All the major English poets labeled Romantics, occasionally caricatured as ‘Christian,’ rejected the orthodox Christian picture of the world as merely a ‘vale of tears.’ John Keats transformed it into a ‘vale of Soul-making,’ where suffering forges individual identity, while ironically feeling his own name was ‘writ in water,’ and then tragically dying at twenty-five. Wordsworth found in memory and nature the gradual education of consciousness. Coleridge argued that the imagination actively creates the world it inhabits. Shelley saw tyranny and dogma—not God—as the true causes of suffering, believing moral greatness lay in enduring pain without hatred. The Romantics viewed the mind as a dynamic battlefield. They all believed that a mature human identity cannot simply be handed to you; it must be hammered out through direct, creative engagement with the hardships of life.
From this consensus, three principles emerge from their works and biographies that seem to me quintessentially ‘Romantic.’ We define them here:
Self-reliance: one’s life and convictions become primarily ethical and practical, with one’s actions and efforts ceasing to depend upon external influences and authority.
Individuation: the discovery and integration of one’s unique identity or vocation, with one becoming fully oneself, psychologically and creatively.
Renunciation: relinquishing attachment to self, possessions, views, and worldly aims until one’s concerns become strictly soteriological. One abandons not only dependence upon others but ultimately dependence upon the very fiction of an enduring self.
What psychological faculty is central to all the principles of the Romantic Movement is of course the imagination; also crucial to achieving all three principles, as it allows a person to see oneself and surroundings as something different from what it usually seems, and what others might insist it really to be. Blake’s ‘believing faith’ becomes an act of his ‘Imagination’ through which the saving reality, already present and active, is recognized. As the greatest syncretic parallel, one shared in different forms by nearly all religious traditions, faith itself in its highest capacity is believing faith that is ultimately transformative.
Seen this way, isolation and disciplined solitude might arise through all three, but they move in different directions: Self-reliance strengthens the person. Individuation fulfills the personality. Renunciation transcends the person altogether.
While the first two relate comfortably to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, all three apply to Blake. Renunciation, whether from what Blake calls the ‘Fallen World’ or Buddhism calls saṃsāra, remains the backbone of religious refuge; and nothing promotes it more effectively than—not a vale of tears—but the transformation of its dark, suffering reality into a bright, ‘illuminated’ one.
Blake called his own transformative procedure an ‘infernal method,’ employing ‘corrosives’ to create his illuminated etchings. But the metaphor extends naturally to his creative process in general, in which the painful products of afflicted mind and sense—his Fallen World—are redeemed through visionary Imagination. There is an intriguing functional resemblance here to Vajrayāna, where passionate or wrathful appearances may be transformed through ‘pure perception’: the affliction is not merely suppressed but taken into a transformative process. Or, as Blake advises in the Proverbs of Hell, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise” (MHH 7; E35).¹
The Infernal Method
Blake’s creation of illustrated pages by etching them onto copper plates using his own original relief process is indicative of his highly involved and evolving creative method in general. By drawing and writing with an acid-resistant medium, he allowed acid to dissolve the exposed copper surrounding his designs, leaving letters and figures standing in relief for printing. Compared with movable type this was intensely artisanal; compared with the labor of carving away the negative space surrounding characters on a xylographic block for Chinese or Tibetan religious printing, however, Blake’s process possessed its own peculiar economy. More importantly, it was patently alchemical.
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he turns his actual printing process into a grand spiritual metaphor:
“…this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.”
(*MHH* 14; E39)
It is precisely this creatively hellacious combination of verse and art that made Blake posthumously famous and eventually secured him a permanent place in the history of British art—literally a dedicated, permanent room in the Tate Britain at London’s Tate Gallery.
Blake’s Imagination-engaged endeavors, of all the English Romantics, suggest something remarkably close in function—though certainly not historical transmission—to advanced Vajrayāna practice. Not only in visualization, but in the Mahāsiddha-like creation of tantric texts: his prophetic epics teach how, through Imagination, the compassion of a ‘Divine Humanity’ and the wisdom ‘Poetic Genius,’ both found in the ‘minutely particular,’ might arise from the exoteric and esoteric resources of the Judaeo-Christian prophetic tradition.
Since Blake’s religiosity—authentic, rebellious and visionary—appears gifted at birth, one is tempted to invoke anamnesis; the Platonic idea learning is a recollection of truths our soul already knows, rather than a gathering from the outside world. While Socrates repeatedly ‘proved’ this by simply asking the right questions, Blake rejected the Socratic Method as a faithless questioning,
creating endless abstractions from ratiocination. He favored instead all being “Holy, Holy, Holy” in a Divine Humanity, where each member, graced by the heroic redemption of Jesus, is reunited by the observance of each others’ minute particularity, while working out their postlapsarian salvation in redeeming creative works of Imagination.
Blake also took a rigorous, constant, repetitive approach to religious practice—something comparable in function to vīrya, diligence, the fourth perfection in Buddhism. His creative procedure is especially suggestive when compared with the Vajrayāna ‘two processes,’ Creation and Completion: an elaborate visionary world is first generated and then dissolved, dethroning the ego long enough to demonstrate its aggregated and unsubstantive nature.
Ideally, this leaves one’s consciousness less self-centered, opinionated, and more pliable, therefore more compassionate and wise.
Generally, advanced Tantric Buddhist sadhana practice requires fully imagining the very place in which one lives as filled with deities and their supports—celestial mansions, thrones and ‘seats’—all appearing as luminous forms,
unsubstantial as images reflected in a mirror. From a Buddhist doctrinal standpoint Blake remains, of course, a spiritual worldling, and his doctrine that of a non-Buddhist religious philosopher—a tīrthika, if that traditional term is used strictly to mean a teacher who has not taken refuge in the Three Jewels of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
That said, Blake’s methods of teaching his doctrine uncannily parallel tantric method to the point if there is such a thing as a Christian tantric, it was certainly him. Case in point: think of a Tibetan thangka crowded with tantric iconography, organized through concentric rings and directional squares, perhaps with outer cemeteries and hells surrounding a Buddha at the center. Around the central image appear lineage holders, protectors and yidams, peaceful and wrathful figures, and representatives of the Sangha. Dharma may appear symbolically in piles of elongated canonical texts. Around all this may be eight directional cemeteries populated by hapless humans, scavenging animals and inimical beings. As a thangka visually informs, orients and keys the practitioner’s imagination to the instructions of a tantric text, so a page from one of Blake’s illuminated manuscripts guides and inspires its reader.
In terms of technique and resulting appearance, Blake’s method also shares certain formal similarities with thangka composition, prominently the mandala. As James Bogan memorably puts it, “Golgonooza is a multi-dimensional mandala-map, which charts the interior universe of the psyche.”² Both traditions can employ spiritually organized pictorial space rather than consistently naturalistic perspective, while human, divine, demonic and symbolic forms coexist according to visionary rather than optical relationships.
Blake’s religious and secular iconography, however, is far more interpretive, original and eclectic than that of most traditional thangkas. Trained for seven years as an engraver before studying at the Royal Academy, he became his own master. Outside of his commissioned work, he was free to shape his own tradition and his imagery extends far beyond the usual Judaeo-Christian and classical motifs available to artists of his time. It is a complex amalgam: Medieval Gothic art, Renaissance and Mannerist forms, Northern European esotericism, biblical prophecy, classical mythology, and the antiquarian fascination with Celtic and Druidic Britain—all heated to the point of sublimity.
The Romantic era witnessed a massive resurgence of interest in Britain’s supposed pre-Christian past. Blake knew James Macpherson’s Ossian and encountered contemporary antiquarian speculation about Druids and ancient Britain. Whether such iconography was received and then wholly transformed, or arrived in Blake’s Imagination as a completed visionary form before being transferred to watercolor, engraving and illuminated printing, remains part of the perennial argument over how literally we should understand Blake’s claims to vision.
The transformative procedure even suggests, at a greater doctrinal distance, the Vajrayāna body-maṇḍala method, in which the ordinary body is reconceived as sacred architecture transmitted through an initiatory lineage. Blake’s corrosives, except in a few secret details, constitute not our analogue to such a practice. Rather the resemblance lies in a spiritual logic of transformation where the apparent surface is sacrificed so that another order of form may appear. ⁸
The Proverbs of Hell similarly cultivate a deliberately antinomian rhetoric:
“Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.”
and:
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
(*MHH* 7; E35)
This is not permission for regressive behavior. Blake overturns conventional prudential morality rhetorically so that the reader must discover what, if anything, survives its acetate. His companion proverb supplies the test: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough” (MHH 9; E37). Excess is thus experimental and revelatory, not an end in itself:
by going beyond an inherited prohibition or the prescribed limits, one experiences what is minutely andparticularly “enough” for themselves—a revelation mere obedience never discloses.
Blake the Visionary and Prophet
Visions were commonplaces to Blake, and his life and works were intensely spiritual. According to the traditions collected by his early biographers, as a child he saw God at a window and later a tree filled with angels, “bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.”
As an adult he remained no less emphatic:
“I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation…”
When asked whether the rising sun was merely “a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea,” Blake answered:
“O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’”
And in 1802 he wrote to his patron William Hayley:
“I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven Daily & Nightly.”
Such experiences naturally became sources for his poems and drawings.
Among Blake’s major works are Songs of Innocence (1789), combined in 1794 with its darker counterpart, Songs of Experience, containing the iconic Tyger of “fearful symmetry”; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93), an illuminated satire and philosophical assault on conventional moral dualism; Europe a Prophecy (1794), whose frontispiece became famous as The Ancient of Days; the vast unfinished The Four Zoas; and Milton, with the celebrated lyric beginning, “And did those feet in ancient time” in the Preface. His most densely iconographic and ambitious prophetic epic is Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, composed and engraved roughly from 1804–20. Finally, the Illustrations of the Book of Job, among Blake’s greatest achievements as an engraver, was issued in 1826.
Born in Soho in 1757, Blake spent most of his life in and around London, with one seismic exception: his residence at Felpham in Sussex from 1800 to 1803. There, in August 1803, Blake encountered the soldier John Schofield in his garden and physically expelled him from the property. Schofield subsequently accused Blake of uttering seditious words against the King and soldiers during wartime. Blake was tried for sedition and acquitted in January 1804. He returned to London, eventually settling at 17 South Molton Street.
The incident traumatically forged itself into Blake’s Jerusalem, wherein the historical Schofield reappears as “Scofeld,” numbered among Albion’s cruel sons. The drunken soldier who historically accused Blake of sedition becomes, through poetic vision, an archetype of accusation, mechanical law and the rational Spectre opposed to creative Imagination. Blake elevates a private injustice into a mythic diagnosis of civilization itself.
Interestingly, there is an additional historical coincidence that only an omniscient Blake could have known. A century later another Scofield—C. I. Scofield (1843–1921), editor of the enormously influential Scofield Reference Bible—would also become associated with prophecy, this time through biblical annotation. His dispensational reading helped shape strands of modern Christian Zionism by assigning extraordinary prophetic importance to the historical restoration of Israel and Jerusalem. While there’s no historically caused connection between Blake’s Scofeld and C. I. Scofield, retrospectively the coincidence produces a remarkable prophetic resonance. Especially for an allegorizing imagination, where coincidence itself can become spiritually suggestive, without the necessary spacial and temporal burden of an empirical prediction.
This is cautiously analogous to what Tibetan Buddhists call tendrel (rten ’brel), the dependent conjunction of causes and conditions whose convergence may acquire significance for an awakened, karmically perceptive mind. Both the Hebrew prophetic tradition, like Buddhism, repeatedly warn against false visions and self-deception. Blake’s attack upon Swedenborg therefore belongs to an ancient prophetic dilemma shared by both traditions in distinguishing genuine liberating vision and wisdom from fakery, fraudulence, and cunning within a received system. Incoherent pronouncements of the Nechung Oracle (the State Oracle of Tibet)—then translated by secretaries of state with vested interests—immediately comes to mind.
