S. Foster Damon
A
BLAKE
DICTIONARY
The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake
S. Foster Damon
UPDATED EDITION with a new foreward andannotated bibliography by Morris Eaves
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE PRESS An imprint of University Press of New England
www.upne.com
© 1965, 1988, 2013 Trustees of Brown University
foreword and annotated bibliography © 2013 Dartmouth College Press All rights reserved
For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com
Cover illustration: The Lovers’ Whirlwind, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hell, Canto V, 37–138, c. 1825 (detail). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Damon, S. Foster (Samuel Foster), 1893–1971.
A Blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of William Blake / S. Foster Damon; updated edition with a new foreword and annotated bibliography by Morris Eaves. — Updated ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-61168-443-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61168-341-7 (ebook)
1. Blake, William, 1757–1827—Dictionaries. 2. Symbolism in literature—Dictionaries. I. Eaves, Morris, 1944– II. Title. PR4146.A24 2013
821’.7—dc23
FOR
GEOFFREY KEYNES to whom all Blake lovers are
indebted permanently
Forgive what you do not approve, & love me for this energetic exertion of my talent.
Contents
Foreword
Blake as Conceived: Lessons in Endurance by Morris Eaves Acknowledgments
Foreword
Blake as Conceived: Lessons in Endurance
The study of Blake inevitably leads to controversy; the reader of this dictionary might never guess that
there was anything but an agreed orthodoxy.
“Guides to a New Language,” 3 October 1968 S Foster Damon was the young Turk of Blake studies when William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols was published in 1924. He was “the patriarch of Blake studies” (Bloom review, 24) when A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake was published in 1965. As I revise this foreword, Philosophy and Symbols is approaching its ninetieth birthday, A Blake Dictionary its fiftieth, and Damon has been dead since 1971. It’s fair to ask what A Blake Dictionary is good for at this late hour. Though Damon loved to pore over patriarchal tomes himself, he would have understood that people entering strange territory want up-to-date guidebooks. When I started getting serious about Blake, my guides were Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947), David Erdman’s Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954), and Damon’s Dictionary. That was 1968, after all, and the Dictionary was nearly new. But today I’d still endorse my own experience: if Blake is where you’re going, Frye, Erdman, and Damon should be your guides. As an introductory offer they remain unbeatable. To understand the power of the Dictionary in this durable trio, we start with the recognition that Damon’s lifetime coincided with the incorporation of Blake into legitimate fields of study. The process began well before Damon arrived on the scene and may continue indefinitely, but the crucial decades were those bracketed by Damon’s Blake books. From the 1920s through the 1960s, various factors cooperated to assign to the name William Blake a set of attributes and a location in history. The rough consensus achieved during Damon’s lifetime is by and large the one we are still operating with today. It leads us to expect to find William Blake at home in one of the six slots allotted to the so-called major English Romantic poets in standard textbooks devoted to the standard subject of English Romantic poetry. To the extent that the Blake of Damon’s Philosophy and Symbols is the same as the Blake of the Dictionary in most essentials, the Dictionary is an annotated index to its own predecessor. The sustained equilibrium in the meaning of “Blake” that made it possible for a book published in 1965 to represent a book published in 1924 has less to do with the consistency of the author than with the consistency of the scholarly institutions appraising him. Not that he or they never changed or never learned anything new during all those years. But the fact that the Blake that Damon calls to memory for his Dictionary is very largely the same Blake that Damon had first assembled for his Philosophy and Symbols four decades earlier confirms not just Damon’s stubborn faith in his own critical powers but also the capacity of institutions to retain what they need to retain and to build on the remembered past, while resolutely sloughing off what they need to.
caste that some observers (not I) have identified as the middle-management bureaucracy of a veritable Blake industry. As a scholarly resource, Damon’s Dictionary has stood up as well as it has for as long as it has because it belongs to that collective effort. Some reviewers pointed out what they saw as a discrepancy between the impersonality of a proper dictionary and the “eccentric and occasionally oracular” (Erdman review, 607) personality of this one. Damon himself played up the independence that made his compilation A, not The, Blake Dictionary: “It is not the intention of this book to compile digests of the works of other scholars or to confute their theories. I have felt it better to make a new start and to attempt to present fresh evaluations of Blake’s symbols” (p. xxviii). To the contrary, the nucleus of the Dictionary was precisely a digest of Damon’s ideas that had become common property over the years. Damon expanded, and occasionally changed, this digest, under the influence of other scholars’ ideas that he had found congenial. Consequently, even as he insisted on his independence, he regularly acknowledged his institutional position with gestures toward scholarly posterity: “When a final answer has not been possible, I have tried to assemble the material for others to work on” (p. xxviii; also p. xxvii). Many of the parts of other scholars’ works that Damon refused to digest were, after all, the peripheral bits for which no consensus yet existed. And his own attempts at “new” starts and “fresh evaluations” are, for the most part, simply the parts of the Dictionary one must learn to ignore. Fortunately, those are few, and they usually advertise their own peculiarity.
