Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision
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Schuchard also writes about physicians who experimented with electricity, magnetism, and mesmerism to enhance the sexual experience. Secret societies met for sacred orgies, and scholars published Tantric texts from India that celebrated sexuality. Enlightenment era scholars argued that sex had originally been a central component of religion. Blake was deeply involved in this underground movement to recover pre-Christian priapic religion, and his creative works take on a new life when viewed through the prism of this sexualized spirituality.
Blake was not always as enthusiastic about this enterprise as her husband. Schuchard is to be commended for bringing to light this hidden aspect of the so-called Age of Reason and uncovering the complex history of a great artist. Schuchard draws some conclusions that I am not sure are warranted, such as that Moravian missionaries brought back Tantric practices from the Tranquebar Islands and that the polemic of Henry Rimius can be accepted as a trustworthy description of Moravian sexual practices. Spector New York: Palgrave Macmillan, , pp.
Shabetai, Karen. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Whitson, Roger. Yoder, R. Karr, Don. Spector, Sheila A. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, In his diary, Swedenborg hinted at similar achievement of conjugal union through mental telepathy:. Because the bachelor Swedenborg hoped to marry the wife of Count Frederick Gyllenborg in the spirit world, he perhaps attempted to achieve mental copulation with her by long-distance thought-transfer in the natural world. Idel points out the similarities and differences between Kabbalistic and Tantric sexual mysticism: The [Jewish] husband has to elevate his thought to its source, to achieve an unio mystica , which will be followed by the descent of supernal spiritual forces on the semen virile It is worthwhile to compare this mystical conception of the sexual act to the tantric view.
In both cases, the sexual act must be performed in a very mindful matter; a certain mystical consciousness is attained alongside the Corporeal act. However, the usage of intercourse as a vehicle for spiritual experiences is evidently different. In the tantric systems, the mystical consciousness, the bodhicitta , is an aim in itself whereas the perfect state is obtained by the immobilization of the flow of semen virile The kabbalists put mystical union in the service of procreation; tantra put fruitless intercourse into the service of mystical consciousness [62].
As noted earlier, Idel also describes Jewish meditative practices in which sexual contact is not necessary, for magical-mystical experiences replace the conception of a child.
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In his Journal of Dreams , Swedenborg wrote a veiled description of his Kabbalistic-style ecstatic experience, which he achieved through meditation on the Hebrew letters;. She with her hand touched my member, and it grew large, larger than it ever had been.
I turned round and applied myself; it bent, yet it went in. She said it was long. I thought during the act that a child must come of it; and it succeeded en merveille This denotes the uttermost love for the holy; for all love has its origin therefrom; is a series; in the body it consists in its actuality in the projection of the seed projectione semenis when the whole [left blank] is there, and is pure, it then means the love for wisdom [63]. Twenty-four years later, in Conjugial Love , his experience seemed to merge Yogic with Kabbalistic practice.
Like Yeats, Swedenborg hinted at the control of seminal flow, when he stressed that the Lord provides "a hinged door, as it were," between earthly and heavenly sexuality, "which is opened by determination, care being taken that it does not stand open, lest the one should pass over into the other and they should commingle. According to Tantric Yoga, some adepts achieve "that extraordinary mastery over non-striated muscles which normally cannot be controlled" that allows them to "arrest the semen" and "in-breathe" it back through the penis [65].
In Swedenborg, the cremaster muscle seemed to function like the Yogic " yoni place between the male organ and anus. In a decadent age of excess, Swedenborg argued the importance of moderation in order to maintain the male's general health, which will sustain sexual vigor: "His fibres, nerves, muscles, and cremasters do not become torpid, relaxed, or feeble, but continue in the strength of their powers.
Adepts of Chinese and Tibetan Tantrism claim that repeated disciplined arousal, without emission "physiological alchemy" empowers the mind, makes the body glow, increases longevity to the point of immortality , and produces communication with the gods [69]. For the Jewish couple, the capacity to maintain high spiritual consciousness while achieving mutual orgasm not only imitated the cosmic marriage but stimulated similar pleasures within the Divine Human Adam Kadmon , who is the manifestation of God [71].
As Swedenborg hinted, the delights of true conjugal love "ascend and enter into heaven": I have heard from angels, that when these delights ascend from chaste partners on earth, they perceive them to be exalted from themselves and infilled.
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Because some of the bystanders who were unchaste, to the question of whether this applied also to the ultimate delights [sexual intercourse], they nodded assent and said tacitly, "How can it be otherwise? Are not those delights the other delights in their fullness. Angelic love of the sex is "full of inmost delights," for it is "a pleasing expansion of all things of the mind.