Alternatively, sensitive Hebrew prophets speak as visionaries whose disclosures expose the moral and spiritual condition of the present while opening an expansive history toward divine fulfillment. Thus Elijah’s promised return, the coming Davidic ruler, and the mysterious priest-king “after the order of Melchizedek” belong within a larger prophetic pattern in which revelation can be historically influential while appearing ethical and transformative rather than predictive.
Buddhism preserves a similar but doctrinally different hierarchy. The Buddha’s vyākaraṇas are not casual predictions but authoritative declarations concerning future awakening and the unfolding of Dharma across enormous reaches of time. Later Tibetan sacred history extends prophetic traditions around masters such as Padmasambhava. Tibetan Buddhism also continues to employ mo, astrological calculation, dreams and prophetic counsel, even by eminent lineage holders—not as replacements for genuine Dharma but as provisional or pragmatic circumstantial aids.
In Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Isaiah explains that he neither saw God nor heard a divine voice through ordinary bodily senses. Instead, his utterance arose through the “Poetic Genius” and through a “firm perswasion” capable of making its declaration historical reality. While Blake’s vision stands squarely within this Judaeo-Christian prophetic tradition, where prophecy is veracious and far more than just foretelling the future, he relocates prophecy within liberated Imagination itself, placing Jerusalem at its epicenter; a symbolic city of regenerated Imagination. Here, the place of prophetic Imagination, Blake’s prophet beholds Humanity transfigured as Divine, ultimate and progressively expressing itself more fully and fulfilling, to become the stuff of revelation itself.
While both Blake and Buddhism reject ordinary perception, they differ profoundly over what remains when ordinary perception has finally been purified and becomes extraordinary. Buddhist wisdom finds no independently existing human, divine or sentient essence to behold, as Buddhist liberation refuses to establish any enduring person or sentient essence as ultimately real. Indeed, Early Buddhism denied that the Liberated One—more strictly proclaimed as an entity no other than ‘one who has awoken’—could finally be grasped through ordinary categories of existence and nonexistence. The advancement of Mahāyāna then took the analysis further by denying intrinsic existence to either persons or phenomena.
Fourfold Vision
Northrop Frye observed that Blake read the Bible continuously throughout his life, visualizing it as a living imaginative landscape. Frye also emphasized Blake’s affinity with the traditional fourfold modes of interpretation: Literal or Historical, Allegorical or Typological, Tropological or Moral, and Anagogical or Visionary.
At the anagogical level, the biblical narrative becomes apocalyptic vision: the material world in its dull, tyrannous rounds is destroyed and transfigured through Divine Humanity and the descent of the New Jerusalem.⁵
There is a fruitful comparison here with tantric outer, inner, secret and ultimate or ‘real’ modes of understanding experience. The comparison is functional rather than genealogical: in each case an event can be read simultaneously at different depths. Blake’s ‘fourfold vision’ therefore approaches something recognizable to a Vajrayāna practitioner: ordinary appearance clarified, as if by smelting, made increasingly sharper and brighter into a ‘pure appearance’ through disciplined repetition.
Personal experience bears out another aspect of the comparison. Increasingly fluent reading of either biblical scripture or tantric sādhana can move from grammar-conscious decoding toward something approaching instantaneous global comprehension. Concentration increases; the interpretive parts begin to illuminate one another; a larger pattern suddenly becomes visible. Indic meditators would recognize the broad contemplative principle: śamatha, tranquility or focused stability, supports vipaśyanā, penetrating insight. A simple example of dependent relation is familiar to everyone. Someone who has forgotten a tune asks, “Can you hum a few bars?” Upon hearing them, the entire song suddenly comes to mind. The part does not contain the whole as an independently existing form or substance; rather, the part functions within a network of memory, conditioning and relation through which the larger pattern becomes present.
Here, however, the indicating fingers of Blake and Buddhism do not quite touch. The Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa coined coincidentia oppositorum, the ‘coincidence of opposites,’ to describe a divine truth beyond ordinary contradiction. Blake similarly insists that opposing powers—Reason and Energy, Attraction and Repulsion, Love and Hate—are necessary to existence. Madhyamaka does something importantly different. It does not reconcile metaphysical opposites in to a higher substantial unity. It examines both sides until neither can be established independently of causes, conditions, parts, relations and conceptual designation.
Contraries, Energy and Mental Fight
Like the wrathful figures of many allegorical traditions, Blake’s lions, fires and combats dramatize inner and spiritual struggles. The reader should not mistake poetic or psychological personifications for ordinary concrete entities inhabiting measurable metaphysical space, nor attribute literal physical properties—wielding swords, bleeding, dying—to states of soul or consciousness. They belong to Imagination: visionary and visualizable reality. This is particularly relevant when Blake is compared with Vajrayāna sādhana, where an entire visionary environment can be generated with extraordinary precision without being asserted as an independently existing material universe.
Another Mahāyāna-like resonance appears in Blake’s insistence upon caring for others in ‘Minute Particulars’:
“He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.”
(*J* 55.60; E205)
And, importantly, not through some generalized institutional ‘Good.’
This aptly characterizes how Bodhisattvas generate compassion into Bodhicitta, the salvific root of Dharma—not as an abstract ‘General Good’ but through attention to particular beings and particular suffering. This to the point the Bodhisattva must be willing to go beyond the apparent ‘obedient’ Buddhist vows to discover a precise action to relieve all, or even just one, sentient being’s suffering.
Likewise, Blake’s fiery rhetoric about violent battles belongs principally to what he calls “Mental Fight” (Milton, Preface; E95–96), akin to the Greek psychomachia and functionally comparable to the Tibetan tantric protection chakra srung ’khor: a ritual and visualized defense against obstructing forces understood as personally troublesome as they amplify passions, corrupt virtues, distort faculties and continually foment delusion.⁶
Such spiritual combat should therefore not automatically be mistaken for a rejection of ahiṃsā, non-harming as its primary battlefield is consciousness. Specific to the lion and lamb imagery central to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the two are not merely moral opposites but expressions of forces held in creative tension. As the Proverbs of Hell insist, apparent violence may belong to the imaginative overthrow of mental tyranny:
“The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.”
(*MHH* 8; E36)
Throughout Blake’s vision, Jesus remains counterpoised to redeem the fallen condition:
“The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains; are in truth the causes of its life & the sources of all activity, but the chains are, the cunning of weak and tame minds, which have power to resist energy.”
(*MHH* 16; E40)
In The Marriage, it is key that these Giants represent primordial Energy, while “Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy” (MHH 4; E34). Jesus ultimately redeems rather than abolishes Energy. His true opposition is to restrictive Selfhood—the condition that chains imaginative life. Upon those Giants’ shoulders we stand as Natural Man, were it not for the intercession of Jesus, Blake’s Hero and embodiment of Divine Humanity.
Blake states the corrective doctrine with extraordinary directness:
“All Bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & Soul.
2. That Energy. calld Evil. is alone from the Body. & that Reason. calld Good. is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses. the chief inlets of Soul in this age
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight”
(*MHH* 4; E34)
His philosophy becomes more paradoxical when Blake introduces the Prolific and Devouring:
“…to the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.”
Northrop Frye reads the Prolific as boundless creative activity and the Devourer as the world of form, law and organization necessary to receive and embody it. The tragedy begins when this receptive faculty mistakes itself for the source of creation rather than its servant.⁷ Blake might say that things fall apart when a partial vision claims universality. That is precisely what “taking portions of existence and fancying that the whole” means. There is a provocative comparison here with Āryadeva’s Catuḥśataka, where analysis demonstrates that visible form is never perceived as a self-contained whole independent of unseen parts and relations. Ignorance fills what it cannot see and then mistakes its constructed totality for reality. Frye returns repeatedly to this epistemological error in Fearful Symmetry, making it one of the organizing principles of Blake’s mythology.
Blake continues:
“But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea recieved the excess of his delights.”
And then:
“These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence…”
Finally:
“Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two. Note. Jesus Christ did not wish to unite but to separate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats! & he says I came not to send Peace but a Sword.”
(*MHH* 16–17; E40–41)
Here is another Contrary: not everything is meant to disappear into compromise. The tantrik has to ask whether there is not something here resembling Discriminating Wisdom itself—Mañjuśrī’s sword—where wisdom liberates precisely by cutting distinctions correctly rather than dissolving everything into an indiscriminate sameness—and this leads us to the philosophical hinge of the following comparison.
Contrary versus Negation
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake states that Reason and Energy, Attraction and Repulsion, and Love and Hate are “necessary to Human existence”:
“Without Contraries is no progression.”
(*MHH* 3; E34)
This relational dynamic approaches something comparable to the Buddhist analysis that phenomena do not stand alone. Blake protects his proposition by making a vital philosophical distinction between a Contrary and a Negation. A Contrary participates in living opposition. A Negation attempts to destroy, or make reductive through abstraction, the particular from its living context. So the fallen, moralizing religion Blake explained used ‘Good’ to eradicate ‘Evil,’ even though this Evil is a necessary Energy of life.
Here the doctrine is demonstrated fully in Jerusalem:
“And this is the manner of the Sons of Albion in their strength
They take the Two Contraries which are calld Qualities, with which
Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good & Evil
From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation
Not only of the Substance from which it is derived
A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer
Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power
An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing
This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning Power
And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation”
(*J* 10.7–16; E152–53)
A worldview founded upon such ‘Holy Reasoning Power’ promotes precisely the illusion that Madhyamaka attacks: that things possess an intrinsic, self-grounding identity. Dependent Origination holds that phenomena arise through causes, conditions, parts, relations and designation, and therefore cannot finally be found to possess independent self-nature. Their emptiness is clarifying rather than annihilating. Buddhist scholastic traditions enumerate multiple modes of emptiness—often sixteen or eighteen depending upon the system. However tempting the comparison, Blake’s Infinite, technically, is not among them.
The Mahāyāna tradition associates the Buddha’s Second Turning of the Wheel at Vulture Peak as a recognition of beings’ unfamiliarity and fearfulness of Śūnyatā—emptiness. Bodhisattvas become brave ‘Mind Heroes’ because they cease to fear signlessness, wishlessness and emptiness—the three doors of liberation—and train toward realization that neither persons nor phenomena possess independent existence.
The result is something Blake might appreciate: attachment relaxes, dualistic conflict subsides and compassion becomes possible. But emptiness requires seeing even the Contraries themselves as empty of independent self-nature—fallen or Divine—because whatever arises dependently cannot constitute an intrinsically existing first principle. It’s here then the two traditions definitively diverge as Madhyamaka liberates the particular when the yogin discovers it was never intrinsically established. While Blake liberates the particular when one’s Imagination restores it’s relation within Divine Humanity.
From a Madhyamaka standpoint, Blake retains positive Eternal Forms. Rather than dissolve mistaken self-nature through emptiness, he magnifies existence into mythic particularity. Even Christ remains the supreme Divine Humanity and not an intrinsically existing ego; but nevertheless a positively affirmed ultimate Humanity—as an existent something. While Blake relinquishes ‘Selfhood,’ he does not relinquish particularity, identity, or imaginative form. Buddhism empties identity of intrinsic existence; Blake redeems identity through imaginative reintegration into Divine Humanity—a ceaseless creation:
“Therefore Los stands in London building Golgonooza —
Compelling his Spectre to labours mighty; trembling in fear
The Spectre weeps, but Los unmovd by tears or threats remains
I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans.
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.”
