic comparison of creativity, personality, cognition, and mental imagery in
synesthetes and controls.’ British Journal of Psychology (2016) 107: 397–418.
12
See Sean A. Day, Synaesthesia, http://www.daysyn.com/Types-of-Syn.html
Accessed 2nd September 2015.
13
Julia Simner, ‘Defining Synaesthesia,’ British Journal of Psychology 103 (2012) pp. 1–15.
14
Julia Simner, ‘Beyond perception: synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon,’
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11 (2007) pp. 23–29.
15
Dominic H. ffytche, ‘The hodology of hallucinations,’ Cortex 44 (2008) pp. 1067–1083.
176 D. WORRALL

elsewhere, there is evidence of ‘co-localization of perceptual and non-­

perceptual activity within individual cortical areas.’16
The impact of following the traces of synaesthesia in Blake’s work is far
reaching but it is not possible to know whether he experienced it as a per-
sistent or as an intermittent condition. Its probable beginnings may date
from c. 1788 to c. 1789, coinciding with the start of the major works in
illuminated printing. For the first time, it is possible to be reasonably con-
fident that something very much like one specific type of synaesthesia,
Grapheme Colour Synaesthesia (GCS) was the source for significant epi-
sodes of creativity in Blake’s “London,” a poem included in his relief-­
etched Songs of Experience (1794), and one of the better known poems of
the British Romantic period. However, for the reasons outlined below, the
traces of Blake’s synaesthesia cannot be reliably dated before 1819 when
he was c. 62 years of age when there occurs good evidence of another,
different, type of synaesthesia, Ordinal Linguistic Personification (OLP)
synaesthesia linked to the so-called Visionary Heads series of drawings, c.
1819–1825. Yet another type, ‘Ticker-Tape’ synaesthesia (TTS), seems to
have been (unwittingly) recorded by Crabb Robinson in conversation
with Blake in February 1826. The current state of the research is such that
TTS may itself be a variant of Sequence Space Synaesthesia (SSS) which
was identified in the late nineteenth century. One study has suggested that
TTS may have a prevalence as high as 7% although another puts it as
nearer 3.3%.17 There is also plausible evidence of a variant approximating
to Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia (MTS), revealed in the same conversation
with Crabb Robinson. While the evidence for a c. 1788–1789 onset of
GCS is quantitatively slight, the cumulative examples of widely separated
episodes, and multiple modalities, of synaesthesia by c. 1825 are signifi-
cant.18 Many of these types can be directly linked to examples of Blake’s
artistic and poetic output.

16
Dominic H ffytche, ‘Neural codes for conscious vision,’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6
(2002) pp. 493–495.
17
Chun CA, Hupé JM. ‘Mirror-touch and ticker tape experiences in synesthesia.’ Front
Psychol. 2013 Nov 7;4:776. 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00776; Silje Holm, Thomas Eilertsen &
Mark C. Price (2015) ‘How uncommon is tickertaping? Prevalence and characteristics of
seeing the words you hear,’ Cognitive Neuroscience, 6: 2–3, pp. 89–99.
18
Jörg Jewanski, Sean A. Day & Jamie Ward (2009) ‘A Colorful Albino: The First
Documented Case of Synaesthesia, by Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs in 1812,’ Journal of the
History of the Neurosciences, 18:3, 293–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647040802431946.
Accessed 15 February 2021.
 6 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA 177

Synaesthesia has two important subsets. Associator mode is where the

concurrent sense (that Tuesday is coloured orange, for example) is per-
ceived within the mind (through the so-called mind’s eye). The second
modality, however, Projector mode, is where the concurrent sense (the
colour orange) is perceived as if it is beyond the confines of the body, in a
location in adjacent space. Many of Blake’s synaesthesia experiences, or at
least those which are the easiest to identify, appear to have been in Projector
mode, exemplified most clearly in the multiple OLP events which trig-
gered the historical figures he drew for The Visionary Heads. However, in
the fictional examples given here by way of explanation, the common trig-
gering event would be hearing or reading words or even parts of words.
Graphemes, whether heard or written, are amongst the more common
triggers of synaesthesia. GCS is where a set of graphemes (for example, the
grapheme letters of ‘Tuesday’) elicits a cross-modal photism of a colour
(for example, orange) within the visual field. In a variation which may be
of particular significance for painters, some synaesthetes experience GCS
in Projector mode, projected outside of the body and perceived within the
visual field. A graphic illustration of this modality, originally mocked-up
for a BBC television Horizon programme, is included in an article by Julia
Simner.19 Not least, there is evidence that some GCS Projector mode syn-
aesthetes perceive the concurrent colour more intensely than those having
GCS in Associator mode.20 GCS has a prevalence of about 1%-2% in the
general population.21 A debate continues about whether synaesthesia’s
cross-modalities of perception are specific to that condition or are faculties
generally distributed across the population, including non-synaesthetes.22
Given what Palmer reports about Blake thinking his ‘visions’ were facul-
ties which ‘can be cultivated,’ it may be that he thought his synaesthesia,
like the other ‘visions’ he experienced, was universally distributed across
H. sapiens.23

19
Julia Simner, ‘Beyond perception: synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon,’
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11 (2007) pp. 23–29, Fig. 1.
20
Dixon, M.J., Smilek, D. & Merikle, P.M. ‘Not all synaesthetes are created equal:
Projector versus associator synaesthetes.’ Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 4,
335–343 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.4.3.335. Accessed 18 February 2021.
21
J. Simner, et al., ‘Synaesthesia: the prevalence of atypical cross-modal experiences,’
Perception 35 (2006), pp. 1024–1033.
22
Ophelia Deroy, Charles Spence, ‘Lessons of synaesthesia for consciousness: Learning
from the exception, rather than the general,’ Neuropsychologia, 88 (2016) pp. 49–57.
23
BR(2): p. 321.
178 D. WORRALL

Perhaps the most significant early indicator that Blake was thinking
about the senses in an unconventional fashion occurs in the illuminated
book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789–1790), when he referred
to the ‘enlarged & numerous senses’ of ‘the ancient Poets’ (E 38). As a
description, this is not a bad approximation for a condition which lacked
workable definitions until the 1880s.24 At the very least, it indicates he was
thinking of the senses as extending beyond the usual five. Interestingly, Sir
Francis Galton, who was investigating synaesthesia-like phenomena in the
early 1880s, mainly on the basis of what would become Sequence-Space
Synaesthesia (SSS), divided people up into ‘seers’ and ‘non-seers’ and pre-
sciently noted the ‘automatic character’ of their perceiving cross-modal
perceptions.25 Synaesthesia may even have been something Thomas Wright
of Olney had learned about by 1923, since in Blake for Babes, the little girl
Hazel is told, ‘You yourself have the sixth sense in a small way.’26 Galton’s
surveys had included evidence gathered from schoolchildren and he
quickly realized ‘from inquiries made for me at schools that young people
see forms more commonly than adults, but that their forms are less devel-
oped and sure. I conclude that where they are vivid and serviceable they
are much used, and insensibly grow in vividness … Otherwise they decay
from disuse and become forgotten.’27 The characteristics that Galton,
Wright, and Blake—more intuitively—found in children helps make him a
particularly valuable historical example to study because his episodes of
synaesthesia, fragmented though they are, stretch across a working life-
time and occur across several types.
The evidence presented here suggests Blake’s synaesthesia occurred in
at least three different modalities between the years 1789 and 1826. This
plurality is not especially problematic. As one study puts it, ‘many people
experience more than one form of synaesthesia, often across multiple sen-
sory modalities.’28 The first of the variants Blake experienced is Ordinal

24
Jewanski, Jörg et al. “The evolution of the concept of synesthesia in the nineteenth cen-
tury as revealed through the history of its name.” Journal of the history of the neurosciences vol.
29.3 (2020): 259–285.
25
Galton F. Visualised numerals. Nature 21 (543 (1880) pp. 494–95.
26
Thomas Wright, Key to Blake. Blake for Babes. A popular illustrated Introduction to the
Works of William Blake (Olney, Bucks: Thomas Wright, 1923) p. 14.
27
Galton F. Visualised numerals. Nature 21 (543 (1880) pp. 494–95.
28
Mary Jane Spiller, Clare N. Jonas, Julia Simner, Ashok Jansari,’ Beyond visual imagery:
How modality-specific is enhanced mental imagery in synesthesia?, Consciousness and
Cognition, 31 (2015) pp. 73–85.
 6 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA 179

Linguistic Personification (OLP) synaesthesia whose incidence in his work

can be dated as early as 1789 with an extended recurrence by 1819, most
spectacularly in the series of drawings known as the Visionary Heads.29 In
OLP, sequences of graphemes, either as numbers, single letters or embed-
ded in words (written or spoken) trigger percepts with attributes of per-
sonification. For example, synaesthetes might think the number 8 is quiet,
9 is angry, 10 is shy. Incidentally, the graphemes triggering synaesthesia
hold good for partially representational languages such as Chinese and can
also manifest to individuals as colours or as musical sounds (all part of
synaesthesia’s c. 63 modalities).30
A particularly important concept in grapheme-activated synaesthesia,
however, is that numbers are usually perceived as number forms, and let-
ters as letter forms. The shape of the number or letter seems to be one of
the things that initially triggers synaesthesia (although meaning and famil-
iarity with their meanings leads to rapid qualification and assimilation).
Perhaps understandably, on account of their ease of recognition, number
forms were the first to be discovered as a trigger of synaesthesia.31 OLP
sequences in grapheme form trigger 82% of synaesthesiae overall.32
On the balance of evidence, the second type of synaesthesia Blake is
most likely to have experienced is Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia (GCS),
most clearly evidenced in ‘London,’ written in 1794, one of Blake’s better-­
known poems. Analogous to OLP, where grapheme units trigger personi-
fications, in GCS grapheme forms trigger colours. Finally, as the third
category of synaesthesia Blake experienced, a record by Crabb Robinson
written in 1826 suggests Blake experienced Ticker-Tape (TTS) synaesthe-
sia, a less well-researched form where concurrent graphemes are perceived
in Projector mode, outside of the body, as if displayed on a nineteenth-­
century telegraphic ticker-tape machine (invented 1863). As a further

29
First defined in, Julia Simner, Emma Holenstein; Ordinal Linguistic Personification as a
Variant of Synesthesia. J Cogn Neurosci 2007; 19 (4): 694–703.
30
See Sean A. Day, Synaesthesia, http://www.daysyn.com/Types-of-Syn.html. Accessed 2nd
September 2015.
31
Noam Sagiv, Julia Simner, James Collins, Brian Butterworth, Jamie Ward, What is the
relationship between synaesthesia and visuo-spatial number forms?, Cognition, 101 (2006)
pp. 114–128.
32
Julia Simner, ‘Beyond perception: synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon,’
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11 (2007), pp. 23–29; J. Simner and E. Holenstein, ‘Ordinal
linguistic personification as a variant of synaesthesia,’ Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19
(2007) pp. 694–703.
180 D. WORRALL

complication for how we might understand Blake’s synaesthesia condi-

tions, OLP and GCS are also known to interact with one another, creating
the kind of unpredictability of percept perhaps encountered most obvi-
ously in the Visionary Heads.33 For the purposes of clarity of exposition,
Blake’s GCS will be discussed first.

Grapheme-colour Synaesthesia
The first indication of Blake’s likely experiences of synaesthesia occurred
early in his career, probably no later than his tiny, experimental, illumi-
nated book in relief-etching with colour printing, There is No Natural
Religion (Series b, 1788). In that work, Blake declared that man, ‘per-
cieves more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover’ (E 2). This appear
to be the first hint that he was thinking of the senses (as well as perception)
in formats not restricted to their five normal manifestations. There is No
Natural Religion was a kind of experimental platform, its pages not much
bigger than a large postage stamp and considerably smaller than a post-
card, both in terms of the etching and colour-printing techniques it
deployed but he also used it as a vehicle for exploring his own conceptual
advances. This little syllogistic tract, in its Series b formation, seems to
have developed as a contrarious reply to his earlier version of this book,
which stated that ‘From a perception of only 3 senses or 3 elements none
could deduce a fourth or fifth’ (Series a, E 2). The idea of perceiving
‘more than sense … can discover,’ and the hypothesis that there might be
more than five senses (since if we only had three how could we know there
might be five?) appears to cluster around a unique set of personal circum-
stances in his life. In the illuminated books c. 1788–1795 the role of the
senses and of perception were subjects he returned to frequently. These
developments occurred while he struggled with the challenges of giving
care to his brother, Robert, who died in February 1787, followed by a
personally significant post-bereavement hallucination of his deceased sib-
ling. Simultaneously, in his professional capacity as an artist, he was devel-
oping the relief-etching method, a process which required greater
proficiency in mirror-writing and increased adaptation to its perceptual
challenges. At what age Blake’s synaesthesia began is not known. A

33
J. Simner, E.M. Hubbard, Variants of synesthesia interact in cognitive tasks: Evidence for
implicit associations and late connectivity in cross-talk theories, Neuroscience, 143 (2006)
pp. 805–814.
 6 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA 181

neonatal disposition for synaesthesia could even place its origins in his
babyhood.34 For the first time it is possible to be confident that more than
one type of synaesthesia was at the origins of significant aspects of his
creativity.
Since the term ‘synaesthesia’ is often used somewhat loosely in popular
discourse, it is worth describing its phenomenology as understood today.
As mentioned above, the kind of cross-modality of the senses exhibited in
synaesthesia (such as the ability to conceptualize Tuesday as orange) may
have developed for evolutionary reasons. For our ancestors, hearing rus-
tling leaves behind them as they walked through a dark forest at night, and
rapidly associating those sounds with a big cat predator they could not see,
are probably quite a good evolutionary pay-off for visualizing or thinking
‘tiger.’ However, it may also be genetically inherited, although certain
environmental factors are known to influence its development.35
Inconsistent clinical thresholds for defining and diagnosing synaesthesia
may mean that both its prevalence and its number of variants are still not
fully understood.36 The possibility of synaesthesia having neurobiological
origins (through what has been described as ‘neurological hyper-­
association’) is only now beginning to challenge an earlier ‘merging of the
senses’ psychological model.37 One investigation into the neuroanatomy
of synaesthetes found an increased cortical thickness in the V4 area of the
brain, the area involved in colour perception.38 Thus far, the precise role

34
Baron-Cohen, S. (1996). Is there a normal phase of synaesthesia in development? Psyche
[online serial] 2(27); https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.54
6.9108&rep=rep1&type=pdf Accessed 13/11/2021.
35
J.E. Asher, J.A. Lamb, D. Brocklebank, J.B. Cazier, E. Maestrini, L. Addis, M. Sen,
S. Baron-Cohen, A.P. Monaco, ‘Whole-genome scan and fine-mapping linkage study of
auditory-visual synesthesia reveals evidence of linkage to chromosomes 2q24, 5q33, 6p12,
and 12p12,’ American Journal of Human Genetics 84 (2009) pp.279–285; Nathan Witthoft
and Jonathan Winawer, ‘Synesthetic Colors Determined by Having Colored Refrigerator
Magnets in Childhood,‘ Cortex 42 (2006) pp. 175–183.
36
Julia Simner, ‘Defining Synaesthesia,’ British Journal of Psychology 103 (2012) pp. 1–15.
37
R.E. Cytowic, Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses (Springer-Verlag, 2002).
38
Jäncke, L., Beeli, G., Eulig, C. and Hänggi, J. (2009), The neuroanatomy of grapheme–
color synesthesia. European Journal of Neuroscience, 29: 1287–1293. https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2009.06673.x. Accessed 25 February 2021.
182 D. WORRALL

and balance between genetic, environmental and neurological determi-

nants in synaesthesia has not been established.39
At a more general level, what is known about Blake’s life and social
interactions fits broadly into several of the more common personality traits
of synaesthetes. Although this type of research is loosely indicative of cer-
tain characteristics rather than defining their presence with certainty, one
study specifically refers to a higher incidence of synaesthesia amongst art-
ists, ‘As predicted from previous studies suggesting an artistic inclination,
synaesthetes were found to score higher on Openness to Experience. They
also scored higher on a measure of Fantasizing which can be construed as
conceptually related to Openness to Experience and perhaps also to fac-
tors such as mental imagery which are also self-reported as being more
vivid in synaesthetes.’40 The category, ‘artistic’ was not defined in this
study and the best that may be said is that what we know about Blake does
not seem to markedly differ from these characteristics. An important
research note in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society has called attention to several significant limitations in recent syn-
aesthesia research, not least the scarcity of synaesthetes able and willing to
offer themselves up for analysis.41 Since synaesthesia is not a disorder,
many people never bother to consult a physician. It is not socially prob-
lematic or dysfunctional to see Tuesday as orange. As with research on
hallucinations, robust experimental procedures have been developed to
eliminate inconsistent subjective responses.42
Blake’s poetry and visual art have been associated with synaesthesia
before. As a general primer, Robert F. Gleckner’s 1965 essay on ‘Blake
and the Senses,’ while only fleetingly referring to synaesthesia, remains

39
Julia Simner, ‘Defining Synaesthesia,’ British Journal of Psychology 103 (2012) pp. 1–15.
See also two responses to Simner’s paper, D.M. Eagleman, ‘Synaesthesia in its protean
guises,’ British Journal of Psychology 103 (2012) pp. 16–19 and R. Cohen Kadosh and
D.B. Terhune, ‘Redefining synaesthesia?’ British Journal of Psychology 103 (2012) pp. 20–23.
40
Michael J. Banissy, Henning Holle, Josephine Cassell, Lucy Annett, Elias Tsakanikos,
Vincent Walsh, Mary Jane Spiller, Jamie Ward, ‘Personality traits in people with synaesthesia:
Do synaesthetes have an atypical personality profile? Personality and Individual Differences,
54 (2013) pages 828–831.
41
Mankin JL. ‘Deepening understanding of language through synaesthesia: a call to
reform and expand.’ Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 374 (2019): 20180350. https://doi.
org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0350.
42
For an excellent setting out of the challenges and a description of some of the experi-
ments, see Rich, Anina N., and Jason B. Mattingley. “Anomalous Perception in Synaesthesia:
A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3 (2002) pp. 43–52.
 6 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA 183

valuable for appreciating the sheer extent and variety of his poetic and
philosophical tropes on the subject.43 However, interest in Blake’s possible
synaesthesia dates back much earlier in the century. In an article on
‘Literary Synaesthesia’ published in 1912, June E. Downey devised a rudi-
mentary experiment for identifying synaesthesia in the work of several
post-1800 poets by testing the subjective reactions of people in a sample
group. She commented of Blake that ‘He has … an odd way of describing
things heard in terms of things seen.’44 Although not mentioned by
Downey, seemingly casually adopted, anthropomorphic, synaesthesia-like
imagery lies scattered throughout Blake’s poetry. In 1793 Blake appropri-
ated a contemporary legitimate mode of ‘Prophecy’ (also practised by
Bryan and Gott, amongst others) and allied it with a grammar of ‘visions’
validated by Biblical terminologies, all part of an informal cloak for his
political radicalism as Britain moved into war with France. That is, verbal
imagery partly prompted by the mixed modalities of synaesthesia became
part of a sophisticated, almost covert, rhetorical strategy intended to cope
with a difficult political moment. In the illuminated book America a
Prophecy (1793), which incorporates a narrative of prophetic ‘visions’
including ones seen by George III (‘The King of England looking west-
ward trembles at the vision’), there are references to ‘angry shores’ and
‘lustful fires’ (E 53, 54, 56). ‘Lustful fires’ is a commonplace derivation
from sexual desire’s association with heat but making ‘shores’ ‘angry’ is
rather less obvious. Although not direct evidence of synaesthesia, such
examples demonstrate Blake’s general tendency to personify what, in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he had described as ‘sensible objects’ and
which were the occasion for the much more precise statement, discussed
below (E 38). While such poetic tropes are not confined to Blake, these
examples may be indicative of susceptibility because he went on to develop
synaesthesia in much more distinctive forms.
Synaesthesia has been recognized more recently in Blake’s art and
poetry. In 1977, although apparently using a generalized definition of the
condition culled from the OED, W.J.T. Mitchell wrote of ‘Blake’s concern
with testing the limits of sensory experience in painting, and particularly
with the phenomenon of synaesthesia,’ linking it to a type of ‘representa-
tional ambiguity’ in the extreme linearity of his pictorial forms (which

43
Robert F. Gleckner, “Blake and the Senses.” Studies in Romanticism 5 (1965) pp. 1–15.
44
June E. Downey, ‘Literary Synaesthesia,’ The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods 9 (1912) pp. 490–498.
184 D. WORRALL

were often based on the intaglio lines produced by etching and engraving,
the basis of his craftsmanship).45 Writing a year later, he unambiguously
identified, ‘Blake’s “synaesthetic” pictorial style.’46 Downey and Mitchell’s
lack of specificity about synaesthesia, multiple types of which are now
known, although helpful in a general sense, have unfortunately not stood
the test of time and the rapid acceleration of collaborative, survey based,
research in the early twenty-first century.
Many literary students and critics will be familiar with one of Blake’s
most vivid phrases from ‘London,’ in Songs of Experience (1794), which
declares that ‘The hapless soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls’
(E 26–27).47 In short, the soldier’s ‘sigh,’ a sound on the borders of artic-
ulation as a word, becomes cross-modally projected as red (‘blood’) run-
ning ‘down Palace walls.’ Again, as one study reminds us, ‘synaesthesia is
neither imagination nor is it metaphorical thinking, instead it has a neural
basis.’48 Blake’s anti-war, anti-urban alienation, anti-marriage poem seems
to be an historically early record (perhaps the first) of cross-modal GCS in
Projector mode. Although defining the boundaries between grapheme
synaesthesia and literary metaphor is beyond the scope of the present
study, it looks likely GCS, in Projector mode, was experienced by Blake in
the early 1790s.
Before examining “London” in greater detail, it is important to estab-
lish the status of graphemes, written and spoken. As far as the triggers of
Blake’s verbal auditory modes of synaesthesia are concerned (and this
holds true for all types discussed here), there is no appreciable difference
between words written and words spoken. In GCS the concurrent word
colour is triggered by graphemes within the lexical structure of the word

45
W.J.T. Mitchell, “Style as Epistemology: Blake and the Movement toward Abstraction in
Romantic Art.” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977) pp. 145–64.
46
W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1978) p. 74. On Blake’s synaesthesia, see my Chap. 7.
47
The key lines are:

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
(E26-27)

48
Nicolas Rothen, Beat Meier, Jamie Ward, Enhanced memory ability: Insights from syn-
aesthesia, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 36 (2012) pp. 1952–1963.
 6 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA 185

just accessed. To be absolutely precise, the written word is processed faster

than the spoken word but the difference is scarcely measurable to anyone
engaged in the process of writing whether with a quill pen or with a word
processor. This is because the lexical content of the grapheme has to be
accessed first in order to determine what colour is intended to be desig-
nated as the percept. Of course, when measured with scientific accuracy, as
Simner et al., put it, ‘Slower colour naming occurs for spoken versus writ-
ten stimuli, as we might expect from the additional requirement of graph-
eme conversion in the former.’49 This has important implications for the
understanding of Blake’s synaesthesia because, although the Visionary
Heads series (discussed in Chap. 7), were triggered by OLP in verbal audi-
tory modes, when he was writing poetry he would not have been func-
tionally aware of the difference in speed of processing between written and
spoken words. If, as is suggested here, graphemes triggered his synaesthe-
sia, there would not have been any measurable delay or difference that he
would have been aware of between graphemes heard or graphemes writ-
ten. This means that when he amended poems, as is it known he did with
‘London,’ his first draft would have had the same weighting as far as its
propensity to trigger his GCS as it would if he had heard (or spoken) the
draft wording. The differences of processing are below the threshold of
being functionally meaningful for a person writing a poem or anything
else in grapheme form.
The “London” poem is perhaps the clinching example, but only one of
several. However, it highlights a problem current in research about syn-
aesthesia that the shapes presented by synaesthesia, the photisms, are not
often discussed. In the example given earlier about Tuesday, the descrip-
tion is limited to naming a colour, not the shape of that colour. There are
limitations in the current research because it has not investigated how
differences in shape (of letters in graphemes), or multiple colours within
percepts, or the textures or even tastes of the percepts induced might alter
experimental results.50 Attempts to draw the shapes of photisms are rare
although some representations of them appear to resemble Klüver-type

