MENTAL FIGHT

First posted June 2016 

On page 26 of Fearful Symmetry, Frye writes:

"It appears then, then, that there are not only two worlds, but three: the world of vision, the world of sight and the world of memory: the world we create, the world we live in and the world we run away to. The world of memory is an unreal world of reflection and abstract ideas; the world of sight is the potentially real world of  subjects and objects; the world of vision is the world of creators and creatures. In the world  of memory we see nothing; in the world of sight we see what we have to see; in the world of vision we see what we want to see. There are not three different worlds, as in the religions which speak of a heaven and hell in addition to ordinary life; they are the egocentric, the ordinary and the visionary ways of looking at the same world."

British Museum
Illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts

The world of vision, of creator and creatures, is Blake's world of Imagination; Jung's of Intuition. This is the mental world of which Blake writes and in which he lives. He takes up the sword for mental fight and never puts it down.

Blake is the teacher par excellence who presents his subject, asks his students to incorporate an understanding of it into their own thinking and then gives them opportunities to practice the paradigm of acting which he hopes to teach. The student has not learned anything experientially until he incorporates an altered behavior into his range of options.

An aspect of becoming aware of the imaginative dimension in what goes on in the world around us, is finding patterns which enable us to fit together diverse pieces of our experience. If we recognize similar patterns in, for example religion and science, we expand our ability to assimilate a cohesive view rather than multiple limited views. If we look through a different window of perception, if we alter our preconceived assumptions, or back away form emotional involvement, the whole picture may begin to become visible.

When I was trying to catch site of a comet in the sky, I simply couldn't see it although I knew its location and that it was visible to the naked eye. I was trying to focus my eyes as I would when looking for detail in a picture. When I instead gave up on seeing the comet and looked at the whole sky, the faint light of the comet came into view. Our eyes are actually constructed with special receptors to see faint light as well as receptors for bright light. Until I 'turned off' the receptors for bright light, the receptors for dim light couldn't make the comet visible.

Frye and Blake are telling us that we have receptors for peering into the mental world of vision or imagination. But if our focus of attention is occupied with sensation, emotion or rationalization, we miss the fainter light of intuition.      

Milton, Plate 1, (E 95)
"I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land."

A Vision of The Last Judgment, (E 555)
                   For the Year 1810
        Additions to Blakes Catalogue of Pictures &c 
"This world of Imagination is the World of
Eternity it is the Divine bosom into which we shall all go after
the death of the Vegetated body   This World of Imagination is
Infinite & Eternal whereas the world of Generation or Vegetation
is Finite & Temporal    There Exist
in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing
which we see are reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature
     All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the
Divine body of the Saviour the True Vine of Eternity
The Human Imagination who appeard to Me as Coming to Judgment.
among his Saints & throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal
might be Establishd. around him were seen the Images of
Existences according to a certain order suited to my Imaginative Eye  

     Here follows the description of the Picture"  

BLAKE & DIOGENES

First posted Sept 2016

 Isaiah 20

[1] In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod, (when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him,) and fought against Ashdod, and took it;
[2] At the same time spake the LORD by Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying, Go and loose the sackcloth from off thy loins, and put off thy shoe from thy foot. And he did so, walking naked and barefoot.
[3] And the LORD said, Like as my servant Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia;
[4] So shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptians prisoners, and the Ethiopians captives, young and old, naked and barefoot, even with their buttocks uncovered, to the shame of Egypt.
[5] And they shall be afraid and ashamed of Ethiopia their expectation, and of Egypt their glory.
[6] And the inhabitant of this isle shall say in that day, Behold, such is our expectation, whither we flee for help to be delivered from the king of Assyria: and how shall we escape?

 Marriage of Heaven and Hell

"I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three
years? he answerd, the same that made our friend Diogenes the
Grecian."

 Blake's Memorable Fancy on Plates 12 and 13 of Marriage of Heaven and Hell uses the Hebrew prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel to emphasize the point that a conventional mindset that follows the popular mores fails to understand the voice of prophecy. Isaiah and Ezekiel developed their ability to listen to the voice that spoke from within. To convey the message they received, they occasionally behaved in ways which startled their contemporaries. They sought to change their societies by demonstrating what were the consequences of continuing in behaviors which were leading to destruction. Blake further emphasized the technique of shocking people out of habitual nonproductive attitudes by indicating that Isaiah attributed his going naked and barefoot for three years to the influence of Diogenes who had practiced the same kinds of outrageous stunts to his Greek contemporaries.