(*J* 10.17–21; E153)
The Tyger and the Problem of Divine Contraries
The Tyger, from Songs of Experience, was familiar to generations of English-language schoolchildren and their parents, perhaps because it ends with the indelible question:
“What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”
(*SE*, “The Tyger”; E24–25)
It may be Blake’s most sublime early poetic presentation of the problem later developed as Contraries: how can terrifying Energy belong to the same Divine source as innocence?
The penultimate stanza asks:
“When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
(*SE*, “The Tyger,” 17–20; E25)
The stars throwing down their spears evoke a cosmic cessation or surrender of conflict. Then the hinge question: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” How is it possible—and why necessary—that a single creative source could produce both Tyger and Lamb?
Blake refuses to resolve the question by rationally converting the pair into simple moral categories such as Good and Evil. The reconciliation occurs in Eternity, beyond fallen three-dimensional perception, while remaining intimately present within every regenerated particular. This is why Los does not simply destroy his Spectre but compels it into rehabilitative, salvific creative labor. This, as opposed to the postlapsarian state, where unproductive/uncreative Reason separates itself from Imagination and manufactures the murderous abstractions Good and Evil. ‘Selfhood’ arises from the ego’s rebellion against relation and Emanation which is the manifested relational counterpart, or aspect, of a being.
In Blake’s epics, examples of these are the females Jerusalem and Enitharmon to the male counterparts Albion and Los. Separation from one’s Emanation becomes catastrophic as it’s also a separation from Humanity’s primordial luminosity. This is suggestive, but not categorically equivalent to mind’s ‘ground luminosity’ in Madyamika. That’s because the latter doctrinally recognizes the possible discovery of clarity and emptiness—a clear light, beyond any relational dependency.
Also not exactly equivalent are Satan and Albion, as the former more fundamentally embodies Selfhood and accusation, and the latter is the Universal Man fallen into division, sleep and spectral reasoning. Albion is the patient of redemption, not simply another Satan; thus
does the Fall remain permeated by accusation, jealousy, religious tyranny, and rejection of Forgiveness. Thus, Blake’s Proverbs states:
“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”
(*MHH* 9; E37)
The above paradox reaches its fullest doctrinal expression in the later prophecies where wrath becomes one of the energies through which fallen Albion may awaken. Consequently, Blake repeatedly refuses to identify wrath automatically with fallen anger:
“If you account it Wisdom when you are
angry to be silent, and Not to shew it: I do
not account that Wisdom, but Folly…”
(*M* 3; E119)
And elsewhere:
“And Satan not having the Science of Wrath, but only of Pity:
Rent them asunder, and wrath was left to wrath, & pity to pity.”
(*M* 9.46–47; E103)
Meaning ‘strength’ was left out and only pity prized. Trungpa Rinpoche understood and popularized the term ‘idiot compassion,’ a lack of true guidance, that betrays both a meekness that averts personal discomfort and laziness that avoids extra effort. The senior Sakya monk after the Tibetan diaspora, Deshung Rinpoche III, and root Guru to the present writer instructed, “your best friend is the one who points out your faults most directly.’
In Jerusalem, the problem of wrath and its useful compassion becomes less a defense of the former than an insistence upon its proper place among Contraries. The celebrated design on plate 54 refuses to collapse Reason, Pity, Wrath, Desire and “This World” into a simple reflexive, moral binary. Thus this emblematic configuration:
Reason
Pity Wrath
This World
Desire
helpful to uncovering the deep psychic structure needed before entering Golgonooza.
Golgonooza: Mandala of Imagination
One of the best visual examples of a Blake mandala is found in the fantastic weeping form seated upon a sunflower throne with protective arching serpents above, as it appears in Jerusalem, plate 53, its caption explaining:
“Los, who is the Vehicular Form of strong Urthona
Wept vehemently over Albion where Thames currents spring…”
Los, one of Blake’s Giant Forms, is the eternal prophet and artificer, embodying human Imagination particularly in its creative and poetic faculty. As a blacksmith of cosmic proportions, his hammering mirrors the beating heart; his bellows the lungs. He forges Golgonooza, Blake’s visionary, and visualizable, tutelary city.
Blake’s other tutelary cities form a fourfold allegorical geography: London represents fallen historical existence; Babylon spiritual captivity; Golgonooza the redemptive labor of imaginative creation; and Jerusalem the eternal fulfillment of that labor within Divine Humanity.
Northrop Frye describes the ontological significance of Golgonooza:
“The construction of a character or identity out of life is part of the attempt of Albion to emerge from time into eternity as one Man who is also a City of God.”
Golgonooza conserves what heroes, martyrs, prophets, artists, and ordinary human beings have genuinely contributed to redeemed existence.⁴ G. I. Gurdjieff’s teaching offers a striking parallel in what he termed B influences: those influences “created consciously by conscious men for a definite purpose,” ordinarily embodied in “religious systems and teachings, philosophical doctrines, works of art and so on.”⁵ᵃ
In Buddhist terms there is no exact equivalent, but the image recalls the accumulation of merit, puṇya-saṃbhāra, and wholesome karmic predispositions: no genuinely virtuous act is simply lost but continues causally toward awakening. Blake imagines this continuity as the Eternal City of Art. Buddhism might say it’s the abode of Saraswati—where streams wisdom, eloquence, and meritorious artistic expression.
Blake commentator Bogan observes that the mandala works its healing power upon the one who creates it and secondarily upon the one who recreates it through contemplation. The statement resonates strongly with Blake’s declaration in the Laocoön:
“Prayer is the Study of Art.”²
In Blake’s mythology Los remains creatively active within the Fall. Albion sleeps in division, but Los continues the labor of Golgonooza, preserving the imaginative principle until restoration becomes possible.
For a Vajrayāna reader, the following is especially striking:
“The Twentyfour Friends of Albion and round the awful Four
For the protection of the Twelve Emanations of Albions Sons
The Mystic Union of the Emanation in the Lord; Because Man
divided from his Emanation is a dark Spectre”
Blake’s Spectre is not merely the ego but reasoning power isolated from Imagination—the Selfhood mistaking abstraction for reality. Blake distinguishes Spectre, Shadow and Shade, though his poetic usages can vary. Broadly, the Spectre is divided Selfhood; Shadow its dark projected appearance or consequence in the fallen world; Shade an insubstantial or ghost-like remainder.³ None of these should simply be equated with the Jungian ‘shadow.’
In Buddhist terms, the closest comparison is therefore not with an unconscious personality but with appearances generated through ignorance and appropriation, upādāna, a divided mode of cognition perpetuating saṃsāric experience.
The Four Zoas and the Tantric Mandala
It was in my undergraduate reading and writing about The Four Zoas that I first encountered—just a few years before initiation into Tantric Buddhism—Blake’s gigantic prophetic figures—Los, Urizen, Orc and Albion, and felt a primordial connection, cohering my consciousness into a single point like I’d never experienced before, priming me for committed involvement in other ‘mystical traditions.’
These immense imaginative projections possess enormous, infinitely expansive faculties: Giant Forms embodying reason, passion, creativity and bodily sensation, all distorted through the Fall. But the comparison needs to be clear from the beginning. When Vasubandhu analyzes how a human being experiences conditioned existence, he works through the five skandhas, twelve āyatanas and eighteen dhātus. When Blake analyzes how Divine Humanity falls into time and suffering, he dramatizes the civil war of the Four Zoas. These are not identical systems. Their formal structures can nevertheless illuminate one another.
Blake announces the purpose of the poem:
“The torments of Love & Jealousy in
The Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man”
and immediately declares:
“Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity
Cannot Exist. but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden
The Universal Man. To Whom be Glory Evermore Amen”
(*FZ* I; E300–301)
Blake then invokes John 17:21–23 and John 1:14.
The latter contains the Greek kai eskēnōsen en hēmin—“and dwelt among us,” literally carrying the imagery of pitching a tent or tabernacling. For Blake, the Universal Man becomes the true tabernacle of Divine Humanity. John 17 supplies the theological logic:
“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee…”
and:
“I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one…”
The paradox is crucial. Father, Son and humanity remain distinguishable while participating in unity. Plurality is not simply annihilated in Oneness.
“Through Jesus humans do not lose their unique identities.” Christian redemption relinquishes pride and Selfhood, but does not finally abolish the particular person. The Christian mechanics of theosisoffer another divergent comparison: Through Christ, Creator and creature enter a relationship in which divine glory can become present within human life without simply obliterating the creature.
Here our syncretic parallelism to Buddhism must pause. Remembering the Buddha saw no limbed or sentient beings in Nirvana, Madhyamika goes logically beyond both personal identity and phenomena—their cause, result, and essence—revealing both to be empty of intrinsic existence. However, the four gates of a tantric maṇḍala and Blake’s four directional gates of Golgonooza parallel one another so strikingly that someone steeped in Blake’s visionary ‘system’ of transformation might naturally feel at home when encountering tantric deity visualization.
Speaking broadly, each direction becomes a psychological and visionary field:
Blake’s East belongs to Luvah, where fallen love becomes jealousy and war until imaginative redemption restores vitality. The tantric East belongs to Akṣobhya, whose Mirror-like Wisdom transforms aggression into clarity.
Blake’s South belongs to Urizen, whose rational vision hardens into abstract law. Ratnasambhava’s southern family transforms pride into the Wisdom of Equanimity.
Blake’s West belongs to Tharmas, the turbulent field of bodily sensation and generation. Amitābha’s western family transforms attachment and desire into Discriminating Wisdom.
Blake’s North belongs to Urthona and, in fallen manifestation, Los, whose furnaces preserve creative regeneration. Amoghasiddhi’s northern family transforms jealousy and fear into All-Accomplishing Wisdom.
The mandalic resemblance is formal, as Blake’s Giant Forms and the Primordial Buddhas both organize visionary psychology around directional powers; but not doctrinal, as Blake seeks restoration of Divine Humanity through Imagination while Vajrayāna transforms afflictions into wisdom through realization of their empty, luminous nature.
After the Fall, the Zoas—very unlike Primordial Buddhas—become afflicted and displaced. Their altered geography becomes part of the governing symbolism of Golgonooza. One which embodies both memory of Eternity and struggle within fallen existence. Its architecture preserves cosmic inversion while Los performs disciplined imaginative labor inside the Fall itself. As his forge and the furnaces of Bowlahoola stand at the heart of the city, binding artistic and spiritual regeneration to active work. Golgonooza is consequently not merely an ideal city. It is a visionary mandala of redemption constructed inside the Fall.
The Tree in the Human Brain
Putting Golgonooza beside Blake’s famous lyric from The Human Abstract—“There grows one in the Human Brain”—reveals the psychological battlefield of his universe.
Blake describes the gods searching throughout Nature for the origin of religious cruelty, moral judgment and institutional oppression:
“The Gods of the earth and sea
Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain.”
Dogma, self-righteousness and psychological enclosure are not discovered in Nature but generated by fallen cognition. Golgonooza becomes the imaginative counter-construction to this internal architecture as Los, not allowing consciousness to become overgrown by the Tree of Mystery and its “fruit of Deceit,” establishes his furnaces within the human imaginative world, continually reworking perception into living forms of art, empathy and relationship.
The name ‘Golgonooza’ itself has often invited comparison with Golgotha, the ‘Place of the Skull.’ Heavy with etymological resonance, Blake unmistakably transforms death-bound human consciousness into a workshop of regeneration.
Golgonooza then is the positive counterpart of the Tree in the Brain: where Urizenic abstraction produces enclosure, judgment and separation, Los’s imaginative labor reopens consciousness to transformation.