49
Julia Simner, Louise Glover, Alice Mowat, Linguistic Determinants of Word Colouring
in Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia, Cortex, 42 (2006) pp. 281–289.
50
Mankin JL. ‘Deepening understanding of language through synaesthesia: a call to
reform and expand.’ Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 374 (2019): 20180350. https://doi.
org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0350.
186 D. WORRALL

shapes.51 It is entirely plausible that the photisms of synaesthesia are the

auras or ‘visions’ experienced by Blake (Galton called his synaesthete cor-
respondents ‘seers’). They are hallucinatory in the sense that they do not
have an immediately verifiable external existence although their presence
can be determined by experimental method. The operational preference
for most research studies of GCS is to employ sophisticated colour charts
which can be calibrated against coloured graphemes. The methodology
for calibration was still under development in the early 2010s.52 However,
at least one experiment found that photisms consisting of geometric
shapes of different colours, shapes and textures occur in determinable—
and varied—spatial locations whether perceived within the ‘mind’s eye’ in
Associator mode or outside the body, in Projector mode.53 These varied
spatial locations may be sufficient to have given Blake a sense of their dis-
connection from his body and visual field, the stand alone ‘visions’ he
claimed he saw. These current constraints on the experimental basis of
synaesthesia, quite naturally, limit the ways in which Blake’s visual art and
poetics can be understood with respect to this condition.
Red is commonly synonymous with ‘blood’ but the social and political
specificity of ‘Palace walls,’ together with its prospective movement (the
‘blood’ ‘runs’), is less easy to understand until it is known that similar let-
ter shapes (that is, graphemes with dimension) provoke similar synaes-
thetic colours. That is, similar colours tend to group around similar letter
shapes.54 One important take-away is that grapheme shape influences syn-
aesthetic colour. There are also further considerations for understanding
the impact of grapheme shape. In a study based on Japanese script,

51
Mills, Carol Bergfeld, et al. “‘Seeing Things in My Head’: A Synesthete’s Images for
Music and Notes.” Perception, vol. 32, no. 11, Nov. 2003, pp. 1359–1376.
52
Nicolas Rothen, Anil K. Seth, Christoph Witzel, Jamie Ward, ‘Diagnosing synaesthesia
with online colour pickers: Maximising sensitivity and specificity, Journal of Neuroscience
Methods, 215 (2013) pp. 156–160.
53
Rocco Chiou, Marleen Stelter, Anina N. Rich, ‘Beyond colour perception: Auditory–
visual synaesthesia induces experiences of geometric objects in specific locations,’ Cortex, 49
(2013) pp. 1750–1763.
54
David Brang, Romke Rouw, V.S. Ramachandran, Seana Coulson, Similarly shaped let-
ters evoke similar colors in grapheme–color synesthesia, Neuropsychologia, 49:5 (2011)
pp. 1355–1358.
 6 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA 187

linguistic grapheme familiarity also influenced colour response.55 Or to

put it another way, Blake’s image in “London” of red ‘blood’ (whatever
shade that was) running down ‘Palace walls’ (in response to hearing a
‘soldiers sigh’) was also the outcome of his psycholinguistic maturity. In
the case of “London,” this is doubly fascinating because of a sigh’s border-
line status as a word. What one knows about Blake’s pacificism and anti-­
monarchism during the first full year of war with France is enough to
suggest that he might have had a reactive response to soldiers going to war
and, aged 37, would also have had a mature response to graphemes
describing soldiers or armies. Indeed, experiments have shown that graph-
eme meaning, a function of linguistic maturity, is also a determinant of the
colour of synaesthetic photisms. To put this more comprehensively as to
what happens in the poem, the grapheme ordinals of a ‘sigh’ directly trig-
gered a ‘blood’ red photism which Blake perceived as running ‘down pal-
ace walls’ through an episode of GCS in Projector mode, a reaction
influenced by the degree of his maturity in understanding language, even
when articulated in its linguistically ambiguous configuration of a ‘sigh.’56
That the ‘sigh’ was endowed with movement (‘…the hapless Soldiers sigh
/ Runs in blood …’), one of the many profound metaphorical transitions
in the poem, may be a quality of another variant of synaesthesia, the so-­
called Ticker Tape Synaesthesia (TTS), an incident of which he described
to Crabb Robinson in 1825 and which is discussed in detail in Chap. 8
(my italics).
There is one further implication about Blake’s synaesthesia which can
be derived from the ‘sigh.’ In GCS, the positions of stressed syllables in
words are differentially salient, ‘words are coloured incrementally by a
process of competition between constituent graphemes, in which stressed
graphemes and word-initial graphemes are disproportionately weighted.’
There is some evidence that initial syllables have greater weight than those
at the end of a word, and vowels have more salience than consonants,
while other studies have concluded that syllable stress is a key factor but

55
Asano, Michiko et al. “Synaesthetic colour associations for Japanese Kanji characters:
from the perspective of grapheme learning.” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of
London. Series B, Biological sciences vol. 374.1787 (2019): 20180349. 10.1098/
rstb.2018.0349.
56
Mike J. Dixon, Daniel Smilek, Patricia L. Duffy, Mark P. Zanna, Philip M. Merikle, The
Role of Meaning in Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia, Cortex, 42: 2 (2006) pp. 243–252.
188 D. WORRALL

that this derives from conceptual meaning.57 This is consistent with the
Japanese study referred to above, which concluded that perceptual colour
is affected by word meaning.58 In “London,” ‘sigh’ would have been
coloured differently if the word used instead had been the evenly stress
weighted word ‘screams’ and different again if it had been, ‘moans,’ with
its heavy initial vowel syllable. Beyond those individual differences, the
colour of all three words would have been affected by the degree of their
common meaning to him in describing varieties of distress or suffering.
The most important point to notice in “London” for understanding
the role of GCS is that the visual percept of the ‘sigh’ which ‘Runs in
blood down Palace walls,’ as with Klüver patterns from V1, is that the hal-
lucinatory experience was endowed with a degree of Blake’s cognitive
capacity. Photisms of all types emanate from areas of the cortex principally
involving either V1 or, in the case of synaesthesia, with a greater involve-
ment of V4. They have neural correlates. Uncovering the cognitive
involvement of synaesthesia, deepens one’s sense of its place in his creativ-
ity. As far as understanding his poetics is concerned, Blake’s synaesthetic
imagery seems at times to become almost automatically reflexive, a deploy-
ment of an automaticity discussed further below but a feature of synaes-
thesia noticed by Galton as early as 1880.59 However, it is also important
to realize how rapidly Blake’s hierarchized synaesthetic linguistic clusters.
Quite typically, buried away in the lengthy unfinished manuscript of The
Four Zoas, within a description of Albion (a mythical surrogate for Britain),
occurs the phrase, ‘listen to my Vision’ (E 328). To ‘listen’ to a ‘Vision’ is
not only noticeably synaesthetic but, within Blake’s philosophy, placed as
a specially chosen metaphor for narrating a faculty (‘Vision’) he valued
particularly highly. At the least, such linguistic privileging or prioritizing
seems to be consistent with the ordinal sequencing known to act as trig-
gers of synaesthesia.
The high cultural and aesthetic value Blake placed upon his ‘visions’ led
to some of his most creative poetic tropes. In “London,” Blake’s synaes-
thetic responses may suggest a clustering of imagery drawn from GCS
although, to be clear, it is sometimes difficult to be sure where unusually

57
Julia Simner, Louise Glover, Alice Mowat, Linguistic Determinants of Word Colouring
in Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia, Cortex, 42 (2006) pp. 281–289.
58
Julia Simner, Louise Glover and Alice Mowat, ‘Linguistic Determinants of Word
Colouring in Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia,’ Cortex 42 (2006) pp. 281–289.
59
Galton F. Visualised numerals. Nature 21 (543) (1880) pp. 494–95.
 6 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA 189

inventive literary metaphorical connections border on images drawn from

his synaesthesia. The immediately previous lines, ‘How the Chimney-­
sweepers cry / Every blackning Church appalls,’ may also suggest a GCS
in Projector mode, transferring its modality from the grapheme of ‘cry’ to
the colouring of a ‘blackning Church.’ Buried in a comment on the role
of institutionalized religion, this is another high value metaphor express-
ing Blake’s distinctive radical social views about a corrupted church. In
this example, the meaning of the grapheme (it is normal for ‘Chimney-­
sweepers’ to be blackened by soot), may trigger the colour of the ‘black-
ning Church,’ what Blake might call a ‘sensible object’ not directly
connected to the sweep. This is consonant with the contribution of lin-
guistic maturity mentioned above but also consistent with what is known
about automaticity of responses in GSC. Not only does ‘viewing graph-
emes automatically trigger … photisms,’ deploying cognitive strategies to
ignore or rebalance subjective responses to the synaesthesia trigger (in this
case, ‘cry’) works less efficiently than using the connection between the
trigger and the photism to optimize recognition of the photism (in this
case, ‘blackning’).60 That is, instead of ignoring or not registering the ‘cry’
or the ‘sigh,’ Blake follows the direction of the projected synaesthesia per-
cept. Of course, Blake may very well have found a different cognitive route
to connecting the chimney sweeper’s ‘cry’ with a ‘blackning Church,’ one
based on cultural, political or religious influences during his processes of
creativity, but the automaticity of a GCS response, since it is consistent
with the very next line of the poem, suggests a continuity of cognitive
processes based on synaesthesia sufficient to explain this particular poetic
outcome in “London.”
It is also possible to differentiate between ‘cry’ and ‘sigh.’ Both words
can mean more than one thing (‘cry’ may mean liquid tears or a shout;
‘sigh’ might be pain or pleasurable passion) and their situational context
within the poem multiplies this ambiguity, but it is also known that graph-
eme ambiguity triggers different colours according to grapheme clarity.
For example, ‘cry’ and (the less ambiguous) ‘sob’—a word he might have
thought of using—would trigger different colours in GCS.61
60
Arielle M. Levy, Mike J. Dixon, Sherif Soliman, ‘Isolating automatic photism generation
from strategic photism use in grapheme-colour synaesthesia,’ Consciousness and Cognition,
56 (2017) pp. 165–177.
61
Kathleen M. Myles, Mike J. Dixon, Daniel Smilek, Philip M. Merikle, Seeing double:
The role of meaning in alphanumeric-colour synaesthesia, Brain and Cognition, 53 (2003)
pp. 342–345.
190 D. WORRALL

As has been referred to above, there are plenty of indications, c.

1788–1789, that Blake was developing his own functional theory of per-
ception to mediate both his personal experience of post-bereavement hal-
lucinations and his development of relief-etching for the specialist
illuminated books. These were the media he chose to use to express his
increasingly recondite ideologies, providing a personal space for him to
react quickly to the momentous social and political conditions of Britain
at the beginning of the 1790s. The relief-etched poem and design,
“London” from Songs of Experience, one of his most significant achieve-
ments from this first phase of the illuminated books, was one of the places
where the aftermath of a post-bereavement hallucination, mirror-writing
and synaesthesia met.
All the illuminated books produced, c. 1788–1795, contain some kind
of commentary on the senses. Indeed, it may be the only feature they have
in common. In order of production, they are, All Religions are One, There
is No Natural Religion, The Book of Thel, Songs of Innocence, The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America a Prophecy,
Songs of Experience, Europe a Prophecy, The Book of Urizen, The Book of Los,
Ahania and The Song of Los. Even the intaglio etched, For Children: The
Gates of Paradise (1793), in its 1818 expanded version, For the Sexes: The
Gates of Paradise, added a significant new caption to one of the emblems,
‘The Suns Light when he unfolds it / Depends on the Organ that beholds
it’ (E 259).
These represent an enormous output of titles which, although in tiny
print runs, required the production of many separate copper plates. Blake’s
broad narrative about the senses in the illuminated books is that human-
kind has moved from the ‘enlarged & numerous senses’ he referred to in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to a catastrophic diminution. In other
words, within these books, alongside other types of political and social
comment, he narrates a myth of the narrowing and occlusion of the senses.
Blake’s radically different thinking about the senses seems to begin, c.
1789, not only in The Marriage but also in The Book of Thel (1789) which
lists how all the senses deceive or restrict (e.g. ‘Why cannot the Ear be
closed to its own destruction?’), a viewpoint reiterated in Europe a Prophecy
which similarly describes how ‘Five windows light the cavern’d Man’ (E 6,
60). In Blake’s developed mythology, however, in more pessimistic mode,
whereas once endowed with ‘all flexible senses,’ people become ‘weaken’d
/ The Senses inward rush’d shrinking’ into ‘narrowing perceptions’ (E
71, 82).
 6 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA 191

What is perhaps most impressive is the scale and scope of Blake’s narra-
tives about the senses, their taking on of epic proportions. It approaches
what might be termed a sublime of synaesthesia. According to him, at
some indeterminate time in the deep past, the senses underwent a cata-
strophic ‘narrowing’ of vast, mythological and geopolitical proportions:

                when the five senses whelm’d

In deluge o’er the earth-born man; then turn’d the fluxile eyes
Into two stationary orbs, concentrating all things.
The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens
Were bended downward; and the nostrils golden gates shut
Turn’d outward, barr’d and petrify’d against the infinite (E 63)

The outcome of this collapse (implicitly exhibited in cycles of political

repression and revolution) created an enormous conceptual and rhetorical
distance from the idealized states of being described in the syllogisms of
There is No Natural Religion where ‘Mans perceptions are not bounded
by organs of perception. he percieves more than sense (tho’ ever so acute)
can discover.’ This looking both forward and backward becomes a habit-
ual strategy across these books. Even in Visions of the Daughters of Albion,
a work demonstrably to do with ‘visions,’ Oothoon, its chief female pro-
tagonist, is represented as having been cheated of her original sensual—in
this work, sexual—freedom by false morality, ‘They told me that I had five
senses to inclose me up’ (E 47). In The Song of Los, this coercive strategy
is systematized even further, ‘Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was com-
plete’ (E 67). By contrast, The Marriage of Hell and Hell, produced before
the outbreak of war, had talked of how the ‘ancient Poets,’ long ago, had
‘enlarged and numerous senses:’ ‘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 perceive[sic]’ (E
38). As so often, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell makes the boldest and
least compromised statements about his beliefs. The key phrase is that
‘The ancient Poets animated’ inanimate objects (‘woods, rivers, moun-
tains’ etc.), giving them new ‘names’ and the attributes of ‘Gods or
Geniuses.’ In this case, Blake seems to have been describing Ordinal
Linguistic Personification (OLP) synaesthesia, the subject of the next
chapter.
 CHAPTER 7

Blake’s Synaesthesia, The Visionary Heads

Blake’s synaesthesia, although it cannot be traced as a continuous feature

of his life, reappeared spectacularly in the late 1810s when his visual art
offers a rare opportunity to study not only the nature of his synaesthetic
percepts but also the immediate context of their recurrence when, for the
first time, he had a group of supportive friends who left documentary
records of their encounters with him. The Visionary Heads, a sequence of
pencil portraits (and one tempera) produced, c. 1819–1825, were the
outcome of Ordinal Linguistic Personification Synaesthesia (OLP).1 In
short, the distinctive appearances of the historical figures he drew in the
Visionary Heads were the products of the synaesthesia events that pro-
voked them. OLP is a modality not classified until 2006 as ‘the involun-
tary association of animate qualities such as gender/personality to
linguistic units such as letters/numbers/days.’2 That is, the reading or
auditing of graphemes (words, parts of words, vowels, consonants etc.)
trigger synaesthetic concurrent personifications, sometimes with elements
of personality. Mary Whiton Calkins was amongst the first to identify the

1
For synaesthesia and some late nineteenth- and twentieth-century painters, see Amy
Ione, ‘Neurology, Synaesthesia, and Painting,’ International Review of Neurobiology,
Academic Press, 74 (2006) pp 69–78.
2
J. Simner, E.M. Hubbard, ‘Variants of synesthesia interact in cognitive tasks: Evidence for
implicit associations and late connectivity in cross-talk theories,’ Neuroscience, 143 (2006)
pp 805–814.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 193

Switzerland AG 2024
D. Worrall, William Blake’s Visions, Palgrave Studies in Literature,
Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2_7
194 D. WORRALL

principal characteristics of OLP when she gathered over five hundred

respondents from her students at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in the
early 1890s. One of them reported, for example, ‘“Q is odd and stands by
himself as rather an eccentric middle-aged man. R is like a maiden lady, an
advisory friend of S, a young, handsome girl. T is the devoted admirer of
S.”’3 That is, this type of synaesthesia triggers personifications in response
to graphemes, in some cases even bordering on personality. In this par-
ticular response, one can discern elements of cultural and historically
marked predispositions influencing responses to grapheme shapes, even
suggesting elements of personality; ‘Q is odd,’ ‘R is … a maiden lady,’ ‘S
[is a] young … girl.’
While there is stronger evidence for Blake’s OLP, c. 1819, when he
began the Visionary Heads series, than for its incidence, c. 1789, in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it is consistent with his hallucinatory types
that it was recurrent, even if intermittently, across most of his lifetime.
Blake claimed to others that his ‘visions’ started c. 1766 and he supplied
his own unequivocal testimony that they recommenced no later than 1800
when he wrote to Thomas Butts enclosing his ‘Vision of Light’ poem (in
fact, the ‘Scheerer’s phenomena,’ discussed in Chap. 2). In OLP graph-
emes trigger personifications that synaesthetes attribute with the physical
and (often) the personality characteristics of people (tall, short, loud,
quiet, extrovert, shy etc.). Mary Whiton Calkins also recorded a number
of what she called ‘dramatizations’ (interacting personifications triggered
by numbers) as early as 1892/1893.4 However, Calkins’ research in the
1890s notwithstanding, there remains a barely acknowledged lacuna
between OLP concurrents produced as ‘personifications’ and OLP con-
currents produced as ‘personalities’ (personalities are capable of articula-
tion, personifications are lists of types) although, in practice, they are
currently treated as undifferentiated.5 To add to these complications
(although it is actually a simplification of the nuances to assist

3
Calkins, Mary Whiton. ‘A Statistical Study of Pseudo-Chromesthesia and of Mental-
Forms.’ The American Journal of Psychology, 5 (1893) pp. 439–64.
4
Mary Whiton Calkins, ‘A Statistical Study of Pseudo-Chromesthesia and of Mental
Forms,’ American Journal of Psychology 5 (1893) pp 439–64; Jewanski, Jörg; Simner, Julia;
Day, Sean; Rothen, Nicolas; Ward, Jamie. ‘The “golden age” of synesthesia inquiry in the
late nineteenth century (1876–1895).’ Journal of the History of the Neurosciences. 29
(2019) pp. 1–28.
5
On this lacuna, see Simner, J., Gärtner, O. and Taylor, M.D. (2011), ‘Cross-modal per-
sonality attributions in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes.’ Journal of Neuropsychology, 5: pp.
283–301. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-6653.2011.02009.x. Accessed 5 March 2021.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 195

understanding), it should be remembered that (as discussed in Chap. 6),

when Blake was engaged in processes of writing or drawing, there was no
functional difference between words written and words spoken as far as
triggering his OLP was concerned.
The first indications of Blake’s OLP begin no later than c. 1789. In The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789–1790) Blake wrote that ‘The ancient
Poets’ ‘animated’ ‘sensible objects’ (including ‘woods, rivers, mountains’),
and gave them the not only the names of ‘Gods or Geniuses’ but ‘the
properties’ of those ‘objects.’ All this they were able to ‘percieve’ through
their ‘enlarged & numerous senses’ (E 38). Modern studies of OLP have
identified people who similarly personify inanimate objects, including
items such as pieces of furniture.6 Blake’s use of the word ‘animated’ is
particularly apt for describing this process of personification. In a poten-
tially important development for how these different sorts of hallucinatory
types might be connected, there is some evidence of cortical links between
synaesthesia and migraine aura (including responses to pattern glare,
sometimes a trigger of migraine).7 Although the evidence for OLP in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell is sketchy, if correct, it fits into a much larger
context where Blake is working through his philosophical position about
perception in There is No Natural Religion, c. 1788, which argued that
man ‘percieves more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover,’ a
formulation seeming to include the agency of ‘enlarged & numerous
senses’ (E 2). As referred to in the previous chapter, he repeatedly returned
to narrating an extended myth of the universal decline or narrowing of the
senses in the illuminated books composed c. 1788–1795.
Perhaps on account of their avowedly secular content and the critical
assumption that they arose from dubious semi-astrological seances orga-
nized by the astrologer and watercolourist, John Varley (1778–1842),
despite their individuality, the Visionary Heads have received relatively

6
Daniel Smilek, Kelly A. Malcolmson, Jonathan S. A. Carriere, Meghan Eller, Donna
Kwan and Michael Reynolds, ‘When “3” is a Jerk and “E” is a King: Personifying inanimate
Objects in Synesthesia,’ Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19 (2007) pp. 981–992.
7
Elliot D. Freeman, ‘Hearing what you see: Distinct excitatory and disinhibitory mecha-
nisms contribute to visually-evoked auditory sensations,’ Cortex 131 (2020) pp. 66–78.
196 D. WORRALL

little critical attention.8 Morton D. Paley’s observation that they are indic-
ative of his ‘imaginative sportiveness’ in late life is probably a fair summary
of critical engagement with them although the complexity of the prove-
nance of their corpus has attracted excellent biographical, bibliographical
or other documentary scholarship (including by Paley himself).9 Or, as the
late G.E. Bentley Jr. summarized the circumstances of their creation, criti-
cal discussion tends to be centred on ‘Blake’s sanity [and] deal anxiously
or dismissively with the Visionary Heads.’10
The best evidence for Blake’s OLP, which mainly derives from the
Visionary Heads, supports a date of onset no later than c. 1819 and
implies that it continued until 1825. They were a series of drawings done
by Blake, c. 1819–25, and were often sketched by him in the company
of witnesses. It is fortunate that, because they originate from Blake’s
later life, he had by then gathered around him a small set of friends,
advocates and otherwise interested parties, so that their circumstances of
composition are fairly well documented. They almost certainly evidence
OLP perhaps in combination with sequence-personality synaesthesia.11

8
Butlin: 692–768. The Small Blake-Varley Sketchbook is dispersed but the contents are
detailed in Butlin’s 1981 catalogue raisonné. The Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook was rediscov-
ered in 1989 and, therefore, is not in Butlin. Its contents were reproduced in the auction sale
catalogue, Christie’s London The Larger Blake-Varley Sketchbook (London, 21 March 1989)
(London: Christie, Manson & Woods Ltd, 1989). See also, Anne K. Mellor, ‘Physiognomy,
Phrenology, and Blake’s Visionary Heads,’ Essick, Robert N., Pearce, Donald Ross (eds.),
Blake in His Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978) pp 53–74; G. Ingli James,
‘Some Not-So-Familiar Visionary Heads,’ Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 12 (1979) pp.,
244–49; G.E. Bentley, ‘Blake’s Murderesses: Visionary Heads of Wickedness,’ Huntington
Library Quarterly 72 (2009) pp. 69–105; Morton D. Paley, The Traveller in the Evening: The
Last Works of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) pp 300–304; Butlin,
Martin. “Blake, Linnell and Varley and A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy.” Burning
Bright: Essays in Honour of David Bindman, edited by Diana Dethloff et al., UCL Press,
2015, pp. 126–35; Sibylle Erle, ‘From Vampire to Apollo: William Blake’s Ghosts of the
Flea, c. 1819–1820,’ Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly (eds.) Beastly Blake
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) pp 225–252.
9
Morton D. Paley, The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003) p 304.
10
G.E. Bentley Jr., ‘Blake’s Visionary Heads: Lost Drawings and a Lost Book,’ (ed.) Tim
Fulford, Romanticism and Millenarianism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) pp 183–206,
cited p 183.
11
For discussions including the preferred usages of these terms see, J. Simner and
E. Holenstein, ‘Ordinal linguistic personification as a variant of synaesthesia,’ Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience, 19 (2007) pp. 694–703; Julia Simner, Oliver Gärtner and Michelle
D. Taylor, ‘Cross-modal personality attributions in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes,’
Journal of Neuropsychology, 5 (2011) pp. 283–301.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 197

That is, Blake’s Visionary Heads were synaesthetic percepts triggered by

graphemes (vocalized or written) which prompted him to automatically
assign them with both human and social characteristics. Perhaps the best
foundational indicator of OLP’s prevalence is that, according to one
study, 65% of synaesthetes attributed both a gender and a personality to
graphemes.12
The Visionary Heads portraits can be assigned to date ranges encom-
passing 14, 27, 29 October 1819, 18 September 1820 and c. 1821–1825.13
There were three sketch-books, one of them extant only in fragmentary
form. Of these, one sketchbook did not come to light until 1989 and so
could not be included in Butlin’s 1981 catalogue raisonné.14 In all, there
seem to have been approximately 130 different subject portrait sketches
although not all have been traced. It is on account of their extremely var-
ied, often esoteric, range of historical portrait subjects, together with their
obviously prolific rate of invention, that OLP is suggested here as a major
originator of his creativity with respect to this series.
Although many of the drawings are now loose from their sketchbooks
and dispersed, the sets of drawings are known as The Small Blake-Varley
Sketchbook, The Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook and the fragmentary, largely
untraced, Folio Blake-Varley Sketchbook, amounting to over one hundred
drawings in all. While sketches associated with the latter volume have been
identified, Varley and Linnell also made several counterproofs from the
originals. John Varley’s counterproofs (probably using a reproductive
method based on mechanically assisted tracings over Blake’s outlines) are
sometimes difficult to distinguish from the original drawings themselves
(as are some replicas of the sketches, probably made by Linnell). Typical
portrait types include ‘Caractacus,’ ‘Milton’s first wife,’ ‘Harrold killd at
the Battle of Hastings,’ ‘Charlemagne,’ ‘Miss Blandy who poisoned her
father,’ ‘Catherine Hayes Burnt for the Murder of her Husband’ and
Mahomet. Varley also drew up his own ‘List of Portraits Drawn by
W. Blake from Visions which appeared to him & Remained while he com-
pleted them.’15 On account of Varley’s interest in astrology, sometimes the
exact time and circumstances of their drawing are recorded. For example,
that of ‘Richard Coeur De Lion’ is inscribed by Varley, ‘Rd. Coeur de Lion.

