Before the Fall

What was Blake saying with this Picture?

It's about the world, and about everyone:

The biblical source is obvious (Genesis 3), the Garden scene:
Adam and Eve and the snake! Just before the fatal meal that
made us all mortal. But who's the 3rd figure above our
ancestors with the snake all coiled around him? Well Genesis
3 mentions a third figure called "cherubim and a flaming
sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of
life."

Now look at Blake's myth:
The third figure has a thousand faces: serpent, Satan, Covering Cherub...Urizen! above all the Spectre, the Selfhood!

Blake, the world, you and I are three: masculine, feminine,
and spectrous.

Man and woman work together amicably-- with love;
the spectre, (Satan, Lucifer, Urizen, the Covering Cherub!)
is jealous; his thoughts are evil.

The Fall of Man began Blake's myth, and he wrote many ends (the Bible does as well). One of Blake's earliest and most dramatic ones come in Plate 14 of MHH:

"The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.

For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt."

Once again the poem, My Spectre Round me Night and Day tells the whole story in microcosm.

Bacon, Newton, and Locke

"I consider them [Bacon, Newton, and Locke] as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception.." (from the pen of Thomas Jefferson in a letter in 1789.

You can see what Blake thought of Bacon by reading his annotations to one of Bacon's books (Erdman pp 620-32). Here's are two examples:

"7. Bacon a Liar

AnnBacon62; E624

8. Bacon has no notion of any thing but Mammon

AnnBacon69; E625"

Re Newton look at the end of a famous letter (23) to Butts in 1802:

"Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always.  May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep" (Erdman 722) 

 Re Locke: the tabula raza was particularly offense to Blake
who thought intelligence and imagination were inherent in us
all.  

 In Milton plate 41 Blake dispatches all three with this:
"To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination.
To bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human
I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration
To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering
To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with
Imagination" (Erdman 142)

Blake felt that these three men (Blake's 'unholy trinity')
had led England into a thoroughly materialistic,
spirit-denying culture dominated by greed.  What he said
about them was largely true although they had a positive
dimension as well. Blake acknowledged the positive dimension

in plate 98 near the end of Jerusalem:

"The Druid Spectre was Annihilate loud thundring rejoicing
terrific vanishing
Fourfold Annihilation & at the clangor of the Arrows of
Intellect
The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appeard in Heaven
And Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakspear &
Chaucer"(Erdman 257)

Although he had excoriated them systematically throughout
his works, he realized that they were not negatives, but
contraries.  The essential polarity of the mind means that
the opposites are also true. 

Blake's God

Here we go again:
We start of course with the four year old who ran screaming to his mother after seeing an angry God in the window. This certainly suggests exposure to one of the angry preachers who (then and now) project their own misery onto the God they describe for their parishioners. It set for Blake the mode for 25 years of defiance for a God so destructive to the human psyche. Christians through the ages have repressed the anger they feel toward such a God. But Blake did not repress! He let it all out.

By the age of 33 in MHH he had learned to express complete skepticism re the God and the Church that directed the religious life of the multitude. In particular he saw it as a conspiracy of rogues (look again at Plate 11).

Now look again at Milton, plate 37:
"The Monstrous Churches of Beulah, the Gods of Ulro
Twelve monstrous dishumanizd terrors Synagogues of Satan.
A Double Twelve & Thrice Nine: such their divisions:"

Here Blake named twelve (prechristian) "Gods, the Twelve Spectre Sons of the Druid Albion " and twenty-seven "Heavens & their Churches" in three groups: the antediluvian ones, the Judaic ones, and the supposed Christian ones. So he's talking about fallen religion, where many of us attend every Sunday (that would be the church of Luther).

The religious denomination that goes by the name of 'Witnesses' would take great issue with the description that Blake made of Jehovah:

Jehovah was Urizen, even Satan, the Angel of the Divine Presence, the Gnostic demiurge who made a hash of his Creation. So much for that God. He was called everything but 'Loving'.

Blake mentioned Jehovah 64 times; here is a fairly representative
one from his notes on The Last Judgment:

" The Aged Figure with Wings having a writing tablet & taking
account of the numbers who arise is That Angel of the Divine
Presence mentiond in Exodus XIVc 19v & in other Places
this Angelis frequently calld by the Name of Jehovah Elohim The I am of the Oaks of Albion"

Jehovah was too often identified with condemnation:

In the Epilogue to Gates of Paradise we read:
" To The Accuser Who is The God of This World
Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce
And dost not know the Garment from the Man
Every Harlot was a Virgin once
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan
Tho thou art Worshipd by the Names Divine
Of Jesus & Jehovah thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline
The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill"

The most derogatory figure Blake used for authorities
such as King George or Jehovah is in Nobodaddy, a term
used again in an indelicate doggerel on Erdman 499.

