Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  It was only in her last communication with Brooke that she veered into national affairs. “The times wear a most favorable aspect viz. French Republic,” she predicted. “The time is approaching very fast, when every man shall feed under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall make them afraid.” Again, self-sufficiency in food, this time for men, was equated with spiritual bliss. She went on to make her predictions more subjective. “I have not time to print my letters, Pharoah will in this life be obeyed. He is the Prince of the power of the air, and we who are witnesses of the resurrection, he persecutes more than any others; but the man child is out of his reach, it dwells with God; and all his floods cannot drown it.”137 By “Pharoah,” did she mean her husband or George III? Whatever the case, in this passage she foreshadowed the two most popular millenarian prophets of the period: Richard Brothers, who called for peace with France, and Joanna Southcott, who claimed to be pregnant with the new Messiah, the “man-child” Shiloh.

  It was all too much for Henry Brooke, who broke off the correspondence after this letter. He chided Pratt for being so resentful towards those who had wronged her, and urged that, “instead of being inflamed at opposition,” she should “pray for, a mistaken friend, a persecuting Pharoah, or an infamous relation.” Brooke later told Richard Clarke that, although he admired her piety, he feared that tapping into her “rich vein of enthusiasm” might “aggravate her malady.”138 He did not mention her political views or attitude towards her family. If Brooke was condescending towards Mary Pratt's feminine mysticism, he was not lacking in sympathy for her. For nine months he had encouraged her to open up her inner world to him, and it was only when she threatened his own equanimity that he broke off from her.

  Mary Pratt may not have been a female Blake, but she has to be placed in the same intellectual milieu of heterodoxy, religious subjectivity and occult philosophy. Like him, she was a self-taught visionary, who drew on radical religious traditions as well as quasi-magical knowledge to shape her own approach to God. In her temperament and language, she looks forward to the Romantic age, and beyond it to the Spiritualists and Theosophers of the Victorian era.139 As a woman mystic, however, she incorporated (the term is apt) a point of view that Blake did not share, based on concepts of physical union with the deity and of the maternal body as the source of life. By laying claim to a physical superiority over men, rather than a moral equality to them, Mary Pratt was reformulating an old argument about female spirituality. To be sure, it was more effective in establishing the exalted character of women than in winning rights for them. She never argued in terms of earthly equality. On the other hand, neither did she subscribe to a belief in essential or natural gender differences. Her Swedenborgian husband may have been an essentialist in gender matters, but she simply ignored any discussion of the self that was premised on natural hierarchies. All that counted was her own supernatural yet physical link to God. Ultimately, that may have been all that mattered to Blake too. In that respect at least, we might call him a male Mary Pratt.

  Urizen Wept: William Blake

  Yet Blake differed in many essential respects from Mary Pratt, as he did from every other occult thinker of the late eighteenth century. For one thing, the God that mattered to him was part of himself. Did this qualify him as a mystic? Perhaps not; but then, categorizing Blake in any way is difficult. His relationship to the occult remains murky, in spite of the painstaking research carried out by Kathleen Raine and others into the Neoplatonic and Hermetic references that run through his poetry.140 Some scholars, eschewing Raine's approach, have chosen to read Blake's visionary writings in strictly political terms, emphasizing his radical opposition to monarchy and organized religion.141 They have drawn out the contemporary relevance of his works, but fail to explain why he chose to compose mythic fantasies rather than political allegories. His imagination was bounded neither by current events, which he bent to his own purposes, nor by occult traditions. This might lead us to disregard him as a madman or self-absorbed loner with almost no audience. In an occult as well as a poetic context, however, Blake was a pivotal figure. A relentless opponent of rationalism, he foreshadowed the modern occult mentality, in which reason is not the instrument but the enemy of vision. Like William Law, Blake resented the constrictions imposed by modern philosophies. He went much further than Law in condemning them. Scorning respectability, Blake regarded occult thinking itself as utterly corrupted by an insidious collaboration with science and materialism.