The best reason for studying Damon is neither to acquire a real English Blake from the bowels of history nor to retrieve a curiosity-Blake from the fascinating mind of an eccentric scholar, but to acquire the Blake that unglamorously satisfies the rules and requirements of the institutions housing our artistic memory, in which Damon lived and thrived. He later said it himself, with a bit of irony and unmistakable pride: “At last, Blake was academically respectable” (“How I Discovered Blake,” 3)—made respectable by a remarkable academic whose work of Blake scholarship had been rejected by Harvard as too inconsequential to merit a Ph.D. Thus what we have before us in the Dictionary is undeniably a sturdy Blake, well crafted for the very purpose of being remembered, read, taught, and written about within our institutions of reading, teaching, and writing. Of course, despite its endurance, we would never want to mistake this brilliantly conceived Blake for the only conceivable Blake. Nor, however, can we pretend that we know at present how to conceive any other Blake of comparable usefulness. In short, the essence of the Blake who materializes in the pages of Damon’s Dictionary is nothing less than the currently indispensable Blake. And only because of that indispensability does it matter in the least that the Dictionary is “a rich treasury embodying the results of a lifetime of masterly and devoted research into every aspect of Blake’s work and thought” (Pinto review, 153). Yes, the treasury is rich. Equally important, it is still, remarkably, the coin of the realm.
Blake died, after all, in 1827, an engraver and painter in a circle that included mainly engravers, painters, and buyers of art. He was barely known to the writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge with whom he is now yoked in anthologies of English Romantic poetry. Although Blake, as an engraver and painter, was virtually unknown to his poet-contemporaries, a fundamental change in Blake’s reputation occurred when his potential audience found a way to conclude that he was essentially a poem maker rather than a picture maker. The change began to come on strongly in the last third of the nineteenth century, with the efforts of Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, and others to promote and produce editions of Blake’s poems. Since many of those “poems” had originally been crafted as “illuminated books” in “illuminated printing”—usually relief-etched and watercolored combinations of text and design—they were doomed to run afoul of the institutional standards for poetic legibility. The first duty of an editor is to present poems. We all know what poems look like: in an illuminated edition, though, pictures may be present as ornaments and illustrations but not as integral poetic elements.
Blake the printmaker and painter was not forgotten, however; in certain narrow circles his art was even revered. But on the larger cultural stage the emphasis was steadily shifting from the visual element in his work to the verbal, and the memories of his literary and artistic work were being stored ever more systematically in separate cultural compartments. The institutions of literacy edited the illuminated books into poems, lowering the visual component to the status of the ornamental and the dispensable. Meanwhile, the institutions of imagery operated by art historians, collectors, and curators looked past the illuminated books—the mainstay, curiously, of Blake’s literary reputation— toward the categories of Blake’s oeuvre where pictures rather than words are primary, because there he most clearly conformed to the conventional definition of a visual artist.
we can see from his comment how Sampson’s meticulous edition had helped codify a concept of Blake the poet. Now the question would be, what kind of poet? Answer: a sort of modernist. Damon’s “ten years ago” had been around 1914, one of the three years when the older William Butler Yeats and the younger Ezra Pound spent the winter at Stone Cottage in Sussex together, plotting the next stage in the history of modern poetry. “Philosophy and symbols” had already become part of that history and were destined to become much more important parts with Yeats’s increasing devotion to the kind of philosophical symbolism that culminated in A Vision (1925). Blake had already influenced the development of Yeats’s symbolism, and Yeats with his collaborator Edwin J. Ellis had edited Blake’s complete works and supplied two volumes of commentary in 1893. Damon once called the first volume “unreadable” (“How I Discovered Blake,” 2). Indeed it took a Foster Damon to write a readable replacement for Yeats and Ellis. But that should not be taken to suggest that we can understand Damon’s Blake without understanding the decisive alliance between Blake’s literary fortunes and the fortunes of modernism. Blake’s system making, his blend of psychology with religion, his exalted claims for the powers of art, the difficulty of his work, and his failure to win an audience in his lifetime are only a few of the several factors that conjoined to make him a potential artist-hero and the guardian angel of a significant filament of modern poetry. Blake and modernism belong together, not necessarily within the strand that was spare and taut in its verbal standards, but in the mythopoeic strand that wanted to make poetry the cult object for an elite society of initiates who would deal only in the deepest, most significant kinds of knowledge, of which the world at large was unworthy. This helps explain why Damon’s Blake is “definitely a mystic,” as Damon says he discovered by reading William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (“How I Discovered Blake,” 2). We would hardly be the first to notice that Damon’s Blake is a mystic of a particularly artistic persuasion, for whom the goal of seeing the face of God becomes a vision of artistic imagination—a magico-aesthetic mysticism we associate more with initiates of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the late nineteenth-century occultists, and poets on the order of William Butler Yeats than with the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.