With that as sufficient introduction, and with the aid of a ‘Reader’s Guide,’ we can now fearlessly enter, The Four Zoas, Night I:
As the Fall Unfolds, the Parent Eternal Tharmas Laments
“Lost! Lost! Lost! are my Emanations Enion O Enion”
(*FZ* I, 4.7; E301)
“I have hidden Jerusalem in Silent Contrition”
(4.9; E301)
“The Men have receivd their death wounds & their Emanations are fled / To me for refuge”
(4.15–16; E301)
The Fall first appears as grief rather than rebellion. Tharmas, the Parent Power of sensation and instinct, discovers his world collapsing as Jerusalem withdraws into concealment and the Emanations flee for refuge. His lament oscillates between pity, guilt and terror at the disintegration overtaking creation.
Tharmas Fears Self-Knowledge
“The infant joy is beautiful but its anatomy / Horrible Ghast & Deadly”
(4.32–33; E302)
“My Emanations are become harlots”
(4.37; E302)
“I am like an atom… Yet I am an Identity”
(4.43–45; E302)
Pressed by Enion, Tharmas recoils from psychological analysis. Blake presents introspection without redemption suggesting to anatomize the fallen soul is not necessarily to heal it, and exposes it instead to despair, division and self-annihilation.
The Spectre Claims Moral Purity
“If thou hast sinnd… know that I am pure”
(6.10–12; E303)
“This world is Thine… that dark & dismal infinite… Is Mine”
(6.13–16; E303–304)
The Spectre separates itself from Tharmas, claiming absolute purity while reducing the fallen self to an object of judgment. Abstract morality divides consciousness against itself and inaugurates Blake’s psychology of Selfhood.
Enion Awakens to Remorse
“I thought Tharmas a Sinner & I murderd his Emanations”
(7.2; E304)
“Those Emanations were my Childrens Souls”
(7.3–4; E304)
“I feel my world within”
(7.7; E304)
Enion realizes that what she destroyed as alien or sinful belonged to her own life. The Fall deepens from accusation into guilt.
Maternal Love Amid Dissolution
“In weeping blindness stumbling she followd them”
(9.2–4; E304)
“Into Non Entity revolving round in dark despair”
(9.6; E304)
“Thus Enion gave them all her spectrous life”
(9.8; E304)
The Emanations reject the very mother who seeks them. Enion’s compassion begins to restore her humanity, yet her children continually absorb her life while driving her toward Non-Entity.
Birth of Fallen Creation
“She also took an atom of space & opend its center / Into Infinitude”
(9.13–14; E305)
“Alternate Love & Hate… Scorn & Jealousy”
(9.24–26; E305)
“Conversing with the visions of Beulah in dark slumberous bliss”
(9.33; E305)
From an “atom of space” Enion fashions fallen spatial existence. While The Daughters of Beulah—protective, yoginī-like powers who hold the contraries in merciful repose—watch in hope as Los and Enitharmon emerge within alternating attraction and repulsion, their prophetic powers already shadowed by jealousy.
Prelude to the Prophecy of the Fall
“I will sing a Song of Death! it is a Song of Vala!”
(10.10; E305)
“Luvah and Vala woke… Into the Brain”
(10.11–14; E305)
“I have refusd to look upon the Universal Vision”
(10.23–25; E306)
The drama expands. Vala—Luvah’s emanation, Nature as the seductive veil of outward appearance—rises with him from the Human Heart into the Brain, where her dream permeates consciousness. Imagination darkens into a “false morning” and Los confronts the illusion eclipsing Universal Vision.
The Descent of Urizen Foretold
“Descend O Urizen descend with horse & chariots”
(11.21; E306)
“The Human Nature shall no more remain nor Human acts”
(11.23; E306)
“Urizen descended… Now I am God from Eternity to Eternity”
(12.5–8; E306–307)
“One must be master. try thy Arts I also will try mine”
(12.20; E307)
Urizen’s descent converts the internal crisis into political and cosmic domination. Human Nature gives way to hierarchy, law and competing claims of mastery. His decisive delusion is complete: “Now I am God.”
The Actual War
“Why should the Divine Vision compell the sons of Eden”
(12.28; E307)
“The Spectre is the Man the rest is only delusion & fancy”
(12.29; E307)
“Ten thousand thousand glittering Chariots shining in the sky”
(12.33; E307)
“Rejoicing in the Victory & the heavens were filld with blood”
(12.35; E307)
Urizen supplies the ideological principle of the Fall: the Spectre is declared the true Man while Divine Vision becomes “delusion & fancy.” Once abstract Selfhood usurps humanity, armies, victory and blood follow naturally.
Violence and its Aftermath—Luvah and Vala Suspended
Los strikes Enitharmon to the earth; but seeing the wound, he pities her, weeps, and repents. Love rises through his veins, and he embraces her “to heal the wound of his smiting” (12.40–43; E307).
“Los now repented that he had smitten
Enitharmon he felt love / Arise in all his
Veins”
(12.41–42; E307)
Los’s violence toward Enitharmon is answered by remorse and renewed love—birth of ‘cyclic abuse’ perhaps—but evidence that even fallen Contraries may recover enduring/endearing ‘relation.’
“Luvah & Vala… remaind alone forsaken in fierce jealousy”
(13.4–5; E308)
“Descend they could not. nor from Each other avert their eyes”
(13.7; E308)
“Eternity appeard above them as One Man”
(13.8; E308)
Luvah and Vala remain suspended in jealousy, unable either to descend or separate, while above them Eternity still appears as the One Man.
Earthly Discontent
“And Los & Enitharmon sat in discontent & scorn”
(13.20; E308)
“Let us refuse the Plow & Spade… burn all these Corn fields”
(14.8–9; E308)
“Fattend on Human blood & drunk with wine of life is better far”
(14.10; E308)
Creation sings, but fertility has become predation. Fallen delight reveals itself as destructive consumption.
The Human Form Is No More
“Children are nourishd for the Slaughter”
(14.21; E309)
“The Horse is of more value than the Man”
(15.1; E309)
“Man shall be no more! Awake O Hosts”
(15.6; E309)
“Luvah & Vala ride / Triumphant in the bloody sky. & the Human form is no more”
(15.7–8; E309)
The corruption reaches its logical endpoint. Civilization raises its children for slaughter and war consumes the image of Universal Man. Blake’s Fall is literally the loss of the Human Form Divine.
Existence as Craving
“Craving the more the more enjoying, drawing out sweet bliss”
(16.19; E310)
“In direful hunger craving / Summers & Winters round revolving in the frightful deep”
(16.21–22; E310)
Fallen enjoyment does not satisfy desire but reproduces it. Here the Buddhist parallel is strong because satiation is ultimately dissatisfying, if not cankerous: a perpetual-motion machine of cyclical existence driven by continuously erupting cravings—Blake’s “Wheels without Wheels, with cogs tyrannic / Moving by compulsion each other” (Jerusalem 15:18–19; E159) as tṛṣṇā ("thirst," "desire," or "craving") does not merely recur; each arising condition drives another.
Then again, in divergence, Blake ultimately redeems suffering through regenerated imaginative relationship; whereas Buddhism analyzes craving through dependent relational arisings until both object and appropriating self are understood as empty.
The Coming Savior
“From the Supporting arms of the Eternal Saviour; who disposd / The pale limbs of his Eternal Individuality”
(18.13–14; E310)
“Then those in Great Eternity met in the Council of God / As one Man”
(21.1–2; E310)
“As One Man all the Universal family”
(21.4; E311)
“They call Jesus the Christ & they in him & he in them / Live in Perfect harmony in Eden”
(21.5–6; E311)
The Eternal Saviour appears not to abolish fallen Man but to preserve his “Eternal Individuality” in a unified multiplicity. The problem of the Fall is not individuality per se but the individual separated from Universal Human communion. For Madhyamaka, an “Eternal Individuality” immediately raises the problem of eternalism. No individual can finally be established as an independent, permanent essence. Blake’s language consequently approaches something closer to a transformed eternal particular than to Buddhist non-self.
Urizen’s Seizure
“Deep in the North I place my lot / Thou in the South”
(21.23–24; E311)
“I remaining in porches of the brain / Will lay my scepter on Jerusalem the Emanation”
(21.29–30; E311)
“Each tenth man / Is bought & sold & in dim night my Word shall be their law”
(21.34–35; E311)
Urizen reorganizes fallen reality until his Word becomes law. Spontaneous Eternal relationship is replaced by command, ownership, surveillance and hierarchy. The dramatic arc of Night I runs from separation and spectral accusation through institutionalized war, disappearance of the Human Form and self-perpetuating craving, until the Saviour enters the catastrophe ajnd preserves Eternal Humanity against complete destruction.
The Fall Dramatized
“Urizen cast deep darkness round him silent brooding death”
(22.12; E312)
“Discord began & yells & cries shook the wide firmament”
(22.15; E312)
“He dropd his hammer. dividing from his aking bosom fled / A portion of his life”
(22.20–21; E312)
“Sudden down fell they all together into an unknown Space / Deep horrible without End. Separated from Beulah far beneath”
(22.38–39; E312)
“The Mans exteriors are become indefinite opend to pain / In a fierce hungring void”
(22.40–41; E312)
Urthona, the imaginative and artificer power, shatters under the strain as Primordial division becomes an open catastrophe. The fallen powers plunge into an “unknown Space” separated from Beulah. The opposite of Eternity’s bounded, yet unimpeded abode, The Fall spatializes an exteriority, plunging its forms into indefiniteness, hunger, and pain.
So Spoke the Messengers of Beulah
“Jerusalem his Emanation is become a ruin”
(21[19].1; E312)
“Her little ones are slain on the top of every street”
(21[19].2; E312)
“She herself led captive & scatterd into the indefinite”
(21[19].3; E312)
“The Family Divine drew up the Universal tent… / Till the time of the End”
(21[19].7–9; E312)
Beulah reports the human consequence of the cosmic disaster: Jerusalem, Albion’s Emanation and the collective form of regenerated humanity, has been shattered, her children slain, and she herself dispersed into the indefinite. Yet the Divine Family does not disappear; it withdraws the Universal Tent and preserves its messengers until the appointed restoration. While this may seem an abandonment, Eternity abides indestructible above the catastrophe as fallen history marches on, in a mechanized misery.
The Lamb Follows Fallen Humanity: Grace Arisen
“The Lamb of God blessed for ever & he followd the Man”
(21[19].13; E313)
“Who wanderd in mount Ephraim seeking a Sepulcher”
(21[19].14; E313)
“His inward eyes closing from the Divine vision & all / His children wandering outside from his bosom fleeing away”
(21[19].15; E313)
The “Man” is fallen Albion, wandering “in mount Ephraim seeking a Sepulcher”—a biblical image of Israel’s lost condition, and every soul seeking life within the dead state of natural man. Blake inverts the last image in a way characteristic of his unique and synthetic Biblical interpretation. In Revelation, the redeemed follow the Lamb.
In The Four Zoas, the Lamb follows fallen Man—now represented in Albion—who’s “inward eyes” have closed to the Divine Vision, an alienation causing his thoughts to scatter, much like the scattering of God’s tribes or children, mirroring Albion’s and humanity’s now shattered, collective human psyche.
In traditional Christian theology, this suggests the need for prevenient grace within the larger economy of salvation: God makes the first move in recovering humanity’s fallen nature—“The Lamb of God blessed for ever & he followd the Man.” Historically, this evokes the Incarnation: Christ enters the fallen world and accompanies humanity into death itself. Therefore, Albion’s fall precedes Christ’s redemptive descent in the narrative, but Christ’s descent precedes Albion’s restoration in the economy of salvation. Blake thus makes redemption begin not with humanity’s effort, but with the prior action of the Divine Humanity. At the highest, anagogic level of allegory, it’s the eternal descent of Divine Humanity into every state of alienation, as grace pursues the soul even before the soul has choosen a return to God. This reversal of the Lamb following Man is indicative of Blake’s theology, where redemption begins with God’s initiative.
