Read Online A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult by Gary Lachman - Free Book Online Page B

Throughout his life friends and associates commented on Blake's distracted air; there is evidence that at times his visions interfered with his capacity for work (as an engraver) and he may, like other visionaries (C.G. Jung comes to mind), have experienced at least one nearpsychotic episode. Blake's confidence in the truth of his visions (the earliest perhaps a sighting of God at the age of four in Soho) led him to reject the rationalist psychology that would label such things madness and to explore alternative accounts of reality. Blake is important in the history of occultism because he stands at the threshold of the radical split between the scientific and hermetic worldviews that ushered in the 19th century. Unlike his contemporary Goethe, Blake did not try to keep united these sundering visions of mankind and the world. Blake was not anti-intellectual, but he knew that the rise of scientism - the belief that the methods and vocabulary of science can eventually account for the whole of reality - spelled disaster for the spiritual in man. Against the rising trend to explain man's interior world in terms of sensory impressions and associative psychology - Locke's tabula rasa - Blake declared instead that the imagination was the source of all, and that the physical external world of the senses was a mere shadow of the infinite realms within. In different ways in the 19th century writers as disparate as Bulwer Lytton, Eliphas Levi, Arthur Rimbaud, W.B. Yeats, Blake's first editor, and many others would carry on this struggle, basically restating in their individual ways Blake's original hermetic insight. It is, in fact, the central Romantic theme. Blake is doubly interesting in this sense because, although a man of the Enlightenment, he was practically unknown during his own life, and only came to prominence in 1898 through the efforts of Yeats and his fellow editor, E .J. Ellis. Thus, as we will see, Blake, the forerunner of the Romantics, became a public figure and prophet at a time when the inheritors of his visionary flame had nearly burned themselves out, and his great cause of the imagination had dwindled to a decadent withdrawal from the world.

    Blake's earliest influence - aside from the visitations of angels - was the Bible, but growing up in a family of dissenters, it was not unusual for him to be drawn to interpretations of holy script that ran counter to the orthodox account. His first introduction to Swedenborg may have been through his older brother James; in any case, in a dissenting household a variety of unorthodox beliefs were probably readily available. That Swedenborg spoke soberly and persuasively about visits to heaven and hell no doubt interested the young mystic. It is even possible that Blake may have seen Swedenborg; in 1772, the last year of his life, the magus of Stockholm lived in a lodging house in Clerkenwell. Blake would have been fifteen then, and could very easily have come across the philosopher.
    In 1783, the Rev. Jacob Duche, ex-Chaplain to the Continental Congress, started the London Theosophical Society, a radical Swedenborgian group. Along with Blake its members include William Beckford's friend Philip de Loutherberg, the Swedish alchemist and Freemason Augustus Nordenskold, and Blake's fellow artists John Flaxman and William Sharp. Earlier I remarked on the similarity between Blake's ideas and those of Saint-Martin. It's possible the two met, as both SaintMartin and Cagliostro visited the group in 1787. Ironically, if Blake and Saint-Martin did meet, then of the two, Blake was truly the unknown philosopher, suffering neglect and obscurity throughout his life.

    Blake would have known of De Loutherberg's `Eido- physikon' as well as his work at David Garrick's Theatre in Drury Lane; as his biographer Peter Ackroyd suggests, it is possible to see the influence of De Loutherberg's stage magic in Blake's dazzling illuminated books. Blake knew other `magical' artists as well. Richard Cosway