This is not the place to trace the affiliations with modernism that helped shape an academically respectable Blake, one who was not only a mystic but also, as Damon’s title advertises, a philosopher and symbolist. In the game of institutionalization, finding powerful metaphors is an important maneuver, and Damon’s three favorites, Blake as mystic, as philosopher, and as symbolist, had all the right connections at the time. But in the long run, mystic and to a large extent Blake-symbolist, at least, fell away as inadequate and anachronistic. Their historical connections with the period of Blake’s discovery, roughly the fifty years from 1875 to 1925, overshadowed their connections with Blake’s texts. But a variety of analogous terms have had to be brought in as substitutes, simply because some identification is required.
our literary institutions.
In discussing the literary elements contributing to the growth of Blake’s reputation, I would not want to give the impression that Damon’s Philosophy and Symbols eliminated Blake’s art from consideration. To some extent, especially by comparison with the literary scholars who would come later, Damon did the opposite. The last section of Philosophy and Symbols commented, however briefly, on each plate of the illuminated books, while the designs often went unmentioned in other books on Blake. But Damon segregated the designs into little clusters under the heading “decorations,” interpreted them as extensions of meanings gleaned first from the poetry, and relegated the designs to the back of his book, where they can easily be forgotten. The best evidence of their forgettability comes with the Dictionary, where Damon eliminates the design component of illuminated printing as a subject of systematic discussion. The justification for doing so, in a presumably unabridged Blake dictionary that one literary-minded reviewer called “extraordinarily comprehensive” (Bateson review, 25), is left implicit. It is again, of course, the metaphor that made most twentieth-century advances in the study of Blake possible: Blake is a poet. And he is that kind of poet who uses words as “tools . . . to rouse with thought” (Philosophy and Symbols, xi); he is a philosopher. As Damon said emphatically, “Jerusalem, as pure poetry, is obviously inferior to the Songs of Innocence. . . . Blake was not trying to make literature. Truth, not pleasure, is the object of all his writings” (his emphasis; Philosophy and Symbols, 63).
As Damon indicated, to find Blake the thinker, one travels well beyond Songs of Innocence (“The lyrics are in every anthology; yet professors of literature wonder if the epics are worth reading!” Philosophy and Symbols, ix) into the territory of the “epics” (as Jerusalem can be termed only if considered a literary work), where thought takes precedence over pleasure—as it must, if Blake is to be taken seriously enough to deserve his place beside Wordsworth and Coleridge. Damon passed this version of Blake the philosopher on into literary history, where it was eventually taken up by Northrop Frye, who relied fundamentally on the model of Blake designed by Damon. The Blake of Frye’s Fearful Symmetry is even more exclusively a writer than Damon’s, and an even more profound and consistent thinker. Frye’s Blake is no longer a mystic (the appeal of that metaphor had dissolved in the mists of modernism), but he is very much a philosopher. When Damon combined philosophy and symbolism, he got mysticism; when Frye combined them, he got myth. Myth, for Frye, is not unlike mysticism for Damon: both are terms for thinking at a particularly profound level that in previous centuries would have been identified with religion. Damon would not refuse to allow that Blake was a Christian, but he knew he had to be an especially appealing kind of Christian, a “Gnostic” Christian, said Damon (Philosophy and Symbols, xi), or a mystic. Frye went a step further by relentlessly exploiting the implications of a new metaphor: religion, deeply considered and thawed out, is poetry. Both draw on the same myths. Blake’s revelations as a thinker, then, are myths that reveal the fundamental nature of poetry itself.