There is a parallelism here to the Sarvavid ‘repair’ of the tantric practitioner’s world where liberation is not merely the achievement of an isolated cognition struggling for purification and its relief of suffering, but the disclosure of a dharmadhātu whose purifying activity has already reached out for that being—living or dead; conscious or unconscious. Extending Gorampa’s ’bras bu’i rjes dpag, “inference from the result,” into a soteriological key, the saving cause is recognized through its result: the sudden restoration of vision reveals that grace—or awakened activity—was operating before the being knew how, or was able, to call upon it. Blake calls this receptive and preemptive power Imagination within which revelatory grace has as its creator-redeemer form Jesus, the Divine Humanity; Vajrayāna presents awakened activity through the Buddha, the maṇḍala, mantra, empowerment, the yidams, and ultimately the Dharmadhātu itself.
While the convergence is striking, with both Dharmadhatu ‘repair’ and Christ’s salvation preceding a recipient’s conscious recognition, the divergence must remain equally clear. Blake’s Jesus pursues and redeems the person through divine-human relationship, whereas no limbed being or substantively existent entity in and of the Buddhist dharmadhātu necessarily appoints an object for its mercy. Rather the supplicant does it for themselves or through the agency of other conscious, living supplicants who may ‘visualize’ or even ‘realize’ Vajradhara primordial nature in a plurality of ‘means.’
Jesus and Vajradhara—or, more precisely here, Sarvavid Vairocana—should not be declared identical; though each does figure the same revelatory reversal: what the fallen being experiences as its own act of believing may prove to be the result by which an antecedent, saving reality—already operational—first becomes recognizable. It’s precisely here then that “believing faith” may be Imagination’s greatest act—not the manufacture of an unseen object, but the awakened recognition of a redemption under way. Thus faith is not the cause that forces salvation to occur; it is the result through which salvation already occurring becomes perceptible.
A temporal distinction is helpful here: Blake’s salvation is extra-temporal: Jesus, the Divine Humanity, acts from Eternity while descending into historical and visionary time. Sarvavid’s repair is atemporally grounded: its awakened efficacy arises from the ever-present Dharmadhātu, although its recognition and ritual accomplishment unfold sequentially in time.
A Ploy to Save Jerusalem and Humanity
“The Emanation stood before the Gates of Enitharmon / Weeping”
(22[20].8–9; E313)
“Spread her a couch unknown to Enitharmon here reposd / Jerusalem in slumbers soft lulld into silent rest”
(22[20].10–11; E313)
“Terrific ragd the Eternal Wheels of intellect”
(22[20].12; E313)
“But perverse rolld the wheels of Urizen & Luvah back reversd / Downwards & outwards consuming in the wars of Eternal Death”
(22[20].14–15; E313)
Jerusalem is secretly sheltered within Beulah while Enitharmon bars her gates against Los. Jerusalem sleeps while the “Eternal Wheels of intellect” rage and Urizen and Luvah reverse the cosmic order into “Eternal Death,” Jerusalem is laid upon “a couch unknown to Enitharmon.” The saving action is therefore hidden and maternal rather than triumphant—a merciful concealment and not just an elaborative iteration of The Fall.
Her repose is a providential act: Blake suspends the Divine Emanation from immediate destruction until redemption can unfold. The Lamb’s descent has already made this possible. What appears to be abandonment is, in fact, the first movement of salvation. The Fall continues historically, but grace has already entered it from within.
Key to the conclusion of Night I, the Eternal Wheels still move through living Contraries, whereas the fallen wheels turn “back reversd / Downwards & outwards.” The Fall is therefore not simply conflict but misdirected motion or energies that should remain mutually generative but instead become self-isolating, centrifugal, and death-producing. Jerusalem lives because the Divine Vision can’t be destroyed but only obscured and temporarily withdrawn from the fallen perception.
This sequence exemplifies Blake’s version of the economy of grace as humanity wanders toward the tomb, yet Divine Humanity follows after, preserving Jerusalem until the final awakening of Albion. Here Blake’s myth shifts from cataclysm and catastrophe to the beginnings of a redemption. This is also perhaps Blake’s first poetic suggestion of prevenient grace, anticipating the redemption that unfolds through Milton and Jerusalem.
From Four Zoas to Milton to Jerusalem: The Economy of Descent
In Milton, redemption begins through voluntary descent:
“I will go down to self annihilation and eternal death,
Lest the Last Judgment come & find me unannihilate”
(*M* 14.22–23; E108)
Then Blake makes the descent literally vertical and incarnational:
“Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a
falling star,
Descending perpendicular…
And on my left foot falling on the tarsus,
enterd there”
(*M* 15.47–49; E110)
Milton does not save Albion from safely outside him but dramatically enters the fallen human body by descending into Blake’s left foot as the poet stands in his garden at Felpham. Here Blake is Albion’s “Shadowy Prophet,” a “minute particular” of Albion and, at this moment, Albion’s prophetic representative. So as a living exponent of the Universal Humanity, he becomes the incarnational vehicle through whom Milton re-enters fallen history.
A Tibetan reader may be reminded, at some doctrinal distance, of yogic adepts enter, as consciousness, another body for similarly beneficial reasons. But Blake’s missionary logic is Christian and so in- rather than rein-carnational.
This is Salvation descending purposely into the state it intends to redeem; here Milton’s ‘mission’ in Paradise Lost is corrected and continued as a Divine ‘movement’ of Humanity itself:
“the Starry Eight became
One Man Jesus the Saviour”²ᵃ
"Starry Eight" because Milton joins the seven angelic spirits, or archangels, and they merge to become eight. Blake uses the word "starry" as an allusion to Milton's own cosmic descriptions of the night sky and the celestial pole ("starry pole") in Paradise Lost. ²
And then:
“Jesus wept & walked forth
From Felphams Vale … to enter into
Albions Bosom, the bosom of death”
(*M* 42; E143)
The Lamb who “followd the Man” in The Four Zoas has become Jesus entering Albion’s bosom of death.
The conceit of a ‘Jerusalem Come Again’ is then fulfilled in Jerusalem when the Divine Humanity finally stands beside the fallen Albion:
“Then Jesus appeared standing by Albion as the Good Shepherd
By the lost Sheep that he hath found & Albion knew that it
Was the Lord the Universal Humanity”
(*J* 96.3–5; E255)
Also:
“Fear not Albion unless I [Jesus] die thou canst not live
But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me”
(*J* 96.14–15; E255)
This is a significant progression of the startling reversal first glimpsed in The Four Zoas as God goes after fallen Man before Man can return to God.
Then comes the magnificent restoration of the Four Zoas:
“Urizen & Luvah & Tharmas & Urthona
arose into
Albions Bosom: Then Albion stood before
Jesus in the Clouds
Of Heaven Fourfold among the Visions of
God in Eternity”
(*J* 96.41–43; E256)
Finally, there’s this proclamation:
“Awake! Awake Jerusalem! …
For lo! the Night of Death is past and the
Eternal Day
Appears upon our Hills”
(J97.1–4; E256.)
That’s the salvific economy then, one of a through-line that runs from Four Zoas, Night I, with the Lamb following the fallen Man, then into Milton as a Milton/Jesus descends into Albion in Jerusalem, and then, as Jesus reached Albion, awakens him, and the scattered Four Zoas arise again within Albion’s bosom as the restored Fourfold Man. This is the redemption that unfolds through Milton and Jerusalemas what is only mysteriously promised when “the Lamb of God … followd the Man” becomes, finally, “the Lord the Universal Humanity” standing beside Albion and raising the Four Zoas within him.
A Blakean Exhibit: The Angel’s Eternal Lot
A Memorable Fancy from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell provides an almost cinematic demonstration of Blake’s prophetic method.
Wrath’s prophetic energy, one that refuses error and compels regeneration, creates the dramatic interactions between his principles with each setting a dramatic tableaux, pitched to the point of a literal public ‘scene’.
This intensifies one’s reading, mirroring back one’s ontological uncertainties even while one’s confidence in a developing revelation keeps one’s reason and imagination absorbed in an allegorical panoply. A kind of ur ‘noir’ setting arises out of London spaces familiar to Blake which behave like dream interiors, where one passes from room to enclosure to cosmic void without interruption.
The filmic ‘inciting situation’ is when an Angel warns Blake of the eternal dungeon he is preparing for himself. Here, the Angel references a hell, not ‘imaginatively envisioned’ but abstract, as a goad to suppress Blake’s prophetic debunking of priest craft religion. Blake responds not by accepting the Angel’s metaphysics but by making a proposal:
“…perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot & we will contemplate together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable…”
They pass through stable, church, vault, mill and cave until a boundless void appears. Blake then reverses the proposition.
“I by force suddenly caught him in my arms, & flew westerly thro' the night, till we were elevated above the earths shadow: then I flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun, here I clothed myself in white, & taking in my hand Swedenborgs volumes sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all the planets till we came to
saturn, here I staid to rest & then leap'd into the void, between saturn & the fixed stars.”
Having carried the Angel through cosmic space Blake then reveals that what they had supposedly seen as Blake’s damnation was the Angel’s fault:“All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics…” epitomizing Blake’s epistemology, in that the world seen depends upon the seer’s world view—the mind being like a white cloth changing to the color of the dye it’s dipped into, as a Tibetan Lama might teach.
“Here said I! is your lot, in this space, if space it may be calld, Soon we saw the stable and the church, & I took him to the altar and open'd the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended driving the Angel before me…”
This may be a reference, or at least an echoing, of when Blake drove the drunken Scofield—an object of compassion to be rejoined with Divine Humanity in a ‘minutely particular’ way—out of his ‘garden’ unto a local inn. An intentionally disturbing scenario follows:
“…soon we [Blake and Angel] saw seven houses of brick, one we enterd; in it were a number of monkeys, baboons, & all of that species chaind by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but witheld by the shortness of their chains: however I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with & then devourd, by plucking off first one limb
and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk. this after grinning & kissing it with seeming fondness they devourd too…”
Certainly this is a criticism of the sensuousness of the natural world and the hell of a natural religion where Man is either wholly ‘sacrificed,’ or made an intellectual experiment—as in the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau—rather than seen as a holy being.
Blake and the Angel’s visit to this prophetic ‘zoo’ also interestedly foreshadows Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, some forty years later, in 1831 where he observed and cataloged many species, laying the empirical foundation for his theory of evolution and the biological linking of man to monkeys. This sentiment runs contrary, and distasteful, to all supernatural or non-natural religions. Especially those of Indic origin, like Buddhism, where man descended from the gods—thus the claim of the Holy Sakya Khon family is that they are indeed direct descendants of the Clear Light Gods (’od gsal lha rnams.)
Not surprisingly then, Natural Man literally ‘stinks’ in the following transition: “…as the stench terribly annoyd us both we [Blake and Angel] went into the mill, & I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotles Analytics.”
The Analytics are the six extant Aristotelian
writings on logic and scientific method the synecdoche of which is the skeleton Blake brings into the mill. The above scene then is less a biological prophecy than a satire upon a merely Natural Man reduced to appetite, competition and analytic abstraction. The joke is exact. Analytical Reason, severed from living Imagination, has produced a skeleton.
The Angel complains that Blake’s “phantasy” has imposed upon him. Blake replies:
“we impose on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics.”
The Proverbs of Hell had already put it more succinctly:
“The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow.”
*MHH* 8; E37)
The entire Fancy is therefore an experiment in visionary epistemology. Blake and the Angel do not merely disagree about the same objective hell. Each inhabits the world produced by his mode of seeing.
“Angels,” Blake concludes, possess “the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise,” their confidence arising from “systematic reasoning.”The quarrel, finally, is not between fantasy and reality but competing modes of revelation.
