William Blake (1757-1827) was a
poet, painter, engraver and prophet/visionary who lived at a time when religion
was at a low ebb in England and when the the materialist philosophy which
developed from the work of Bacon, Newton and Locke was taking an increasingly
strong hold, particularly in science. Blake was born in London and lived almost
the whole of his life there. He was the second son of a lower middle class
hosier who never sent his son to school; instead he helped him to develop his
obvious early talents as an artist. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed
to an engraver and it was through the exercise of this craft that he earned a
somewhat precarious livelihood throughout his adult years. His skill and genius
as an artist, a poet and a spiritual visionary went almost unrecognised during
his lifetime - probably because his spiritual approach to life was considered
to be out of date (or even beyond the comprehension of many of his
contemporaries) - and he was able to sell very little of his own artistic
output.
From a very early age he had
visions and was aware of the reality of the spiritual world. At the age of four
he saw God looking in through the window and five years later he saw "a
tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like
stars". Such mystical visions and awareness remained with him for the rest
of his life For example, in his mid-40s he lived for three years in a little
cottage at Felpham on the Sussex coast and here, as Kathleen Raine tells us, he
"saw angels descending on a ladder from heaven to his cottage, and the
visions that came to him by the sea were among the most radiantly beautiful
that he ever had." It was here that he also often saw fairies and once
observed what he called a fairy’s funeral.
Blake’s over-arching vision of
spiritual reality was such that it not only guided him throughout his life; it
also drove him to undertake courses of action which would have seemed almost
irrational to any ordinary person. What he called his ‘Inspirers’ would not let
him escape from them, as: "I am under the direction of Messengers from
Heaven, Daily & Nightly; ...". Most people would have adapted
their output to the fashions of the day and earned a good income from sales of
their work. Under the influence of his awareness of spiritual reality Blake was
unable to do this and accordingly lived all his adult life on the edge of
poverty. He concentrated instead in his writings and artistic output on taking
issue with the materialist philosophy which sought, then as now, to separate
humanity from an awareness of the spiritual reality behind the created
universe. Interestingly from the point of view of this review, Blake claimed
that a great deal of his work was produced under direct guidance - that it was
essentially automatic writing arising from a source other than his normal
consciousness, presumably in a similar way to the individuals recorded in
Section 5 below. Thus in describing his book Milton, he states:
"I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time, without pre-meditation and even against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study."
Blake does not say a great deal
specifically about life after death as such, although it is clearly a part of
his overall philosophy. However, there are some quotations from his writings
where the concept of survival is understood or more directly indicated. The
following instances are quoted by Kathleen Raine:
- Blake strongly opposed the idea that humanity is constrained completely by space and time. There are two conditions for human life, confinement within a material body and the unconfined freedom of unimpeded energy when the ‘spiritual body or angel’ is released by death from the material body.
- He often saw and communicated with human spirits from another plane of existence. Thus his much-loved younger brother Robert died at the early age of 20. Blake was present at his death and records that he saw his brother’s spirit rising up through the ceiling ‘clapping his hands for joy’. Blake later wrote in a letter:
"Thirteen years ago I lost a brother & with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the Spirit & see him in my remembrance in the regions of my imagination. I hear his advice & even now write from his dictate."
Blake believed that it was his brother’s spirit which gave him the secret of the process by which he produced the beautifully illuminated pages of his poems.- He drew pictures of the heads of some of his spiritual visitants. One of these is entitled "The Man who taught Blake Painting".
Raine sums up Blake in the
following words: "Take him as one will, as artist, poet, or religious revolutionary,
Blake is a figure whose stature overtops all but the greatest men of genius
that England has produced." Caroline Spurgeon puts it more specifically
when she says:
"William Blake is one of the great mystics of the world; and he is by far the greatest and most profound who has spoken in English. Like Henry More and Wordsworth, he lived in a world of glory, of spirit and of vision, which, for him, was the only real world. At the age of four he saw God looking in at the window, and from that time until he welcomed the approach of death by singing songs of joy which made the rafters ring, he lived in an atmosphere of divine illumination."
There is an enormous literature
covering the life and artistic output of William Blake but perhaps two fairly
small books provide a rounded introduction to this subject. They are:
Raine, Kathleen (1951). William Blake. Longmans, Green & Co., Harlow. (Revised version published 1965).
Raine, Kathleen (1970). William Blake.
Thames & Hudson, London. ISBN 0-500-20107-2.
Another small book, from which some
of the above quotations were taken, and which gives a brief but powerful
introduction to Blake, is:
Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. (1913). Mysticism in English
Literature. Cambridge University Press, London. Pp. 129-147.
On to Rudolf Steiner or Edgar Cayce