Blake was not averse to looking to the Greek philosophy of Diogenes to reinforce his principle that man could not depend upon only data from his senses to interpret his environment and experience. Isaiah, Ezekiel and Diogenes risked being outcast from their societies in order to encourage men to have their intellect and courage opened to perceiving the limitations of conventional thinking. In writing Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake was engaging in similar strategies to those used by his heroes. He was presenting his ideas in forms and statements which were unacceptable to his public. He risked the ridicule of the critics and the indifference of potential readers by writing poetry which seemed ridiculous on the surface, and making images which appeared unpolished and obscure to current taste.

Fitzwilliam Museum
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Plate 21

We can judge that Blake had an affinity toward Diogenes from the label cynic which is often attached to the name of the fourth century BC philosopher. As a young man Blake wrote An Island in the Moon: satirical observations on the set of people with whom he was acquainted. He gave himself the name Quid the Cynic. The Greek word cynic was derived from a word meaning dog-like, and Diogenes was thought of as a dog by his critics. Perhaps the unexpected pictures of dogs in Blake's images is meant to point out his viewing whatever situation was being illustrated from a cynical perspective which he shared with Diogenes.

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, PLATE 12, (E 38)
                    "A Memorable Fancy.                            
   The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked
them how they dared so roundly to assert. that God spake to them; 
and  whether they did not think at the time, that they would be 
misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
   Isaiah answer'd. I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite
organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in
every thing, and as  I was then perswaded. & remain confirm'd;
that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared
not for consequences but  wrote.
   Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?
   He replied.  All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination
this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable
of a firm perswasion of any thing.
   Then Ezekiel said. The philosophy of the east taught the first 
principles of human perception     some nations held one
principle for  the origin & some another, we of Israel taught
that the Poetic Genius (as  you now call it) was the first
principle and all the others merely  derivative, which was the
cause of our despising the Priests & Philosophers  of other
countries, and prophecying that all Gods [PL 13] would at last be
proved. to originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the
Poetic  Genius, it was this. that our great poet King David
desired so fervently  & invokes so patheticly, saying by this he
conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God.
that we cursed in his name all  the deities of surrounding
nations, and asserted that they had rebelled; from these opinions
the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be
subject to the jews.
   This said he, like all firm perswasions, is come to pass, for all 
nations believe the jews code and worship the jews god, and what
greater subjection can be
   I heard this with some wonder, & must confess my own
conviction.  After dinner I ask'd Isaiah to favour the world with
his lost works, he said none of equal value was lost.  Ezekiel
said the same of his.
   I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three
years? he answerd, the same that made our friend Diogenes the
Grecian.
   I then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung, & lay so long on his
right  & left side? he answerd. the desire of raising other men
into a  perception of the infinite this the North American tribes
practise. & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience.
only for the sake of present  ease or gratification?"

AMERICA/EUROPE

  This is a lecture by Professor Edwin G Wilson to students at Wake Forest University:

You can follow pictures from Blake's America and Europe thru looking at the books at the Internet Archive as you listen to the lecture.

America - Internet Archive  

Europe - Internet Archive

In 2015 Yale Center for British Art presented an Exihibition titled Critique of Reason: Romantic Art,1760-1860. Included in the Exihibition were several of Blake's works.

The following quote is from the Yale Center for British Art, Gallery label for the Critique of Reason: Romantic Art,1760 -1860.

"At the height of the political and social upheaval of the French Revolution, William Blake printed his first full-scale prophetic book, America. A Prophecy. Rather than recounting the horrors that reverberated from France throughout Europe, his illustrated poem reflects on the revolutionary spirit in the American colonies, which had ended in American independence a decade earlier. Blake and many other radicals in the 1790s viewed the American Revolution as the beginning of a global process of liberating nations from superstition and despotism. Although America. A Prophecy is rooted in recent events, the text and accompanying plates do not offer a historical chronology but rather transform history into a mythical narrative of universal relevance."

I think I was most impressed by Professor Wilson's description of Orc since my association of Orc has been as Los and Enithirmon's jealous son as shown in this picture.

National Gallery Victoria

Book of Urizen

Plate 21

However I need to think of Orc more as the Energy, Freedom, Youth, and Desire motivating the Rebel.