12
Amin, Maina, et al. ‘Understanding Grapheme Personification: A Social Synaesthesia?’
Journal of Neuropsychology, 5 (2011), pp. 255–282.
13
For the physical details, see BR(2): pp 346–357.
14
An alphabetical list, including those still untraced, is provided in BR(2): pp 357–63.
15
BR(2): p 350.
198 D. WORRALL

Drawn from his spectre … WBlake fecit Octr. 14 1819 at 14 Past

12-Midnight.’16 That some may have been drawn in a cluster of sessions is
indicated by a similar session included in The Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook,
‘Cassibelane the British Chief,’ recorded as ‘By Blake Octr. 27 1819 11 P
M.’17 Most seem to have been done at Varley’s instigation, often late at
night, and all can be dated to Blake’s late life.
The general circumstances of their composition are well understood
because, unusually, they were composed during a series of séance-like ses-
sions mainly at the request of John Varley. Varley was fairly punctilious in
recording them, noting that a set of 38 of these drawings (although not
certainly all) began at a session ‘Wednesday 29 / Tuesday Oct 29th 1819
Night.’18 These sessions were sometimes also attended by Blake’s friend
and patron, John Linnell, as well as other, unidentified, persons who
formed part of their artistic and friendship circle. One of those possibly
present was Frederick Tatham, an early biographer of Blake who had met
him no later than 12 June 1824 when he received an inscribed copy of A
Descriptive Catalogue ‘from the Author.’19 Tatham, who acquired three
different pencil versions of the Last Judgment after Blake’s death, received
two Visionary Heads directly from his widow, Catherine. Tatham wrote on
the back of one of them, ‘the first sketch of his celebrated last judgment &
2 others[sic] sketches from personages as they appeared to him. in Vision.
Blake asserted that he saw these people in vision & he sketched from what
he saw in Vision. F. Tatham.’ Although it is not clear which pictures are
referenced in Tatham’s remarks, if he did not attend any of the sessions
himself in person, they were vouched by Catherine as being ‘what he saw
in Vision.’20 There are sufficient third-party witnesses or contemporary
records extant to provide a reliable picture of what went on, including
notes made by Varley and Linnell inscribed directly onto the drawings.
The subjects of the portraits are mainly drawn from British history or

16
Butlin: 729.
17
BR(2): p. 348.
18
BR(2): p 352, see Bentley’s footnote on exact dates which notes that ‘29th October
1819,’ may have been Tuesday, 19 October 1819.
19
BR(2): p 396.
20
Butlin: 643. Tatham sold this and two other versions of the Last Judgment, Nos. 644
and 646 or 647, at Sotheby’s, 29 April 1862. The ‘2 others[sic] sketches’ may possibly refer
to two of the four Visionary Heads Tatham is known to have owned, see Butlin: 756, 758,
759, 764.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 199

literary culture, occasionally from the Bible, but more often typified by
secular worthies and warriors (of both sexes) fairly well recorded in con-
temporary history books. However, when it surfaced in 1989 the Large
Blake-Varley Sketchbook rather surprisingly revealed some now very obscure
figures from British popular history, including notorious criminals from
the early part of the eighteenth century. Most of the Visionary Heads are
pencil sketches except for one, The Ghost of a Flea, now in Tate Britain,
perhaps the most famous, executed in tempera heightened with gold on a
mahogany support.21 This latter seems to be the ‘small panel’ referred to
in Allan Cunningham’s account (see below).
OLP was not firmly assigned as a category of synaesthesia until the
work of Julia Simner and E.M. Hubbard in 2006.22 As they note, however,
relevant cases histories can be found much earlier. Examples were col-
lected at least as far back as Mary Whiton Calkins’ research of 1893. As
mentioned above, at least one of Calkins’ respondents reported an associa-
tion of personalities linked to letters of the alphabet, ‘K seems like a young
woman, a friend of L, which seems like a daughter to M. N seems to be a
sort of maiden aunt, sister to M. O is a young man connected to M as a
nephew. He connects M and N with P, an older friend of his.’23 That is,
the graphemes of the alphabet become animated with different personality
types based on their sociability with one another. Not only are these more
complex than personifications, they were also attributed with explicit
social relationships, most obviously connections of friendship and kinship.
Calkins’ studies are important not only on account of being amongst the
earliest records of synaesthesia but also because of the way her respondents
assigned quite complex—and implicitly historic—social relations between
letters which are themselves animated (‘N. seems to be a sort of maiden
aunt, sister to M.’). Calkins, in possibly the first journal article to use syn-
aesthesia in the title, even reported ‘The elaborate dramatization of letters,

21
Butlin: 750.
22
J. Simner and E.M. Hubbard, ‘Variants of synaesthesia interact in cognitive tasks: evi-
dence for implicit associations and late connectivity in cross-talk theories,’ Neuroscience, 143
(2006), pp. 805–814.
23
Mary Whiton Calkins, ‘A Statistical Study of Pseudo-Chromesthesia and of Mental
Forms, American Journal of Psychology 5 (1893) pp 439–64. These attributions also some-
times applied to inanimate objects such as furniture, Daniel Smilek, Kelly A. Malcolmson,
Jonathan S. A. Carriere, Meghan Eller, Donna Kwan and Michael Reynolds, ‘When “3” is a
Jerk and “E” is a King: Personifying inanimate Objects in Synesthesia,’ Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience 19 (2007) pp 981–992.
200 D. WORRALL

numerals and musical notes, by which they are endowed with physical and
psychical characteristics, so that they often become actors in entire little
dramas among themselves.’24 Two of Blake’s Visionary Heads, for exam-
ple, were of ‘Edward the First’ and ‘Sir William Wallace,’ titles of rank
attached with active social meanings within specific types of nations politi-
cally organized as monarchies and aristocracies. Like the ‘maiden lady’
referred to above reported by another of Calkins’ sample subjects, the
respondent who determined one of her percepts to be a ‘maiden aunt’ was
also designating them with a precise, highly gendered, cultural construc-
tion of social relativity extracted from an experience of synaesthesia. In
modern countries retaining monarchies, Blake’s kings and knights might
even be viewed as rather less culturally circumscribed than the gendered
and sexually specific, ‘maiden aunt’ and ‘maiden lady’ reported by Calkins.
Aligning synaesthesia with the specific historical or social relationships
implied by their phenomenal modalities does not yet appear to have been
much researched. Nevertheless, Julia Simner, Oliver Gärtner and Michelle
D. Taylor conclude that ‘Synaesthetes tend to associate high-frequency
letters with high agreeable and low neurotic personalities, and non-­
synaesthetes share these tendencies at an implicit level.’ However, they can
also largely be charted using L.R. Goldberg’s personality trait measures
which they discuss but conclude that substantial, culturally or historically
founded personality perspectives are not covered by Goldberg’s tests (of
which religious and gendered characteristics are perhaps the most socially
significant).25 To what extent the personalities of the subjects of Blake’s
Visionary Heads (or any other images he painted), can be correlated with
letter frequency is beyond the scope of this study.
Simner, Gärtner and Taylor caution that the number of personality-­
synaesthete variables is already formidable. The principal analytical frame-
work they establish is that of sequence-personality synaesthesia. That is,
the sequenced order of the triggering units is paramount in precipitating
the percept (rather than any holistic designation to which they have been

24
Calkins, Mary Whiton. ‘Synaesthesia.’ The American Journal of Psychology
(1895) pp. 90–107.
25
L.R. Goldberg, ‘An Alternative “Description of Personality”: The Big-Five factor struc-
ture,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990) pp 1216–1229; ‘The
Development of Markers for the Big-Five factor structure,’ Psychological Assessment 4 (1992)
pp. 26–42; Julia Simner, Oliver Gärtner and Michelle D. Taylor, ‘Cross-modal personality
attributions in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes,’ Journal of Neuropsychology, 5 (2011)
pp. 283–301.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 201

assigned, e.g. gender or race). This fits with the case history of Blake’s
Visionary Heads because the evidence suggests his responses were trig-
gered by personal pronouns, sometimes accompanied by some designa-
tion of their social role, and that these were conveyed to him—most
probably—in spoken form. One study noted that 29% of their sample of
synaesthesia subjects reported no difference in the strength and frequency
of personifications when responding to written rather than spoken texts. A
very small proportion (6%) thought spoken triggers stronger than written
(rather than no difference).26 Although beyond the scope of the present
study, coloured hearing (perceiving spoken words in colours) has also
been recognized as a modality of synaesthesia.27
The significance of the surviving testimonies about Blake’s Visionary
Heads is that they refer to a series of convivial and conversational meetings
held late at night. As will be described, Blake was often specifically
requested by his friends, chiefly John Varley, to call them up in response to
verbal requests. According to Varley’s notes, the sessions produced a ‘List
of Portraits Drawn by W. Blake from Visions which appeared to him &
remained while he compleated them.’28 For example, one of them is
inscribed, ‘Head of Achilles drawn by Willm Blake at my [Varley’s] request.
1825.’29 Allan Cunningham, writing in 1830, although he may not have
attended one of the Visionary Heads soirees himself, was told by an anony-
mous friend that ‘Blake … sat with a pencil and paper drawing portraits of
those whom I most desired to see.’30 Both testimonies make it clear that
the suggestion was verbal (or written), made ‘at my request,’ and con-
sisted of named persons, that is, those ‘whom I most desired to see.’ Or,
as Linnell recorded in his memoir of the sessions, he found ‘Blake sitting
in the most attentive attitude listening to Varley.’
One of the sessions may be illustrated in a drawing by John Linnell,
now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, which shows Blake apparently listening
to an animated John Varley, both seated at a table at Linnell’s premises at

26
Amin, M., Olu-Lafe, O., Claessen, L. E., Sobczak-Edmans, M., Ward, J., Williams,
A. L. and Sagiv, N., ‘Understanding grapheme personification: A social synaesthesia?’ Journal
of Neuropsychology, 5 (2011) pp. 255–282.
27
Baron-Cohen, Simon, et al. ‘Coloured Speech Perception: Is Synaesthesia What Happens
When Modularity Breaks Down?’ Perception, 2 (1993), pp. 419–426.
28
BR(2): p 350.
29
Butlin: 707.
30
BR(2): p 649.
202 D. WORRALL

Fig. 7.1 John Linnell, William Blake in conversation with John Varley,
c.1821–26, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Cirencester Place, London, in September 1821 (Fig. 7.1).31 The one

referred to above, captioned by Varley ‘Head of Achilles drawn by Willm
Blake at my request,’ can only mean that he asked Blake verbally to draw
this portrait. Given the convivial and informal circumstances, it seems
unlikely he wrote this request down on a piece of paper and gave it to him.
If the requests were verbally delivered, the connections between sonic
sound and visual synaesthesia are already understood. Pitch effects percep-
tion of size as well as brightness. In other words, there is a connection
between the percepts of synaesthesia and their sonic and spatial proper-
ties.32 Although unverifiable, it is plausible that the pitch or volume of

31
Object Number: PD.59-1950, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
32
Rocco Chiou, Marleen Stelter, Anina N. Rich, ‘Beyond colour perception: Auditory–
visual synaesthesia induces experiences of geometric objects in specific locations,’ Cortex 49
(2013) pp 1750–1763.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 203

their conversations or requests during these convivial evenings altered the

percepts Blake experienced. The sonic impact of synaesthesia on size, per-
haps particularly if he was in a noisy convivial environment, may have been
sufficient for Blake to have seen a figure life-size, as with Allan
Cunningham’s c. 1830 testimony that he called out, ‘“William Wallace!”
he exclaimed, “I see him now—there, there, how noble he looks—reach
me my things.”’33
An anonymous article in The Monthly Magazine of 1839 on ‘Blake’s
Poetry,’ similarly reported a typical sketching session where Blake was
asked to, ‘“’Call up, and paint the Founder of the Pyramids,” said some
one to the artist-visionary. “There he is,” replied Blake, “a stately man, in
purple robes, with a book full of golden leaves on which he sketches his
designs.”’34 Perhaps more reliably, John Linnell reported, ‘It was Varley
who excited Blake to see or fancy the portraits of historical personages—as
Edward & Wallace, David, Solomon, the man who built the pyramids &c.
&c.’ Linnell’s testimony that ‘It was Varley who excited Blake to see or
fancy the portraits of historical personages,’ supports the possibility of a
sonic dimension to Blake’s OLP (my italics). Presumably alluding to the
Fizwilliam drawing, Linnell particularly recorded that these were social,
convivial, and conversational occasions, ‘I have a sketch of the two men
[Blake and Varley] as they were seen one night in my parlour near mid-
night, Blake sitting in the most attentive attitude listening to Varley who
is holding forth vehemently with his hand raised.’35 This impression is also
corroborated by one of the later pictures (actually a tracing) inscribed,
‘The Egyptian Task Master slain by Moses,’ ‘Seen in a Vision by Wm Blake
& Drawn while the Same remained before him, My Self J. Varley being
Present. in[sic] the Front room first floor No. 3. Fountain Court near
Exeter Change.’36 In his c. 1830 memoir, Cunningham’s recollection of
the William Wallace drawing incident captures much of the dramatic
excitement of the event, once again implying its raised sonic dimensions,
‘He was requested to draw the likeness of Sir William Wallace—the eye of
Blake sparkled, for he admired heroes. “William Wallace!” he exclaimed,
“I see him now—there, there, how noble he looks—reach me my things.”’
In short, Cunningham’s recollection was of Blake ‘seeing visions at the

33
BR(2): pp 648, 652.
34
BR(2): p 366.
35
BR(2): p 368.
36
Butlin: 696A.
204 D. WORRALL

request of his friends.’37 The 1839 Monthly Magazine account, specifically

reporting a verbal request (‘“Call up, and paint the Founder of the
Pyramids”’), is also consistent with Alexander Gilchrist’s written in 1863
that ‘Varley would say, “Draw me Moses,” or David; or would call for a
likeness of Julius Caesar, Cassibellaunus, or Edward the Third, or some
other great historical personage. Blake would answer, “There he is!” and
paper and pencil being at hand, he would begin drawing, with the utmost
alacrity and composure, looking up from time to time as though he had a
real sitter before him.’38
It looks likely OLP is a variant of the GCS Blake had experienced in the
early 1790s. A contemporary of Mary Whiton Calkins, Théodore Flournoy,
author of Des phénomènes de synopsie (1893), one of the first studies of
(what later became known as) synaesthesia, reports individuals whose
OLP triggered images provoked from whole words.39 For one of his sub-
jects, ‘Bottle, for instance, invoked and still invokes the image of a large
woman, laughing, sitting on a little backed bench, with a table in front of
her, but no other suggestion of a bottle in the vision.’ Perhaps more rele-
vantly to Blake, a person widely read in the Bible and world history,
Flournoy reported that this particular subject, ‘From the first two or three
lines relative to a character [in a book] he sees him rise in his mental vision,
often very different from the description given by the author.’40 That is, a
percept is triggered in a form different from what might have been
expected. There are also other facets and nuances to personification in
synaesthesia. In examples given in Des phénomènes de synopsie, ‘“Charlotte,
says a 37-year-old lady, is too heavy, massive, doughy; Hélène is transpar-
ent like a piece of ice; Adèle is too light, thin, fragile, etc.”’41 These descrip-
tions, provided by an anonymous woman, of a synaesthetic percept are
noticeably visually evocative, ‘massive,’ ‘transparent,’ ‘light, thin.’ Calkins

37
BR(2): pp. 648, 652.
38
Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1880) 2 vols. Vol 1, p 300.
39
Anna Plassart & Rebekah C. White (2017) ‘Théodore Flournoy on synesthetic personi-
fication,’ Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 26:1, 1–14, https://doi.org/10.108
0/0964704X.2015.1077542. Accessed 2 April 2021.
40
Théodore Flournoy, ‘Strange personifications.’ Popular Science Monthly 51 (1897)
pp. 112–116.
41
Quotations from Flournoy come from an unabridged English translation provided in
Anna Plassart & Rebekah C. White (2017) ‘Théodore Flournoy on synesthetic personifica-
tion,’ Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 26:1, 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/
0964704X.2015.1077542. Accessed 2 April 2021.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 205

and Flournoy established long ago that trigger words are capable of invok-
ing photisms markedly different from their ostensible source. Their
accounts may help explain why Blake’s Visionary Heads either depart from
known portraits of their subjects or were noticeably facilitated by the
absence of portraiture.
One can go further. As mentioned above, graphemes were apparently
called out to him with some degree of excitement, ‘It was Varley who
excited Blake to see or fancy the portraits,’ calling out the names ‘of those
whom I most desired to see.’ In two of the soirees, there is even dramatic
movement between the percepts. While painting Sir William Wallace,
‘Blake stopt suddently, and said, “I cannot finish him Edward the First has
stept in between him and me.”’42 In another, ‘He[Blake] took out a large
book filled with drawings, opened it, and continued, “Observe the poetic
fervour of that face—it is Pindar as he stood a conqueror in the Olympic
games. And this lovely creature is Corinna, who conquered in poetry in
the same place. That lady is Lais, the courtesan—with the impudence
which is a part of her profession, she stept in between Blake and Corinna,
and he was obliged to paint her to get her away.”’43 This dramatization, is
consistent with the report of Calkins, who noted ‘elaborate dramatization
of letters, numerals and musical notes, by which they are endowed with
physical and psychical characteristics, so that they often become actors in
entire little dramas among themselves.’44 Frederick Tatham’s account
(which can be only circumstantially connected to the Visionary Heads
series), noted that ‘he was the companion of spirits, who taught, rebuked,
argued, & advised, with all the familiarity of personal intercourse,’ but
which enabled Blake to ‘delineate their forms & features, & to converse
upon the topic most incidental to the days of their own existence,’ a recol-
lection which suggests some degree of mini-dramatization during his
interactions with figures from history while he drew their portraits.45
Of course, similarities between the Visionary Heads and Blake’s earlier
works, or images which would have been available to him from paintings
or prints by other artists, can easily be found. The muscular figure of ‘Old
Parr when Young,’ inscribed and dated by John Varley ‘Aug[ust]
42
BR(2): p 649.
43
BR(2): p 650. The paintings are identifiable as Pindar, Corinna, Lais, Butlin: 710,
708, 712.
44
Calkins, Mary Whiton. ‘Synaesthesia.’ The American Journal of Psychology
(1895) pp. 90–107.
45
BR(2): p 673.
206 D. WORRALL

1820 W. Blake,’ may have been a recollection of one of the figures from
his, now untraced, Ancient Britons tempera, featured in the 1809 exhibi-
tion and which included ‘the Strongest Man’ as one of its figures (E
542–545).46 On the other hand, while the Visionary Head frontal portrait
view chosen for ‘Saul under the Influence of the Evil Spirit’ is difficult to
compare with the profile of Saul shown in the watercolour, The Ghost of
Samuel Appearing to Saul (c. 1800), the face is very different from the
watercolour, The Witch of Endor, Saul and the Ghost of Samuel, c.
1775–1780.47 Similarly, the Visionary Head of ‘Solomon’ (inscribed as
such by John Linnell), looks nothing like the sweet faced, delicately fea-
tured, king in his tempera, The Judgment of Solomon, c. 1799–1800.48 This
list of comparison and contrasts could be extended but there is also some-
thing else going on.
The ‘Spirit of Voltaire,’ c. 1819–1820 (certified by John Varley), with
its angular jaw looks like a younger, idealized, version of the man shown
in Blake’s tempera portrait bust of Voltaire (c. 1800–1803) commissioned
for William Hayley’s library in Felpham. As Butlin was the first to point
out, it is recognizably based on Maurice de La Tour’s portrait, c. 1731.49
This degree of conformity, or otherwise, between Blake’s earlier images
and the portraits in the Visionary Heads, does not prepare us, however, for
the verbal exchange on 18 February 1826 between Blake and Crabb
Robinson about Voltaire (discussed below), which triggered an extraordi-
nary example of Blake’s synaesthesia. Similarly, while at least one of the
two Visionary Heads of Socrates has some resemblance to an engraving in
Johann Kaspar Lavater’s 1789 English edition of Essays on Physiognomy (to
which Blake had contributed a plate of Democritus), Crabb Robinson’s
1852 write-up of a conversation with Blake he had about Socrates, c.
1825–1826, demonstrates a completely unexpected turn.50 In short, the
‘vision’ of Socrates Blake described to Crabb Robinson bears little rela-
tionship—of any kind—to the two Visionary Heads. This is because the
phenomenology of the two hallucinatory events was different even though
both seem to be related to OLP. For the drawing of the Visionary Head of
Socrates, it is known that these pictures were produced when Blake was

46
Butlin: 748. Thomas Parr (d. 1653) was alleged to have died at the age of 153.
47
Butlin: 74 recto and verso, 458, 696.
48
Butlin: 392, 700, 701, 702 (the latter is a counterproof).
49
Butlin: 343.15; 749.
50
Butlin: 713, 714.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 207

responding directly to verbal requests made by Varley, Linnell or others.

Blake’s OLP triggered a heightened or idealized memory of the plates he
saw in Lavater or elsewhere (oddly, Hayley did not commission a Socrates
for his Felpham library). Crabb Robinson’s record of their conversation
which took place in the mid-1820s precipitated a much more complex
response, based on a different kind of OLP episode.
During a discussion again probing the consistency of Blake’s testimony
about his ‘visions’ (‘This was somewhat at variance with what he had said
both this day & afterwards—implying that he copies [the del] his Visions’),
‘This led me to say [“]Socrates used pretty much the same language,’ and
from that they started onto a discussion about ‘Genius.’ Crabb Robinson
asked him, ‘Now what affinity or resemblance do you suppose was there
between the Genius which inspired Socrates and your Spirits?[“] He
smiled, and for once it seemed to me as if he had a feeling of vanity grati-
fied—[Pretty much del] [“]The same as in our countenances[;”] he paused
And said “I was Socrates[“]—And then as if he had gone too far in that—
[“] Or a sort of brother—I must have had conversations with him—So I
had with Jesus Christ[.] I have an obscure recollection of having been with
both of them[”].’51 Crabb Robinson’s question about the similarity
between ‘Socrates and your Spirits,’ followed by Blake’s unexpected but
explicit identification, because of ‘our countenances’ (Blake shared
Socrates’ allegedly snub nose), seems to have triggered an OLP personifi-
cation.52 Or, ‘“I was Socrates,”’ as he apparently blurted out. Much might
be made of this sudden confessional, ‘“I was Socrates,”’ but it is sufficient
to say that high-functioning autism has been shown to have a nearly 19%
rate of incidence in people who also have some type of synaesthesia.53
In this case, no doubt due to the social awkwardness of explaining him-
self to what he must have sensed as the already sceptical Crabb Robinson,
he deflected the OLP-induced concurrent, ‘[“] Or a sort of brother—I
must have had conversations with him …,”’ converting his association of
the percept to a personification of a sibling rather than of Socrates. The
reply, ‘“a sort of brother,”’ is itself anxiety loaded. Blake had already had

51
BR(2): pp 695–696, underlining in Bentley.
52
Blake thought this was a similarity he shared with Jesus, ‘The Vision of Christ that thou
dost see / Is my Visions Greatest Enemy / Thine has a great hook nose like thine / Mine
has a snub nose like to mine’ (E 524).
53
Baron-Cohen, S., Johnson, D., Asher, J. et al. ‘Is synaesthesia more common in autism?’
Molecular Autism 4, 40 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/2040-2392-4-40. Accessed 5
April 2021.
208 D. WORRALL

at least one post-bereavement hallucination, c. 1787–1788, of his deceased

brother, Robert, as referred to in Chap. 3. Moreover, in the more recent
past, in the relief-etched illuminated book, Milton a Poem (c. 1804–1811),
in what has been called ‘the key event of Book 1,’ there is a remarkable
full-plate design of ‘WILLIAM’ falling backwards complemented by
another plate, its exact reversed mirror image, simply labelled ‘ROBERT.’54
That is, Blake’s reply that he was ‘“a sort of brother”’ to Socrates, had a
potential personal equivalence in the post-bereavement, felt-presence, hal-
lucination of Robert, his biological brother. Admitting he thought of
Socrates as ‘a sort of brother,’ referenced a sibling relationship with a
special significance to Blake, and a sacredness he quickly elevated by his
inclusion of Christ (‘So I had with Jesus Christ’). Hence his afterthought,
‘I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them[”].’
These intricate interactions are helpful in showing how Blake’s ‘visions,’
in this case the OLP episodes triggering the Visionary Head drawings of
Socrates, produced different manifestations, but within the same modality
of synaesthesia, when he talked to Crabb Robinson about the same person
a few years later. The differences across the two OLP episodes probably
results from differences in their triggers. It may be simply that, in the case
of the drawing of the Visionary Heads of Socrates, Blake was in a more
supportive environment, possibly in the company of his friends John
Varley or John Linnell, whereas Crabb Robinson’s questioning, verging
on scepticism, might have raised his anxiety levels. Recorded OLP exam-
ples, dated as far back as Mary Whiton Calkins, demonstrate that social
relationships are often inferred from synaesthesia experiences. Revealingly,
Crabb Robinson’s teasing question about Socrates and ‘your Spirits’ elic-
ited in Blake an apparent automaticity of response typical of synaesthesia.
The range of time durations it would have taken Blake to deflect unwanted,
socially unacceptable, concurrent percepts during synaesthesia, such as ‘I
was Socrates,’ or ‘a sort of brother,’ are understood.55 Something of this
same range of complexity of response can be demonstrated in another
Visionary Head.

