The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

 

William Blake is the occult artist.  Drawing from the various dissenting and mystical currents that were circulating in late 18th century London he created a personal mythology that is unique in the history of art and literature. As he famously said he must create his own system or be enslaved by another’s man, and Blake followed his own star from beginning to end, never wavering once. Although his later prophetic works are virtually impenetrable, Blake best work (The Songs of Innocence & Expericence; The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, especially the Proverbs of Hell) is incandescent with an unrivalled visionary intensity.

Rebelling against the rational and scientific world-view that was beginning to impose its tyranny on thought and imagination, Blake believed that the key to human liberty was imagination. Only through imagination and an unfettered sexuality can we escape the prison of the ‘senses five’ that was created by the demiurge Nobodaddy (equated in true Gnostic fashion with the Old Testament Jehovah). His urgent appeal for the total emancipation from the restrictions of suffocating laws and soul crushing conventions is more pertinent today than ever. Society imposes constraint upon desire, or rather in its more sophisticated modern version creates and manufactures vacuous pseudo-desires the fulfillment of which is always just out of reach, deflecting us from our pursuit of liberation, the reconciliation of opposites (in the Blakean sense) and the discovery of the innate divinity in the human form.

Blake was a prophet, and like all prophets derided as a madmen while he was alive. In fact Blake was one of the illuminated.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite’