norton ash » Wed Aug 03, 2016 11:02 am wrote:As a comment, Blake's writings (especially The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) reflect the occult and mystical influence of Emanuel Swedenborg on Blake. Blake was also involved in and influenced by Theosophy and fringe freemasonry similar to the influence of the Golden Dawn order on William Butler Yeats.
Blake is such a visionary dynamo of energy/delight/awe in his words and art. I imagine he felt influences like streams entering a whirlpool.
If you're going to be honest about teaching any of these proposed creeds to kids (including after-school Blake) you're just going to frighten a lot of children. Some parent or administrator could just stamp 'violent', 'trigger warning' or 'non-inclusive' on the educational materials and they could be protested and shut down.
Anyway, I wish the kid would stop bringing home those Baphomet pictures and leaving them in the front hall... they always startle me when I put on my shoes.
Amen to that bolded above.
On Blake and Swedenborg:
Lessons of Swedenborg: or, the Origin of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
[Part II. of The Evolution of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell]
Joseph Viscomi *
On the 27th of January last [1788] a chapel, called the New Jerusalem Church, was opened in Great Eastcheap, London, by a sect of mystics, who consider Swedenborg as a prophet sent from God to establish the true doctrines of Christianity. They have a set form of prayer, on the model of that of the established church, and read chapters taken from the writings of Swedenborg as lessons.
—Analytical Review 2 (1788): 98
[Blake] . . . would allow of no other education than what lies in the cultivation of the fine arts & the imagination.
—H. C. Robinson (Bentley, Blake Records 543)
This is the second of three essays on the evolution of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. [1] The first argues that Blake began Marriage with plates 21 through 24, began executing the work without a completed manuscript, and that Marriage's disjointed structure is partly the result of its production history. It reveals that Marriage evolved through four to six distinct printmaking sessions in the following order: 21-24; 12-13; 1-3, 5-6, 11, 6-10; 14-15, 4; 16-20; and 25-27. [2] Marriage's structure may also have been partly influenced by literary models, such as Menippean satire, or by the Higher Criticism's theory "that the Old Testament was a gathering of redacted fragments" (Essick, "Representation"). These models, though, if present, appear to have come into play only after Blake wrote and etched plates 21-24, which constitute a sustained attack on the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). [3] Because the four plates form an autonomous text and are quarters cut from the same sheet of copper, and because that sheet was the first of seven cut, the text appears to have been conceived as an independent, anti-Swedenborgian pamphlet. It became instead the intellectual core of what became the Marriage, helping to generate twenty of its subsequent twenty-three plates. The only extant printing of plates 21-24 supports the pamphlet hypothesis. [4]
The present essay, which extends the first, argues that plates 21-24 do, indeed, form an autonomous text; that they are, unlike the other textual units, thematically, aesthetically, and rhetorically coherent; and that their textual and visual coherence supports the hypothesis that they were initially conceived as an independent pamphlet. Throughout its examination of plates 21-24, it identifies the primary Swedenborgian texts and themes that Blake refers to and/or satirizes. The third essay, by tracing many of these themes and texts through the remaining textual units in the order in which the units were produced, reveals how Marriage evolved through its production. By examining visual and verbal connections heretofore obscured, particularly those between printmaking and Swedenborg, it helps to reveal Blake's mind at work, locate where in practice execution and invention appear to intersect, and distinguish Blake's original from final intentions. The last essay reveals that Marriage, in effect, is a series of variations on themes raised on plates 21-24 instead of on plate 3, as is commonly thought (e.g., Bloom, Introduction; Miller; Nurmi; Punter), that Swedenborg, though mentioned only on plates 3, 19, 21, and 22, figures pervasively throughout Marriage, and that graphic allusions, which usually set into play the reflexivity associated with formalism, serve to evoke or communicate the unrepresentable—the spirit incarnate in a creative work of art.
The present essay, then, necessarily refers backward and forward, supporting theories already presented while also providing the textual and thematic grounds for a new reading of Marriage. But it stands firmly on its own as well, for it provides the first reading of plates 21-24 as they appear to have been initially written, that is, as an autonomous text preceding the composition of—and without the visual and verbal referents provided by—the Marriage. Read closely in this light, the aesthetic issues underlying Blake's theological critique of Swedenborg, as well as Blake's idea of himself as visionary artist and the relation between original artistic creation and prophecy, come into sharp focus.
http://siteslab.unc.edu/viscomi/lesson.html for more.
William Blake and the Radical Swedenborgians
Robert Rix
Introduction: Occultist or Political Radical?
If the philosophy of Immanuel Kant is now studied worldwide, the current climate of philosophical investigation ignores the mystical thinker Emanuel Swedenborg – at best relegating him to footnote status. But towards the end of the eighteenth century, the interest in Swedenborg among intellectuals was immense; his writings “made a lot of noise in the speculative world,” as the leading journal on esoteric matters, The Conjuror’s Magazine, commented in 1791. [1] Kant even felt compelled to respond to Swedenborg in Träume eines Geistesseher (1766; Dreams of a Spirit-Seer). Swedenborg’s teaching became the main substance of the occult revival in the late eighteenth century, and his ideas have had a lasting appeal as a source of inspiration to many intellectuals who were not converts, such as Lavater; Goethe; Coleridge; Emerson; Balzac; Baudelaire; Whitman; Melville; Henry James, Sr; and, not least, the poet and painter William Blake, on whom the essay at hand will focus. [2]
From documents we know that on 14 April 1789 Blake and his wife, Catherine, attended the First General Conference of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church at the chapel in Maidenhead Lane, just off Great Eastcheap (now Cannon Street) in London’s East End. The conference lasted four days until 17 April. It was held in response to a circular letter of 7 December 1788, which had been distributed in 500 copies to “all the readers of the Theological Writings of the Hon. Emanuel Swedenborg, who are desirous of rejecting, and separating themselves from, the Old Church, or the present Established Churches.” The letter drew up forty-two propositions outlining the terms for a separation, which the Blakes signed. [3]
The Swedenborgian Church is the only religious institution we have any record of him ever attending. However, if the dating Blake scribbled in blue ink on copy K of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his scathing satire on Swedenborg, is correct, it seems that he was, at this time, not willing to accept Swedenborg as the singular prophet on which one could build a system of beliefs.
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeV/Blake.htm for more.
Blake and Swedenborg
Opposition is True Friendship
Edited by Harvey Bellin and Darrell Ruhl
An exploration of Emanuel Swedenborg’s influences on the art and life of William Blake, examined from a spectrum of literary, art historical, philosophical, religious, and historical perspectives
With rare exception, every major study of William Blake’s life and arts includes at leads passing mention of the influences of Emanuel Swedenborg’s theological writings. This anthology is intended as a comprehensive exploration of Emanuel Swedenborg’s influences on the poetry, visual arts, ideas, and life of William Blake, examined from a spectrum of literary, art historical, philosophical, religious, and historical perspectives.
Included are essays by Blake scholar Kathleen Raine about Swedenborg’s influence on Blake’s poetry and descriptions of Blake’s encounters with the Swedenborgian church (a fledgling organization in Blake’s lifetime) by Raymond H. Deck, Robert Hindmarsh, and more.
http://www.swedenborg.com/product/blake ... borg/#full
Also available at: https://www.amazon.com/BLAKE-SWEDENBORG ... 0877851271
Edit to add:
One can buy all sorts of T-shirts and garb including a shirt or statue of Baphomet at the links in the OP. (meant to type shirt not shit)