54
William Blake’s Illuminated Books Vol 5: Milton a Poem (eds.) R.N. Essick and J. Viscomi
(London: Tate Gallery/Princeton University Press, 1993) p 27.
55
Arielle M. Levy, Mike J. Dixon, Sherif Soliman, ‘Isolating automatic photism generation
from strategic photism use in grapheme-colour synaesthesia,’ Consciousness and Cognition,
56 (2017) pp. 165–177.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 209

An even clearer example of OLP occurs in the versions of the Visionary

Head titled (rather complicatedly) as The Portrait of a Man who instructed
Mr. Blake in Painting &c. in his Dreams or (also known as) Imagination
of a Man whom. Mr. Blake has recd. instruction in Painting &c. from[sic].
Both titles were inscribed by John Linnell onto what was a possibly
mechanically reproduced counterproof taken from an original drawing
(itself uninscribed) now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.56 Its sty-
listic relationship to (what is now known to be) a self-portrait by Blake in
pencil and wash provisionally titled, Anonymous Portrait of William Blake
(1802?) aged about 45, now in a private collection, was suggested when
the drawing first came to light when reported by Martin Butlin in the
1970s.57 With a view to establishing the Anonymous Portrait as a self-­
portrait by Blake (and not a sketch by John Linnell), Robert N. Essick
challenged the position of the ‘Portrait of a Man who Instructed Mr. Blake
in Painting’ (its more commonly abbreviated title) as a direct precursor
sketch to the much more highly finished Anonymous Portrait, but did not
otherwise account for the similarities others have found between them,
including in the opinion of Butlin.58 Tom Hayes went much further in
suggesting that the ‘Portrait of a Man who instructed Mr. Blake in
Painting’ was a kind of template for the Anonymous Portrait in a project
by Blake to produce a specifically androgynous, non-binary gendered, self-­
portrait.59 In this case, the presence of grapheme triggers is probably cen-
tral to the potential connections between the two drawings. It would be
difficult to conceive of Blake having been ‘instructed,’ or having ‘recd.
instruction in Painting,’ without some verbal exchange being involved,
not to mention the even simpler explanation that Varley, Linnell—or
someone else—just asked Blake who had taught him to paint and then to
draw him. The teasing similarities others have noticed between the
‘Portrait of a Man who Instructed Mr. Blake in Painting’ and the
Anonymous Portrait may simply be that Blake taught himself to paint or,
rather, that he considered he had learned little about it from the Royal

56
Butlin: 753, 754, 755; Martin Butlin, ‘Blake, The Varleys, and the Patent Graphic
Telescope,’ William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes (eds.) Morton D. Paley
and Michael Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) pp. 294–304. The most likely original
is Butlin: 753.
57
Martin Butlin, “A New Portrait of William Blake,” Blake Studies 7 no. 2 (1975): 101–03.
58
Robert N. Essick, ‘A (Self?) Portrait of William Blake,’ Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly,
39 (2005) pp. 126–139.
59
Hayes, Tom. ‘William Blake’s Androgynous Ego-Ideal.’ ELH 71 (2004): 141–65.
210 D. WORRALL

Academy, as his exchange with Sir Joshua Reynolds quoted above seems
to demonstrate. That is, the question triggered himself as the percept, so
that is what he drew.
There is some evidence to suggest that the mental image of an inducer
can trigger synaesthetic concurrent responses. That is, when asked to draw
the ‘Man who Instructed Mr. Blake in Painting,’ Blake’s synaesthetic
response was to picture a version of himself. As one paper puts it, ‘synaes-
thesia is linked to more vivid imagery, and that imagery abilities generalize
to stimuli not directly involved in the synaesthetic experience.’60 In this
model, because mental imagery and synaesthesia involve similar or adja-
cent cognitive pathways, there is a kind of modified self-replication of the
trigger percept. Consistent with what one paper calls ‘internally-generated
stimuli,’ something unwittingly triggering a synaesthetic concurrent pho-
tism (spoken or written GCS graphemes, for example), may account for
the Anonymous Portrait of William Blake (1802?) aged about 45, which
looks broadly similar to other portraits of Blake yet with the qualities of
idealization noticed by Hayes.61 Such a hypothesis would be consistent
with what Blake evidently led Crabb Robinson to believe, that ‘His paint-
ings are copies of what he sees in his Visions’ and would restore Blake’s
own self-portrait to having originated in one of the ‘visions’ he so val-
ued.62 Indeed, the full subtitle, ‘The … Man who instructed Mr. Blake
in … in his Dreams,’ vouched presumably first-hand from Blake by Linnell,
suggests exactly that and even suggests the supplementary hypnogogic or
hypnopompic hallucinatory states he refers to elsewhere (my italics).
If this seems strange territory, then one of the best known of the
Visionary Heads is the tempera heightened with gold on panel, The Ghost
of a Flea c. 1819–1820. A re-copied label inscription by John Varley on
the back of the picture reads, ‘The Vision of the Spirit which inhabits the
body of a Flea & which appeared to the Late Mr. Blake … The Vision
appeared to him in my presence & afterwards till he had finished this
picture.’63 Varley’s designation that this was ‘The Vision of the Spirit
which inhabits the body of a Flea,’ is a reminder that the epithet, ‘the

60
O’Dowd, Alan et al. ‘Do synaesthesia and mental imagery tap into similar cross-modal
processes?.’ Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sci-
ences vol. 374,1787 (2019): 20180359. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0359.
61
Mary Jane Spiller, Ashok S. Jansari, ‘Mental imagery and synaesthesia: Is synaesthesia
from internally-generated stimuli possible?,’ Cognition, 109 (2008) pp 143–151.
62
BR(2): p 437.
63
Butlin: 750. There two associated drawings, 692.94 and 692.98.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 211

ghost of a flea,’ only arrived with Allan Cunningham’s narrative and was
even then supplemented by its also being described as ‘a spiritualization of
the thing!’ The significance of its being ‘a spiritualization of the thing,’
discussed below, has been ignored yet today it can be seen as relevant to
OLP synaesthesia.
Cunningham’s narrative of the events surrounding the making of this
picture is confusing in some points but two artists, John Varley and per-
haps John Linnell, seem to have met to discuss the Visionary Heads ses-
sions with Blake, with one of them ‘taking out a small panel from a private
drawer.’ One (probably Varley) tells the other, ‘“It is a ghost, Sir—the
ghost of a flea—a spiritualization of the thing!” “He saw this in a vision
then,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it, Sir. I called on him one evening and
found Blake more than usually excited. He told me he had seen a wonder-
ful thing—the ghost of a flea! And did you make a drawing of him? I
inquired. No, indeed, said he, I wish I had, but I shall, if he appears again!
He looked earnestly into a corner of the room, and then said, here he
is—reach me my things—I shall keep my eye on him. There he comes! his
eager tongue whisking out of this mouth, a cup in his hand to hold blood,
and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green;—as he described him so
he drew him.”’64 According to Cunningham’s separate record, which
derived from Varley or Linnell’s testimony, they did not initiate the idea of
‘the ghost of a flea’ but they clearly followed it up with some excitement
when they were with Blake, implicitly using the word several times in what
ensued (‘did you make a drawing of him? … There he comes!’).
Cunningham’s emphasis on what Calkins was to call the ‘dramatization’ of
the scene is also matched by modern synaesthesia categories which now
include ‘personification.’
The equivocation by these first reporters around using the term ‘ghost’
is interesting. Varley wrote that the Visionary Head was a ‘Vision of the
Spirit … of a Flea,’ something that ‘inhabits’ it, while Cunningham
explained that the tempera was ‘a spiritualization of the thing.’ Such
phrases suggest they thought of it as a kind of essence or qualitative distil-
lation of the insect rather than a phantom. Uncannily, Gilchrist’s account
of the same episode (which he mainly quotes from Varley) titled the paint-
ing ‘the Ghost of a Flea or Personified Flea.’65 By the 1890s, no doubt
impelled by the publication of Gilchrist’s biography, the Personified Flea

64
BR(2): pp 650–651.
65
Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1880) 2 vols. Vol 1, p 302.
212 D. WORRALL

title had become well distributed. A January 1890 issue of the Pall Mall
Gazette, following on from a snippet of information about fleas (illustrated
by a real flea), ran a connecting item using Varley’s facsimile and giving its
readers ‘a sketch of William Blake’s “Ghost of a Flea”’ but also describing
it as ‘a Personified Flea.’66 Two years later, in provincial England, the
‘Ghost’ name had been dropped. In August 1892 the ‘Quaint and
Curious,’ section of the Essex Standard newspaper, ‘Specially Written for
the “Essex County Standard.” [By the Barber.][sic],’ included an item
headed, ‘A Personified Flea’ (‘William Blake, the artist, poet, and mystic,
whose extraordinary works of art at the National Gallery delights some
visitors and perplexes others, had a fondness for drawing visionary heads’).
Citing Varley’s account by name, the Essex Standard declared ‘One of his
visionary heads was that of a personified flea.’67 ‘The Barber’ never referred
to it as The Ghost of a Flea.
Gilchrist had recorded a version of Varley’s account of the origins of
The Ghost of a Flea, repeated from Varley’s book, Treatise on Zodiacal
Physiognomy (1828) but, because it was rare, he copied it from The Doctor
(1848), a publication edited by the poet, Robert Southey:

‘This spirit visited his (Blake’s) imagination in such a figure as he never

anticipated[,] in an insect. As I was anxious to make the most correct inves-
tigation in my power of the truth of these visions, on hearing of this spiritual
apparition of a Flea, I asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of
what he saw. He instantly said, “I see him now before me.” I therefore gave
him paper and pencil with which he drew the portrait … I felt convinced, by
this mode of proceeding, that he had a real image before him; for he left off
and began on another part of the paper to make a separate drawing of the
mouth of the Flea, which the spirit having opened, he was prevented from
proceeding with the first sketch till he had closed it. During the time occu-
pied in completing the drawing, the Flea told him that all fleas were inhab-
ited by the souls of such men as were by nature blood-thirsty to excess, and
were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects; oth-
erwise, were he himself, for instance, the size of a horse, he would depopu-
late a great portion of the country.’68

66
31 January 1890, Pall Mall Gazette, cf. Butlin: 692.98.
67
13 August 1892, Essex Standard (Colchester), punctuation as in the original.
68
Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1880) 2 vols. Vol 1 pp 303–304. See also,
Robert Southey, The Doctor (1848) p 578.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 213

While there is something tongue-in-cheek about the flea being able to

‘depopulate a great portion of the country,’ this may suggest Blake had a
degree of (comical) insight into his OLP. No one has suggested OLP
includes dysfunctional social responses. Again, the grapheme trigger of
‘Flea’ is evident in the conversation which took place. Varley relates that ‘I
asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw,’ ques-
tioning him after ‘hearing of this spiritual apparition of a Flea’ (my italics).
The absurdity, or near-absurdity, about all these exchanges being about
‘a Flea’ is also covered by the OLP condition. As mentioned above, a key
concept in synaesthesia is that numbers are actually number forms, and
letters are actually letter forms. Or, as one paper puts it, ‘typically, it is the
form of the grapheme that is crucial in triggering photisms’ (although
grapheme meaning is an ancillary to that trigger in helping determine the
percept).69 In their conversations about the flea, whoever initiated them,
the word was obviously bandied about and this was Blake’s response,
whether understood by him as the meaning of the word or just the indi-
vidual grapheme shapes of ‘Flea.’
The consequences for finding an appropriate hermeneutic for The Ghost
of a Flea is that the tempera needs to be realigned on a continuum with
Blake’s ‘vision’ of the Sun, ‘[“]I have conversed with the—Spiritual Sun—I
saw him on Primrose-hill[”],’ a triggered percept which is equally, consis-
tent with Calkins’ findings, both dramatization and personification. That
is, the picture is less of a Ghost and more like Gilchrist’s ‘Personified Flea’
or, even better, Cunningham’s ‘spiritualization of the thing.’ Mary Whiton
Calkins’ descriptions may also be preferred, that these percepts are ‘dra-
matizations’ and, indeed, the double-sided swagged curtains and floor-
boards in the Tate tempera may even suggest an actually dramatic,
theatrical, stage.
That Blake occasionally perceived personifications talking back to him
(much like the Sun on Primrose Hill, with whom Blake ‘conversed’) is not
surprising. One episode relates to his several drawings of the ‘Empress
Maud’ (also known as, Empress Matilda, 1102–1167) with Varley record-
ing, ‘the Empress Maud said rose water was in the vessel under the table ‖
Octr 29 Friday 11 PM 1819 … & said there were closets which contained

69
Mike J. Dixon, Daniel Smilek, Patricia L. Duffy, Mark P. Zanna, Philip M. Merikle, ‘The
Role of Meaning in Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia,’ Cortex, 42 (2006) pp 243–252.
214 D. WORRALL

all the conveniences for the bed chamber.’70 Another concerns the
Visionary Head of Sir Henry Percy (1364–1403), better known as
Hotspur. Varley recorded that ‘Hotspur Said[?] he was indignant to have
been killed by trusting[?] the Stars[?].’71 This switching between auditory
and visual modalities during synaesthesia events is common. The very
basis of synaesthesia lies in the very good evolutionary reasons for being
able to switch sensory modalities, rapidly prioritizing between dangers
from perceptions of things heard or dangers from perceptions of things
seen. Conductors waving their arms about (visible motion) to interpret
music (sound) for orchestral players would be an example of how unob-
trusively the legacy of concurrent auditory and visual encodings has been
absorbed by H. sapiens.72
If the OLP theory is correct, then it is plausible Blake may even have
responded to the graphemes of his own speech (which is what the double
portraits referred to above might suggest) although the evidence for this
is largely embedded in the records of his conversation with his interlocu-
tors. Of great interest with regards to stimuli is the Large Blake-Varley
Sketchbook, the volume of drawings which re-surfaced in 1989, long after
publication of the Butlin catalogue, and which have since been sold and
dispersed (largely into private collections).73 Their subjects, although not
their styles, are very different from the extant sketches in the rest of the
group. Many are of obscure historical people (e.g. ‘Felton the
assassinator[sic] of the Duke of Buckingham,’ ‘Tom Nixion the Idiot
author of the Prophecies’), including several criminals (e.g. ‘Miss Blandy
who poisoned her father,’ ‘Catherine Hayes Burnt for the Murder of her
Husband’). Fortunately, the late G.E. Bentley Jr. has a fine essay identify-
ing the subjects and comparing them, where possible, to contemporary
prints Blake might have seen.74 The characters mentioned in the reminis-
cences of Varley and Linnell, and whose portraits appear in the other
Visionary Heads sketch books, are usually either of subjects of universally
acknowledged notoriety (e.g. Satan) or, a type of notoriety accompanied

70
Presumably Blake’s tongue-in-cheek humour about chamber pots for urination,
BR(2): 367.
71
BR(2): p. 368.
72
Guttman, Sharon E., et al. ‘Hearing What the Eyes See: Auditory Encoding of Visual
Temporal Sequences.’ Psychological Science, 16 (2005), pp. 228–235.
73
BR(2:) pp 348–350.
74
Bentley, G. E. ‘Blake’s Murderesses: Visionary Heads of Wickedness.’ Huntington
Library Quarterly, 72 (2009), pp. 69–105.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 215

by some degree of nobility (e.g. Mary Queen of Scots, Pharoah). Bentley’s

conclusion about the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook drawings is that the
likes of Mary Blandy (1720–1752), who poisoned her father with arsenic,
were drawn from Blake’s knowledge of ‘the gutter press.’ Varley and
Linnell, when reporting the Visionary Heads, do not mention his criminal
subjects or the names from popular history (such as ‘Colonel Blood who
attempted to steal the Crown,’ or ‘Mother Brownrigg’). Their recorded
memories tend to be the drawings of patriotic or schoolbook type figures
(e.g. ‘Guy faux,’ i.e. Guy Fawkes of the 1605 Parliament plot).
The most striking thing about the portrait subjects in the Large Blake-­
Varley Sketchbook, as Bentley observes, is their obscurity. They were people
little known even when Blake was alive. It remains a conundrum as to how
Blake brought them to mind. One plausible answer is that his experience
of OLP was accompanied by the enhanced memory known to be associ-
ated with synaesthesia. ‘People with synaesthesia show an enhanced mem-
ory relative to demographically matched controls.’75 This may be in part
because the encoding of the percept (as a colour or a set of graphemes)
assists with calling up memories encoded in other formats. If the graph-
emes of ‘Wat Tyler’ (in the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook) initiated a per-
sonified photism, this may have suddenly activated already pre-existing
linguistically coded knowledge about the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt of
1381, enabling its easier retrieval from his memory. In this way, the OLP
can work not only as the trigger of a photism but also to activate a storage
area in a mental memory system. That is, synaesthetic percepts augment
normal memory processes, a function possibly developed as an evolution-
ary advantage (our forebears in the forest in darkest nights may have
needed to retrieve an image of a tiger very fast, as soon as they heard the
rustle of leaves). What seems certain is that synaesthesia is linked to cogni-
tive changes closely associated with memory and perception. Significantly,
there is evidence to suggest synaesthesia particularly enhances the recall of
names and nouns by visual or auditory means (but not non-language
delivery, e.g. a drawing).76 Such factors demonstrate how synaesthesia
potentially optimized Blake’s invention of the Visionary Heads series

75
Nicolas Rothen, Beat Meier, Jamie Ward, ‘Enhanced memory ability: Insights from syn-
aesthesia,’ Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 36 (2012) pp 1952–1963.
76
Carol Bergfeld Mills, Joanne Innis, Taryn Westendorf, Lauren Owsianiecki, Angela
McDonald, ‘Effect of a Synesthete’s Photisms on Name Recall,’ Cortex, 42 (2006),
pp 155–163.
216 D. WORRALL

where individual subject identities seem to have proliferated in a fashion

which is unusual by comparison to the rest of his work.
In some of the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook subjects, as with the other
Visionary Heads drawings, there is evidence that Blake conceived of several
different types of socialized relationships within his OLP percepts, consis-
tent with samples Mary Whiton Calkins recorded in 1893, such as ‘L …
like a daughter to M [and] N … a sort of maiden aunt.’77 At the moment,
research in OLP does not fully differentiate between percepts as personifi-
cations and percepts as personalities. Simner and Holstein report that one
of their respondents thought of ‘January … [female] not many friends;
introvert,’ ‘December … [male] a young guy; really, really nice; protective
over the rest; maybe a boss.’ One suggestion they put forward is that ‘per-
sonality traits may be encoded in regions [of cortex] closely associated to
those encoding linguistic knowledge.’78 It may be these features of OLP
that enabled Blake to create grouped Visionary Heads drawings such as
‘Milton when a Boy,’ ‘Milton when Young,’ ‘Milton’s Youngest Daughter’
and ‘Milton’s elder daughter,’ almost an entire family, all in the Large
Blake-Varley Sketchbook, perhaps even drawn during a single session.79
Consistent with Simner and Holstein’s theory, it is plausible that, respond-
ing to OLP events, the linguistic centrality of ‘Milton’ gave rise to the
different ages and familial relationships posited in this group with the
prompting of Blake’s interlocutors initiating different memory retrievals
acting in combination with his own artistic creativity.
In short, there are two clear elements in these accounts of the Visionary
Heads which satisfy the criteria for OLP synaesthesia as currently under-
stood. The first is that it is known Blake’s companions called out verbally
to him the names of historical figures (‘“Varley would say, “Draw me
Moses” … Blake would answer, “There he is!” and … would begin draw-
ing’). This constitutes the grapheme verbal-auditory element, in this spe-
cific example articulated around the word ‘Moses’ with its prominent long
‘o’ vowel. The second element is personification, although in this case
noticeably augmented by implicit personality characteristics since Blake
would have had an excellent working knowledge of the Biblical figure.

77
Mary Whiton Calkins, ‘A Statistical Study of Pseudo-Chromesthesia and of Mental
Forms,’ American Journal of Psychology 5 (1893) pp 439–64.
78
J. Simner and E. Holenstein, ‘Ordinal linguistic personification as a variant of synaesthe-
sia,’ Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19 (2007) pp. 694–703.
79
BR(2): p 349.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 217

While no one would argue that Blake’s original portraits, or the faces in his
figurative designs, reveal depths of personality, the Large Blake-Varley
Sketchbook occasionally tends that way. A set of drawings named by Butlin,
Various Personifications, c. 1793–4, exemplifies the difference.80 A later
hand (just possibly Blake’s), added titles to the over 30 designs on the
recto and verso crammed onto a single sheet of paper. The titles attributed
to them include, ‘Avarice,’ ‘Despair,’ and ‘Listlessness,’ over twenty in all.
These are all personifications. Christopher Heppner, who has the only
extended discussion of the set, comments that Blake was ‘developing his
own lexicon of embodied sentiments,’ but specifically not drawing on the
lexical types of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment figures ‘as close as one
might have expected.’ Indeed, Heppner estimated in this group ‘approxi-
mately thirty-five figures that seem to be Blake’s own inventions.’81 If
Butlin’s date range is correct, this would more or less coincide with Blake’s
interest in the ‘enlarged & numerous senses’ discussed in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (1789–1790) and the GCS evidenced by the 1794
“London” poem. By contrast, ‘Colonel Blood who attempted to Steal the
Crown,’ from the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook, strikes a calculating and
characterfully determined aspect, one vastly different from the profiles of
‘Mother Brownrigg,’ ‘Miss Blandy,’ ‘Pope Joan,’ ‘Cornelius Agrippa,’
‘Eloise,’ ‘Abelard’ and the ‘Countess of Essex,’ all squeezed almost over-
lapping onto another page. That is, although OLP can account for the
apparently fluent creativity of the sessions, he was also bringing to bear his
acquired skills of representation.
The extant accounts of the sessions which produced the Visionary
Heads sketchbooks present a clear picture of the plethora of stimuli excit-
ing Blake’s synaesthesia. The characteristics of Projector mode synaesthe-
sia, that percepts can occur on an axis of auditory or grapheme triggers
while also having spatial dimension, may help to explain the basic neural
or psychological components likely to have produced the Visionary Heads.
Within the late night (‘14 Past 12-Midnight’) domestic space visible in
Linnell’s Fitzwilliam drawing, there seem to have been vocal interjections
from third parties (such as ‘“’Call up, and paint the Founder of the
Pyramids,”’ as the 1839 Monthly Magazine reporter described it).82 Also,

80
Butlin: 214, recto and verso.
81
Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998) pp 47.
82
BR(2) p 366.
218 D. WORRALL

alongside spatial movement occurring within the room (in Linnell’s pic-
ture the seated Varley’s arm gesticulates wildly) there was a tendency for
Blake to visualize historical figures with vividly contrasting personalities.
It is worth examining the inferences that can be drawn from the spatial
phenomenology of one of Blake’s ‘visions.’ In Allan Cunningham’s
account of one drawing session (although not attended by him) where
Blake had seen the Scottish national leader, William Wallace (c.
1270–1305), as with the one involving Corinna and Lais, there occurs a
dramatic superimposition of one figure over another. The Wallace picture
can be reliably located to a double pencil drawing Linnell recorded in
notes for copies apparently commissioned from him by Varley: ‘October
[1819] Began a painting in oil colours of two Heads size of Life from
Drawings by W Blake of Wallace & Edward 1st for Mr. Varley.’83 According
to Cunningham’s account, which seems to re-tell this occasion, ‘He was
requested [by Varley] to draw the likeness of Sir William Wallace—the eye
of Blake sparkled, for he admired heroes. “William Wallace!” he exclaimed,
“I see him now—there, there, how noble he looks—reach me my things.”’
The sonic and spatial disposition of the session is quite explicit: Blake has
been requested, presumably verbally, to draw something using his ‘vision-
ary’ powers. Blake then saw Wallace ‘as if a living sitter had been before
him.’ There is a clear conjunction between sound (the request plus Blake’s
speech) and spatial dimension (‘as if a living sitter had been before him’).
In this account the spatial aspects are quite pronounced because the per-
cepts move and block each other: ‘Having drawn for some time, with the
same care of hand and steadiness of eye, as if a living sitter had been before
him, Blake stopt[sic] suddenly, and said, “I cannot finish him—Edward
the First has stept[sic] in between him and me.” “That’s lucky,” said his
friend, “for I want a portrait of Edward too.” Blake took another sheet of
paper, and sketched the features of Plantagenet; upon which his majesty
politely vanished, and the artist finished the head of Wallace.’ Again, con-
versations containing heavily intonated graphemes and explicit vowels
(‘Edward … First;’ ‘William Wallace’) together with the unexpected inter-
jection of Blake’s interlocutor (‘“That’s lucky … for I want a portrait of
Edward too”’) all seem to have contributed to the outcome of highly dif-
ferentiated percepts, ‘Wallace … noble and heroic … Edward stern and
bloody.’84 It may be that the more general area of Sequence Space