Like the Sabbatians, Swedenborg elevated the sense of touch into the highest spiritual gift: "That the sense of touch is dedicated to conjugial love and is the sense proper thereto, is eveident from its every sport and from the exaltation of its refinements to the supremely exquisite. A passage in Dr. Falk's diary suggests that one of his Kabbalistic students engaged in bizarre phallic rituals [79]. Thus, Swedenborg and his Masonic colleagues in London assimilated their sexual theories into highly Christianized degrees within a special order of Freemasonry, the "Royal Order of Heredom of Kilwinning" or "Rite of Seven Degrees.
William Blake: Glances on His Engagement with the Theosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg
One of the leaders of this rite, the French artist and engraver Lambert de Lintot, produced a series of hieroglyphic designs, which included phallic and vaginal symbolism as part of the process of regenerating the psyche and rebuilding the Temple of the New Jerusalem [80]. Swedenborg also described a secret mystical society, in which "spirits from Asia" teach inititiates how to meditate on emblems of love"works of art and some small images as though cast in silver" that represent "the many qualities, attributes, and delights which belong to conjugial love.
The merging of Jewish and Asiatic rituals would thus have significant earthly as well as heavenly relevance. As I have argued elsewhere, Blake was possibly associated with Lintot's rite, which featured the word "Los" the name of Blake's illuminated prophet among its erotic emblems [84].
While Blake may have been initially exposed to these antinomian notions through his parents' religious associations, he also had access to them through Richard Cosway, who was an instructor at Pars's Drawing School when Blake Studied there in l, and who became a lifelong friend [85]. During the period of Moravian, Swedenborgian, and Falkian sexual experimentation, Cosway was familiar with all three groups [86]. As a student, he lived with Dr. Husband Messiter, who was friendly with Zinzendorf and moved in Moravian circles. Cosway subsequently developed lasting friendships with James Hutton and other Moravians.
After Zinzendorf's death in l, Messiter became Swedenborg's personal physician and agent. Messiter was also connected with "irregular," Ancient Freemasonry, at a time when the name James Blake, "Eve Tempted by the Serpent," pencil, , prior to an illustration in Paradise Lost. Notice the figure's left toe. Blake appeared in the register of an Ancient's lodge [87].
It was probably through Messiter that Cosway acquired rare volumes of Swedenborg's early works, which inspired him to immerse himself in Jewish studies, magical experiments, and erotic art. While Blake served his apprenticeship, he had access to these Masonic developments, often centered at Freemasons' Hall and Tavern, which faced Basire's studio on Great Queen Street.
The name William Blake appeared frequently in the l's and '90's in surviving lodge registers but, unfortunately, no further identification is given [88]. Both Cosway and Blake would have applauded the efforts of the radical Swedish Masons to publish Latin editions and English translations of Swedenborg's most erotic and occultist writings. Messiter and then moved into the home of the latter's friend, Dr. Gumpertz Levison, a Jewish physician and alchemist [89]. After his arrival in London in l, when he undertook medical studies with the Hunter brothers, he became a Swedenborgian Mason.
Like Zinzendorf's and Falk's disciples, Levison was accused of antinomian sexual and religious practices [91]. In l another Jewish Swedenborgian named Samuel acted as a liaison between the London society and the illuminist lodge at Avignon, which was accused of "frivolous erotic practices.
From the early l's, Blake's drawings and writings reflected his interests in Swedenborg and other occultists, such as Paracelsus and Boehme.
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In fact, it was through the Swedes' influence on the Swedenborg Society in l that the first evidence of Mrs. Blake's difficulties with her husband's sexual theosophy begins to emerge. Though Blake's friend John Augustus Tulk offered to subsidize the publication of these "memorabilia" from the spirit world, some of the English Swedenborgians were horrified at the erotic and magical scenes described in them [94]. Though the London society was linked with Swedenborgian Masonic lodges in Avignon, Paris, Berlin, and Stockholm, a minority of English members distrusted the revolutionary leanings of the foreigners, and they determined to establish a separate dissenting church at Great Eastcheap.
When the Blakes attended the Great Eastcheap Conference in April l, the factions attempted to patch over their quarrel, and they issued a compromise manifesto signed by William and Catherine Blake. However, the Swedes were distressed at the reluctance of the conservatives to publish an English translation of Conjugial Love , which they considered Swedenborg's most inspired work. In a particularly provocative passage, Swedenborg stressed the importance of male sexual potency to the capacity to receive divine influx:.
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That conjugial love makes man more and more a male That the ability and vigour called virile accompanies wisdom according as the latter is animated from the spiritual things of the Church; that it is then present in the conjugial love; and that wisdom opens the vein of that love from its fountain in the soul, and thus invigorates the intellectual life, which is masculine life itself, and blesses it with perpetuity Moreover it was told me from heaven that with those who abominate adulteries as infernal, this spiritual sufficiency will not be lacking in the natural world also To Swedenborg's claim that "Man in whom the spiritual degree is open" can come into that Wisdom "by laying asleep the Sensations of the Body, and by Influx from above at the same time into the Spirituals of his Mind," Blake responded that "This is while in the Body.
