William Blake

1
William Blake

• Songs of Innocence and Experience

2
The End Is Near

• The late eighteenth century was a time of
  widespread apocalyptic visions.
• Political revolutions in America and France
  inspired both terrified predictions of the
  destruction of the world and hopeful designs for
  its renovation.
• Not only governments but also individuals hoped
  to build a better world, or as S.T. Coleridge
  called it, a new earth and a new heaven after
  the impending apocalypse. For example, Coleridge
  and fellow poet Robert Southey married sisters
  and planned to move to Pennsylvania where they
  would establish a commune organized according to
  their invented system of pantisocracy. The
  children born and raised in their system would
  grow up free from corrupt and confining social
  institutions.
• Others imagined a spiritual, rather than a
  political or social apocalypse. For example,
  Emmanuel Swedenborg, who influenced Blake,
  founded the Church of the New Jerusalem. A woman
  named Joanna Southcott convinced a group of
  followersand herself that her ovarian tumor was
  a miraculous virgin pregnancy and the second
  coming of Christ was imminent.

3
Blake and Apocalypse

• William Blake (1757- 1837) shared the apocalyptic
  thinking of his contemporaries.
• Rather than imagining a new heaven and a new
  earth as the result of purely political, social
  or spiritual change, Blake examined the ways in
  which the spiritual and the material conditioned
  each other.
• To effect material change, one need not instigate
  a bloody revolution if spiritual and mental
  states determine material conditions. Rather,
  one need only change his/her mental state to
  change his or her material state.

4
The Fortunate Fall

• Like the Christian vision of the apocalypse,
  Blakes system links the resurrection into
  eternal life at the end of the world to the Fall
  in Eden at the beginning of the world.
• In the Christian version, Adam and Eve must fall
  so that Christ can bring human souls to heaven.
  Had they not sinned, they would have lived
  forever in Eden, but never would have entered
  heaven. In this sense, Adam and Eves sin is
  known as the felix culpa or fortunate fall.

5
Innocence

• Just as before the fall in Genesis Adam and Eve
  could walk in the garden with God, before the
  fall in Blake, no divisions separated humanity
  from divinity.
• In fact, no divisions existed at all male and
  female, human and animal, material and spiritual
  were undivided in Blakes imagined prelapsarian
  state.
• Blake calls this undivided state Innocence.
  Innocence is the state in which the self or ego
  does not establish distinctions between itself
  and the rest of existence.
• See The Lamb (p.45) and The Divine Image (p.
  47) for the unity of humanity and divinity and of
  the spiritual and material worlds.

6
Experience

• Blake imagines the fall as the imposition of
  divisions, or the state of Experience.
• The soul in a state of Experience errs by seeing
  itself as separate from all other existence. It
  allows itself to be controlled by, for example,
  priests who tell people that they are separate
  from god, or by kings who tell people that they
  must maintain fixed positions within social
  systems.
• Contrast The Human Abstract (p. 57) to The
  Divine Image (p. 47) to see the difference
  between Innocence and Experience.
• See London (p. 47) to understand how priests
  and kings enforce the illusion of the separation
  between humanity and divinity, enslaving people
  in mind forgd manacles.

7
Organized Innocence

• At the apocalypse, the human soul will re-enter
  the state of union with all things. Blake calls
  this Innocence re-achieved after passing through
  Experience Organized Innocence.
• Just as heaven is better than Eden, Organized
  Innocence is better than the original Innocence
  of childhood.
• For Blake, the fall into Experience is a
  fortunate fall.

8
Contrary States

• While Blakes vision of the the history of the
  human soul shares much with the Christian vision,
  it also differs in important ways.
• For instance, Blake imagines the fall and
  salvation, and Innocence and Experience, as
  unbounded by time and space. The fall is not an
  event that happened in a place called Eden at the
  beginning of time, and salvation is not an event
  that will happen in a place called Jerusalem at
  the end of time.
• Rather, as the subtitle to Songs of Innocence and
  Experience says, Innocence and Experience,
  Salvation and Fall are contrary states of the
  human soul.

9
Individual Apocalypse

• Since the Fall and Salvation are states of the
  soul or states of consciousness, individual
  apocalypses can happen whenever and wherever a
  person frees him/herself from the error of
  perceived division and becomes aware of the unity
  of all things.
• Since mental states of consciousness and
  perception determine material conditions,
  individual spiritual apocalypses result in new
  material, political, and social worlds.