  Blake's religious roots and artisanal background figured in the formation of his ideas, although their significance is hard to decipher. His mother was apparently a Moravian, at least for part of her life. The joyful impulse in Blake's early poetry, as well as his exaltation of Jesus as a full-fledged God, may owe something to her beliefs.142 By the late 1780s, Blake and his wife, Catherine, were involved with the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, of which his friend John Flaxman was a strong supporter. Soon, however, Blake became critical of Swedenborgianism, and he never joined any other religious group. Despite E.P. Thompson's suggestion, no evidence exists to link him with the Muggletonians, the descendants of a radical Civil War sect.143 As for Blake's politics, they were highly personal. Working as a printer and engraver, Blake rubbed shoulders with radicals like William Sharp, and he was employed by the Unitarian bookseller Joseph Johnson, who published radical pamphlets. Yet Blake was never a member of any political organization, and he was not involved with any seditious publications. Expression of his strong anti-monarchical and anticlerical views was confined to self-published writings that circulated among a tiny number of friends.144

  Access to works of occult philosophy may have been provided by his early mentor the miniature painter Richard Cosway, who praised Blake's engravings as “works of extraordinary genius and imagination.” Through him, Blake may have encountered Boehme, Freher, spiritual healing and ritual magic.145 Whether or not Blake was introduced to animal magnetism or the prophecies of Richard Brothers by William Sharp, as has been mooted, is an unanswerable question. The two men were not close friends. Lacking evidence, we can no more infer that Blake shared the attitudes of Cosway or Sharp than we can assume that his passing acquaintance with Alexander Tilloch, whose invention of a device to prevent banknote forgeries Blake endorsed in 1797, had its basis in a shared love of alchemy.146

  Blake applauded the American and French revolutions as blows against tyranny and slavery. Like the “Nephew of the Almighty,” however, he understood these momentous events in a prophetic sense entirely detached from the conventional rhetoric of rights and liberties. In fact, Blake's poetry displays a marked ambivalence towards the goals and methods of revolutionaries. His verses on the American War of Independence begin with a sexual assault by the rebellious Orc, who is chained to a rock like Prometheus, on his unnamed sister, who recognizes him as “the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa” (a reference to the Swedenborgian dream of finding an African source of revelation). Orc then stirs up a cosmic conflict between the thirteen angels of the American colonies (who sit in “magic seats”) and the angels of Albion. While the American angels seem to be carrying out a judgment on the British monarchy, the plagues that they shoot back at Britain do not present much of a case for republicanism.147 Blake's unfinished poem on the French Revolution is even more insistent on representing that upheaval as a curse, as well as a liberation. When “Fayette” marches his army out of Paris, he is surrounded by “pestilential vapours” on which “flow frequent spectres of religious men weeping,” driven from their abbeys “by the fiery cloud of Voltaire, and thund'rous rocks of Rousseau.”148 For once, Blake seems to feel sorry for the clerics. Revolution is a disease spread by “deists” (Voltaire, Rousseau and later Edward Gibbon), whom Blake pilloried as the destructive, warmongering advocates of natural religion. They may be instrumental in the overthrow of kings, priests and aristocrats, who are far worse than they are, but nobody really seems to benefit much from their efforts.149 Revolution, in short,
was a necessary evil in an imperfect moral universe.

  Blake's own philosophical views were first expressed in his 1790 pamphlet, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, whose title is derived from a work by Swedenborg. Blake took the opportunity to scorn his former spiritual teacher. “Any man of mechanical talents,” he wrote, “may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg: and from those of Dante or Shakespeare, an infinite number.”150 We may assume that Blake himself was that prolific mechanic, but we cannot know what volumes of Boehme or Paracelsus he had read. In philosophical terms, at this stage, not much separates Blake from Swedenborg. Blake maintains that there is no division between body and soul, that all living things are holy and that they are infused by the essential life force of energy—all propositions with which the baron would have agreed.151 What distinguishes Blake is his insistence that reason (which encompasses conventional religion) puts a cloying damper on energy, whose negative effects can only be overcome by demonic power. Although Swedenborg did occasionally converse with demons, Blake's sympathy for the Devil is a novel feature of his theology. It owes more to John Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Satan takes on heroic characteristics and foreshadows Christ, than to any occult work. Blake's identification of the life force with sexuality was perhaps less original—the concept was not foreign to Swedenborg. It contrasts nonetheless with the strait-laced moralism of the Platonist Thomas Taylor, whose lectures Blake attended at the house of their mutual friend John Flaxman.