Yale Center for British Art

America

Plate 10

LIMITED & ETERNAL

 

British Museum
Illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts

First posted Jan 2019

Near the end of his final book, Jung reached some conclusions on the ultimate questions facing man.

From C. G. Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Page 325:
"The decisive question for man is this: Is he related to something infinite or not?
...
The more a man lays stress on false possessions, the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that there is in this life a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.
...
Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one and the other."

Perhaps Blake would have quibbled if he had heard Jung's statement that man breaks through to awareness of the unity of the limited and the eternal, through consciousness of his constraints. But both men were struggling to reconcile the poles of a paradox. Man experiences himself as divided, as living in two worlds - the sordid world of the survival of the fittest, and the divine world of innocence where 'all things work together for good.' One which imprisons him in time and space and one which invites him to soar in his imagination.

Reconciling the opposite poles of the dilemma may have come more naturally to Blake because he spoke the language of poetry whereas Jung spoke the language of science. Blake provided us with first hand images in metaphor and pictures to facilitate the experience of reconciliation. Jung analyzed dreams and myths for the material that supported ideas and concepts which he formulated intellectually.   

---

All Religions are One, (E 1)
 "The Religions of all Nations are derived from
each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is
every where call'd the Spirit of Prophecy."

All Religions are One, (E 1)
  As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various) So
all Religions & as all similars have one source 
  The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius

There is No Natural Religion, (E 2)
  The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite
& himself Infinite
     Conclusion,   If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic
character. the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the
ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat
the same dull round over again
     Application.   He who sees the Infinite in all things sees
God.  He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.
 Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is"

Marriage of Heaven and Hell,Plate 13, (E 39)
 "I then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung, & lay so long on his
right  & left side? he answerd. the desire of raising other men
into a  perception of the infinite" 

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 14, (E 39)
 "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would
appear  to man as it is: infinite.
   For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro'
narrow chinks of his cavern."

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 18, (E 41)
"By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke 
of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun,
black but shining[;] round it were fiery tracks on which revolv'd
vast spiders, crawling after their prey; which flew or rather
swum in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals
sprung from corruption. & the air was full of them, & seemd
composed of them; these are Devils. and are called Powers of the
air, I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot? he said,
between the black & white spiders 
  But now, from between the black & white spiders a cloud and
fire burst and rolled thro the deep blackning all beneath, so
that the nether deep grew black as a sea & rolled with a terrible
noise: beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest,
till looking east between the clouds & the waves, we saw a
cataract of blood mixed with fire and not many stones throw from
us appeard and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent.
at last to the east, distant about three degrees appeard a fiery
crest above the waves slowly it reared like a ridge of golden
rocks till we discoverd two globes of crimson fire. from which
the sea fled away in clouds of smoke, and now we saw, it was the
head of Leviathan. his forehead was divided into streaks of green
& purple like those on a tygers forehead: soon we saw his mouth &
red gills hang just above the raging foam tinging the black deep
with beams of blood, advancing toward [PL 19] us with all the
fury of a spiritual existence.
  My friend the Angel climb'd up from his station into the mill;
I remain'd alone, & then this appearance was no more, but I found
myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon light
hearing a harper who sung to the harp. & his theme was, The man
who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds
reptiles of the mind." 

SONG OF LIBERTY

Blake Archive

Original in Fitzwilliam Museum

Copy H, Plate 24

 Thanks to Geoffrey Keynes for his introduction and commentary in William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Introduction - commentary by Keynes

 "On the third plate he had stated the doctrine of contraries - Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate. Without these contraries there could be no progression, that is, human thought and life need the stimulus of active and opposing ofrces to give them creative movement. In the light of this principle Blake gave the qualities, Good and Evil, meanings opposite to their their usual acceptation, and in the fourth plate announced in plain terms how the wrong interpretation had arisen, stemming from conventional moral codes. To him passive acceptance was evil, active opposition was good. This is the key to the paradoxes and inversions of which the whole work consists. Angels and Devils change places. Good is Evil. Heaven is Hell. Through freely using satire and paradox, Blake gives this book some of the most explicit statements of his mental attitudes, which he elaborated in the later Prophetic Books and restated more clearly in the phrases of the Laocoon plate in 1820. Page xi

"It is important to remember while reading the book that there are two primary features throughout - satire and personal philosophy. Blake is neither being flippant no too serious; the Marriage has much wit and good humor mingled with the expression of deeply felt personal convictions." Page xi