(Except where indicated, the above is quoted from: MHH, pl. 17, E41 to MHH, pl. 21, E42 )
The Twenty-First-Century Devourer
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake divides existence between the creative “Prolific” and a formalizing “Devouring.” Properly related, they are necessary contraries: the Devourer receives and gives bounds to the Producer’s overflowing energy. Yet the Devourer, in its fallen, predatory distortion habitually mistakes its portion for the whole, imagining “the producer was in his [the devourer’s] chains” (MHH 16; E40). Blake later, as referenced above, renders this fallen relation grotesquely as chained monkeys and baboons who grin, embrace, and finally dismember and consume one another, leaving behind only a skeleton identified as “Aristotles Analytics” (MHH 19–20; E42).¹
In honor of Blake’s “devouring monkeys,”²ᵇ and in the spirit of his continuing relevance, it seems to me that today the Producer increasingly appears to have been swallowed by the Devourer. Blake’s diagnosis has become technologically amplified. The five senses no longer merely limit perception; they are continuously cultivated as channels of consumption. Images, desires and identities, arrive already organized before Imagination has had an opportunity to transform them. Thus Blake’s warning has becomes increasingly urgent:
“The eye altering alters all…”
The danger is not commerce itself but a culture in which production—the things of creation and creativity—increasingly serves consumption rather than Imagination.
The twenty-first-century Devourer does not merely consume products of imagination. It packages, markets, predicts, simulates and increasingly attempts to displace imaginative activity itself. This hegemonic profile is closer to the insidious nature of Blake’s Spectre than even a material analysis of industrial capitalism into its advanced, fascistic stages. The Spectre’s greatest deception is convincing us that its vertically owned, organized and manufactured, productions are themselves creative: the modern equivalent of “taking portions of existence and fancying that the whole.” In such a dimmed world, the Prolific appears absorbed into the Devourer, as though creation existed chiefly to serve ever more sophisticated acquisition on the behalf of billionaires
Psyche, Art, and Believing Faith
The three principles offered at the beginning of this article have, through the Blake–Madhyamaka/Tantra comparison, unexpectedly converted themselves into something closer to three soteriological trajectories slightly redefined: Self-reliance: emancipation from external authority. The person becomes responsible—precisely so—for their own ‘vision;’ and thus of their perceptions and actions. Individuation: emancipation of the particular person into accomplishment, making them distinctive through intensified, integrated and imaginative creation. Renunciation: emancipation from intrinsic person—or Selfhood itself. Even the supposedly unique and self-existent individual is relinquished.
Blake, unsurprisingly, as we know from him speaking through Los that “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans” possesses radical Self-reliance. But his Self-reliance is instrumental rather than his end. Each member of the Divine Humanity must also exist as such, ‘studying’ and producing redemptive art. Otherwise, their default, fallen nature leads idle-handed members away from Los’s creations of the Imagination into abstraction; a belief in and adherence to Urizen’s Spectral pronouncements—cold, rigid soul-crushing laws issued by man's hyper-rational, detached mind that lead to woeful Judgement. On a therapeutic, ‘minutely particular’ social level, it may be that while one is engaged within the Imagination one is then away from unholy actions, chatter and influences, of the Spectre’s minions. Minions at first thought to be members of ‘the Devil’s Party,’ but oppositely so, since Blake so designated Milton, and even himself, as such because of their creative Rebellion and Imagination. Rather, it’s precisely the prophetic poets and artists of the Imagination who mine the particular for its infinite valuation—away from all detraction, distraction, or abstraction—so that the ‘miner’ and the ‘mined’ may become fully and relationally Divine or Holy.
While Blake also possesses something analogous to genuine Renunciation—the annihilation of Selfhood—by not renouncing unique and self-existent individual particularity a something is left for self-appropriation. Indeed, Blake’s suspicion might be that an abstractly conceived renunciation could itself become another abstracting or rigidifying Negation of the Holy.
Seen this way, Blake embraces more decisively the third salvific arc: Individuation, though not in the Jungian sense of ‘the Process of Individuation.’ In my own experience of Jungian analysis, I kept a dream journal, regularly discussing it with the analyst, who was also my religious-studies professor. That process helped sustain a positive attitude during my stepmother’s terminal brain cancer—a Blakean ‘Tree in the Human Brain’ association that now returns all too vividly. As Blake’s vision seeks human wholeness through reintegration of divided faculties, such as Reason, the Body with feelings/emotions, and Imagination, Carl Jung’s analytical depth psychology seeks psychic wholeness through recovering unconscious content and archetypal life from a Collective Unconscious and integrating it into the conscious ego.
Most interesting is how some of Blake’s giant forms, especially Urizen from the plate entitled Ancient of Days—his hoary hair wind-blown and nearly obstructing his vision, with his elongated fingers becoming a luminous compass that circumscribe creation itself—eventually became Jungian archetypes, positive but also with a negative aspect. In this case it’s the ‘wise old man turned tyrant.’
Certainly, psychic integration is important to all three programs—Blakean, Jungian and Tantric—but they do not mean the same thing by it. For Blake, reintegration is cosmic and visionary, ontologically fundamental enough to constitute Apocalypse. In Vajrayāna, visualization can appear equally apocalyptic: from emptiness an entire deity, celestial palace and sacred environment arise; offerings and ritual actions occur; then the entire visualization dissolves again into emptiness. But here the divergence becomes literally a salvation as Blake’s redeemed particular is not finally dissolved. It becomes infinitely particularized—restored to relationship, vision, and Divine Humanity.
Tantric Completion does not preserve an Eternal Individuality. It reveals the empty and luminous nature of whatever appeared. So while one tradition perfects the particular, the other empties it of instantiation. Both require Imagination—or something close to what that word means when rescued from ‘mere fantasy’ or mere graphic visualizing.
However, no easy comparisons between visualizations of the Creation Process and ‘visionary mission’ of William Blake can be made for want of a single word: yoga, the yoking, linking, or merging of two elements. In the exoteric teachings of the Sakya School of Tibetan Buddhism, they describe a potential Buddhist practitioner as having three visions: The Impure Vision (madakpé nangwa), The Vision of Experience (naljor Nyam kyi nangwa), and The Pure Vision (dakpé nangwa). It’s the middle path, the Vision of (yogic) Experience, its hinge word self explanatory only to those who know that term and the science behind it—which didn’t really become understood in the West until well after Blake’s time—that capture what being a ‘visionary’ such as Blake is and, most crucially, what they both share: taking refuge in a religion at the level of a ‘believing’ faith.
Jealousy and (the need for) Representation
Taken altogether, Blake’s works suggest that jealousy is one of the principal expressions of Selfhood. It is not simply envy or sexual suspicion.
But the refusal to allow another being to exist in the freedom of its own imaginative identity. It converts love into possession, forgiveness into accusation, and infinite relationship into ownership. It’s important to know that whenever Blake decries ‘jealousy’ he’s talking about ‘representation,’ the splitting of a unified spiritual entity into a dualistic ontological one:
“Elynittria! whence is this jealousy running along the mountains
British Women were not Jealous when Greek & Roman were Jealous
Every thing in Eternity shines by its own Internal light: but thou Darkenest every Internal light with the arrows of thy quiver
Bound up in the horns of jealousy to a deadly fading Moon
And Ocalythron binds the Sun into a Jealous Globe
That every thing is fixd Opake without Internal light
(M, pl. 10, ll. 14–20 (Erdman, p. 104).
Blake’s jealousy is structural rather than merely emotional. It resembles a fundamental cognitive distortion—a way consciousness appropriates what is not itself—making it surprisingly close to what Buddhist thought would identify as grasping (upādāna) arising from self-clinging, while remaining distinct in Blake’s insistence on the eternal reality of the individual imaginative person.⁹
Blake announces “Opposition is true Friendship.” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 20; E42) after his debate with an angel concerning Jesus’ “impulsive” behavior as a challenging life story detail, which he would characterize as a “Generous Contention.” However, as representation especially among artists can create comparison, the difference becoming a competitive measurement, the question of whose is better may generate imitation, self-diminishment, and jealousy. His answer is: “I cannot think that Real Poets have any competition. None are greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven; it is so in Poetry” (MHH 20; E42; Annotations to Wordsworth; E666).
There’s a Śrāvakayāna parallel in The Simile of the Cloth, envy (issā), possessive jealousy or stinginess (macchariya), rivalry (sārambha), and conceit (māna) appear together as “defilements of the mind” (MN 7; M I 36–37). In addressing self-devaluation, the early teaching treats all three comparative thoughts—I am superior, I am equal, I am inferior—as forms of māna (ego mind), because each constructs and measures an “I.” Theravāda teachers today speak online of the affective consequence of comparison and competition as self-devaluation or even ‘depression,’ as part of a modern teaching trend to be psychologically and therapeutically ‘relevant.’
Religious Syncretism and the ‘Two Wings’
The benefit of observing religious syncretisms, whether from the standpoint of “universal human process of piecing together a religious system” (Bricolage), or discerning the hidden structures
created by the combination of separate religious concepts (structuralism), is that both or several (polysyncretism) operate as meta-spiritual disciplines through which faith becomes transformative. Believing faith is perhaps the greatest act of Imagination, and something close to this is what Blake calls “firm perswasion” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. When Isaiah and Ezekiel are asked whether a firm persuasion that something is so can make it so, Isaiah answers: “All Poets believe that it can.”¹¹ Blake’s “perswasion” is not mere credulity; it is visionary conviction made active in the world. This I dare say transcends the confines of any one religion.
On the macro-level of religious systems, however, boundless mundane differences can be made. For instance, should the argument be made that Blake’s Prophetic Christianity, particularly in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, eschews wealth while Buddhist tantra embraces it, a closer look suggests that the apparent opposition largely disappears if we compare the Mahāsiddhas to the Prophets. Trungpa Rinpoche provocatively spoke of wealth as the “manure” of spiritual life, fertilizer to grow one’s practice, but then becoming like uremic poisonous when hoarded or coveted. OT readers will probably recall Proverbs 16:16 declaring wisdom better than gold and understanding preferable to silver.¹⁰
The point in either tradition is not poverty nor wealth for its own sake, but freedom from possession by possessions. The ascetic who makes austerity into a kingdom, the rich man who makes gold a god, have merely chosen different poisons. Buddhist teachings on acquiring wealth likewise warn of its hardships: first you must get it, then you must guard it, then, at death or sooner, you must lose it. All of this is characterized as exhausting and a waste of one’s life.
Regarding syncretism between Blake and tantra, any exegesis here is not an attempt to describe what is happening allegorically so much as it is to describe what is happening narratively. This in order to demonstrate its similarity to meditating a sādhana. While doing so, two basic operations are always occurring: concentration produces tranquility, and then tranquility becomes the basis for knowing something more through the arising of insight. This process is accelerated by decoding the icons, so plentiful in both literatures, each interpretation deepening concentration while stimulating insight.
This matters in both tantra and Blake’s prophetic verse. Blake signals the stakes through the Bard’s recurring injunction in Milton: “Mark well my words! they are of your eternal salvation” (M7.16; E100; repeated thereafter).¹⁵ Behind the bewildering concrete and symbolic formations there is a coherent doctrine, though one sometimes difficult to discern. Blake’s visionary cosmogony consequently produces chains of dependent relations—desire, division, selfhood, abstraction, generation—not identical to the Buddhist Wheel of Life, certainly, but comparable in presenting suffering as a process whose conditions can be traced and known; rather than an inexplicable punishment imposed by some “Nobodaddy” or “Big Black Nothing” from the outside. (Coined, alternately, by Blake and Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band.)
Common to both Blake’s epics and tantra, Deity visualization requires sustained attention and meditative stability: an abiding pacification (śamatha) enabling a superior, penetration that ‘sees more’ (lak tong). And while Blake’s Imagination is not strictly the two wings of meditation, it too requires a disciplined capacity to sustain forms that ordinary distracted consciousness cannot hold. Similarly, concerning those ‘two wings,’ Wordsworth stated poetry is both "emotion recollected in tranquility" and the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” in the Preface to his book, Lyrical Ballads. These descriptions generally relate to the technique called ‘spots of time’ used in that poetic watershed publication.