This is to be understood as unusual in our time, but common in ancient. On 4 May he presented his proposals for "The Form of Society in the New Jerusalem," which argued for the centrality of conjugial love to society and advocated a sexualized process of meditation upon Swedenborg's texts as well as the Bible.
Because sexual energy is so important to spiritual energy, Swedenborg's theory of "permission" for concubinage should be implemented immediately:. As it will happen, of course, that for a long time to come there will be unmarried men in our Church who are not able to marry, and married men who have been received among us, but who have unchristian wives, rejecting the New Doctrine, and who thus must live in a disharmonious marriage, it follows that such men are driven so strongly by the inborn amor sexus that they cannot contain themselves, it is inevitable, for the sake of order, that they be permitted, the former to take a mistress and the latter a concubine [97].
On 26 May he issued an invitation to the liberal Swedenborgians to join his secret alchemical order, which would implement the master's philosophy of chemistry, economics, and sexuality. In the process, the initiate would "render the day of his Tabernacling in the Body a continual State of Bliss, correspondent with the spiritual State of Happiness, which was prepared in him before.
If we deprive ourselves intirely of this, we shall never be able to become rich and great, because then we are incapable of any social Life.
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This Love of the Sex in every Male has two kinds of Eruption, or two channels of Ebullition; the one extends more and more towards various objects, and the other concentrates its force into one, and never strays beyond its proper circle. The former tends always to Impotency, and of course to Infelicity; the latter continually increases in Virility It is not at present believed Nothing however is more true, than that the Love of the Sex , and the constant exercise thereof, which is the Virile Potency , is the very basis to the accession of all other kinds of permanent Powers.
All activity and every executive impulse is in such complete conjunction with the Virile Power , that they all advance step by step, and can never be separated. Who does not find, that in Activity lies the very foundation of all kinds of real happiness? It is then evident why a Man with the permanent Power of Virility , stands on the sure foundation of being exalted to every Power of Wealth and Dignity [99].
Marriages in their present state are but Seminaries for a corrupt Generation; instead of a sincere Friendship, which ought to subsist in the Union, we find nothing but Indifference, proceeding from dissimulation; instead of Liberty, constraint; instead of tender love, cold Disgust [].
Most popular. While much has been written about the work of William Blake, and some of the religious beliefs that influenced him, there is a secret history which, until w, has been kept deep beneath the surface in the mystical underground of England in the eighteenth century. With skin-crawling chromatics, the worm, at first benign in its seeming invisibility, evolves into a serpent suggestive of a phallus and its corruption of Eve. According to the Kabbalistic theories adopted by Zinzendorf, God and the universe are composed of dynamic sexual potencies the sephiroth which interact with each other and produce orgasmic joy when in perfect equilbrium [13]. It is possible that the Mr.
Since wives are so often dominated by the "Lust of Dominion" and the "Lust of Possession," which debilitate Virile Potency, concubinage "never ought to be forbidden in a Free State. That Blake responded enthusiastically to these proposals is suggested by his paean to sexual love in Thel , probably composed in summer or autumn l []. A conservative critic would later charge that illuminist "clubs" in England sent to the French National Assembly a memorial, "in which the Assembly was requested to establish a community of wives, and to take children from their parents, and educate them for the nation.
Accusations about erotic ceremonies at Avignon suggest that these revolutionary sexual theories were not only preached but practised.
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At this time, emissaries from the "Asiatics" were in London, and several Swedenborgians collected their writings []. When Blake declared that Swedenborg "is the Angel sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up," he suggested his own movement towards the Sabbatian position Blake, "Dragon Forms," from Vala, or the Four Zoas , pencil, c. Blake shared Thel's hesitations about the plunge into sexuality, she must have been even more distressed by her husband's increasing advocacy of free love.
In the powerful erotic paean of Visions of the Daughters of Albion , Blake targeted "the frozen marriage bed," which needed "wanton play" in "happy copulation" preferably in groups in order to thaw []. According to Swedenborg and the liberated J.
Tulk an admirer of Grabianka , the divine innocence of conjugial love is best expressed in daylight nakedness, rather than furtive couplings under the covers []. Thus, Tulk would not have been shocked to discover the Blakes naked in their garden, acting out "the return of Adam into Paradise.
That Mrs. Butts hoped for a romantic relationship with Blake is suggested by the poem, "The Phoenix," that Blake wrote for her []. When Mrs. Blake cried at her husband's proposal to bring a concubine into their home, she was perhaps influenced by those New Church preachers who warned about "opening the floodgate to immorality.