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 24, (E  44)

"One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression

Plate 25

Song of Liberty
1.  The Eternal Female groand! it was heard over all the Earth:
2.  Albions coast is sick silent; the American meadows faint!
3  Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers
and mutter across the ocean! France rend down thy dungeon;  
4.  Golden Spain burst the barriers of old Rome;
5.  Cast thy keys O Rome into the deep down falling, even to
eternity down falling, 
6.  And weep! 
7.  In her trembling hands she took the new, born terror howling;
8.  On those infinite mountains of light now barr'd out by the
atlantic sea, the new born fire stood before the starry king! 
9.  Flag'd with grey brow'd snows and thunderous visages the
jealous wings wav'd over the deep.
10. The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield,
forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and 
[PL 26] hurl'd the new born wonder thro' the starry night.
11. The fire, the fire, is falling!
12. Look up! look up! O citizen of London. enlarge thy
countenance; O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and
wine; O African! black African! (go. winged thought widen his
forehead.) 
13. The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun
into the western sea.
14. Wak'd from his eternal sleep, the hoary, element roaring
fled away:
15. Down rushd beating his wings in vain the jealous king: his
grey brow'd councellors, thunderous warriors, curl'd veterans,
among helms, and shields, and chariots horses, elephants:
banners, castles, slings and rocks,
16. Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona's
dens.
17. All night beneath the ruins, then their sullen flames faded
emerge round the gloomy king,
18. With thunder and fire: leading his starry hosts thro' the
waste wilderness [PL 27] he promulgates his ten commands,
glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay,
19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the
morning plumes her golden breast,
20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony
law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night,
crying

  Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.

          Chorus

  Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly
black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy.  Nor his accepted
brethren whom, tyrant, he calls free; lay the bound or build the
roof.  Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that
wishes but acts not!
  For every thing that lives is Holy"
 ____________________

Chorus - Paraphrase

Liberty requires the removal of restraints which prevent the expression of joy. Accepting the designation of free when the tryrant is restricting freedom with political and religious restraints would set limits to liberty. Pretense which hides desire behind deceit destroys liberty no matter what the name.

It is life expressed through physical action and mental imagination that impart the divine to all creation. 

________________

Out of the destruction of the old system came the new. Song of Liberty began with a birth whose cry was 'heard over all the Earth.' It ended with the commandments being stomped to dust by the revolutionary force which released the energy of a new age. Liberty was not to be attained until the opposition to it had been removed. Blake systematically enumerated, in poetic language, aspects of the society in which he lived which kept him and his contempories in chains.

_____________

A Song of Liberty - Plates 25-27, commentary by Keynes

"In the sixteeenth sentence of the Song Blake added to the Rintrah of 'The Argument' one more of his personifications of abstract ideas by the name 'Urthona'. This is one of the 'Four Zoas' of Blake's conception of  Man's nature: Tharmas, his body; Urizen, his reason; Luvah, his emotions; Urthona, his imagination, All of these are explained only in later writings, yet Blake was content to throw in one of the Zoas, unexplained, among the consequences of Revolution, perhaps because it must have been the most important result of all. Urthona concerned Art and the Divinity of Man and worked darkly in the 'dens' of the subconscious mind, but would be liberated by the collapse of Tyranny." 

LIBERTY

 First posted Sept 2020

  Blake Archive

Orginal in British Museum

Jerusalem

Plate 26

Blake's Song of Liberty is often thought of in terms of support for the revolutionary spirit which could liberate man from political oppression. But this type of liberation has proven to be of a cyclical nature. Although man may temporarily acquire greater freedom by throwing off the tyranny under which he lives, he soon submits to rulers and laws which deprive him of his freedom. Blake was less interested in ending the recurring cycle of political control which kept man bound in the physical world, than he was in breaking out of the mental cycle which keeps him trapped mentally by finding repetitious patterns necessary.

Northrop Frye presents the question asked by Nietzsche: 'is the limit we see there really a limit.' Is it possible to transcend the barrier which we fear to cross? There is a New Song to be sung, but we cannot sing it unless we can look at one another not as 'the other' but as 'my other self.' In a way this would represent a return because we all crossed this barrier in the opposite direction when as infants we first discerned that we were separate from the mother who was the source of milk and warmth and the comforting touch.