  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, therefore, is a bold, albeit not entirely convincing, declaration of independence from the visions and philosophies of others. Already, Blake was using the names of mythological characters to express his alienation from the material world. While these “Eternals,” as he called them, are infused with the characteristics of classical gods (they have female “Emanations” who often behave as headstrong or lascivious goddesses), they do not correspond precisely to any ancient pantheon. Blake evoked them with a portentous seriousness reminiscent of James Macpherson's Ossian poems. Swedenborg claimed to have encountered spirits from other planets, but he never constructed mythic stories out of their lives as Blake did.152

  The “Eternals” appear to stand for aspects of the human mind, which may link them to various psychological theories, from Plato to Hartley. In the early “Lambeth Books” composed in that London suburb from 1790 to 1795, however, they are more active than acted upon, and can be identified more easily by what they do rather than by any correspondence to ideal mental states. Generally speaking, the “Eternals” spread despair and misery, without offering much hope of eventual transcendence. The mythic characters who will eventually confer divinity on human beings—Jesus and Albion, the original man—do not have a strong presence in the “Lambeth Books.” Eventually, readers will learn that Albion's fall into materiality resulted in the separation of the Four Zoas—Urizen, Urthona-Los, Luvah and Tharmas, who stand for reason, intuition or imagination, emotion and bodily sensation. The division of Albion's spirit may reflect the fragmentation of Adam Kadmon, which Blake could have read about in an English-language synopsis of Kabbala Denudata.153 In his earlier books, however, the name Albion appears chiefly as the title of a rather sinister angel whose voice issues the “thunderous command” to bring plagues on the rebellious Americans, “as a storm to cut them off / As a blight cuts the tender corn when it begins to appear.”154

  If the “Lambeth Books” do not contain much spiritual optimism, neither are they very positive about occult philosophy. The subject is mentioned specifically only once, in The Song of Los (1795), where we read that “To Trismegistus. Palamabron gave an abstract Law: To Pythagoras Socrates & Plato.”155 As Palamabron was the offspring of the “Eternal” Los, who represents (more or less) the creative or imaginative faculties, this might be regarded as a benevolent gift, but it actually comes from Urizen or reason, whose lawgiving always has a negative connotation in Blake's poetry. Furthermore, Palamabron's description as a “horned priest” in Europe: A Prophecy (1794) hardly seems encouraging.156 His gift of “abstract Law,” therefore, cannot be interpreted as an endorsement of Hermeticism, Pythagoreanism or Platonism, which are apparently no better than any other established system of belief. Blake does not spare Hinduism either, as he describes Palamabron's brother Rintrah giving “Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East.” A few lines later, modern philosophy will be lumped into the same overall condemnation. Urizen weeps piteously as he delivers “a Philosophy of Five Senses … into the hands of Newton & Locke.” Meanwhile, in another sign of reason's dulling power, “Clouds roll heavy upon the Alps around Rousseau and Voltaire.”157 Evidently, the constraints imposed by Urizen's laws on the senses (Blake accepted many more than five) and the imagination are embedded in empirical science and natural religion as well as in occult philosophy. All are actually concerned with the material rather than the spiritual world. Boehme had signalled in a similar direction by urging “Seekers of the Metallic Tincture” to “apply yourselves to the New Birth in Christ,” but Blake booms in a different register.158 No writer of the eighteenth century had gone so far as to reject the whole tradition of Western and Eastern thought as misguided.