83
Butlin: 734.
84
BR(2): pp 648–9.
 7 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA, THE VISIONARY HEADS 219

Synaesthesia, a variant discussed further below, is relevant here but Blake’s

experiences recovered from the anecdotes surrounding his Visionary
Heads sessions are not only consistent with OLP but also with the personi-
fications, personalities and dramatizations of synaesthesia percepts first dis-
cussed by Mary Whiton Calkins in the 1890s.
For the first time, it is possible to suggest a theory for the creativity that
impelled the Visionary Heads series, making it both consistent with the
known socially convivial circumstances of their composition and the neu-
ral processes activated by his synaesthesia. In particular, Gilchrist’s
‘Personified Flea’ subtitle for the famous Ghost of a Flea tempera comes
closer than most descriptions to pinpointing the inspirational background
of one of his most enigmatic images.
 CHAPTER 8

Blake’s Synaesthesia: The Testimony

of Crabb Robinson

G.E. Bentley Jr. has written that Henry Crabb Robinson’s diaries and
notes ‘give far fuller information about Blake’s conversations than may be
found anywhere else.’ By the time he met Blake socially at a dinner given
by Eliza Aders (b.1785) on 10 December 1825, he ‘had seen the 1809
exhibition, read his Descriptive Catalogue, and written an essay about him
[in the Vaterländisches Museum, 1810].’1 His notes, taken verbatim and
apparently written down on the day, or day after, their meetings subse-
quent to Aders’ dinner, are an extremely valuable resource. They are ear-
nest in tone yet also emotionally distanced by a scepticism belied by Crabb
Robinson’s eagerness to faithfully record Blake’s ideas.
A distinctive type of synaesthesia Blake appears to have experienced is a
variety of ‘Ticker-Tape’ Synaesthesia (TTS), a type occurring only in
Projector mode where the grapheme forms of spoken words are perceived
beyond the body (within the normal visual field), and explicitly seen as
letters or text, sometimes in motion, sometimes static. To make it easier to
conceptualize, one study has suggested subtitles, as in movie subtitles, as
a better description of the phenomenology of TTS.2 In what was perhaps
1
G. E. Bentley, Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2001) p 410.
2
Fabien Hauw, Mohamed El Soudany, Laurent Cohen, ‘Subtitled speech: Phenomenology
of tickertape synesthesia,’ Cortex (2022): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005.
[insert] pp 167–179. Accessed 12 May 2023.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 221

Switzerland AG 2024
D. Worrall, William Blake’s Visions, Palgrave Studies in Literature,
Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2_8
222 D. WORRALL

the first study of TTS’s prevalence, Charlotte A. Chun and Jean-Michel

Hupé put its incidence at (a surprising) 6.9% of the French population in
2013.3 The principal evidence for Blake’s TTS comes from a conversation
recorded by Crabb Robinson on 18 February 1826 when Blake told
him,’“I write[,”] he says[,] [“]when commanded by the spirits and the
moment I have written I see the words fly abot. the room in all directions.
[”].’4 However, because the cross-talking of synaesthesia acts in multiple
modalities (or, at least, in Blake it did), he also seems to have experienced
a variant of Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia (MTS). The MTS variant is where
sensory boundaries between Self and Other disappear. Watching another
person touch their face might result in experiencing that sensation oneself.
The evidence for this is in Blake’s case is not conclusive, however, mainly
because his variant seems to have been a less well-reported or analysed
form and because, in the examples drawn from his conversation with
Crabb Robinson, the distinction between Self and Other is less well
defined than ideal. However, although the evidence offered by Crabb
Robinson’s conversation with him dates from 1826, very late in Blake’s
life, there are a sufficient number of his Songs of Innocence and of Experience,
composed between 1789 and 1794, such as ‘On Another’s Sorrow,’ ‘The
Clod and the Pebble,’ ‘The Human Abstract’ and ‘A Poison Tree,’ to
indicate that his interest in the boundaries of separation between Self and
Other started much earlier (E 17, 19, 27, 28). It may also account for the
much more significant importance in Blake’s later work of ‘the Spectre,’
an entity within the Self which destroys or inhibits imagination.5 For the
purposes of clearer exposition, and to maintain the original narrative
sequence of Crabb Robinson’s record, Blake’s MTS will be discussed first.

3
Charlotte Anne Chun and Jean-Michel Hupé, ‘Mirror-Touch and Ticker Tape Perceptions
in Synesthesia,’ Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013) https://doi.org/10.3389/
fpsyg.2013.00776; Accessed 14 May 2021. ‘Some few persons see mentally in print every
word that is uttered; they attend to the visual equivalent and not to the sound of the words,
and they read them off usually as from a long imaginary strip of paper, such as is unwound
from telegraphic instruments. The experiences differ in detail as to size and kind of type,
colour of paper, and so forth, but are always the same in the same person,’ Francis Galton,
Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: MacMillan, 1883) p. 67, cited
by Chun and Hupé.
4
BR(2): p 435.
5
Paley, Morton D. ‘Cowper as Blake’s Spectre.’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 1, no. 3,
(1968), pp. 236–52.
 8 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA: THE TESTIMONY OF CRABB ROBINSON 223

Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia
Crabb Robinson’s personal attitude towards Blake is perhaps best made
clear in diary notes he made after talking to him on Saturday 18th February
1826 at his home in Fountain Court, off the Strand: ‘Then called on
Blake, an amusing chat with him but still no novelty—The same round of
extravagt. & mad doctrines.’6 That is, unlike Tatham, Linnell or Varley,
Crabb Robinson was a sceptical, even occasionally adversarial, interviewer
rather than an enthusiastically supportive observer. On the 23 February
1826, he wrote up a report of his visits, noticing that, after Blake had said,
inter alia, ‘“I was always studying that class of [‘German school’] paint-
ing,”’ he commented that ‘This was somewhat at variance with what he
had said both this day & afterwards—implying that he copies [the del.] his
Visions.’7 Although not exactly gleeful, Crabb Robinson not only recorded
Blake’s minor inconsistencies, but also took pains to record their verbal
content accurately. His near-verbatim transcripts of their conversation can
be considered reliable records of their exchanges.
On the 18th February Crabb Robinson seemed to want to probe the
veracity of Blake’s ‘visions,’ apparently with the aim of exposing inconsis-
tencies in his accounts of their occurrence. Crabb Robinson had trained
and practised as a barrister, admitted to the bar in 1813, so this may not
have been just overt scepticism but a straightforward wish to establish the
truth. ‘Visions’ was a word Blake seems to have used quite freely during
their conversations. Nevertheless, whatever Crabb Robinson thought
about his ‘visions,’ doctrinally he noted that he found ‘Blake’s language
more in conformity with Orthodox Christianity than before.’ When their
conversation on this day alluded to Voltaire (died 1778), whom Blake
claimed to have conversed with in a ‘vision’ (‘“I have had much inter-
course with Voltaire and he said to me …”’), Crabb Robinson asked him
which language Voltaire used in his reply: ‘I asked in what langue. Voltaire
spoke[;] he gave an ingenious answer—“To my Sensations it was English—
It was like the touch of a musical key—He touched it probably in French,
but to my ear it became English.”’8 Having spent his teens apprenticed to
an engraver, the little French Blake had was self-taught according to his
first substantial biographer, Alexander Gilchrist: ‘[Blake] earlier in life had

6
BR(2): p 434.
7
BR(2): p 695.
8
BR(2): p 434.
224 D. WORRALL

taught himself something of Latin, French, and even Greek … He would

declare that he learnt French, sufficient to read it, in a few weeks.’9
This episode is probably one of the clearest testimonies Blake gives of
an episode involving the cross-modality of the senses, the basis of all syn-
aesthesia types, ‘—“He touched it … in French, but to my ear it became
English.”’ This seems to be an almost classic example of MTS, a type of
synaesthesia where, for example, someone sees another person touching
their face but feels that touch as if it is upon their own face. The resulting
changes in mirrored somatosensory cortex activation levels in MTS sub-
jects have been measured using fMRI.10 In this case, Blake perceives
Voltaire’s speech as analogous to a ‘musical key’ (presumably the ‘key’ of
a contemporary keyboard instrument) being depressed or ‘touched’ but
its sound changed from French to English when it reached, ‘my ear.’ The
mirroring of the same somatosensory cortex area (that is, sound—in this
case, moving from the verbal to the auditory) is consistent with MTS. While
the sonic properties of the episode are striking (‘“It was like … a musical
key—… but to my ear it became English,”’) so too are its properties of
touch as a sensation, ““To my Sensations …—It was like the touch of a
musical key—He touched it … it became English”’ (my italics). In MTS a
perceptual boundary disappears (as far as the synaesthete’s experience is
concerned) and normally active Self-Other demarcations become blurred.
The mechanisms controlling this Self-Other boundary are not fully under-
stood.11 Something analogous appears to have happened in this episode in
a process of self-effacement which was accompanied, in this case, by a
concurrent auditory projection of Voltaire who, as with his hallucination
of Robert, seems to have been perceived as an interlocutor standing
before him.
However, 88% of people in a sample reporting TTS (discussed further
below), in addition, also saw subtitle-like graphemes in Projector mode,
outside of their body, initiated by their own covert speech, that is, the

9
BR(2): p 400 and 400n.
10
S.-J. Blakemore, D. Bristow, G. Bird, C. Frith, J. Ward, ‘Somatosensory activations dur-
ing the observation of touch and a case of vision–touch synaesthesia,’ Brain, Volume 128,
Issue 7, July 2005, pp 1571–1583.
11
Banissy Michael, Ward Jamie, ‘Mechanisms of self-other representations and vicarious
experiences of touch in mirror-touch synesthesia,’ Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013)
112: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00112.
 8 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA: THE TESTIMONY OF CRABB ROBINSON 225

inner speech most people use as a cognitive aid for encountering their
environment.12 Again, this would complicate, the Self-Other distinction of
MTS because the TTS sample self-initiated a Projector grapheme image
through their own sub-vocalized speech. In Blake’s case this would involve
enabling the graphemes of English to switch into the graphemes of French
(since in this case, the process seems to have been seen outside of his body
as well as sensed within—‘He touched it’ (my italics). While the evidence
available from Blake is tantalizingly slender, one of the implications of
both normal MTS (in the example of mirrored face touching) and TTS is
that normal demarcations between Self and Other have temporarily bro-
ken down. While Blake’s case is somewhat different in that the ‘Voltaire’
Other is a hallucinatory percept (signified as Other by speaking a different
language), ‘Voltaire’ still remains a projection of Blake’s Self, perhaps spe-
cifically the product of his covert speech. Whatever else is happening, MTS
signifies a temporary breakdown between perceptions of Self and Other.
Whether such a condition is absolutely connected to synaesthesia is a sub-
ject of debate although the cross-modality switch between French and
English (discussed further below) is a good indicator that, in Blake’s case,
synaesthesia is involved.13
While not all cross-modal correspondences indicate synaesthesia,
there is nothing in the Crabb Robinson testimony which rules it out.14
Blake’s cross-modal responses are recognizable within the symptomol-
ogy of synaesthesia. These phenomenologies even account for the differ-
ences in languages Blake thought he heard. In an important investigation
relevant to Blake’s hearing Voltaire speak in French, Kaitlyn Bankieris
and Julia Simner examined the link between sound symbolism and syn-
aesthesia by employing tests involving understanding unfamiliar foreign
languages: ‘To test this we predicted that synaesthetes would have

12
Fabien Hauw, Mohamed El Soudany, Laurent Cohen, ‘Subtitled speech: Phenomenology
of tickertape synesthesia,’ Cortex (2022): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005.
pp 167-179. Accessed 12 May 2021.
13
Idalmis Santiesteban, Geoffrey Bird, Oliver Tew, Maria Cristina Cioffi, Michael
J. Banissy, ‘Mirror-touch synaesthesia: Difficulties inhibiting the other,’ Cortex, 71 (2015)
pp. 116–121; Serino A, Giovagnoli G, Làdavas E (2009) ‘I Feel what You Feel if You Are
Similar to Me.’PLoS ONE 4(3): e4930. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004930.
Accessed 2 June 2021.
14
Charles Spence, K. Sathian, Chapter 11—‘Audiovisual crossmodal correspondences:
Behavioral consequences and neural underpinnings,’ Editor(s): K. Sathian,
V.S. Ramachandran, Multisensory Perception (Academic Press, 2020) pp 239–258.
226 D. WORRALL

superior understanding of unfamiliar (sound symbolic) foreign words. In

our study, 19 grapheme-colour synaesthetes and 57 non-synaesthete
controls were presented with 400 adjectives from 10 unfamiliar lan-
guages and were asked to guess the meaning of each word in a two-
alternative forced-choice task. Both groups showed superior
understanding compared to chance levels, but synaesthetes significantly
outperformed controls. This heightened ability suggests that sound sym-
bolism may rely on the types of cross-modal integration that drive syn-
aesthetes’ unusual experiences. It also suggests that synaesthesia endows
or co-occurs with heightened multi-modal skills, and that this can arise
in domains unrelated to the specific form of synaesthesia.’15 They found
that synaesthetes have a greater level of sonic recognition of unfamiliar
languages than one might have expected (they were tested on 400 words
in Albanian, Dutch, Gujarati, Indonesian, Korean, Mandarin, Romanian,
Tamil, Turkish and Yoruba). Void of external stimuli, Blake’s dialogues
with Voltaire were verbal auditory perceptions of synaesthesia assisted by
the condition’s elevated ability in sonic recognition. One might also add
that this was probably assisted, not least, by some improved level of
maturity in the French language, or simply through his reading Voltaire
(remembering that grapheme forms trigger at least as immediately as
grapheme sound).
The reasons for suspecting Blake had developed some proficiency in
French in mid-life may also be implicit in the conversational tactics of his
interview with Crabb Robinson. During the same session he had been
asked why he did not draw the persons he saw, ‘I spoke again of the form
of the persons who appear to him[,] asked why he did not draw them—
[“]It is not worth while—There are so many the labour wod be too great[.]
Besides there wod be no use—[”.]’16 Blake’s declining to draw Voltaire’s
portrait was probably no more than him being politely disingenuous on
account of Crabb Robinson’s goading. Blake had already painted a high
quality bust portrait of Voltaire for William Hayley’s library at Turret
House, Felpham (c. 1800–1803), as well as making two more recent pen-
cil drawings of ‘The spirit of Voltaire,’ in the Visionary Heads series, c.
1819.17 Living in Felpham between 1800 and 1803, working on Hayley’s

15
Kaitlyn Bankieris and Julia Simner, ‘What is the link between synaesthesia and sound
symbolism?’ Cognition 136 (2015) pp 186–195.
16
BR(2): p 434.
17
Butlin: 343.15; 692.106.
 8 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA: THE TESTIMONY OF CRABB ROBINSON 227

commission, clearly with access to his library for the purposes of the com-
mission, he would have had opportunity to improve his knowledge not
only of Voltaire but also the author’s native language.
More significant, however, is that this conversation was concerned with
an arcane doctrinal debate about the theological grounds in Christianity
for the forgiveness of blasphemy, ‘“Voltaire … said to me [“]I blasphemed
the Son of Man and it shall be forgiven me[.] But they (the enemies of
V[oltaire]:) blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me and it shall not be forgiven
them[.”]’ The account’s significance is not just that this is an early histori-
cal example of sound symbolism synaesthesia (‘“He touched it probably in
French, but to my ear it became English”’) but that it is cognitively highly
developed, dealing with precise points about the theology of forgiveness
for blasphemy relative to concepts of Christ and the Holy Ghost. As with
his adroit deflection of Crabb Robinson over the Voltaire portraits, strate-
gically refraining to mention that three already existed, whatever his inter-
locutor thought was happening, Blake’s strategy allowed him to maintain
control of the conversation. High functionality during synaesthesia events
has never been a subject of doubt.
The theological sophistication of this exchange about Voltaire and blas-
phemy had been preceded, on 10 December 1825, by a wide ranging
discussion with Crabb Robinson about Blake’s religious beliefs, some of it
equally recondite, ‘Among the [more unexplainable del] unintintelligible
sentims which he was continually expressing is his distinction between the
natural & the spiritual world.’18 There is no doubt that some of their con-
versations took place at a very high doctrinal level, challenging even for
Crabb Robinson to figure out, ‘it would be hard to fix Blake’s station
between Christianity Platonism & Spinozism[sic].’19 By the time, eight
days later, they had their conversation about Voltaire, Blake would have
been ready for the encounter. Crabb Robinson is one of the few people
known to have visited the 1809 exhibition (‘I went to see a Gallery of
Blakes paintings’) when he attended it on 23 April 1810, after its exten-
sion. Although meeting only his brother, James, at the exhibition, he had
confided to his notes his interest in ‘amusing myself … by writing an
account of the insane poet painter & engraver Blake.’20 These events, their
meetings and possible exchanges (Crabb Robinson had asked James

18
BR(2): p 423.
19
BR(2): p 422. The reference is to the Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677).
20
BR(2) pp 296, 298,299, underlining in Bentley.
228 D. WORRALL

whether he could return to the exhibition again before it closed), must all
have created preconceptions particularly informing Blake’s responses on
18 December 1825.
These strong priors, as they are sometimes called, may help in under-
standing Blake’s conversation with Blake about Voltaire.21 One possible
alternative explanation of this area of their conversation was that this was
not dominated by synaesthesia but by unarticulated (or subvocalized)
inner speech. This was, quite noticeably, a case of voice hearing but in
Blake’s native language, ‘“I have had much intercourse with Voltaire and
he said to me … To my Sensations it was English.”’ Inner speech as a
cognitive, developmental, process carried forward from childhood, is
deeply complex, currently evading reliable analysis.22 One intriguing
hypothesis, outlined by Sam Wilkinson, is that auditory hallucinations are
cortically embedded predictions of patterns in inferred verbal language
(referred to as the Predictive Processing Framework). That is, language
which is the result of rationalizations of predicted or expected linguistic
articulation, may be connected to the normal, subvocalized, inner speech
that most of us practise as cognitive aids when encountering our environ-
ment. It is sometimes known as misattributed inner speech.23 However,
the fact of Blake’s voice hearing, even in command mode, is unexceptional
because he claimed its occurrence several times. Examples include Blake’s
declaration in a letter to his patron, Thomas Butts in April 1803, that ‘I
have written this Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes
twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my
Will’ (E 728–729). Although he did not claim such episodes to be ‘visions,’
they fall comfortably under the misattributed inner speech models first
described by L.S. Vygotsky in 1934. That is, they were likely to have been
innocuous variants of internalized cognitive reproductions of normal

21
Philip R. Corlett, Guillermo Horga, Paul C. Fletcher, Ben Alderson-Day, Katharina
Schmack, Albert R. Powers, ‘Hallucinations and Strong Priors,’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
23 (2019) pp 114–127.
22
Alderson-Day, B. and Fernyhough, C., 2015. ‘Inner speech: Development, cognitive
functions, phenomenology, and neurobiology.’ Psychological bulletin, 141(5), pp. 931–965.
23
Sam Wilkinson, ‘Accounting for the phenomenology and varieties of auditory verbal
hallucination within a predictive processing framework,’ Consciousness and Cognition 30
(2014) pp. 142–155.
 8 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA: THE TESTIMONY OF CRABB ROBINSON 229

conversational social interaction.24 The prevalence of such voice hearing in

non-clinical populations is much more extensive than previously thought.25
Another alternative model suggests that strong prior beliefs (in the
Crabb Robinson conversation, about Blake’s understanding of Voltaire
and blasphemy) disturb the ‘delicate balance between prior beliefs about
unobserved (hidden) variables and the sensations they cause. A false infer-
ence that a voice is present, even in the absence of auditory sensations,
suggests that prior beliefs dominate perceptual inference.’26 It is known
that areas of the cortex are ‘tuned to the statistics of human speech,’ auto-
matically readying to decipher new linguistic encodings.27 Of course, these
theoretical models do not specifically presuppose the presence of synaes-
thesia, only that it was likely Blake had pre-existing convictions about
Voltaire. In Blake’s case, because the very specific priors concerning these
episodes with Crabb Robinson can be sequenced with great accuracy
through analysis of Crabb Robinson’s diaries, such hypotheses would have
the distinct advantage of being able to account for his controlled, lucid,
richly allusive language in those passages where he also appears to explic-
itly refer to auditory hallucinations.28 Within this model, Voltaire’s words
were subvocalized speech in Blake’s probably limited French, manifesting
through cortically embedded predictions of patterns in inferred verbal lan-
guage Blake processed from his native English. His self-taught French
would have given him the rudiments of an episteme in that language. His
native English corrected it into this doctrinally complex dialogue about
blasphemy formed out of his own embedded predictions of meanings, all
processed as his own subvocalized utterances. In Blake’s case this might
suggest that his established verbal auditory hallucinatory episodes could
sometimes be concurrent with the types of synaesthesia of sonic language

24
L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and language, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1987), originally
published 1934.
25
Louise C Johns, Jim van Os, ‘The Continuity of Psychotic Experiences in the General
Population,’ Clinical Psychology Review, 21 (2001) pp 1125–1141.
26
Benrimoh, D.A., Parr, T., Vincent, P., Adams, R.A. and Friston, K., 2018. ‘Active
Inference and Auditory Hallucinations.’ Computational Psychiatry, 2, pp.183–204. https://
doi.org/10.1162/CPSY_a_00022. Accessed 3 June 2021.
27
Philip R. Corlett, Guillermo Horga, Paul C. Fletcher, Ben Alderson-Day, Katharina
Schmack, Albert R. Powers, ‘Hallucinations and Strong Priors,’ Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 23 (2019) pp 114–127.
28
For the misattributed inner speech model, see Peter Moseley, David Smailes, Amanda
Ellison and Charles Fernyhough, ‘The effect of auditory verbal imagery on signal detection
in hallucination-prone individuals,’ Cognition 146 (2016) pp 206–216.
230 D. WORRALL

investigated by Bankieris and Simner.29 Yet another refinement of the

model might be that this episode simply lies somewhere on a continuum
between a verbal auditory hallucination and MTS.
This brings us to a slightly later part of Crabb Robinson’s diary from
the same interview on Saturday, 18 February 1826. That Blake exhibited
an array of synaesthesia types should not be too troubling. The incidence
and distribution of the full range of different concurrent modalities of
synaesthesia, although they are known to manifest in individuals, has not
yet been the subject of extensive research. As one study has argued, ‘To
date, studies examining the neural basis of synesthesia have mainly focused
on letter- or word-color synesthesia, without reporting how many other
forms of synesthesia these individuals may have.’30 The complex mix of
modalities found in Blake’s Voltaire hallucination may prove, subject to
further research, not to be that uncommon. That there is reason to think
in terms of multiple modalities of synaesthesia and other hallucinatory
types in Blake’s perceptual phenomenological history is evidenced by the
later parts of the diary, discussed below.