There have been periods in history when man's self-perception changed. These events were evolutions of consciousness which permanently opened the psyche to new abilities. They altered the mind of man and the physical world followed as a result. The job of the individual is to follow his imagination as it leads to another dimension.

In The Great Code, Page 232-3, Northrop Frye writes about the conditions which inhibit man from achieving his potential:

"As soon as we begin to wonder whether, to use Nietzsche's phrase again, the limit we see there really is a limit, we find ourselves stumbling over the traditional Christian doctrine of 'original sin.' This doctrine holds that since the fall of Adam human life has been cursed with a built in inertia that will forever prevent man from fulfilling his destiny without divine help, and that that help can be described only in terms of the external and the objective. From our present vantage point we can characterize the conception of original sin more precisely as man's fear of freedom and his resentment of the discipline and responsibility that freedom brings.

"Thus in Milton ...liberty is the chief thing that the Gospel has to bring to man. But man for Milton does not and cannot 'naturally' want freedom, he gets it only because God wants him to have it. What man naturally wants is to collapse back into the master-slave duality, of which the creator-creature duality is perhaps a projection. Paradise Lost tells again the fall of Adam to explain, among other things, the failure of the Puritan Revolution as Milton saw it. 

"..If Milton's view of the Bible as a manifesto of human freedom has anything to be said for it, one would expect it to be written in a language that would smash these structures beyond repair, and let some genuine air and light in. But of course anxiety is very skillful at distorting languages".

Jerusalem, Plate 26, (E 171)
" SUCH VISIONS HAVE APPEARD TO ME 
     AS I MY ORDERD RACE HAVE RUN 
      JERUSALEM IS NAMED LIBERTY 
       AMONG THE SONS OF ALBION

Songs and Ballads, (E 473)
"Why should I care for the men of thames
Or the cheating waves of charterd streams
Or shrink at the little blasts of fear
That the hireling blows into my ear

Tho born on the cheating banks of Thames     
Tho his waters bathed my infant limbs
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me    
I was born a slave but I go to be free"   

Songs and Ballads, (E 472)
[How to know Love from Deceit]

"Love to faults is always blind
Always is to joy inclind                             
Lawless wingd & unconfind                    
And breaks all chains from every mind

Deceit to secresy confind                       
Lawful cautious & refind                         
To every thing but interest blind             
And forges fetters for the mind" 

SWEDENBORG

 First posted June 2022

Library of Congress

Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Plate 3

 Quote from an earlier post by Larry:

"In the 18th century Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist, philosopher and religionist, had a very high reputation. In London a 'new church' sprang up espousing his values. William Blake's parents were members of the New Church. That probably explains several interesting things about Blake's early life. For example his father appeared to be about as permissive as the average modern father in our culture today, but very atypical for his generation.

Blake was imbued with a great many of the famous man's values, particularly his esoteric religious ones. As a young adult Blake found many of the same ideas among the great thinkers of the ages. He thus became less dependent on Swedenborg's thought forms. With MHH Plates 21 and 22 he declared his independence of his childhood teacher.

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, (E 42)

"Plate 21
  I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of
themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident
insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning:
  Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho' it
is only the Contents or Index of already publish'd books"

Plate 22

 "Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new
truth: Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods.
  And now hear the reason.  He conversed with Angels who are
all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion,
for he was incapable thro' his conceited notions.
  Thus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all
superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no
further."

Perhaps the chief objection of the mature Blake was that Swedenborg had a positive demeanor re the established church. But one of the things that stayed with Blake was Swedenborg's concept of the Divine Humanity." 

____________________

Here is a section of An Interview Conducted with Kathleen Raine on July 12, 1993 by Donald E. Stanford:

interview 

"Stanford: Why did he leave the Church of the New Jerusalem? 