But the technique in Lyrical Ballads and the view behind it, are also neither Blake nor Buddhism, as we’ve seen the Prophetic Poet and the Sage too are not one in the same. Nor should Blake’s Imagination be called the Romantic “primary imagination” as that technical distinction belongs to Coleridge, especially Biographia Literaria. Interestingly, Coleridge’s psychology first developed in an intellectual background inclusive of David Hartley and his associationism¹³ where a secondary imagination was emphasized among he and other key Romantics.
Another comparison, held equally in cautious significance, is the sādhana–śāsana dynamic found in monastic Vajrayāna, where one’s personal practice is balanced by the ‘Sage’s intent’ to benefit others. Practice cannot terminate in private visionary accomplishment. Here the two comparisons—sādhanaand śāsana, and Blakean vision and Vajrayāna—find a point of convergence: private realization must issue into forms capable of benefiting others. Organized religion, at its best, becomes the vessel in which such forms can be preserved, transmitted, corrected, and renewed.
All Religions Are One, Blake’s earliest illuminated argument, is only true insofar as all religions are equally true. Thus in pursuing the parallels too far, one might begin to expect the two traditions to converge at some imagined point beyond themselves, overlooking Blake’s own resistance to the tyranny of a convergent single-pointed perspective as found in Renaissance painting. The important point here is simpler: both literatures, Buddhist and Blakean, are continuums which, once entered by the faithful, aim at the transformation of suffering—one through the purification and recognition of afflicted experience, the other through cleansing the black clouds of a Fallen World.
Visionary Fields
As I go through the epic Milton, viewing it as Blake’s correction of John Milton’s vision (as in a Weltanschauung or world perception) it reminds me of an extensive tantric sādhana—let us say Cakrasaṃvara or Guhyasamāja—as the poem establishes successive visionary planes: first this level, then another, sometimes interpretive or allegorical, sometimes narrative with incidents collated across the visionary field as Blake continually creates within these modes.
Blake’s correction of Milton traces his ontology from elemental powers to the Bard, is also a check upon Blake’s own visionary acumen—his believing faith. Los states the principle with his purpose in Jerusalem: “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (J10.20–21; E153).¹² This means more than artistic production. It means bringing visionary forms into existence—prophetic and religious icons through which Blake can live his own spiritual existence and which others may enter imaginatively themselves.
Thus Milton enters Albion: “Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star” (M15.48; E110), descending until he enters Blake through his left foot.¹⁴ This action we take literally within the visionary narrative. Then comes the shift: from the left foot a black cloud spreads over Europe, giving visionary form to doubt, opacity, and fallen consciousness. Next follows another movement: Milton’s Human Shadow journeys above the rocky masses of the Mundane Shell, through Edom, Aram, Moab, Midian, and Amalek, while the Mundane Shell itself becomes “a vast Concave Earth,” an immense hardened shadow of the vegetated world—a mythopoetic cosmological rendering of the Fallen World.
Perhaps Blake inherited not only the fourfold tradition of scriptural interpretation from medieval Christianity but also the Renaissance ideal that poetry should both teach and delight. While tantric sādhanas are pointedly not entertainment—the intention established in the preliminaries expressly turns away from ordinary diversion—they can nevertheless be dramatic and psychologically compelling. Yet that drama is continually redirected toward concentration and insight, compassion and wisdom, clarity and emptiness. This is similar to what our prophet is trying to do.
“Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.” (MHH9; E37).¹⁶ The proverb sounds almost comically simple after Blake’s cosmic machinery, yet it grounds visionary existence in ordinary discipline. More strikingly, “Every thing in Eternity shines by its own Internal light,” whereas jealousy darkens that light (M10.18ff.; E104). The passage can resonate with Vajrayāna transformative psychology, including the purification of afflicted aggregates and elements, without requiring us to claim that Blake somehow taught Vajrayāna.
Futurity
At this juncture one might ask whether anyone seriously responsible for the Judaeo-Christian prophetic arc has attempted to update its soteriological determinants through Blake’s prophetic pronouncements. A few thinkers have certainly moved in that direction, but none has succeeded in making Blake’s prophetic books function as a new normative soteriology for either Judaism or Christianity. Blake remains instead something stronger and more useful: a prophetic Christian poet whose system continually demands that inherited Christianity undergo imaginative judgment.¹⁴ Thus this prophet for our era pronounced:
“But still I labour in hope, tho’ still my tears flow down.
That he who will not defend Truth, may be compelld to defend
A Lie: that he may be snared and caught and snared and taken
That Enthusiasm and Life may not cease: arise Spectre arise!
Thus they contended among the Furnaces with groans & tears;
Groaning the Spectre heavd the bellows, obeying Los’s frowns;
Till the Spaces of Erin were perfected in the furnaces
Of affliction, and Los drew them forth, compelling the harsh Spectre.”
(J9)¹³
For Blake, Futurity is the imagined void—which is how he saw the Atlantic Ocean—into which fallen consciousness projects its hopes and fears. Redeemed vision, however, discovers the future is actively present in the eternal moment:
“I cast futurity away & turn my back upon
that void
Which I have made—for lo! futurity is in this moment.” —The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth (FZ 9.120–21; E406)
Quantum Collisions
Quite directly, Blake’s spiritual and poetic legacy continues through William Butler Yeats and Allen Ginsberg. Yeats absorbed Blake for years before producing A Vision; Ginsberg’s encounter was more sudden and spectacular. In 1948, at twenty-two, living in East Harlem and reading Blake, Ginsberg experienced what he thereafter called his “Blake vision” when he heard a deep voice reciting “Ah! Sun-flower,” associated the voice with Blake or the “Ancient of Days,” and experienced the ordinary world as suddenly illuminated and charged with significance.²⁰ “The Sick Rose” and “The Little Girl Lost” became associated with the same period of visionary experience. What matters here is not whether we retrospectively diagnose the event as hallucination, revelation, or poetic audition. For Ginsberg it became vocational. Blake had ceased to be merely a poet he read and had become a visionary possibility he might inhabit. ¹⁷
That possibility helped generate the rebellious, ecstatic, and insistently “Holy” poetry of Howl and the Footnote to Howl. Decades later, Ginsberg’s poetic life would intersect with the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora through Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, whom he regarded as an important Buddhist teacher. Here the Blakean and Buddhist strands of Ginsberg’s life genuinely meet—not because Blake secretly becomes Buddhist, nor because Ginsberg ceased being Blakean, but because the poet who had learned from Blake to seek eternity in immediate perception subsequently undertook Buddhist meditation and Vajrayāna practice. ¹⁸
Blake is an omnidirectional figure, inspiring multitudes across time—from Marxist-Leninist architect of the 1968 Prague Spring, Ivan Sviták dancing to World Music of The East-West Transcendental Spark and Cinder Band, an early-1970s ‘Butte Family,’ Northern California hippie bar band led by Jimmy Fey, to contemporary Blakean online communities like ‘Golgonooza,’ to Patti Smith’s book Blake and Me and her continuous, lifelong devotion to the poet. A devotion to the extent it’s known that when her close friend, mentor, and fellow Blake-lover Allen Ginsberg was on his deathbed in 1997, Smith brought a leather-bound book of Blake's poems and read them aloud to comfort him as he passed away.
The point here is not merely Blake’s ‘influence,’ as these art, ideas, and ‘entertainment’ allusions are also expressions of Rebellion, one of our Lambeth-dwelling bard’s specialties. Blake’s conviction was certainly that the imagination must resist whatever makes human beings smaller than they are.
The modern poetic line runs visibly from Lambeth through the Six Gallery in San Francisco. On October 7, 1955, Ginsberg gave the first public reading of Howl there, with Kenneth Rexroth (then Berkeley’s East Asian poetry luminary) acting as master of ceremonies. Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, and Philip Lamantia were among the readers; Jack Kerouac was famously in the audience.²⁰ Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s crucial intervention came immediately afterward, when he sought to publish Howl. The event has consequently become one of the coalescing, if not emblematic moments in the emergence of the Beat Generation.
Ginsberg consciously understood himself within a Blake–Whitman–Yeats poetic lineage and transmitted poetry as something more intimate than literary influence. He could behave as though poetic lineage were almost initiatory, even sealing it with a kiss. As a young poet finding himself receiving just such a Blakean-Ginsbergian blessing, I can attest to this. After a timely delivery of his first epic poem, in a convention room of a Holiday Inn in Boulder, on the memorable occasion of his fiftieth birthday, Anne Waldman—that Fast Speaking Woman herself—having witnessed it, remarked “Oh, you boys.”
Less than a year later, that same “blessed” poet would be awakened in his Lower East Side cold-water flat by the music of a harmonium playing directly beneath his window, as he had inadvertently rented an apartment above the Nuyorican Poets Cafe of which Ginsberg was a frequent habitat. Ginsberg had already tutored the young poet in Boulder with remarks such as, “I can’t imagine being twenty-five and never been to New York City,” and by asking how much he had written—first indicating with his hands a stack of paper an inch or two high, then one perhaps a foot or two high. More than fifty years later, that young poet, now hoary-faced and hoary headed as ‘The Ancient of Days’, must confess to having written considerably more than two feet of manuscript.
There is precedent for such collisions between generations. Ezra Pound met W. B. Yeats in London when Pound was still in his early twenties, having deliberately sought out the older Irish poet whom he regarded as one of the few living poets from whom he could learn. Their relationship soon became reciprocal: the younger Pound could be merciless about Yeats’s diction even while serving as his secretary, while Yeats offered Pound entry into a much older visionary and literary establishment with whom one night he literally ate peacock. Perhaps not unrelated, Pound later wrote the Imagist classic, In a Station of the Metro: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Or peacock feathers.
Yeats, of course, stood at the center of the Irish Literary Revival and produced both lyric masterpieces such as The Wind Among the Reeds and the prophetic historical imagination of “The Second Coming.” In A Vision he would eventually construct his elaborate cyclical system of history, personality, lunar phases, and gyres.
Blake was one of Yeats’s most important artistic and spiritual predecessors. With Edwin Ellis, Yeats spent four years studying Blake’s prophetic books, and in 1893 published the three-volume Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical.¹⁹ The edition was frequently idiosyncratic and has long since been textually superseded with superior redactions. Still its historical importance is difficult to exaggerate as it helped establish the prophetic books, such as The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, as central rather than embarrassing appendages to Blake’s achievement. Thus did Blake’s symbolic universe enter deeply into Yeats’s own developing thought, a connection he would later acknowledge directly, saying his mind had been “full of Blake from boyhood up” and he understood the world through such Blakean polarities as Spectre and Emanation, Contrary and Negation.
So did Yeats, ‘full of Blake’ beginning somewhere in the 1870’s mature in the time of both a discovery of a Collective Consciousness (Émile Durkheim, 1893) that explains how shared moral beliefs and social bonds bind communities together through a psychic repository into which the visible artifacts of a society collect; and a Collective Unconscious (Carl Jung, 1916), containing shared ancestral experiences as archetypes—universal symbols and primordial images—stored in a shared layering accessible to all humanity. Most significantly, archetypes act as innate tutelary models shaping human interactions with the world. Jung argued archetypes are non-personal, absent of memories, and function as symbolic forms or empty crystal formations, determining the form and shape of real-world experiences. This, as Buddhist logic and Ernst Cassirer both teach, is because humans do not experience raw reality directly. (See Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, published in three volumes between 1923 and 1929.)