Blake accurately portrayed the leading spirit of the Old Testament in the above discussion.

We come now to the gospel. Blake considered Jesus the only God. In his mind Jesus was largely about forgiveness; many examples of Blake's forgiveness (the forgiveness Jesus taught can be found throughout his poetry.) The most succinct one has
appeared in these posts before: the little unnamed poem going by the name of My Spectre; here's the end of it:

"And Throughout all Eternity I forgive you; you forgive me.
As the dear Redeemer said, this the Wine and this the Bread."

If you want more on Blake and God, look at the
Spiritual Autobiography, Chapter Five.

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Blake's Vision of God

Of all the Christian spiritual leaders of the past
200 years this British poet would be placed near
the top by any enlightened Christian. God
was the primary theme and motif of his poetry, his
pictures, and his life. His poetry and pictures
contained his revelations of the reality of life,
ultimate reality, which we call God.

At three he ran screaming to his mother after the
sight of a grim punishing God in his window. A few
years later a similar vision embraced a roomful of
angels. Brought up in a Swedenburg and/or
Moravian climate he escaped the common
fallacies that go by the name of Christian
orthodoxy. But the first half of his life he
occupied wrestling with the Old Testament God.

With The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
he inverted the conventional values of good,
obedient, unimaginative church goers (more likely
to idolize and follow their minister than their God).
Blake called them angels, and called those who
ask questions, who think independently, who
experiment, devils.

With Songs of Innocence and Experience he
portrayed first the childlike, who have not met a
judging God, and second those who have tasted that fateful experience.

In his prophetic books Blake exhaustively pictured
the judging God, the Rulemaker and Enforcer
worshipped today by 'fundamentalist'
Christians and Muslims.

Through the years Blake gradually got free from
the baleful influence of a God of Control, used
ainly by the most powerful to control the rest
of us. He came to refer to him as Old Nobodaddy.

In the fullness of time Blake met the God introduced
to us by Jesus: the Loving Heavenly Father. The
gospel was a matter of forgiveness. Most of us have
to forgive (our) God, forgive our parents, our
spouses, most of all ourselves. Blake's First Vision of Light is the moment when he came into that glad awareness. Afterward the old negative ideas of Diety faded away to be replaced by the New Creation characterized by the Gifts of the Spirit.

Image from Songs of Innocence: Jesus and children in LITTLE BLACK BOY. Click on image for enlargement.

Blake's Vision of God

Of all the Christian spiritual leaders of the past
200 years this British poet would be placed near
the top by any enlightened Christian. God
was the primary theme and motif of his poetry, his
pictures, and his life. His poetry and pictures
contained his revelations of the reality of life,
ultimate reality, which we call God.

At three he ran screaming to his mother after the
sight of a grim punishing God in his window. A few
years later a similar vision embraced a roomful of
angels. Brought up in a Swedenburg and/or
Moravian climate he escaped the common
fallacies that go by the name of Christian
orthodoxy. But the first half of his life he
occupied wrestling with the Old Testament God.

With The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
he inverted the conventional values of good,
obedient, unimaginative church goers (more likely
to idolize and follow their minister than their God).
Blake called them angels, and called those who
ask questions, who think independently, who
experiment, devils.

With Songs of Innocence and Experience he
portrayed first the childlike, who have not met a
judging God, and second those who have tasted that fateful experience.

In his prophetic books Blake exhaustively pictured
the judging God, the Rulemaker and Enforcer
worshipped today by 'fundamentalist'
Christians and Muslims.

Through the years Blake gradually got free from
the baleful influence of a God of Control, used
ainly by the most powerful to control the rest
of us. He came to refer to him as Old Nobodaddy.

In the fullness of time Blake met the God introduced
to us by Jesus: the Loving Heavenly Father. The
gospel was a matter of forgiveness. Most of us have
to forgive (our) God, forgive our parents, our
spouses, most of all ourselves. Blake's First Vision of Light is the moment when he came into that glad awareness. Afterward the old negative ideas of Diety faded away to be replaced by the New Creation characterized by the Gifts of the Spirit.

Image from Songs of Innocence: Jesus and children in LITTLE BLACK BOY. Click on image for enlargement.