concern, though with everyday events, was with the most elevated aspect of those events: liberty, justice, fraternity, equality. In bringing him down to earth, Erdman paradoxically managed to create an even more formidable Blake, a both-and rather than an either-or thinker, whose poems could deliver simultaneously profound truths about poetry and equally profound reactions to local events. And like Damon and Frye, Erdman reinforced the element of surprise, in discovering again a consistent thinker, this time a consistent social and political thinker, where before we saw none. When Damon returned with his Dictionary two decades after Frye’s book and a decade after Erdman’s, he had no trouble recognizing the Blake he found. This augmented, fortified, and considerably refined Blake, though now a celebrity much in demand to ornament the books of scientists, literary theorists, theologians, and philosophers, was still recognizably the Blake that Damon had introduced to the academy in the 1920s, now ready to be represented by a scholarly tool as impartial and consensual as a dictionary.
From our vantage point nearly half a century later, we can see that Damon’s Dictionary arrived just in time to signal the end of an era of definition and the beginning of an era of rapid consolidation and codification—after, certainly, some evolution. As many significant additions to our knowledge of Blake as there have been over the years since the Dictionary, most have been additions to the base. One important alternative image has been a changing, as opposed to a consistent, Blake. We might speculate about what motivated the creators of a monolithically stable Blake. Perhaps it was the need to hold a difficult subject still long enough to obtain a focused likeness, and, more important, the need to deny the possibility that Blake might be intellectually erratic, even insane. If so, then a consistent Blake was the required precursor of any (memorable) less consistent Blake. The way for a Blake who changed his ideas significantly over the course of his life had already been prepared to some extent by Erdman, whose focus on political ideology almost necessarily brought change into the picture. It must be said, though, that Erdman’s Blake is notable for his stubborn refusal to change with the tides of English opinion on the French Revolution—and in that way belongs in the family with Damon’s and Frye’s.
The most important product of our updated understanding is a Blake closer to the historically situated engraver, painter, and poet. (Consequently, I have devoted most of the space in the annotated bibliography to this aspect of Blake scholarship.) Although major advances have been made in understanding Blake as an artist and artisan, they have nonetheless proceeded chiefly from the prior understanding of Blake as a writer and remain subsidiary. The main categories of analysis have been preserved. In fact, with a few notable exceptions, most of the scholarship on Blake’s visual art has been done by English professors working out of their areas of specialization. Understandably, they have eased the difficulties of their transition by importing their literary understanding of Blake. In their terms, Blake the artist works by analogy alongside Blake the writer. Meanwhile, the position of Blake among the art historians has not altered significantly in recent years. He has greater name recognition among them and perhaps somewhat greater respectability, and has, at last, engendered a relatively complete kit of scholarly tools for art historians (see the bibliography). Even after these modifications to the scholarly base, however, no rumblings in recent art history so far suggest an imminent change comparable to Blake’s twentieth-century ascendancy to a place among the Romantic poets.
the dangerous Blake, the angry, flawed Blake, the crank . . . the ingrate, the sexist, the madman, the religious fanatic, the tyrannical husband, the second-rate draughtsman” (410–11) seemed a symptom not only of the need to reinstitute surprise in the Blake canon but also of a fear that a Blake who can’t surprise his readers may not be able to hold his place. In the decades since Mitchell’s article, though progress has continued and access to the full range of Blake’s work has improved remarkably, no new era has begun. Meanwhile, however, the consolidated Blake holds his own along with Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, Erdman’s Blake: Prophet against Empire, and Damon’s Blake Dictionary, making them the oldest surviving threesome of comparable influence in literary studies and, to my knowledge, the best. Not that there is any reason to suppose that we have seen our last Blake. Like all such figures, as we call them, in the history of the arts, Blake is one name that can cover many mutable and even incompatible things. Literary critics and art historians have called many Blakes to our attention and will call many more. Many are called, but few are chosen.
MORRIS EAVES University of Rochester
Annotated Bibliography
The lists given here are highly selective. For fuller listings, see the entries for Grant and Johnson’s Norton Critical Edition and the Blake Archive and Cambridge Companion bibliographies, below.
Works Cited in the Foreword
Bateson, F. W. “Blake and the Scholars: II.” Review of A Blake Dictionary. New York Review of Books 28 Oct. 1965: 24–25.
Blackmur, R. P. “A Critic’s Job of Work.” The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation. New York: Arrow, 1935. 269–302.
Bloom, Harold. “Foster Damon and William Blake.” Review of A Blake Dictionary. New Republic 5 June 1965: 24–25.
Damon, S. Foster. “How I Discovered Blake.” Blake Newsletter 1 (winter 1967–68): 2–3. . William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924.
