TITLE PAGE MHH

Fitzwilliam Museum

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Copy I,  Plate 1

Printed 1827

Insight From The Unholy Bible: Blake, Jung and the Collective Unconscious, 

by June Singer

"Blake serves notice that in this little book we must expect the unexpected."  

Page 43

June Singer begins her sturdy of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by describing the title page of his book. At the top of the page is a scene which includes the first three words of the title and images of two couples under leafless trees. The woman of the couple to the right is prone on the ground, the man is kneeling beside her with a babe in his arms. Singer calls this scene the Earth. She states that "Blake gives less space to the earth than to the underworld because to him the daily activity of conscious life was the palest part of existence." She sees that the figures in this space "approch precariously close to the rim of the bottomless depths from which individual consciousness emerges." 

The middle section of the picture is divided into the left side representing the "sinister, dark, or hidden side", covered with flames of Hell. On the right side are dark and bright clouds of Heaven. This section symboizes the abyss into the pairs of opposites, represented as couples, have fallen from the earth above.

In the lower section we enter "the limitless underground regions below the threshold of consciousness." This is the area Blake felt compelled to enter:

"When Blake comes to a place in his life where his understanding of the world about him - the problems of nations in their struggle for freedom from tyranny, the travail of the working people of his own England trying to maintain themselves against the incursion of the machine - and the lack of satisfaction in his personal life and especially in his marriage, bring him to the point of despair, he sinks his own roots deeper into a place of quiet darkness where he can hope to find restoration." He was led to explore Heaven and Hell and "the archetypal opposites from which they sprang."

The lowest part of the picture in which the word HELL appears, contains male and female figures embracing. Singer postulates that Blake "consciously identifies" with the male figure on the right, the side of consciousness. The darker unconscious side of his personality is represented by the female on the left. Singer states that the embrace "is in reality a confrontation between the male ego and the 'other,' between the male who sees himself as a rational being able to perform successfully in the manner prescribed by the social order and the female afire with energy which knows no bounds or limitation...Reason and Energy are seen as the two contraries which struggle within Blake, and whose interaction so deeply concerns him in this work."