Ticker-Tape Synaesthesia
Crabb Robinson then asked Blake what he was currently working on. This
was his own manuscript edition of Genesis, the first book of the Christian
Bible, but in Blake’s edition using slightly elaborated source texts based
on the King James Authorized translation. Crabb Robinson wrote that
‘He shewed me his Version (for so it may be called) of Genesis’ with the
conversation then turning to the status of Blake’s manuscripts (‘“My MSS
[are] of no further use—I have been tempted to burn my MSS but my
wife wont let me”’). Whatever its state of development at this point, and
whether or not he envisaged etching it in the future, Genesis proved to be
his final illuminated work. It may be this actual document—or something
very like it—that survives as 11 leaves of manuscript with text and design
at the Huntington Library, California, and which is now the subject of a

29
Kaitlyn Bankieris and Julia Simner, ‘What is the link between synaesthesia and sound
symbolism?’ Cognition 136 (2015) pp 186–195.
30
Mary Jane Spiller, Clare N. Jonas, Julia Simner and Ashok Jansari, ‘Beyond visual imag-
ery: How modality-specific is enhanced mental imagery in synesthesia?’ Consciousness and
Cognition 31 (2015) pp. 73–85; italics in original.
 8 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA: THE TESTIMONY OF CRABB ROBINSON 231

fine scholarly edition by Mark Crosby and Robert N. Essick.31 Blake con-
fided verbatim to Crabb Robinson that he was rendering it in a format ‘“as
understood by a Christian Visionary.”’ This is a notably clear indication
that he was continuing this conversation within the parameters of a cul-
tural vocabulary he controlled himself and within which he situated him-
self as a self-reported, ‘“Visionary.”’
Blake then ‘read a passage at random’ to Crabb Robinson before add-
ing, ‘“I write[,”] he says[,] [“]when commanded by the spirits and the
moment I have written I see the words fly abot. the room in all directions.
[”]’32 The detail that ‘“I write[,”] he says[,] [“]when commanded by the
spirits,”’ is yet another, incidental, example of Blake’s persistent verbal
auditory hallucinations, a modality referred to several times in this book.
However, it is the next phrase that is much more significant in the history
of synaesthesia. He explained that, ‘[“]the moment I have written I see
the words fly abot. the room in all directions[”].’ That Crabb Robinson
was recording the incident as accurately as he could remember it is sug-
gested by how, in his own old age, writing a manuscript Reminiscences of
Blake in February and March 1852, he repeated exactly the same account,
‘[“] When I am commanded by the Spirits then I write, And the moment
I have written, I see the Words fly about the room in all directions[”].’33
This is almost certainly Ticker-Tape synaesthesia (TTS), a type of
Projector mode synaesthesia where text is perceived outside of the body.
At the very least, this exchange between Blake and Crabb Robinson cap-
tures what is probably the first objectively reported example of any type of
Projector synaesthesia. An illustration in one of Julia Simner’s journal
articles, which utilizes a still from a BBC TV Horizon broadcast, gives a
graphic idea of a phenomenology of synaesthesia closely resembling TTS.34

31
Mark Crosby and Robert N. Essick (eds.) Genesis: William Blake’s Last Illuminated
Work. Edited, with a commentary (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 2012).
Crosby and Essick print for the first time Robert R. Wark’s original curatorial essay (a proof
draft of which is in Essick’s collection) titled, ‘Blake’s Illuminated Manuscript of Genesis,’ c.
1974. Wark wrote that ‘The Huntington Genesis should not be confused with … a version
of Genesis “as understood by a Christian Visionary”’ (p 21.n3). BR(2) repeats this caution
(p 435 and n). If Blake produced the Huntington Genesis plus another, ‘“Christian
Visionary”’ Genesis, the latter has either ‘not survived’ (as BR(2)’s footnote puts it) or else
it remains untraced.
32
BR(2): p 435.
33
BR(2): p 704.
34
Julia Simner, ‘Beyond perception: synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon,’
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11 (2007) pp 23–29, Fig. 1.
232 D. WORRALL

The phenomenon of subjects seeing projected spoken words as external

texts, moving or static, was first noticed in 1883 by Francis Galton. One
example he gave was of an unnamed ‘statesman [who] has assured me that
a certain hesitation in utterance which he has at times, is due to his being
plagued by the image of his manuscript with its original erasures and cor-
rections.’ Suited to the era, Galton’s most accessible metaphor for the
phenomenon was ticker-tape, ‘Some few persons see mentally in print
every word that is uttered; they attend to the visual equivalent and not to
the sound of the words, and they read them off usually as from a long
imaginary strip of paper, such as is unwound from telegraphic
instruments.’35 From the point of view of someone with TTS, as Charlotte
A. Chun and Jean-Michel Hupé put it, ‘when spoken to, a ticker taper
might see mentally the spoken words displayed in front of his face or as
coming out of the speaker’s mouth.’ In their study, respondents ‘reported
a constant size and font for visualized letters; however, some individuals
reported experiencing a change in letter size depending on the volume
with which words are spoken … we received reports of both static dis-
play … and dynamic display, with words that stream out through the
mouth or from behind the head.’36
TTS-like faculties have been reported without subjects having appar-
ently being aware of synaesthesia as a possible diagnosis of the phenom-
ena. In the case of O, a female university student reporting in 1971, an
ability to fluently talk backwards (to say ‘backwards’ as ‘sdrawkcab,’ as well
as a range of reversed sentences) seems to have been facilitated by using a
visual image of the reversed word projected outside of the body, ‘Her
images of a word sequence were usually situated on the surface at which
she was looking.’ O could then just read-off the word, even missing out
elements of words if these had been covered up for experimental purposes.
The possible role of synaesthesia was not discussed in relationship to O’s
condition.37 It is plausible that Blake’s fluent ability to write backwards,

35
Galton, F., Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: MacMillan,
1983) p 67.
36
Charlotte Anne Chun and Jean-Michel Hupé, ‘Mirror-Touch and Ticker Tape
Experiences in Synesthesia,’ Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013) https://doi.org/10.3389/
fpsyg.2013.00776. There seem to be two versions of this paper, one describing ‘Ticker Tape
Perceptions,’ and one describing ‘Ticker Tape Experiences,’ both essentially the same paper
with minor variations of grammar. Accessed 5 June 2021.
37
Max Coltheart and Marcia J. Glick, ‘Visual Imagery: A Case Study,’ Quarterly Journal
of Experimental Psychology 26 (1974) 438–453.
 8 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA: THE TESTIMONY OF CRABB ROBINSON 233

which improved once he began producing mirror-writing for the illumi-

nated books from the late 1780s onwards, may have produced a phenom-
enon of projection linked to the OLP synaesthesia which cropped up again
in his later life, as evidenced in the Visionary Heads. In other words, this
late example of Blake’s TTS-like condition in the mid-1820s may have
been the outcome of developments initiated by starting a recurrent pro-
gramme of mirror-writing over 30 years earlier. In one modern survey of
TTS subjects, 38% out of a sample of 26 reported ‘that being endowed
with TTS facilitated writing.’38 Blake’s Projector mode synaesthesia, evi-
dent no later than “London” of the 1794 Songs of Innocence and of
Experience, may have been a facility which had already enhanced his lan-
guage acquisition.
Crabb Robinson’s diary also specifies that Blake told him ‘“when com-
manded by the spirits … the moment I have written I see the words fly
abot. the room”’ (my italics). This seems to accord with Chun and Hupé’s
finding of words streaming, if not around a room, then ‘from behind the
head.’ In the TTS experiment referred to above, 58% reported that the
words were ‘nearby’ and that ‘localization’ was ‘definite and stable.’39
That these are ‘written’ words, rather than spoken, does not make any dif-
ference. In Romke Rouw and H. Steven Scholte’s study of GCS, in both
Associator and Projector samples, there was no significant difference
between graphemes heard or graphemes seen.40 However, in Blake’s case,
his TTS is accompanied by verbal auditory hallucinations in com-
mand mode.
In order to set it out more fully in all its complexity, Blake’s testimony
as reported by Crabb Robinson describes verbal auditory hallucinations
(‘“when commanded by the spirits”’) connected to Projector mode syn-
aesthesia (‘“I see … words fly abot.”’) in which grapheme percepts (‘“the
moment I have written”’) are the inducer and TTS graphemes the
Concurrent (‘“I see the words fly abot. the room,”’ my italics). On this
occasion, on 18 February 1826, when he and Crabb Robinson continued

38
Fabien Hauw, Mohamed El Soudany, Laurent Cohen, ‘Subtitled speech: Phenomenology
of tickertape synesthesia,’ Cortex (2022): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005.
pp 167-179. Accessed 12 May 2023.
39
Fabien Hauw, Mohamed El Soudany, Laurent Cohen, ‘Subtitled speech: Phenomenology
of tickertape synesthesia,’ Cortex (2022): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005.
pp 167-179. Accessed 12 May 2023.
40
Romke Rouw and H. Steven Scholte, ‘Neural Basis of Individual Differences in
Synesthetic Experiences,’ The Journal of Neuroscience 30 (2010) pp 6205–6213.
234 D. WORRALL

their discussion about his new Genesis manuscript, this discussion was part
of an extended conversation which included the anecdote about Voltaire.
The role of the Voltaire section of their discussion suggests an overall
strong priors framework of inner speech for this type of auditory halluci-
nation because Blake felt ‘“commanded by the spirits,”’ that is, the voices
he heard confirmed his pre-existing beliefs.41 Most importantly for this
analysis, Blake reported very precisely that this occurred, ‘“the moment I
have written”’ (my italics). That is, his synaesthesia was induced by graph-
emes. Although Rouw and Scholte’s study of GCS does not conclusively
transpose across to grapheme TTS, Blake’s potential status as a founding
case of this combination is significant. Not least, although a third-person
report, the sceptical Crabb Robinson’s attempt to render Blake’s testi-
mony verbatim makes it credible as an historical example, arguably com-
paring well with the self-identified synaesthetes of modern trials.
There is another aspect of this episode that connects it to a much more
extensively researched type of synaesthesia. While TTS is currently under-­
researched, its major characteristic of grapheme percepts in Projector
mode, perceived outside the body, are also common to Sequence Space
Synaesthesia (SSS). Indeed, TTS may be a variant of SSS, a type of synaes-
thesia where trigger words or numbers (such as months or dates) are visu-
alized in a spatial array or idiosyncratic patterns. SSS was amongst the first
variants to be discovered with the earliest research dating back at least to
Francis Galton’s article on ‘Visualised Numerals’ in an 1880 issue of
Nature which illustrated the spatialized date and calendar arrays some of
his subject samples sent him.42 There is evidence that SSS may have the
advantage of being associated with an ‘elevated visuospatial working mem-
ory ability.’43 Or, alternatively, ‘synesthetes do not experience enhanced
visual imagery, but due to their pre-existing color and shape associations
of graphemes in their “mind’s eyes,” they engage in more frequent use of
mental imagery.’44 In the case of the Crabb Robinson episode and their

41
Benrimoh, D.A., Parr, T., Vincent, P., Adams, R.A. and Friston, K., 2018. ‘Active
Inference and Auditory Hallucinations.’ Computational Psychiatry, 2, pp.183–204. https://
doi.org/10.1162/CPSY_a_00022. Accessed 27 May 2021.
42
Galton, Francis, Visualised Numerals, Nature 21 (1880) pp 252–256.
43
Joanna Hale, Jacqueline M. Thompson, Helen M. Morgan, Marinella Cappelletti & Roi
Cohen Kadosh (2014) ‘Better together? The cognitive advantages of synaesthesia for time,
numbers, and space,’ Cognitive Neuropsychology, 31:7–8, 545–564.
44
David Brang, EunSeon Ahn, ‘Double-blind study of visual imagery in grapheme-color
synesthesia,’ Cortex, 117 (2019) pp 89–95.
 8 BLAKE’S SYNAESTHESIA: THE TESTIMONY OF CRABB ROBINSON 235

discussion of the Genesis manuscript, the phenomenology of the event

happened in Projector mode, being perceived by Blake outside of his body
and accompanied by non-static spatial characteristics.
Not only did the words ““fly abot.”’; they specifically flew about ““the
room,”’ a domestic space familiar to everyone and configured in three
dimensions (my italics). The highly spatial, non-static, nature of the per-
cepts is consistent with reports of SSS as much as they are with TTS. What
seems to have happened is that, when Crabb Robinson was with him on
18 February 1826, Blake chose a passage from the Bible’s Genesis ‘at ran-
dom’ to read out aloud. It was this event which seems to have elicited his
description of the synaesthetic event. The following gives the larger con-
text: ‘He shewed me his Version (for so it may be called) of Genesis—“as
understood by a Christian Visionary” in which in [the del] a style resmblg
the Bible—The spirit is given[; ] he read a passage at random[.] It was
striking—He will not print any more—[“]I write[,”] he says[,] [“when
commanded by the spirits and the moment I have written I see the words
fly abot the room in all directions …[”].’45 The passage Blake ‘read … at
random’ was actually 1 Corinthians 12: 7 (‘the Spirit is given to every man
to profit withal’), not Genesis.46 Blake obviously had his Bible to hand, a
work he knew well, but Crabb Robinson missed the satire. ‘The spirit is
given to every man,’ but did Crabb Robinson know how to ‘profit withal’
from it?
One possibility about this whole exchange is that Blake’s SSS was
enhanced by the advanced motor dexterity and visual acuity specifically
acquired during a lifetime’s professional engagement with engraving. This
required the forward visualization of the three-dimensional grooves to be
incised out of solid copper with a burin, the standard engraving tool.
Enhanced proficiency at visuo-spatial tasks has been recognized as a fea-
ture of SSS.47 At that moment Blake was reaching the end of a major
engraving project. Crabb Robinson’s first known meeting with Blake, on
10 December 1825, happened shortly after Blake had presented some of
the first working proofs of Illustrations of the Book of Job to John and Mary
Ann Linnell, his patrons for the project, on 16 October 1825, delivering

45
BR(2): p 435.
46
BR(2): p 435fn. Bentley misunderstands. This is a conversation, not a declaration
of titles.
47
Julia Simner, Neil Mayo, Mary-Jane Spiller, ‘A foundation for savantism? Visuo-spatial
synaesthetes present with cognitive benefits,’ Cortex, 45 (2009) pp 1246–1260.
236 D. WORRALL

them personally to their home.48 Unlike the standard mixed method of

combining engraving for fine detail of faces and hands with the easier
method of etching for background and drapery, Illustrations of the Book of
Job was wholly done in engraving, an incision method (not least, giving
definitive evidence of the absence of motor tremble or neurological impair-
ment in a man then of some 68 years of age).
A minimal conclusion which can be drawn from Blake’s synaesthesia,
particularly with respect to the Visionary Heads and Crabb Robinson’s
record of their conversations, all events dateable to within the range c.
1819–1826, is that the evidence suggests he responded to verbal auditory
graphemes, that some of these episodes took place within domestic social
environments while he was talking or listening to others and that the
Visionary Heads, at the least, are the artistic outcomes of grapheme-­
induced synaesthesia in one or more of its variants. That Crabb Robinson
had some nominal understanding of the significance of what Blake was
reporting to him is evidenced by his writing to Dorothy Wordsworth on
19th February 1826, the day after his discussion with Blake about Voltaire,
when he told her that, ‘His paintings are copies of what he sees in his
Visions—his books … are dictations from the Spirits.’49 The domestic
context of these events is also consistent with the visual, auditory and syn-
aesthetic qualities fictionalized as early as Isaiah’s declaration (‘The
Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me’) in The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell composed no later than c. 1790, ‘I saw no God. nor heard any,
in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in
every thing’ (E 38). However, perhaps the most far-reaching revelation in
Crabb Robinson’s testimony, and he is an authority unlikely to have mis-
heard or mis-transcribed Blake’s conversation, is that ‘[“]when com-
manded by the spirits and the moment I have written I see the words fly
abot. the room in all directions[”].’ This anecdote, especially as it relates
to the last of Blake’s illuminated books, suggests that variants of synaes-
thesia were at the very origins of his creativity in grapheme mode and
provided the phenomenological basis for many of the verbal auditory
‘visions’ incorporated into his writings.

48
BR(2): pp 416, 420.
49
BR(2): p 437.
 CHAPTER 9

Discussion and Conclusion

Throughout this book, an attempt has been made to analyse Blake’s

‘visions’ as visual and auditory neurophysiological conditions whose phe-
nomenology is capable of recovery and explanation. The aim throughout
has been no more complicated than to restore the ‘visions’ to an artist who
declared himself to be a ‘visionary.’ Blake’s hallucinatory conditions, all of
which can be broadly accommodated within Dominic H. ffytche’s
hodological model of brain interconnectedness, have measurable preva-
lence within the general population.1 Blake’s conditions occur only in a
small minority of the population, but they are not rare and do not evi-
dence dysfunction. Although this study has not had a particularly polemi-
cal agenda, its thesis should do something to displace continuing assertions
alleging degrees of psychosis. The allegation of madness has never quite
left Blake. The legacy of Robert Hunt’s aspersion, made in the only known
review of the 1809 exhibition, referring to ‘WILLIAM BLAKE, an unfor-
tunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confine-
ment,’ has endured.2 Writing the ‘Afterword’ for the 2019 Tate Britain
William Blake exhibition catalogue, the writer and self-described
magician, Alan Moore, alluded to the artist as ‘the Lambeth

1
Dominic H. ffytche, ‘The hodology of hallucinations,’ Cortex 44 (2008) pp. 1067–1083.
2
BR(2): p 283.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 237

Switzerland AG 2024
D. Worrall, William Blake’s Visions, Palgrave Studies in Literature,
Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2_9
238 D. WORRALL

angel-whisperer,’ a clever nod-and-a-wink whose levity does not quite

conceal its generic ancestry in Hunt’s review.3
The problem with this type of continuing innuendo is that, just to take
one category of pathology, visual hallucinations are also known to accom-
pany serious disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease
with Lewy bodies, Parkinson’s disease with dementia, vascular dementia
and several types of age-related degenerative eye disease. The stigma
attached to them erects barriers to patients coming forward to report their
symptoms, the result being a consequent loss or absence of public and
private facilities to provide for their support, including the assistance nec-
essary for their relatives and loved ones.4 As far as Blake’s synaesthesia is
concerned, there is some evidence that synaesthesia may be associated
with conditions of raised anxiety. Identifying periods when Blake had
mildly elevated levels of anxiety, of which there would appear to have been
several, is beyond the scope of this book. However, now that synaesthesia
has been identified in children as young as six, when thinking about
national health provision, further research might yield long-term benefits
for therapeutic interventions associated with synaesthesia and anxiety in
childhood.5
It would be good for everyone if, in the light of the arguments pre-
sented in William Blake’s Visions, those who think he exhibited psycho-
logical impairment, dysfunction or disorder should state their case
evidentially. Or, otherwise, let us just take him out of the casual frame of
reference for inclusion within diagnoses of pathological psychosis or hal-
lucinatory disorder. A moratorium on Blake-the-angel-whisperer is long
overdue.
The worst that might be said about a possible pathology for Blake’s
synaesthesia is that there is an elevated chance that some degree of high-­
functional autism played a role in aspects of his social behaviour. Beyond
the scope of this study, because not directly concerned with his ‘visions,’ is
the question of Blake’s possible place on the autism spectrum. Autism

3
Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, with afterword by Alan Moore (eds.), William
Blake (London: Tate Publishing, 2019) p 201.
4
Badcock Johanna C., Dehon Hedwige, Larøi Frank, ‘Hallucinations in Healthy Older
Adults: An Overview of the Literature and Perspectives for Future Research,’ Frontiers in
Psychology 8 (2017): https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01134. Accessed 3 May 2023.
5
Carmichael, D.A., Smees, R., Shillcock, R.C. and Simner, J. (2019), ‘Is there a burden
attached to synaesthesia? Health screening of synaesthetes in the general population.’ Br J
Psychol, 110: 530–548.
 9 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 239

might have been an aspect of his having to learn to live with his truly
‘visionary’ conditions. As well as occasional reports of Blake’s discomfort
amongst certain elite social groups, the Royal Academy being the most
obvious, autism may be indicated by that sudden confessional of ‘“I was
Socrates,”’ reported by Crabb Robinson. Autism has an 18.9% rate of
association with synaesthesia.6 Both have neural correlates. The height-
ened sensitivity and attention to detail common to synaesthesia and autism
may have been beneficial to his career as a commercial engraver, a profes-
sion based upon laboriously building up etched or engraved images from
thousands of diverging and converging lines.7 Several incidents, captured
during Blake’s participation in unconducive social situations, may suggest
a degree of high-functioning autism. The painter, Samuel Palmer, who
knew him well during his lifetime, writing in 1862 to Anne Gilchrist, pre-
sumably preparatory to her husband’s biography published a year later,
reported an undated incident where ‘Being irritated by the exclusively
scientific talk at a friend’s house, which had turned on the vastness of
space, he [Blake] cried out, “It is false. I walked the other evening to the
end of the earth, and touched the sky with my finger.”’8 A thesis of Blake’s
autism, because of the known rate of its coincidence, could potentially be
supportive of arguments presented here about his synaesthesia.
It is worth repeating again that is not claimed here that all, or even a
majority, of Blake’s drawings and paintings were directly derived from
‘visions’ but it is clear he placed a high personal value on his ‘visionary’
faculties. Paradoxically, unlike his interest in religion, politics, gender, race
and empire, his own valuation of his ‘visions’ has not subsequently been
matched by critical inquiry into their phenomenology. For his own part,
he may have realized his ‘visions’ were experiences he simply needed to
learn to live with. Writing on 10 December 1825, aiming to ‘put down as
they occur to me without method all I can recollect of the conversation of
this remarkable man,’ Crabb Robinson remarked that ‘when he said my
visions it was in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial
matters that [no one del] every one understands & cares nothing about.’9

6
S. Baron-Cohen, D. Johnson, J. Asher, S. Wheelwright, S.E. Fisher, P.K. Gregersen, et al.
‘Is synaesthesia more common in autism?’ Molecular Autism, 4 (1) (2013) Item 40.
7
Jamie Ward, Paris Brown, Jasmine Sherwood, Julia Simner, ‘An autistic-like profile of
attention and perception in synaesthesia,’ Cortex, 107 (2018) pp 121–130.
8
BR(2): p 412.
9
BR(2): pp 420–421. Underlining in Bentley.
240 D. WORRALL

It is worth summarizing the duration and variety of the phenomenol-

ogy of Blake’s ‘visions.’ When put alongside Crabb Robinson’s reliably
dated records of the 1825–1826 meetings which, if nothing else, record
Blake repeatedly referring to his apparently continuing ‘visions’ within a
year or two of his death, a minimum duration for their persistence should
begin from the time of the Peckham Rye incident of c. 1766, when he was
around nine years old. As reported in 1863, he ‘looks up’ and sees ‘bright
angelic wings’ and glittering, ‘bespangling’ ‘stars.’10 A plausible candidate
for Blake’s ‘first vision’ is migraine aura, a phenomena to which children,
as well as adults, are known to be susceptible, an episode perhaps induced
by simple photophobia caused by looking ‘up’ at the sun and manifesting
itself in the glittering or shimmering star-like phosphenes induced by the
CSD. A link between Blake’s art and migraine aura was suggested no later
than 1909 by George Munro Smith writing in the BMJ.11 The first evi-
dence (which must remain provisional) for Blake’s Klüver form-constant
visual hallucinations, a known co-modality of the migraine aura he prob-
ably experienced, c. 1766, occurs in the pen and watercolour, An Allegory
of the Bible, dated by Butlin within the range c. 1780–1785.12 This would
set the earliest date for the appearance in Blake’s visual art of traces of one
his ‘visions.’ An implication of this finding is that all his visual work since
that date, and possibly his poetics as well, needs to be re-scrutinized to
locate the phenomenology of the ‘visions’ he repeatedly claimed inspired
his art. The four distinct Klüver patterns are particularly recognizable
although, of course, they may be memories of ‘visions’ rather than instant
responses to entoptic events. Although the best evidence for Blake’s syn-
aesthesia dates from c. 1819 to 1826, supported by the Visionary Heads
and the testimony of Crabb Robinson’s face-to-face interviews, he may
have been aware of some of its cross- and multi-sensory modalities as early
as c. 1788–90 at the time of writing There is No Natural Religion and The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, although there are also strong indicators of
synaesthesia in some of his phrasing decisions in the poem “London,” of
Songs of Experience (1794). The first reference to the poetics of Blake’s
synaesthesia seems to have been the fleeting comment in June E. Downey’s

10
BR(2): p 10.
11
G. Munro Smith, ‘Literary Notes,’ British Medical Journal 2 (11 September 1909) p 710.
12
Butlin: 127.
 9 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 241

journal article on ‘Literary Synaesthesia’ published in 1912.13 As with

Munro Smith, Downey’s contribution appears to have been overlooked in
subsequent studies of Blake, pre-empting the establishment of a critical
canon which might otherwise have inquired into the phenomenological
characteristics of his ‘visions’ rather than taking the circuitous route of
discussing degrees of psychosis.
If Blake’s ‘visions’ had the longevity suggested here, even if experi-
enced intermittently, from Peckham Rye to Crabb Robinson so to speak,
did they leave any general legacy in his paintings? Can the art museum or
gallery-goer see such traces at a glance, even if not aware of the several
hallucinatory types discussed in this book?
Perhaps the best general evidence is that his experience of the geomet-
ric patterns of Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations left a residual
legacy of symmetrical patterning choices in significant numbers of Blake’s
paintings and drawings (although not necessarily in a majority of them).
Whatever their plane of orientation, Klüver’s form-constants resolve them-
selves into symmetrical patterns mirroring signals on the striate cortex and
the neural architecture of V1. That is, Blake developed a cognitive aes-
thetic preference for the symmetry of this group of neurally propagated
shapes he associated with ‘visions.’ Such cognitive preferences are deter-
mined between the eye and early visual cortex or, to put it with reference
to the eye’s cognitive role, the eye’s mind.14 The classic 2008 ‘binocular
rivalry’ experiment, amongst others, established that ‘“perceptual prim-
ing” might be elicited without perception.’15 That is, visual images may be
retained in visual memory without perception having taken place as a part
of visual memory.
Noticeable amounts of compositional symmetry, principally vertical
bilateral symmetry, will already have struck the conscientious gallery-goer
looking at Blake’s paintings. The classic Blake images probably best known
to the public, Glad Day, The Ancient of Days and Jacob’s Ladder, all have
a noticeable vertical bilateral symmetry. This symmetrical preference was
noticed even in his lifetime. Although he had few enough reviewers, an
anonymous critic in the November 1808 issue of The Anti-Jacobin Review
13
June E. Downey, ‘Literary Synaesthesia,’ The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods 9 (1912) pp 490–498.
14
Adam Zeman, Matthew MacKisack, John Onians, ‘The Eye’s mind—Visual imagina-
tion, neuroscience and the humanities,’ Cortex, 105 (2018) pp 1–3.
15
Joel Pearson, Colin W.G. Clifford, Frank Tong, ‘The Functional Impact of Mental
Imagery on Conscious Perception,’ Current Biology, 18 (2008) pp 982–986.
242 D. WORRALL