Ellis, Edwin J., and William Butler Yeats, eds. The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical. 3 vols. London: B. Quaritch, 1893.
Erdman, David V. William Blake: Prophet against Empire. 3rd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977 [1st ed. 1954].
. Review of A Blake Dictionary. Journal of English & Germanic Philology 65 (1966): 606–12. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1947.
“Guides to a New Language.” Review of A Blake Dictionary. Times Literary Supplement 3 Oct. 1968: 1098.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Dangerous Blake.” Studies in Romanticism 21 (1982): 410–16.
Pinto, Vivian de Sola. Review of A Blake Dictionary. Modern Language Review 65 (1970): 153– 55.
(and later printings).
Yeats, William Butler. A Vision. London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1925.
Further Information on S. Foster Damon
Blake Newsletter 1.3 (15 Dec. 1967, special issue devoted to Damon).
Petry, Alice Hall. “S. Foster Damon (22 February 1893–25 December 1971).” American Poets, 1880–1945, First Series. Ed. Peter Quartermain. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 45. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986. 94–99.
Rosenfeld, Alvin H., ed. William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1969. (See especially Rosenfeld’s preface, Malcolm Cowley’s “S. Foster Damon: The New England Voice,” and Ernest D. Costa and Elizabeth C. Wescott’s bibliography of works by Damon.)
Rosenfeld, Alvin H., and Barton Levi St. Armand, eds. A Birthday Garland for S. Foster Damon: Tributes Collected in Honor of His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, February 22, 1968. Providence, R.I.: privately printed, 1968. (The volume includes tributes by numerous students, friends, and admirers, including e. e. cummings, Virgil Thomson, and Colin Wilson.)
Biography
Bentley, G. E., Jr. Blake Records. 2nd ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. (A rich source of contemporary accounts of Blake, arranged, as far as possible, in chronological order. Blake Records can be read profitably as a continuous narrative.)
. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, Conn.: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2003. (The fullest and most recent scholarly account of Blake’s life, though scholars regularly discover important and sometimes surprising new facts.)
Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus.” 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1880. (Gilchrist’s biography [1st ed. 1863] is the platform from which Blake’s twentieth-century reputation was launched. Although Gilchrist has distinct biases and some of the events he reports are mythical, no narrative of Blake’s life has so far managed to render Gilchrist’s irrelevant.)
Editions
Bentley, G. E., Jr. William Blake’s Writings. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. (Equal to but different from Erdman’s edition. Usefully keyed to Bentley’s Blake Books.)
Eaves, Morris, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. The William Blake Archive. http://www.blakearchive.org. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of Rochester; and Library of Congress, 1996–present. (A free online scholarly edition that aims to incorporate the full range of Blake’s work in all media—manuscripts and typographic works, etchings and engravings, drawings and paintings from all the major collections, plus much helpful supplementary material. The Archive adds about eight new editions per year. Their contents are fully searchable, and most images are described in intricate detail. For the project’s history and aims, see Plan of the Archive http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/public/about/plan/index.html). Erdman, David V., ed. (with commentary by Harold Bloom). The Complete Poetry and Prose of
Archive).
Grant, John E., and Mary Lynn Johnson, eds. The Poetry and Designs of William Blake. Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2007. (A useful selection with equally useful introductions, notes, reproductions, essays by others, and a selected bibliography.)
Stevenson, W. H., ed. Blake: The Complete Poems. 1971. 3rd ed. New York: Longman, 2007. (Texts only—and poems only—but conscientiously edited and annotated with an awareness of recent scholarship.)
A Selection of Facsimiles
“Facsimiles” include not only precise replicas but also useful photographic reproductions. The emphasis of the small selection presented here is on variety.
Bain, Iain, David Chambers, and Andrew Wilton, eds. The Wood Engravings of William Blake for Thornton’s Virgil . London: British Museum, 1977. (Modern impressions printed from Blake’s own woodblocks from the British Museum collection.)
Bentley, G. E., Jr., ed. William Blake: Tiriel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. (An early work in manuscript; with several associated drawings. Reproductions, transcriptions, and commentary.) Bindman, David, general ed. The Illuminated Books of William Blake. 6 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Blake
Trust and Princeton University Press; London: Blake Trust and Tate Gallery Publications, 1991– 95. (These substantial volumes, edited by specialists, include high-quality color reproductions of all Blake’s illuminated books [one copy of each title, some of which exist in several quite differently printed and colored copies; see The William Blake Archive], transcriptions of texts, bibliographical data, commentary, and other helpful information. The reproductions and transcriptions only, without commentary, are available in one volume from Thames & Hudson, 2000.)