Raine: Ah, that’s a good question. He wasn’t a churchman really. But he remained to the end of his life a Swedenborgian. This is this much-disputed Blake system. The scholars all scratch their heads about this; but it’s no problem. If you read the “Everlasting Gospel,” which is one of his latest works, it is in fact a point-by-point summary of the five leading beliefs of the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem, and in his interviews with Crabb Robinson, Robinson asked him about Swedenborg, and Blake said that he was a sent and inspired man, and then added, “but sometimes inspired men go beyond their commission from God.” He followed the Swedenborgian teaching. In fact, we’re all deeply familiar with the phrase “Divine Humanity,” but this phrase is not Blake’s invention; this is Swedenborg. And the Grand Man of the heavens, the one in many, and many in one, of all human souls — this is Swedenborg, and Blake uses this concept in a very beautiful passage in the Four Zoas in which he talks about man contracting our exalted senses with the multitude and expanding what we hold as one, as one man, all the universal family. Swedenborg’s greatest idea, I think, was this of the one in many, and many in one, and the divine presence in man. It was a really very wonderful idea because for him, the Divine Humanity was the eternal Christ, not the historical Christ. That was the Divine Humanity of whom Blake speaks and writes and speaks of as “Jesus the Imagination.” This is purely Swedenborgian. He disagreed with Swedenborg only in one respect: He said Swedenborg put all the good in heaven and the sinners in hell and didn’t realize that both the good and the evil are included in the Divine Humanity who transcends good and evil. That is what The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is about. Point-by-point, it’s quite a funny book. It takes up Swedenborg and his memorable experiences—it’s a running discussion with Swedenborg in semi-satirical terms, but although he poked fun at Swedenborg in certain respects, nevertheless, his system is pure Swedenborgian. I’m sure the only reason why everyone doesn’t know this is that the works of Swedenborg are so boring to read that none of the academics have read them, and I don’t blame them."

Descriptive Catalogue,(E 544)

   "Reasons and opinions concerning acts, are not
history.  Acts themselves alone are history, and these are
neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire,
Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus.  Tell me the Acts, O
historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away
with your reasoning and your rubbish.  All that is not action is
not [P 45] worth reading.  Tell me the What; I do not want you to
tell me the Why, and the How; I can find that out myself, as well
as you can, and I will not be fooled by you into opinions, that
you please to impose, to disbelieve what you think improbable or
impossible.  His opinions, who does not see spiritual agency, is
not worth any man's reading; he who rejects a fact because it is
improbable, must reject all History and retain doubts only."

Annotations to Reynolds,(E 658) 

 "The Ancients did not mean to Impose when they  affirmd 
their  belief  in Vision & Revelation  Plato was in Earnest. 
Milton was in Earnest.  They believd that God did Visit Man
Really & Truly & not as Reynolds pretends" 

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3, (E 34)
  "As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years
since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is
the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. 

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

Milton, Plate 22 [24], (E 117)

"O Swedenborg! strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches!
Shewing the Transgresors in Hell, the proud Warriors in Heaven:
Heaven as a Punisher & Hell as One under Punishment:
With Laws from Plato & his Greeks to renew the Trojan Gods,
In Albion; & to deny the value of the Saviours blood.
But then I rais'd up Whitefield, Palamabron raisd up Westley,    

And these are the cries of the Churches before the two Witnesses' 
Faith in God  the dear Saviour who took on the likeness of men:
Becoming obedient to death, even the death of the Cross
The Witnesses lie dead in the Street of the Great City
No Faith is in all the Earth: the Book of God is trodden under Foot:       
He sent his two Servants Whitefield & Westley; were they Prophets
Or were they Idiots or Madmen? shew us Miracles!
Plate 23 [25]
Can you have greater Miracles than these? Men who devote
Their lifes whole comfort to intire scorn & injury & death
Awake thou sleeper on the Rock of Eternity Albion awake
The trumpet of Judgment hath twice sounded: all Nations are awake
But thou art still heavy and dull: Awake Albion awake!" 

Descriptive Catalogue, (E 546) 

 "The spiritual Preceptor, an experiment Picture.

THIS subject is taken from the visions of Emanuel Swedenborg.
Universal Theology, [P 53] No. 623.  The Learned, who strive to
ascend into Heaven by means of learning, appear to Children like
dead horses, when repelled by the celestial spheres.  The works
of this visionary are well worthy the attention of Painters and 
Poets; they are foundations for grand things; the reason they 
have not been more attended to, is, because corporeal demons 
have gained a predominance; who the leaders of these are, will 
be shewn below.  Unworthy Men who gain fame among Men, 
continue to govern mankind after death, and in their spiritual 
bodies, oppose the spirits of those, who worthily are famous; 
and as Swedenborg observes, by entering into disease and 
excrement, drunkenness and concupiscence, they possess
themselves of the bodies of mortal men, and shut the doors of
mind and of thought, by placing Learning above Inspiration, O
Artist! you may disbelieve all this, but it shall be at your own
peril."