Yeats, sensitive and receptive as he was, began absorbing Blake’s psychological archetypes as well as those that constitute his indigenous Irish background, eventually culminating in the Irish Renaissance and founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904. Thus did Blake's visionary archetypes fuse with native Irish folklore, fairy tales, and Gaelic mythology (such as Cuchulain and Oisin) to form Yeats’ creative output. Useful here is Carl Jung’s assertion that the true artist should never have to apologize for his work, as it belongs to the objective forces of nature rather than the personal ego, so Blake cannot be held directly responsible for Yeats’s later ethereal and predictive gyres—highly mathematical, precise interlocking geometric cones. Rather, Yeats’s system had many sources, occult and literary, and A Vision emerged partly from the automatic communications of his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees, and celestial "instructors, claimed Yeats," beginning in 1917. But Blake provided one of the great imaginative precedents for constructing a symbolic cosmos in which contraries generate rather than merely cancel one another out. In that qualified sense a ‘family’ resemblance is unmistakable.²²
So our ‘hidden’—as some of the most potent poets and yogins often remain—lineage of Blakean poets begins to look a little less so. Blake and Yeats profoundly shaped Ginsberg, and Ginsberg in turn became a teacher and ‘lineage-holder’ for Anne Waldman and others. For Waldman, as for Ginsberg, both ‘rhetorical poets,’ poem don’t remain merely silent text on a page but become energy fields of spoken, sung, shouted, breathed, and chanted awareness. Her poetics would eventually absorb not only Beat performance but Buddhist mantra, ritual language, and the possibilities of altered or intensified consciousness.²¹
Howl itself is wild in content but intentionally propelled. Ginsberg built the great catalogues of Part I around the repeated “who,” allowing the long line to accumulate pressure across the breath. The result is incantatory rather than metrically conventional as a prophetic catalogue in which the rejected inhabitants of modern America are successively named and transfigured:
"...who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the EL and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated." ²³
While Yeats supplied Ginsberg with an important precedent for visionary system-making, Blake was Ginsberg’s determinate spiritual ‘fixer.’ That 1948 auditory and visual experience can certainly be called hallucinatory in a descriptive psychological sense; but this would betray what it meant to Ginsberg himself, annexing both his ontology and the symbolic resonances of poetic allegory. For the experience must have been something of an initiation into Blake’s poetic method itself, as his ordinary perception suddenly opened into the extraordinary and he himself became a visionary. Merging this attainment with those related to his mature entrance into the vision of yogic experience as a student of Vajrayana Mahamudra teachings, their origins coming from the poet Milarepa passing into Trungpa Rinpoche, who perhaps was Ginsberg’s final teacher before departing. Allegorically and ontologically speaking, the anagogical thus begins to resemble—from a lineal perspective, both Buddhist and Blake’s—the play of Mahāmudrā vision, in which ordinary appearances need no longer remain imprisoned within their habitual designation.
So if we can say there is a Blakean mission or project, as well as a living poetic lineage—and I think we can—then Ginsberg gives us an extraordinary example of its continuation. He followed Blake in seeing the divine among the marginalized, transforming society’s rejected figures into visionary beings, his “angelheaded hipsters,” burning for an ancient heavenly connection in the "starry dynamo machinery of night”—this a gorgeously progressed Miltonic and Blakean allusion. ²ᵃ
Some of the remaining exponents of those transfigured members of the Devil’s party, still burning for Blake’s redemption in the Divine Humanity, could actually be encountered in the streets of Boulder, Colorado, in the mid-1970s, attested here by an extant member of that still-living poetic lineage—the prudent young poet named “Proud Cloud” in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn by an eccentric, same-yet-entirely-different, epic poet. So are all flames passed, affirming the old Buddhist illustration of Dependent Origination, giving us a closing image: one candle lighting another. We say that the flame has passed from the first to the second, although no independently existing thing has actually travelled between them. The flame is neither simply the same nor simply another. Yet it burns again.
Blake might have understood that.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.”
(MHH 14; E39) ²⁴
སེམས་ཅན་རྣམས་ནི་སངས་རྒྱས་ཉིད། །
འོན་ཀྱང་གློ་བུར་དྲི་མས་བསྒྲིབས། །
དྲི་མ་དེ་བསལ་སངས་རྒྱས་དངོས། །
*Sentient beings are themselves Buddhas,
yet they are obscured by adventitious stains;
when those stains are removed, there is actual Buddhahood.* ²⁵
Footnotes
1. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Blake are cited by illuminated-book plate and line where appropriate, followed by the page number in David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Subsequent references abbreviate Erdman as “E.”
2. James Bogan, “Blake’s City of Golgonooza in Jerusalem: Metaphor and Mandala”; William Blake, Laocoön, in David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), E273: “Prayer is the Study of Art.”
2a. The “Starry Eight” are Milton together with the Seven Angels of the Presence: as Milton enters his Shadow, his eternal body walks with them in Eden “as an Eighth / Image Divine tho’ darken’d” (M 15.3–7; E109); once restored, they appear as the “Eight / Immortal Starry-Ones” (M 35.29–34; E135) and finally unite as “One Man Jesus the Saviour” (M 42.10–11; E143). “Starry” primarily designates their eternal or celestial condition, though it may also carry a Miltonic resonance: compare the “starry pole” contemplated by Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost 4.720–25. See Susan Fox, Poetic Form in Blake’s Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), on the progression from the seven starry Angels and the darkened eighth to the fully restored “Starry Eight.”
2b. The monkeys are not themselves Blake’s Devourer in its necessary cosmic function; they represent its pathological degeneration, when analytic reason, institutional authority, and appetite cease to receive creative life and begin consuming it. Blake’s two images should therefore be read together as the passage from Contrary into Negation: see The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plates 16–17 and 19–20; E40–42.
3. On Blake’s distinction among Spectre, Shadow, and Shade, see S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, rev. ed. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), entries “Spectre,” “Shadow,” and “Shade”; see also Blake’s recurrent treatment of the Spectre as divided Selfhood in Jerusalem and Milton. The terms are related but should not be treated as interchangeable.
4. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947; rev. ed. 1969), 248. The passages are also discussed by James Bogan in “Blake’s City of Golgonooza in Jerusalem: Metaphor and Mandala.” Supports both Frye quotations concerning Golgonooza as the accumulated imaginative achievement of Albion.
5. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry, especially the discussion of Blake’s biblical symbolism and fourfold vision. For the traditional fourfold Christian exegetical schema, the usual categories are literal/historical, allegorical/typological, tropological/moral, and anagogical.
5a. P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), chap. 10, pp. 199–200. Ouspensky is reporting Gurdjieff’s teaching concerning B influences, which are “conscious in their origin” but enter ordinary life and become subject to accident, distortion, and mechanical transmission.
6. William Blake, Jerusalem 55.60; E205: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars”; Milton, Preface; E95–96: “I will not cease from Mental Fight.” These passages establish the distinction between Blake’s concrete ethical action and the spiritual or imaginative warfare characteristic of his prophetic books.
7. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry, especially chs. 5 and 11, on the Prolific and Devourer, Contraries, and Urizen’s usurpation of imaginative authority; S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary, entries “Prolific,” “Devourer,” “Urizen,” and “Contraries.” Compare Āryadeva, Catuḥśataka I.4, on the impossibility of directly apprehending an entire visible form from any single perceptual position.
8. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 7–8; E35–36: “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead” and “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” The comparison here with Vajrayāna “body method” or body-maṇḍala practice is analogical rather than historical: no claim of transmission or direct influence upon Blake is intended.
9. William Blake, Milton, pl. 10, ll. 14–20; E104. Blake’s “jealousy” here belongs to the fallen fixation by which the internal light of Eternal forms becomes “fixd Opake,” making the passage especially pertinent to the article’s distinction between Blakean division and Buddhist grasping.
10. Chögyam Trungpa’s discussions of wealth repeatedly distinguish richness or “basic wealth” from acquisitive materialism. Compare Proverbs 16:16: “How much better is it to get wisdom than gold! and to get understanding rather to be chosen than silver!” (KJV).
11. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 12–13; E38–39. In the “Memorable Fancy” with Isaiah and Ezekiel, Isaiah explains prophetic utterance through “a firm perswasion” arising from the Poetic Genius; Blake concludes that “a firm perswasion that a thing is so, makes it so.”
12. William Blake, Jerusalem 10.20–21; E153: “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans. / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.” This is the precise source for the paraphrased “…my job is to create.”
13. William Blake, Jerusalem 9, particularly Los’s struggle with the Spectre at the furnaces; compare Jerusalem 10.17–21; E153. Los does not simply annihilate the Spectre but compels the divided reasoning power into imaginative labour.
14. William Blake, Milton 15.47–49; E110, for Milton’s descent “in the Zenith as a falling star” and entrance through Blake’s left foot; the ensuing passage describes the “black cloud” spreading over Europe and Milton’s Human Shadow journeying above the “Mundane Shell.”
15. William Blake, Milton, pl. 3; the Bard’s repeated injunction, “Mark well my words! they are of your eternal salvation!” The refrain occurs repeatedly throughout Milton and explicitly presents prophetic reading as soteriological activity.
16. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 9; E37: “Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.” Compare Milton 10.18ff.; E104, “Every thing in Eternity shines by its own Internal light.” The comparison with Vajrayāna purification here remains phenomenological and functional, not a claim of historical dependence.
17. Allen Ginsberg dated his celebrated “Blake vision” to 1948, when, while reading Blake in his Harlem apartment, he experienced an auditory recitation associated especially with “Ah! Sun-flower,” followed by other Blake poems. Ginsberg subsequently interpreted the experience as a decisive confirmation of his poetic vocation.
18. For Ginsberg’s later Buddhist formation, especially his relationship with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the development of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, the important distinction is between Ginsberg’s earlier Blakean visionary experience and his later formal engagement with Tibetan Buddhist practice; the latter should not retrospectively be made the doctrinal explanation of the 1948 vision.
19. W. B. Yeats and Edwin John Ellis, eds., The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical, 3 vols. (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893). Their edition was crucial to the late-nineteenth-century revival of serious interest in Blake and profoundly affected Yeats’s developing symbolic and occult thought.
20. Allen Ginsberg, Howl (San Francisco: City Lights, 1956). Ginsberg first read the poem publicly at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. Kenneth Rexroth served as master of ceremonies; participants included Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Ginsberg, with Jack Kerouac present but not reading. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was not one of the readers, although his subsequent offer to publish Howl became inseparable from the event’s literary history.
21. Anne Waldman’s poetics developed in close association with Ginsberg, the Beat/post-Beat oral-performance tradition, and Vajrayāna Buddhism. Her conception of poetry as embodied vocal and energetic practice provides an especially important continuation of the Blake–Yeats–Ginsberg visionary lineage argued for here.
22. W. B. Yeats, A Vision (1925; substantially revised 1937). Blake supplied an important precedent for Yeats’s paired oppositions, cyclical structures, visionary personae, and symbolic cosmology.
23. Allen Ginsberg, Howl, Part I. The “angelheaded hipsters” who are “burning for the ancient heavenly connection” provide one of Ginsberg’s clearest transformations of the socially marginalized into visionary or prophetic figures.
24. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 14; E39: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” The sentence follows Blake’s declaration that creation will appear “infinite and holy” when finite and corrupt perception is overcome.
25. Hevajra Tantra, commonly cited for the tathāgatagarbha-like declaration represented by the Tibetan: སེམས་ཅན་རྣམས་ནི་སངས་རྒྱས་ཉིད། ། འོན་ཀྱང་གློ་བུར་དྲི་མས་བསྒྲིབས། ། དྲི་མ་དེ་བསལ་སངས་རྒྱས་དངོས། ། — “Sentient beings are themselves Buddhas, yet are obscured by adventitious stains; when those stains are removed, they are actual Buddhas.”
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