  The attack on occult philosophy underpins The Book of Urizen (1793). Urizen, the “Eternal” associated with reason, worldliness and sensory knowledge, is depicted in a colour plate, measuring the universe with a compass that radiates out from his fingers.159 Anyone familiar with the symbols of Freemasonry could have identified him as the Divine Architect, planning out the cosmos. The egomaniacal Urizen goes on to behave like a god of the alchemists, forming an earthly world by controlling the three other seething elements, then writing down his secrets in “books formed of metals”:

  First I fought with the fire; consum'd

  Inwards, into a deep world within:

  A void immense, wild dark & deep,

  Where nothing was: Natures wide womb

  And self balanc'd, stretch'd o'er the void

  I alone, even I! the winds merciless

  Bound; but condensing, in torrents

  They fall & fall; strong I repell'd

  The vast waves, & arose on the waters

  A wide world of solid obstruction

  Here alone I in books formd of metals

  Have written the secrets of wisdom

  The secrets of dark contemplation.160

  These images may be inspired by the engravings showing the creation of the universe in Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi, but there is a big difference: for Blake, they mark the beginning of a cursed world of misery and subjection operating under the slogan “One King, One God, One Law.”161 Apparently, the fulfilment of alchemy does not entail the liberation of the spirit, but the enslavement of nature to a unitary code of material science.

  The fatal association of the occult with materialism and science is emphasized again in Vala: or The Four Zoas (1797–1804), a confusing, unfinished poem that provides a link between the “Lambeth Books” and the later epics, Milton and Jerusalem. Here, Urizen's rationalizing efforts serve to pervert both the Temple of Solomon and the ancient mysteries. On the seventh night of the poem, Urizen “& all his myriads / Builded a Temple in the image of the human heart.” Blake may have had in mind the roughly circular stone “temples” ascribed by William Stukeley to the Druids, and regarded by him as versions of the Temple of Jerusalem. On the last page of his poem Jerusalem (1804–20), Blake would copy Stukeley's engraving of the “serpent-temple” at Avebury, behind a scene of writhing “Eternals.”162 As with all his borrowings, however, Blake complicates the original image. The serpent signifies for him the materialism of an earth-bound creature. Urizen's heart-like structure turns out to be a weird parody of Solomon's Temple. Like the pagan temples of Babylon, Jerusalem's opposite, it is served by priestesses as well as priests, “clothd in disguises beastial.” Urizen goes on to imprison the sun in the centre of his temple, where it takes the place
of the Ark of the Covenant:

  they put the Sun

  Into the temple of Urizen to give light to the Abyss

  To light the War by day to hide his secret beams by Night.163

  Light is held in darkness so as to conceal secrets—a swipe, perhaps, at the promise of Freemasonry to reveal what is hidden.

  Above the temple rises the Tree of Mystery, which Kathleen Raine has compared to the Tree of the Soul, one of Leuchtner's illustrations to Boehme's works.164 Blake's Tree, however, is a site of anger, despair and mourning—“in fierce pain shooting its writhing buds”—not a path to paradise. The Lamb of God is eventually nailed to it, but he will return to “rent the Veil of Mystery.” When the “Synagogue of Satan” rises up against Urizen, the tree is burned, so that “Mysterys tyrants are cut off & not one left on earth.” Soon, however, a successor forms in its place:

  The Ashes of Mystery began to animate they calld it Deism

  And Natural Religion as of old so now anew began.165

  By using the term “Mystery” as if it were the proper name of the tree, Blake suggests that its grisly power lies in fear of the hidden or unknown. This may seem contradictory, as natural religion was supposed to reveal the hand of God in the universe, but, for Blake, the material world actually disguises that which is obvious to the inner imagination. Thus, deism becomes the offspring of mystery, or the occult. Through the image of a tree, Blake may also have intended to target the adaptation of ancient mystery cults by Freemasons.166 Aeneas found the entrance to Hades beside an elm, and Warburton, among others, had argued that the hero's descent into the underworld (Urizen's domain) mirrored the Eleusinian mysteries. In Masonic myth, the remains of Hiram were discovered under a blossoming acanthus tree. Blake was not celebrating these stories in The Four Zoas: rather, he was identifying them as sources of mental slavery.