Blake Trust facsimiles. (Through the Trianon Press in Paris the William Blake Trust [established in 1949] published a series of very fine, expensive volumes—too many to list here, chiefly but not exclusively the illuminated books—that are now in libraries throughout the world.)
Crosby, Mark, and Robert N. Essick, eds. Genesis: William Blake’s Last Illuminated Work. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 2012. (Full-sized color reproduction of Blake’s twelve-page Genesis manuscript, produced near the end of his life, composed of text from the biblical Genesis accompanied by his own designs. With critical commentary.)
Erdman, David V., ed., with Donald K. Moore. The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile. Rev. ed. New York: Readex, 1977 [1st ed. Clarendon, 1973]. (An ingenious feat of editing in which each page of the Notebook—an important source of Blake’s writings and designs—is photographically reproduced opposite a translation of the handwriting into type. Extensive commentary.)
Essick, Robert N., ed. Songs of Innocence and of Experience. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 2008. (Full-sized color reproduction of Blake’s illuminated book with extensive commentary.)
. Visions of the Daughters of Albion. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 2003. (Full-sized color reproduction of Blake’s illuminated book with extensive commentary.)
engravings for Blair’s Grave, executed by another engraver, were probably the works for which he was best known in his lifetime.)
Hamlyn, Robin, ed. Night Thoughts: The Poem by Edward Young Illustrated with Watercolours by William Blake. 2 vols. London: Folio Society, 2005. (Reproduces all 537 watercolor designs in color. With commentary.)
Magno, Cettina Tramontano, and David V. Erdman, eds. The Four Zoas by William Blake: A Photographic Facsimile of the Manuscript with Commentary on the Illuminations. Lewis-burg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1987. (Attempts to recover heretofore indecipherable pictorial details, many of them sexual. Lengthy commentary offers interpretations of the designs.)
Phillips, Michael, ed. An Island in the Moon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. (An early satirical manuscript fragment—incomplete and unpublished in Blake’s lifetime— with transcription and commentary.)
. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011. (Despite questionable theories about Blake’s printing processes, a useful facsimile edition with transcription and commentary.)
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Manchester, England: Manchester Etching Workshop, 1983. (Unfortunately rare, since few copies were made. The printer/publisher took special care in duplicating Blake’s printing, inking, and coloring. Joseph Viscomi, one of the most knowledgeable scholars of Blake’s printmaking processes, participated in the production of the facsimile and wrote an accompanying pamphlet.)
Miscellaneous Aids to Study
Bentley, G. E., Jr. Blake Books. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977. (Bentley’s subtitle indicates the vast range of work covered: “annotated catalogues of William Blake’s writings in illuminated printing, in conventional typography, and in manuscript, and reprints thereof, reproductions of his designs, books with his engravings, catalogues, books he owned, and scholarly and critical works about him.” See also Blake Books Supplement, Clarendon, 1995, and annual updates in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly.)
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. Ed. Morris Eaves and Morton D. Paley. (Blake, in print since 1968 and online since 2011 at http://www.blakequarterly.org, is an international quarterly journal for specialists—art historians, literary critics, museum curators, and students of Blake—compiled by specialists: in addition to Eaves and Paley, Robert N. Essick [annual checklist of Blake sales], Alexander Gourlay [book review editor], and G. E. Bentley, Jr. [bibliographer], Blake publishes articles, book reviews, news, and comprehensive annual checklists of Blake scholarship and art sales. Back issues are being integrated into The William Blake Archive.)
Erdman, David V., et al. A Concordance to the Writings of William Blake. 2 vols. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967. (Erdman’s concordance to Blake’s texts is keyed to Keynes’s edition of Blake [1957 and later printings], which though no longer standard is still in print and can be found in many libraries.)
Painting and Printmaking
Although certainly Damon was always alert to Blake’s artistic side, he had a literary view of that side. One of the most obvious changes in his approach to Blake was the elimination in the Blake Dictionary of any systematic discussion of the visual component of Blake’s illuminated books, which had played a larger part in Damon’s William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. Since the publication of the Dictionary, however, knowledge and understanding of Blake’s work as painter and printmaker have increased very substantially, and long-overdue standard works of scholarship, such as Butlin’s two-volume catalogue raisonné and The William Blake Archive, have made good scholarship considerably easier to carry out.