(what would be considered today a right-wing journal) wrote of the struc-

ture of his design for The Meeting of a family in Heaven illustrating Robert
Blair’s poem The Grave in an edition published by Robert Cromek, ‘the
wings of two angels … extend their pinions till, like the longer sides of an
Isosceles triangle, they meet in a point at the top … this gives a pyramidi-
cal formality to the whole design.’16 It was also a quality possibly refer-
enced after Blake’s death by an anonymous writer in The Eclectic Review of
December 1828, ‘much of his invention in design is frigidly extravagant.’17
Particularly good examples of his persistent decision to compose paint-
ings demonstrating vertical bilateral symmetry are the watercolours com-
missioned by Thomas Butts illustrating the Bible. In this case the
circumstances of the original commission are known. In one of Blake’s
letters to his friend and patron, George Cumberland, in 1799, he wrote,
‘I am Painting small Pictures from the Bible … I have an order for Fifty
small Pictures at One Guinea each’ (E 704). These were a set of temperas
painted c. 1799–1803 but this commission also initiated a subsequent (or
concurrently produced) compositionally separate set of Bible waterco-
lours, c. 1800–1805.18 Although both sets were painted for Butts, Blake’s
compositional preferences are not likely to have been the result of his
patron’s interventions. The fullest critical account of them considers their
subjects to be focussed on Christ’s communitarian ministry.19
There are over 80 watercolours in this series but notable examples illus-
trating the prevalence of bilateral vertical symmetry include, The Sacrifice
of Jephthah’s Daughter (1803); Christ Crucified Between the Two Thieves (c.
1800–03); Christ Nailed to the Cross: The Third Hour (c. 1800–03); The
Crucifixion: “Behold Thy Mother” (c. 1805); The Entombment (c. 1805);
Setting the Stone and Setting a Watch (c. 1800–03); Christ in the Sepulchre,
Guarded by Angels (c. 1805); The Magdalene at the Sepulchre (c. 1805); St.
Paul Preaching in Athens (1803) and The Transfiguration (c. 1800).20 In
some cases, this symmetry arises from backgrounds in the paintings, a
vaulted ceiling in Christ Baptizing (1805); a view out of a door (onto

16
BR(2): p 273. Although Cromek commissioned designs from Blake, the engraving con-
tract was awarded to the more fashionable engraver, Luigi Schiavonetti.
17
BR(2): p 491.
18
The Butts temperas of Biblical subjects are Butlin: 379–432. The Butts watercolours of
Biblical subjects are Butlin: 433–526.
19
Naomi Billingsley, The Visionary Art of William Blake: Christianity, Romanticism and
the Pictorial Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2018) pp 92–131.
20
Butlin: 452, 494, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 504, 507, 484.
 9 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 243

pyramids) in Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (c. 1803–1805); a tented interior

with chandelier in Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (c. 1803–1805);
a window high in a wall in Mary Magdalene Washing Christ’s Feet (c.
1805). Symmetrical structure is perhaps at its most extreme in Setting the
Stone and Setting a Watch where—of all things to choose—it is the mun-
dane feature of a vertically placed ladder which forms the vertical bilateral
symmetrical axis. The role of the ladder is what Bindman calls, with great
understatement, his practice in this series of ‘placing the central figure
firmly on the main vertical axis.’21 However, this modulation of a recur-
rent compositional motif can also sometimes be memorably disrupted,
such as in The Blasphemer (c. 1800), where the explosiveness of the subject
is as startling as the painting’s containment within a symmetrical composi-
tion of stone-throwing figures.22
These characteristics have been noticed before. The symmetry in the
Butts Bible watercolour group has been thought so extensive as to inhibit
their aesthetic appeal. Writing about them in 1959, Anthony Blunt, noted
that ‘In many of these water-colours the composition is of dangerous sim-
plicity, and Blake uses effects of symmetry which sometimes come near to
complete failure.’23 In 1977, David Bindman wrote more cautiously about
their ‘tendency towards centralization.’24 This vertical bilateral symmetry
is recurrent across a range of Blake’s art. Of those which might be most
readily accessible to the reader, several plates in Illustrations of the Book of
Job (1826) provide evidence of this patterning, even to the extent that, as
with Blunt’s comment, the repetition may be thought aesthetically inhib-
iting.25 The Job Illustrations demonstrate the persistence of these prefer-
ences into Blake’s late life.
However, perhaps the best examples, because they can claim to have
been curated by Blake himself into a cognate group, are the paintings he
exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1808 (though hung in the Council
Room, not the more prestigious Great Room). All three demonstrate ver-
tical bilateral symmetry as their defining structure. Although one cannot
know exactly what selection process the Academy used, or whether Blake

21
David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977) p 128.
22
Butlin: 439, 446, 485, 488, 489, 517.
23
Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake (New York: Columbia University Press,
1959) p 73.
24
David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977) p 128.
25
The most scholarly edition is David Bindman (ed.) William Blake’s Illustrations of the
Book of Job (London: The William Blake Trust, 1987).
244 D. WORRALL

submitted other paintings that year that were rejected or withdrawn, the
1808 Royal Academy pieces are significant not only on their own account
but also because they offer a set of paintings selected by him a year before
his 1809 exhibition and which he had clearly submitted as leading exam-
ples of his work.
The significance of the 1808 Royal Academy set has been overlooked.
This is odd because, while recent studies of the 1809 exhibition have cen-
tred on institutional frameworks, his three successful entries into the Royal
Academy the previous year have received little attention.26 In part, Blake
must take some of the blame. It has been argued that the temperas Blake
showed in 1809 were intended to circumvent the problem referred to in
his allegation in the 1809 Descriptive Catalogue that his ‘Designs, being all
in Water-colours, (that is in Fresco) are regularly refused to be exhibited
by the Royal Academy’ (E 527). However, all three of his works shown at
the Royal Academy in 1808 were pen and watercolour.27 One must be
circumspect about accepting that the principal reason precipitating Blake’s
solo show was to demonstrate an institutional variance based on his Royal
Academy refusals.
The three pen and watercolour drawings in the Royal Academy 1808
exhibition were, ‘311 Jacob’s Dream,’ ‘439 Christ in the sepulchure,
guarded by angels’ and 477, ‘Last Judgment,’ paintings now in the British
Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum and Petworth House, Sussex.28 Of
these, the 1808 Royal Academy Jacob’s Dream was retitled as Jacob’s
Ladder for 1809 while ‘Christ in the Sepulchre, guarded by Angels’ was

26
David Blayney Brown and Martin Myrone, ‘William Blake’s 1809 Exhibition,’ Tate
Papers, no.14, Autumn 2010, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-
papers/14/william-blake-1809-exhibition, Accessed 18 February 2016; Susan Matthews,
‘An Alternative National Gallery: Blake’s 1809 Exhibition and the Attack on Evangelical
Culture,’ Tate Papers, no.14, Autumn 2010, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publica-
tions/tate-papers/14/an-alternative-national-gallery-blakes-1809-exhibition-and-the-at-
tack-on-evangelical-culture, Accessed 18 February 2016; Philippa Simpson, ‘Lost in the
Crowd: Blake and London in 1809,’ Tate Papers, no.14, Autumn 2010, http://www.tate.
org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/lost-in-the-crowd-blake-and%20london-
in-1809, Accessed 18 February 2016; Konstantinos Stefanis, ‘Reasoned Exhibitions: Blake
in 1809 and Reynolds in 1813,’ Tate Papers, no.14, Autumn 2010, http://www.tate.org.
uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/reasoned-exhibitions-blake-in-1809-and-reyn-
olds-in-1813, Accessed 18 February 2016.
27
Aileen Ward, ‘“sr Joshua and His Gang”: William Blake and the Royal Academy,’
Huntington Library Quarterly 52 (1989) pp. 75–95.
28
BR(2): 250–51; Butlin: 438, 500, 642.
 9 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 245

retitled as Angels hovering over the Body of Jesus in the Sepulchre—a Drawing
and put up for sale in the 1809 show. The third picture, the Last Judgment
(also known as The Vision of the Last Judgment), has a complicated history
and provenance.29 In short, several versions of this latter picture exist (or
existed) although some are sketches or tracings. The Royal Academy
exhibited version, having been commissioned by Elizabeth Ilive, Countess
of Egremont, in 1807 (via the artist, Ozias Humphry), seems to have
gone, if not straight to Petworth House, then delivered to her directly
around February 1808.30 Otherwise, one might guess Blake would also
have put it into the 1809 exhibition since that is what happened to the two
other Royal Academy pictures. The date for the Petworth House version
is established by the date of Blake’s letter to Humphry containing an
explanation of the contents of the picture (presumably written at
Humphry’s request), to oblige the Countess (E 552–54). It is probably
the most ambitious of the 1808 Royal Academy group. W.J.T. Mitchell
was perhaps the first to comment on the ‘mirror-like symmetry’ of the Last
Judgment pictures. Of course, as Mitchell adds, ‘The symmetrical struc-
ture of saved and damned has been part of Last Judgment iconography
since the earliest days of Christian art.’31
Blake’s later commentary (c. 1810) on one of the Last Judgment paint-
ings almost certainly refers to a tempera version also possibly painted or
begun c. 1810 but untraced since 1827. A drawing in the National Gallery
of Art (NGA), Washington D.C., may have been a preparatory sketch.32
Of course, the Royal Academy Last Judgment was not in the 1809 exhibi-
tion because it had gone directly to the Countess of Egremont. However,
the manuscript Notebook commentary of c. 1810, while generally based on
the 1808 version, is closest in its detail to the pen and wash drawing now
in the NGA.33 The Notebook remarks are headed ‘For the Year 1810’ as
29
The best guide is Butlin: 639–48, supplemented by Albert S. Roe, ‘A Drawing of the
Last Judgment,’ Huntington Library Quarterly, 21 (1957) pp 57–67. For Blake’s borrow-
ings from Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, see Chayes, Irene H. (1984) “‘Blake’s Ways with
Art Sources: Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment,’” Colby Quarterly: Vol. 20 pp 60–89. The
precise title, A Vision of the Last Judgment (as opposed to The Last Judgment), seems to have
no contemporary authority (not even Blake’s).
30
It was inscribed by Blake, ‘W Blake inv & del: 1808,’ Butlin: 642.
31
W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Blake’s Visions of the Last Judgment: Some Problems in Interpretation,’
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 9 (1975) pp 7–10.
32
Butlin: 645, 648.
33
David V. Erdman, with Donald K. Moore, The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic
and Typographic Facsimile (New York: Readex Books, 1973, revised edn, 1977).
246 D. WORRALL

part of ‘Additions to Blakes Catalogue of Pictures &c.’ In the event, the

commentary was not printed because the separate or extended exhibition
did not take place although Crabb Robinson attended towards the initial
event’s close in 1810 (E 554–66). The version of the Last Judgment Blake
was probably working on, c. 1810, was a tempera (with gold). It is
reported to have been, as witnessed by Tatham in 1815, ‘six feet long and
about five wide’ (with ‘Hellish Purple’ highlights, according to George
Cumberland, Jr.). According to J.T. Smith, who saw it shortly after Blake’s
death in the company of his widow, Catherine, it contained ‘upwards of
one thousand figures’ and had been given enhanced depth and foreground
by an alternating use of blue for the deeper, darker areas and a lighter,
‘warm colour,’ wash over the gold for highlights. Not least on account of
its commissioning by Elizabeth Ilive, Countess of Egremont, the Last
Judgment, in whatever version he showed at the Royal Academy in 1808,
was a significant composition which Blake was clearly determined to
develop further. As he asserts exactly with respect to this picture, ‘The Last
judgment is one of these Stupendous Visions [.] I have represented it as I
saw it’ (E 555).
These three 1808 Royal Academy paintings, Jacob’s Dream, Angels hov-
ering over the Body of Jesus in the Sepulchre and the Last Judgment, perhaps
more than any other group authorized by Blake as a cognate group, in
their adherence to vertical bilateral symmetry, amount to extraordinary
evidence about the long-term effect of what he called ‘visions’ and which
can now be classified as visual hallucinations. Klüver’s form-constants, one
of the more dominant visual hallucinatory types in Blake’s art (discussed
in Chap. 3), are geometrically patterned and always symmetrical.34
Whatever their plane of orientation, they resolve themselves into sym-
metrical compositions. Klüver’s form-constants have a well-understood
structure ultimately arising from the neural architecture of V1 and its
mapping onto the retina.
Again, to recap the neuroscience surrounding these claims. These types
of visual hallucination were propagated from Blake’s V1. He called them
‘visions’ not only because he was adopting a traditional terminology, but
also because they appeared on his retina in a process of retino-cortical
mapping. Of course, because V1 is a part of the cortex it is a cognitive
environment for images. It is what Blake referred to, specifically with

34
On the symmetry of spirals, see I. Hargittai and C.A. Pickover (eds.), Spiral Symmetry
(Singapore: World Scientific, 1992).
 9 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 247

reference to the Last Judgment painting, a version of which was in the

1808 Royal Academy show, as a ‘Vision … seen by the [Imaginative Eye]
of Every one.’ These were comments Blake made in remarks intended for
the 1810 extension of his exhibition of the previous year. According to his
commentary, the whole painting is structured in ‘a certain order suited to
my Imaginative Eye’ (E 555). That is, his explicitly cognitive ‘Imaginative
Eye,’ or Cowan’s expressly ‘cortical retina’ embedded in V1.35 Given the
repetition of his preference for vertical bilateral symmetry it seems likely
that his symmetrical ‘visions’ of Klüver form-constants, retino-cortically
mapped onto his V1, produced an embedded visual memory of their sym-
metrical formation.
One of his principal statements about his ‘Visions’ gathered from these
notes to this painting has been referred to above but it is worth returning
to examine them in more detail, ‘The Last judgment is one of these
Stupendous Visions [.] I have represented it as I saw it [.] to different
People it appears differently is every thing else does for tho on Earth
things seem Permanent they are less permanent than a Shadow as we all
know too well.’ Like the ‘binocular rivalry’ experiment where the Right
eye has a visual memory of the Left eye’s visual image without having per-
ceived the Left visual image, the first sight of the real event is accommo-
dated according to its second sighting, a ‘Stupendous Vision’ that ‘to
different People … appears differently.’ The ‘Imaginative Eye,’ neurologi-
cally identical across the species, has a secondary reception, ‘a Shadow,’
darkened and impermanent as a visual memory (perhaps much like the
‘binocular rivalry’ experiment or Blake’s musings in the same notes on
how ‘the Greek Fables originated in … Real Visions Which are lost &
clouded in Fable & Allegory’ E 555). Frederick Tatham, who acquired no
fewer than three different pencil versions of the Last Judgment after Blake’s
death, noticeably found both the religious and secular qualities of his
paintings capable of having originated in ‘visions.’36 He wrote on the back
of one of the Last Judgment sketches, which he received directly from his
widow, Catherine, that they were ‘Three sketches by Blake very curious,’
one of them ‘the first sketch of his celebrated last judgment & 2 others[sic]
35
Jack D. Cowan, ‘Geometric visual hallucinations and the structure of the visual cortex,’
Daniel Collerton, Urs Peter Mosimann, Elaine Perry (eds.) The Neuroscience of Visual
Hallucinations (2014) chapter 10, pp. 217–253, cited on p. 228. https://doi.
org/10.1002/9781118892794.
36
Butlin: 643, 644, 648. He also seems to have acquired two tracings of the same subject,
Butlin: 646 and 647.
248 D. WORRALL

sketches from personages as they appeared to him. in Vision.’37 As far as

he was concerned, with the benefit of having spoken to Catherine, Blake’s
widow, the production of the Last Judgment painting was entirely cognate
with the Visionary Heads.
Processing axes of bilateral symmetry is a known characteristic of V1.
Indeed, the processing of symmetry in V1 may have had an evolutionary
priority amongst H. sapiens.38 It is perhaps for these reasons that symme-
try’s importance in aesthetics has long been acknowledged, as has its gen-
eral prevalence in all the global and historical visual arts.39 Seeking
symmetrical precursor paintings in other artists to Blake’s Last Judgment
pictures is redundant since all art displays symmetry to some degree but
Blake was exceptional in affirming that his art was inspired by ‘visions’ and
reiterated this account of their origin over many years. In Blake’s case, as
argued above, his symmetrical compositional choices probably arose from
acquired cognitive preferences derived from the recurrent symmetrical
geometrical patterns of his visual hallucinations, the phenomena he repeat-
edly called ‘visions.’ In the first decade of the 1800s, perhaps reaching a
peak in the 1808 Royal Academy submissions, vertical bilateral symmetry
seems to have been something Blake wished to explore as a means of rep-
resenting or accessing ‘the Eternal.’ Blake makes many statements about
eternity in his Last Judgment commentary of c. 1810, referring to ‘Eternal
Vision,’ ‘the Eternal nature & permanence of … ever Existent Images,’
and ‘Eternal Forms’ (E 554, 555). By contrast, recent critics have found
wombs and vulvas in the Last Judgment pictures.40
To be clear, Blake embodied ‘the Eternal’ within a single vertical bilat-
eral symmetrical line centralized, and common to the three pictures sub-
mitted to the Royal Academy in 1808, including the Last Judgment.

37
Butlin: 643. Tatham sold this and two other versions of the Last Judgement, Nos. 644
and 646 or 647, at Sotheby’s, 29 April 1862. The ‘2 others[sic] sketches’ must be two of the
four Visionary Heads Tatham is known to have owned, Butlin: 756, 758, 759, 764.
38
R. van der Zwan, E. Leo, W. Joung, C. Latimer, P. Wenderoth, ‘Evidence that both area
V1 and extrastriate visual cortex contribute to symmetry perception,’ Current Biology 8
(1998), pp. 889–892.
39
Herman Weyl, Symmetry (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1953); Christopher
W. Tyler, ‘Some Principles of Spatial Organization in Art,’ Spatial Vision 20 (2007)
pp 509–530.
40
Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation
(Ithaca and London, 1993) pp 148–152; Christopher Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New
Haven, CT: 2010) pp 229–230; Susanne Sklar, ‘Erotic Spirituality in Blake’s Last Judgment,’
Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly (eds.) Sexy Blake (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013) pp 125–140; Naomi Billingsley, The Visionary Art of William Blake: Christianity,
Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2018) p 153.
 9 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 249

Whichever way round one orientates the pictures, they always resolve
themselves along its single symmetrical axis, a plane of ‘ever Existent
Images’ which is the principal axis of the painting, visible yet invisible as a
plane embodying ‘Eternal nature.’ Or, to put it another way, as he wrote
in the 1810 commentary, a ‘Vision or Imagination … a Representation of
what Eternally Exists. Really & Unchangeably’ (E 554).
Anyone going to a museum or exhibition where Blake is on display will
not fail to notice his tendency to favour vertical bilateral symmetry and
geometric form. Whether palinopsia or something else, these are the after-
images of his visual and verbal auditory hallucinations. Although the artis-
tic outcomes of these processes are open to debate about their cultural
derivation, there can be little doubt about the broad role of Blake’s neural
physiology. Zeki and Lamb found that artists created visual patterns in
their art which selectively optimized messages from the visual cortex. As
they put it, ‘in their explorations artists are unknowingly exploring the
organization of the visual brain though with techniques unique to them.’41
The significance of tracing the phenomenology of Blake’s ‘visions’ is that
it means not only can he be firmly moved out of any category of psycho-
logical dysfunction; the array of hallucinatory types he experienced can
also be calibrated with their presence in his visual art.
What may be most remarkable about Blake is that these different visual
and auditory hallucinatory types did not interfere or conflict with the
powers of acute political and social observation most explicitly apparent in
his poetry and other writings. His ‘visions’ or visual and auditory halluci-
nations, including his synaesthesia, were combined with a high degree of
cognitive functionality. While the geometric preferences of his visual art
are open to scrutiny as revealing their origin in types of visual hallucina-
tion, there are other far-reaching implications for his writings if the propo-
sition is correct that key elements of Blake’s poetry are founded on
percepts triggered by graphemes during episodes of synaesthesia. It may
be asked, where does synaesthesia end and literary metaphor begin? What
is beyond doubt is that his ‘visions’ enabled, rather than disabled, social,
religious and political insight. For clinicians and healthcare professionals
working in these areas, the example of William Blake raises the bar for
what might be considered the full functionality of persons subject to visual
and auditory hallucinations and synaesthesia. For the many museum cura-
tors and academics who may have fought shy of discussing Blake’s ‘visions,’
the times have now changed. He had no dysfunction, no disorder and
there is no further need for silence, let alone evasion.

41
S. Zeki and M. Lamb, ‘The neurology of kinetic art,’ Brain 117 (1994) pp. 607–636.
 Index

A Angels hovering over the Body of Jesus in

Abelard, 217
Achilles, 201, 202
‘Additions to Blakes Catalogue of
Pictures &c,’ 23
Aders, Eliza, 221
The Age of Reason, 140, 142
Ahania, 142, 190
Airy, Hubert, 48, 122, 149, 155, 156
An Allegory of the Bible, 40, 102,
104–109, 111, 122, 142, 143, 240
Allen, F.J., 89
All Religions are One, 59, 83, 85–87,
90, 96, 164, 190
Altered Consciousness States, 146
Alzheimer’s Disease, 238
America a Prophecy, 52, 119, 134,
135, 183, 190
American Psychiatric Association, 7
Ancient Britons, 206
The Ancient of Days, 20, 47, 136,
152–154, 156, 165, 241
the Sepulchre-a Drawing,
245, 246
Anonymous Portrait of William Blake
(1802?), 29, 209, 210
The Anti-Jacobin Review, 4, 241
Antinomian, 132
“A Poison Tree,” 222
Arminian, 132
The Art of William Blake, 64, 65
Associator mode, 177, 186
Attachment anxiety, 79, 80
Auditory hallucinations, 10, 11, 22,
70, 171, 228–231, 249
“Auguries of Innocence,” 30
Aura, 45–57, 77, 106, 113, 120, 136,
142, 143, 145–150, 155, 156,
161, 163, 167, 186, 195, 240
Autism, 18, 27, 207, 238, 239
Automatic, 178, 197
Automaticity, 188, 189, 208
Avarice, 217

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 251

Switzerland AG 2024
D. Worrall, William Blake’s Visions, Palgrave Studies in Literature,
Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2
252 INDEX
B The Book of Urizen, 52–55, 95,
Bankieris, Kaitlyn, 225, 230
The Barber, 212
Bartolozzi, Francisco, 117
Basire, James, 90, 91, 94, 109,
163, 164
BBC, 177, 231
Bedlam, 4, 61
Behrendt, Stephen C., 124
Bentley, G.E., Jr., 18, 45, 196,
214, 221
Beobachtungen und Versuche zur
Physiologie der Sinne, 162
Bethlem mental hospital, 4
Billingsley, Naomi, 21, 22
Billock, Vincent A., 121, 146,
151, 161
Bindman, David, 111, 119, 128, 243
Binocular rivalry, 13, 68, 241, 247
Birch, John, 157–160
Blair, Robert, 4, 81, 242
Blake and the Bible, 104
Blake and the Idea of the Book,
86, 95, 103
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 45
Blakearchive.org (William Blake
archive), 134
Blake as an Artist, 111
Blake, Catherine, 36, 37, 60, 69, 72,
118, 132, 145, 153, 154,
156–160, 198, 246−248
Blake for Babes, 65–68
Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 52
Blandy, Mary, 197, 214, 215, 217
The Blasphemer, 243
Blasphemy, 144, 227, 229
Blue Danube, 174
Blunt, Anthony, 64, 65, 111, 112, 243
The Book of Ahania, 139
The Book of Los, 70, 76, 119, 139, 142,
143, 169, 190
The Book of Thel, 86, 90, 98, 164, 190
139–142, 190
Boucher, Catherine, 60
Brang, David, 150, 154
Bressloff, Paul C., 8, 9, 100, 102,
132, 148
Bristol, 171
British Medical Journal (BMJ), 33, 45,
47–49, 56, 139, 157, 240
British Museum, 17, 74, 103,
109, 244
Brothers, Richard, 171
Brunton, Thomas Lauder, 45
Bryant, Jacob, 137
Bryan, William, 69, 70, 72–74,
170–172, 183
Buchanan, Roderick D., 6
Bunyan, John, 24
Burke, Joseph, 28
Butlin, Martin, 76, 104, 108, 109,
114–117, 119, 121, 122, 127, 128,
197, 206, 209, 214, 217, 240
Butts, Thomas, 10, 36, 37, 39, 42, 43,
109, 124, 128, 130, 131, 157,
194, 228, 242, 243
Butts, Thomas, Jr., 124
C
Calkins, Mary Whiton, 193, 194, 199,
200, 204, 205, 208, 211, 213,
216, 219
Calvert, Edward, 5
Calvinist, 127, 128, 131, 132
Canterbury Pilgrims, 76
Caractacus, 197
Cartwright, Thomas, 132
Cassibellaunus, 204
Charlemagne, 197
Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims, 168
‘The Chimney Sweeper,’ 4
Christ Baptizing, 242

Christ Crucified Between the Two
Thieves, 242
Christ in the House of Martha and
Mary, 243
Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by
Angels, 242, 244
Christ Nailed to the Cross: The Third
Hour, 242
Chun, Charlotte A., 232, 233
“The Clod and the Pebble,” 222
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 70
Colonel Blood, 215, 217
Conditions, 3, 11
Conservation of consciousness, 81
Continuing bonds, 75, 79
Copper plates, 25, 26, 61–63, 69,
70, 73, 74, 83, 89–92,
98, 146, 155, 161,
163–167, 170
Corinna, 205, 218
Cornelius Agrippa, 217
Cortex, 8
Cortical Spreading Depression (CSD),
53, 148, 150, 151, 240
‘The Couch of Death,’ 14
Countess of Essex, 217
Cowan, Jack D., 8, 9, 30, 99, 102,
132, 138, 148, 247
Crabb Robinson, Henry, 2, 14, 18,
19, 24, 26, 68, 101, 144, 147,
156, 176, 179, 206, 210,
221–223, 225–227, 229–231,
233–235, 239–241, 246
Crick, Francis, 33
Cromek, Robert, 4, 81, 242
Crosby, Mark, 231
The Crucifixion: “Behold They
Mother,” 242
Culworth, Northamptonshire, 132
Cumberland, George, 88, 93, 95,
157, 242
Cumberland, George, Jr., 246
INDEX 253
Cunningham, Allan, 25, 145,
153–156, 162, 201, 203, 211,
213, 218
Cunningham, Andrew, 6
D
Daily Universal Register, 3
Damon, S. Foster, 27
Damrosch, Leo, 19–21
Dante Alighieri, 45
Darwin, Charles, 6
Darwin, Erasmus, 16
David (King), 203, 204
Davies, J.M.Q., 125
Degenerative eye disease, 3, 238
de La Tour, Maurice, 206
A Descriptive Catalogue, 10, 16, 21,
70, 71, 76, 100, 111, 114, 115,
118, 122, 171, 198, 221, 244
Des Maladies Mentales, considerées sous
les rapports médical, hygienique et
médico-légal (Esquirol), 22, 26
Despair, 217
Des phénomènes de synopsie, 204
Deville, James S., 5, 28
Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, 20
Directional apraxia, 92, 95, 98
Discourses on Art, 65, 152
The Doctor, 212
Doré, Gustave, 45
Dörrbecker, Detlef W., 52,
135–137, 139
Downey, June E., 183, 184, 240, 241
E
East India Company, 160
Eaves, Morris, 76, 134, 163
Eccles, Sir John, 28, 29
The Eclectic Review, 4, 242
Edward the First, 200, 205, 218
254 INDEX
Edward the Third, 204
Edward & Wallace (Visionary
Heads), 203
Egyptian Task Master slain by
Moses, 203
Eidetic images, 19, 20, 27, 28
Electrical surges, 82
Electricity, 145, 151, 157–160
Electro, 33, 158, 161
Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), 160
Elements of Morality, 164
Elizabeth Ilive, Countess of Egremont,
245, 246
Elizabeth Shore (née Lambert), known
as Jane, 114
Eloise, 217
Empress Maud, 213
The Entombment, 242
Entoptic images, 7, 9, 20, 23, 24, 27,
36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 48, 53,
56, 63, 68, 84, 102, 107, 128,
131–134, 137, 141, 142, 147,
149, 150, 154, 155, 162, 166,
167, 190
Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations
Among the Tombs,” 103,
127–133, 144
Erdman, David V., 52, 94
Ermentrout, G. B., 8, 9, 99, 102,
132, 148
Esquirol, Jean Étienne
Dominique, 22, 26
An Essay on the Medical Application of
Electricity, 157
Essays on Physiognomy, 206
Essex Standard, 212
Essick, Robert N., 18, 134, 209, 231
Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World
of William Blake (Damrosch), 19
Europe a Prophecy, 52, 119, 136–140,
152, 190
The Examiner, 4, 21
Exophthalmia, 29
Exoptic images, 20, 31, 63, 68
Eye’s mind, 13, 64, 67, 68, 241
F
Fawkes, Guy, 215
Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William
Blake (Frye), 31
Felpham, 35–39, 42–44, 113, 157,
159, 160, 206, 207, 226
Felton, John, 214
Felt-presence hallucination, 13,
77–79, 82, 97, 208
Fernyhough, Charles, 71
ffytche, Dominic H., 22, 56, 67, 68,
112, 120, 175, 237
FitzGerald, Edward, 16
Fitzwilliam Museum, 30, 201, 202,
209, 217
Flaxman, Anna, 36, 113, 114
Flaxman, John, 21, 37, 39, 158
Flickering light, 122, 146, 151,
161–163, 166, 167
Flournoy, Théodore, 204, 205
Flying corpuscles, 37, 41, 42, 44
Folio Blake-Varley Sketchbook, 197
For Children: The Gates of Paradise,
16, 52, 75, 190
Form-constants (Klüver), 7, 9, 24, 25,
30–32, 88, 96, 99–101, 103–114,
117, 120, 122, 123, 125–126,
132–139, 141–144, 148,
150–152, 155, 161, 169, 240,
241, 246, 247
For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, 190
Fortification spectra, 33, 46, 47, 56,
113, 120, 136, 149, 151
Fothergill, John, 149
Four Zoas, 188
Frye, Northrop, 31, 64
Fuseli, Henry, 21, 120

G H
Galton, Sir Francis, 178, 186, 188,
232, 234
Ganzfeld, 161
Garnett, Richard, 17
Gärtner, Oliver, 200
The Gates of Paradise, 52, 75
Geddes, Alexander, 140
Genesis, 230, 234, 235
The Ghost of Abel A Revelation In the
Visions of Jehovah Seen by William
Blake, 10, 85, 100
Ghost of a Flea, 199, 210–213, 219
Ghost of Samuel Appearing to
Saul, 206
Gilchrist, Alexander, 5, 46, 49,
61, 66, 80, 128, 147,
158, 204, 211, 212,
219, 223
Gilchrist, Anne, 239
Glad Day, 241
Gleckner, Robert F., 182
Goldberg, L.R., 200
Goldwater, Barry, 7
Goldwater Rule, 7
Gordon, Caroline, 70
Gott, Dorothy, 23, 69, 70, 72–74,
108, 109, 116–118, 183
Gourlay, Alexander S., 88, 98
Goya, Franciso de, 15
Grant, John E., 124
Grapheme Colour Synaesthesia (GCS),
176, 177, 179–181, 184–189,
204, 210, 217, 233, 234
Graphemes, 2, 11–13, 33, 89, 97,
169, 175, 177, 179, 184–187,
193, 194, 197, 199, 205, 210,
211, 213–218, 224–225, 233,
234, 236, 249
Grapheme shapes, 194, 213
The Grave, 4, 81, 242
Gray, Thomas, 10
INDEX 255
Hallucinations and Allied Mental
Phenomena, 45
Hamlyn, Robin, 30, 44
Harrold, 197
Hayes, Catherine, 197, 210, 214
Hayes, Tom, 209
Hayley, William, 37, 43, 113, 157,
159, 160, 206, 207, 226
Health (Blake’s), 3, 5, 7, 14, 15, 17,
29, 101, 160
Heppner, Christopher, 111, 120, 217
Herschel, John, 122
Hervey, James, 127–133, 144
Higgs, John, 18
Hobbes, Thomas, 31, 32, 126, 150
Hodological model, 56, 68,
175, 237
Holdway, Paul, 92, 164, 165
Holstein, 216
Horizon, 177, 231
Houghton Library, 136
The House of Death, 51
Howard, John, 149
Hubbard, E.M., 199
“The Human Abstract,” 222
Humphry, Ozias, 96, 245
Hunt, Robert, 4, 20, 21, 237, 238
Huntington Library, 230
Hunt, Robert, 4, 20, 237, 238
Hupé, Jean-Michel, 232, 233
Huxley, Aldous, 63
Hypnagogic/hypnopompic, 27, 43,
71, 78, 80, 111, 123, 126, 146,
147, 150, 210
I
Illustrations of the Book of Job, 15, 16,
47, 48, 73, 74, 147, 235,
236, 243
Il Penseroso, 103, 123–124, 126
256 INDEX
Imagination of a Man whom. Mr.
Blake has recd. instruction in
Painting &c. from, 209
Inner speech, 13, 225, 228, 234
Insanity/sanity, 3, 5, 16, 17, 75,
196, 227
‘Introduction,’ 94, 97
Ishizuka, Hisaoy, 54
An Island in the Moon, 92, 95, 98, 131
J Lamech and His Two Wives, 51
Jacob’s Dream/Jacob’s Ladder, 103,
109–114, 123, 125, 127, 128,
130, 241, 244, 246
Jaensch, E.R., 27
Jane Shore, 103
Jarvik, M.E., 106
Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant
Albion (Blake), 26, 27, 43, 66,
79, 86, 89, 111, 121, 133, 155
Joan, Pope, 217
Job, his Wife and his Friends: The
Complaint of Job, 51
Johnson, Joseph, ix
John, Thomas, 36
Jones, Simon R., 71
Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, 243
Joseph making himself known to his
brethren, 63
Journal of Mental Science, 45
The Journal of Natural Philosophy, 88
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes, 64–65
Judgment of Solomon, 206
Julius Caeser, 204
K Liveing, Edward, 48, 53, 54
Kirkup, Seymour Stocker, 29, 71
Klüver, Heinrich, 7–9, 24, 25, 30–33,
40, 88, 96, 99–102, 106–109,
111–114, 117, 120, 122–128, 130,
146–148, 150–152, 154, 155, 161,
169, 185, 188, 240, 241, 246, 247
Koch, Christof, 33
L
Lais, 205, 218
L’ Allegro, 123–124
Lamb, Charles, 4, 249
Lamb, M., 9
Lancet, 157
Langguth, Georg August, 39
Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook, 197,
198, 214–217
A Large Book of Designs, 96
Lashley, Karl S., 149
Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 206, 207
Leão, Aristides A.P., 150
Left-hemispheric stroke, 15
Letter Addressed to the Addressers, on
the Late Proclamation, 140
A Letter to Mr. George Adams, on the
Subject of Medical Electricity, 159
Leukocytes, 37, 40, 41
Leviathan (Hobbes), 31, 150
Life, 66
Life-mask, 5, 28
Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor ignotus,’
49, 65, 66
Life of William Blake (Thomas
Wright), 66
Linnell, John, 5, 68, 73, 88, 93, 95,
147, 196–198, 201, 206–211,
214, 215, 217, 235
Linnell, Mary Ann, 235
Listlessness, 217
‘London,’ 129, 176, 179, 184, 185,
187–190, 217, 233, 240
Lovett, Richard, 158

M Milton, John, 20, 103, 123–126,
The Magdalene at the Sepulchre, 242
Mahomet, 197
The … Man who instructed Mr. Blake
in … in his Dreams, 209
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 12,
62, 63, 70–74, 86, 87, 90, 94,
116, 163, 171, 178, 183, 190,
191, 194, 217, 240
Marrow Theologians, 131
Mary Magdalene Washing Christ’s
Feet, 243
McGann, Jerome J., 140
McManus, Noa Cahaner, 104
Meditations among the Tombs. In a
letter to a Lady, 127, 129
Meditations and Contemplations,
129, 131
Mee, Jon, 18
The Meeting of a family in
Heaven, 242
Melland, Charles H., 47, 49
Mescaline, 146
Michelangelo, 15, 217
The Midnight Cry, “Behold, the
Bridegroom comes!” Or, An Order
from God To Get Your Lamps
Lighted, Otherwise you must go
into Darkness, 70, 72, 118
Migraine, 26, 29, 33, 45–51, 53–57,
77, 106, 113, 121, 122, 136,
142, 143, 145–152, 155, 156,
161, 163, 165–167, 195, 240
Migraine Art Collection, 50, 55, 106
Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience
From Within, 50
Migraine aura, 25, 26, 29, 33
Migraine: Understanding a common
disorder, 47
Milton a Poem in 2 Books, 42, 43, 54,
81, 82, 84, 86, 124, 157, 208
INDEX 257
197, 216
Milton’s … Dream, 126
Milton’s Mysterious Dream, 123–126,
137, 138
Mirror-invariance, 91, 94, 97, 98
Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia (MTS),
176, 222–224, 230
Mirror-writing, 33, 60, 62, 83, 84,
88–98, 164, 180, 190, 233
Mitchell, Piers D., 6
Mitchell, W.J.T., 32, 64, 133, 134,
183, 184, 245
Montgomery, James, 4
Monthly Magazine, 203, 204, 217
Moore, Alan, 237
Moravians, 66, 116, 117, 131, 132
Morgagni, Giovanni Battista, 39
Morgan Library, 123, 124
Morse code, 95
Moses, 203, 216
Mother Brownrigg, 215, 217
Muir, William, 65
Munro Smith, George, 45–49,
56, 136, 145, 148, 150,
240, 241
Myopia, 30
Myrone, Martin, 21
N
Nair, Anupama, 150, 154
National Gallery (London), 212
National Gallery of Art (NGA), 245
National Health Service (NHS), 7
National Portrait Gallery, 14
Nature, 234
Newton, Sir Isaac, 38, 39, 152
Night Thoughts (Young), 10
Nixion, Tom, 214
Nobel Prize, 28, 33
258 INDEX
The Noon Day Sun, a Revelation from
Christ to Dispel the Night of
Apostacy, 118
Notebook, 23, 52, 75, 76, 116,
117, 245
Novelist’s Magazine, 61
O Paul’s Church, 103, 107, 114,
Oberon and Titania on a Lilly, 76
Oberon and Titania Reclining on a
Poppy, 76
Observations on the Deranged
Manifestations of the Mind, or
Insanity, 5
Old Parr when Young, 205
“On Another’s Sorrow,” 222
On Megrim, Sick-Headache, And Some
Allied Disorders: A Contribution
to the Pathology of Nerve-­
Storms, 48
Opium, 153
Opticks, 39, 152
Ordinal Linguistic Personification
Synaesthesia (OLP), 176–180, 185,
193–197, 199, 203, 206–209, 211,
213–217, 219, 233
P 147–151, 158, 159, 161, 240
Paine, Tom, 140, 142
Paleopathology, 3–6
Paley, Morton D., 27, 196
Palinopsia, 28, 249
Pall Mall Gazette, 212
Palmer, Samuel, 5, 14, 29, 30, 64,
142, 239
Parker, James, 61
Parkinson’s Disease with
Dementia, 238
Parkinson’s Disease with Lewy
Bodies, 238
Pathological disorder, 2
Pathologies, 4
Peasants’ Revolt, 215
Peckham Rye hallucination, 14, 46,
57, 72, 87, 148, 155, 240, 241
The Penance of Jane Shore
drawing, 109
The Penance of Jane Shore in St.
116–122, 132
Percy, Henry, 214
Personality, 193, 194, 196, 197, 199,
200, 216–217
Personifications, 13, 176, 193–195,
199, 201, 204, 207, 211, 213,
216, 217, 219
Personified Flea, 211–213, 219
Petitot, Jean, 138
Petworth House, 244, 245
Phenomenology, 2, 18, 21, 32–34, 36,
45, 47, 49, 51, 100, 107–109,
120, 125, 126, 139, 142,
150–152, 181, 206, 218, 221,
231, 235, 237, 239, 240, 249
Phillips, Michael, 92
Phillips, Thomas, 14, 29
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London, 48, 182
Phosphenes, 40, 43, 101, 107,
Photism, 177, 185–189, 205, 210,
213, 215
Photophobia, 145, 156, 240
Photophobic, 155, 162
Phrenology, 5, 6
Pilgrims Progress, 24
Pindar, 205
Podoll, Klaus, 50, 51, 55, 122, 137,
141, 143, 148
Poetical Sketches, 14, 62, 63
The Portrait of a Man who instructed
Mr. Blake in Painting, 209

Post-bereavement hallucinations, 13,
33, 57, 60, 72, 75–83, 87, 97,
180, 208
Prado, Madrid, 6, 7
Prevalence, 7, 11, 12, 27, 56, 101,
148, 175–177, 181, 197, 222,
229, 237, 242, 248
Primary Visual Cortex (V1), 23,
30, 33, 40
Projector mode, 177, 179, 184–187,
189, 217, 221, 224, 231,
233, 234
Psychological illusion, 3
Psychotic, 2
‘Public Address,’ 31, 76
Purkinje, Jan Evangelista (Purkinĕ),
25, 39, 43, 121, 122, 161,
162, 166–169
Pyramids, 203, 204, 217
Q Satan, Sin, and Death: Satan Comes to
Quinney, Laura, 19, 21
R Scheerer, Richard, 37, 41
Reading Blake’s Designs, 111
Relief-etching/relief-etched, 10, 12,
33, 42, 60–62, 64, 70, 73–77,
82–86, 88, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97,
138, 139, 152, 164, 180,
190, 208
Reminiscences, 214
Retina, 3, 9, 10, 30, 41, 100, 102,
108, 116, 147, 151, 247
Retino-cortical mapping, 147,
148, 246
Retrospective diagnoses, 3, 4,
6, 7, 145
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 61, 65, 152, 210
Richmond, George, 5
The Rights of Man, 140
INDEX 259
Ritson, Joseph, 61, 91, 164
Robert, 4, 13, 33, 36, 37, 57, 75–82,
85, 171, 208, 224
Roberts, Jonathan, 22, 36–38, 43, 44
Robinson, Derek, 50, 51, 55, 122,
137, 141, 143, 148
Robson, Lane, 165
Rowe, Nicholas, 117
Rowland, Christopher, 36, 44, 104, 108
Royal Academy, 3, 16, 29, 61, 63, 71,
109, 111, 130, 239, 243–248
S
Sachs, Georg Tobias Ludwig, 173
Sacks, Oliver, 46, 47, 49, 143
The Sacrifice of Jephthah’s
Daughter, 242
Sale, Richard, 118
Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 164
Sanity, 3
the Gate of Hell, 155
Saul under the Influence of the Evil
Spirit, 206
Scheerer’s phenomena, 33, 35, 37,
41–44, 56, 145, 194
Schiavonetti, Louis, 4
Schizotypy, 11, 17
Schott, G.D., 89, 97, 157, 158
Scintillating scotoma, 46, 151, 156, 163
Seen in My Visions: A Descriptive
Catalogue of Pictures
(Myrone), 21
A Select Collection of English Songs,
61, 91, 164
Sequence Space Synaesthesia (SSS),
176, 178, 218, 234, 235
Serif, variant ‘g’, 94–96, 98
Setting the Stone and Setting a Watch,
242, 243
260 INDEX
Sharp, Granville, 149
Sheridan, David, 106
Shore, Jane, 114–123
Shufeldt, R.W., 4
Siddons, Sarah, 117
Siegel, R.K., 106
Simner, Julia, 84, 175, 177, 185, 199,
216, 225, 230, 231
Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and the Nine and
Twenty Pilgrims on their Journey to
Canterbury, 31
Small Blake-Varley Sketchbook, 197
A Small Book of Designs, 96
Smeathman, Henry, 157
Smith, John Raphael, 61
Smith, J.T., 14, 75–78, 80–82, 136,
152–156, 240
Socrates, 144, 206–208
Solomon, 203, 206
The Song of Los, 52, 76, 169, 190, 191
Songs of Experience, 76, 94, 129, 176,
184, 190, 240
Songs of Innocence, 4, 12, 20, 21, 76, 86,
90, 94, 97, 98, 164, 190
Songs of Innocence and of Experience,
70, 222, 233
A Soul at the Door of Paradise, 104
“The Soul hovering over the
Body reluctantly parting with
Life,” 80
Southey, Robert, 171, 212
Spectacles (Blake’s), 29, 30
Spectre, 198
“The spirit of Voltaire,” 206, 226
Spiritual Preceptor, 171
Spode Factory, 25, 92, 164, 165
Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar, 5
Stothard, Thomas, 168
St. Paul Preaching in Athens, 242
The Stranger from Paradise:
A Biography of William Blake
(Bentley Jr.), 18
Strauss, Johan, 174
St. Thomas’s Hospital, 157
Swedenborg conference, 69, 108, 118
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 69–73, 87,
108, 171
Synaesthesia, 3, 11–13, 17, 18, 20, 25,
32, 33, 84, 87, 89, 100, 144, 150,
152, 154, 173–189, 199–204, 207,
208, 210, 211, 213–217, 219,
221–236, 238–240, 249
T
Tate Britain, 21, 30, 103, 104, 199, 237
Tatham, Frederick, 67, 91, 198, 205,
223, 246, 247
Taylor, Michelle D., 200
Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, 15
Tessellopsia, 120–122
There is No Natural Religion, 59, 60,
62, 83–87, 90, 93, 96, 164, 180,
190, 191, 195
Theron and Aspasio; Or, A Series of
Dialogues And Letters, 131
Thornton, Robert, 14
‘Ticker-Tape’ Synaesthesia (TTS), 176,
179, 187, 221, 222, 224,
225, 231–235
Tiriel, 66
Tobacco, 146
Toppin, Adam, 61
‘To Spring,’ 63
Townsend, Joyce H., 104, 116
Townshend, Piers, 116
The Tragedy of Jane Shore, 117
The Transfiguration, 242
Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy, 212
Trodd, Colin, 17
Trusler, John, 9
Tsou, Brian H., 121, 146, 151, 161
Tulk, Charles Augustus, 70
Turing, Alan, 151

Twiss, Richard, 16
Tyler, Christopher W., 40, 107
U Visual delusion, 19
University of Prague, 161
Untitled, 106
V 137–139, 141–143, 146, 148, 151,
V1, 8–10, 13, 22, 23, 30, 33, 40, 57,
67, 68, 99–102, 108, 112, 114,
121, 130, 132, 138, 139, 147–152,
163, 188, 241, 246–248
See also Primary Visual Cortex (V1)
V2, 121
V4, 13, 181, 188
V5, 168
Vala, 66
van Gogh, Vincent, 15
Various Personifications, 217
Varley, John, 5, 147, 195, 197, 198,
201–203, 205–218, 223
Vascular Dementia, 238
Vaterländisches Museum, 221
Venetian Secret, 82
Verbal auditory hallucinations, 2, 3,13,
19, 27, 33, 34, 39, 78, 82, 84,
102, 171, 183–185, 216, 224,
226, 228–231, 233, 236, 249
Victoria and Albert Museum, 244
Virgil, 14
Viscomi, Joseph, 86, 89, 94–96, 103,
134, 165
The Visionary Art of William Blake:
Christianity, Romanticism and the
Pictorial Imagination
(Billingsley), 21
Visionary Heads, 12, 155, 176, 177,
179, 180, 185, 193–201,
205–206, 210–212, 214–217,
219, 223, 233, 236, 240, 248
INDEX 261
The Vision of the Last Judgment, 21,
23, 24, 65, 198, 217, 244–249
Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 70,
119, 190, 191
Visual hallucinations, 2, 7–9, 13, 20,
22–25, 27, 29, 30, 54, 56, 69, 77,
99–102, 104, 108, 109, 111, 112,
114, 120–121, 123, 125–128, 130,
154, 156, 161, 162, 169, 172, 238,
241, 246, 248, 249
Visual illusions, 22
Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 144,
206, 223–230, 234, 236
Vygotsky, L.S., 228
W
Walkeringham, 132
Walker, Jearl, 151
Wallace, William, 200, 203, 205, 218
Wat Tyler, 215
Wellesley College, 194
Werner, Bette Charlene, 124
Wesley, John, 158
West, Benjamin, 82
Weston-Favell, 127, 132
Wheatley, Henry B., 49
Whitehead, Angus, 157
Wilkinson, Sam, 228
The William Blake Archive, 134,
136, 137
William Blake exhibition catalogue, 237
William Blake: His Philosophy and
Symbols (Damon), 27
William Blake on Self and Soul
(Quinney), 19
William Blake Society, 65
William Blake vs. The World (Higgs), 18
The Witch of Endor, Saul and the Ghost
of Samuel, 206
262 INDEX

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 16 Y
Wordsworth, Dorothy, Young, Thomas, 10
26, 236
Wright, Catherine, 132
Wright, Thomas, 65–68, 178 Z
Wyndham, Charles, 65 Zeki, Semir, 9, 68, 236