Bindman, David. Blake as an Artist. Oxford: Phaidon, 1977. (The best single art-historical account of the subject, superseding the earlier work by Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake, 1959.) Bindman, David (assisted by Deirdre Toomey). The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake.
New York: Putnam’s, 1978. (The reproductions of plates from the illuminated books are too small, and information about individual works is scant. Nevertheless, the 765 reproductions cover a lot of ground and the annotations are authoritative. “Complete graphic works” does not include works designed by others but engraved by Blake.)
Butlin, Martin. The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981. (Butlin’s catalogue totals more than a thousand pages. The first volume contains the text of entries; the second volume contains reproductions—a mix of color and monochrome—of most of the items. “Paintings and drawings” excludes Blake’s work as a printmaker.)
Eaves, Morris. The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. (An illustrated account of Blake’s activities as a print-maker in the context of his ideas about ancient art and the art of his time, under increasing pressure in an increasingly sophisticated commercial system.)
. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. (A venerable tradition denies that Blake had coherent theories for his practice. Eaves draws the broad outlines of a theory from Blake’s writings and from the literary and art discourses of his time.) , ed. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003. (A collection of previously unpublished essays by experts on fundamental topics in Blake scholarship and criticism. With useful aids to further study.)
Erdman, David V. The Illuminated Blake: All of William Blake’s Illuminated Works with a Plate-by-Plate Commentary. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday-Anchor, 1974. (The monochrome reproductions range from adequate to dismal, while the commentary ranges from the irrefutable to the incredible, but the book can always be counted on as a thought-provoking starting point.)
Essick, Robert N. The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.
. William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations: A Catalogue and Study of the Plates Engraved by Blake after Designs by Other Artists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. (Essick’s catalogues complement Butlin’s catalogue raisonné and Bindman’s Complete Graphic Works, cited above.)
it now fits into a coherent base of accurate knowledge. See, for example, the booklet by Viscomi [Songs, Manchester Etching Workshop] and his Blake and the Idea of the Book.)
Mitchell, W. J. T. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. (The most forceful book-length attempt to establish a theory and practice of reading Blake’s illuminated books, which is aimed at encompassing both the textual and visual elements of the medium.)
Myrone, Martin. The Blake Book. London: Tate, 2007. (A readable introduction to Blake’s art.)
Paley, Morton D. William Blake. Oxford: Phaidon, 1978. (A concise alternative to Bindman’s Blake as an Artist.)
Criticism of Blake since Damon’s Dictionary
The infrastructure of our understanding, and our estimate, of Blake continues to derive largely from the illuminated books, plus The Four Zoas, though with increasing attention to the full range of his work. Here is a highly condensed and sparsely annotated list—a tiny sample, biased toward recent publications— of critical studies and other resources that approach Blake’s work from various angles. Some products of the past several decades are very much of the school of Damon, some not.
Blake 2.0. (http://blake2.org/myblake/: An experimental effort to use social media to provide a contemporary “community portal for anyone interested in Blake.” The resulting “network” includes a Zoamorphosis blog and a Facebook site.)
Bruder, Helen P., and Tristanne J. Connolly, eds. Queer Blake. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. (One of several recent books to emphasize tricky issues of gender and sexuality.)
Connolly, Tristanne J. William Blake and the Body. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Crosby, Mark, Troy Patenaude, and Angus Whitehead, eds. Re-Envisioning Blake. Hound-mills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. (A collection that grew out of a 2007 conference celebrating the 250th anniversary of Blake’s birth.)
Haggerty, Susan, and Jon Mee, eds. Blake and Conflict. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. (The volume seeks “to sustain an ongoing debate over his complicity with or defiance of ideologies of oppression.”)
Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. (A prime instance of politically oriented Blake criticism post-Erdman. See also the quite different but equally interesting books by Michael Ferber and Jon Mee.)
Matthews, Susan. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Paley, Morton D. The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. (Among recent studies that approach Blake’s work in both linguistic and visual media as part of a single artistic enterprise.)
Acknowledgments
THROUGH the years I have been indebted to so many people for information and discussion that I am at
a loss to acknowledge them all. Particularly I have been indebted to Sir Geoffrey Keynes, establisher of the Blake text, describer of all known copies of the books, collector of many facts about Blake, and hearty encourager of my efforts; to the late Joseph Wicksteed, whose Job taught us all how to read Blake’s pictures; to the late Max Plowman, who discovered the basic structures of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Four Zoas; to Kerrison Preston, contributor of ideas and prompt and precise checker of material in London; to George Goyder, whose publication of all Blake’s Biblical pictures made easy their comparison and interpretations; to Dr. Karl Kiralis, discoverer of the structure of Jerusalem, for maps of the counties, the loan of his Jerusalem index, and many suggestions; to Dr. Merrill Patterson for the use of his discovery that hands and feet have meaning in the fourfold system; to David Erdman, establisher of many facts about Blake, and eager critic of my manuscript pro and con; to G. E. Bentley, Jr., for information about Blake’s Blair illustrations and other matters; to Dr. Gershom Scholem and Rabbi William G. Braude for elucidation of the Hebraic material; to the Reverend John D. Elder, ever ready with his concordances; to Dr. Ronald Levinson for the clue to Taylor’s mysticism; to Mrs. Norman V. Ballou for information about the correspondence of Horace Scudder, the first American Blake enthusiast; to David Jenkins, the Keeper of Printed Books at the National Library of Wales, who found the source of Blake’s “Welch Triades”; to Paul Miner, who took such pains in locating The Green Man and other places Blake knew as a boy; to William Thomas Wilkins III for an important quotation from Athanasius; to the late William A. Jackson, librarian, and Miss Caroline Jakeman, of the Houghton Library; to H. Glenn Brown and other members of the staff of the Brown University Library; to Alvin Rosenfeld, checker of Blake references, who gave me some valuable suggestions; to Catherine Brown and the copy-editing staff of the Brown University Press, whose unflagging application and intelligent criticisms were most welcome in preparing the manuscript for the printer; and particularly to John R. Turner Ettlinger, Curator of the Annmary Brown Memorial, for his maps and diagrams and constant encouragement.
Introduction
EXUBERANCE is Beauty” (MHH 10). “Passion & Expression is Beauty Itself” (On Reynolds, K 466).
“Knowledge of Ideal Beauty is Not to be Acquired. It is Born with us” (On Reynolds, K 459). Blake wrote little else about Beauty, although he created it in new forms all his life.
The fact is, Beauty for him was not an end in itself, nor was it a mere byproduct. It was a means of communication. Beauty is the spark at contact, marking the mystical union of poet and reader. All art exists at that point and nowhere else. The thrill is the preliminary perception of a Truth, and prophecy of its revelation. I know of no other poet who so constantly wrote passages which give us that thrill while the actual meaning is still quite hidden from the corporeal understanding. A single poem, say “Ah! Sun-Flower,” holds one by its mere melody. “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright” fascinates, long before one connects it with Wrath in heaven and Revolution on earth. The “Proverbs of Hell” seem to make sense long before they do. Even in the turbulence and thunder of his most chaotic passages, a paragraph or even a single line will flash and strike like a lightning bolt, illuminating an entire landscape. It is so powerful because it has the force of a new universe behind it.
Blake’s basic purpose was the discovery and recording of new truths about the human soul. For him the most exciting thing possible was the discovery of these truths. Hunting for them and warfare over them with other thinkers were the joys of his “eternity” (Mil 35:2). His “long resounding strong heroic [lines are] marshall’d in order for the day of Intellectual Battle” (FZ i:5). The “Births of Intellect” come to us direct from “the divine Humanity” (LJ, K 613). “The Treasures of Heaven are . . . Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory” (LJ, K 615). These truths are the only possible basis for genuine belief. With a few trifling exceptions, Blake never wrote a poem or painted a picture without intellectual meaning.
So profound were his researches in the terra incognita that he may be hailed as the Columbus of the psyche, in whose course Freud and Jung, among others, were to follow. So novel was everything in this new world that no vocabulary was prepared for him. But these psychic forces were so real that he had to name them. Thence arose his special mythology, for these forces were living creatures.
Blake was not content only to record: he wanted to force his reader to think along with him. No great work of art has its meaning on the surface, not Chaucer’s, Shakespeare’s, or Milton’s. The public has taken these great writers merely as a storyteller, a playwright, an epic-maker, and has been content to enjoy their writings on that level only. For example, Paradise Lost has been treated as an epic (but is it really Aristotelean?), as a theological treatise (but is it quite orthodox?), and as Biblical history, though it is no more history than The Divine Comedy is a travelogue; but never had it been understood as a study of damnation. Blake was the very first person to know what Milton was writing about. He was determined not to have his own message sidetracked by surface meanings. So he removed the surface meanings.
Esop, Homer, Plato” (To Trusler, 23 Aug 1799). Even Aesop’s easy fables require thought for their application.
Blake’s great task was “to open the immortal Eyes of Man inwards, into the Worlds of Thought” (J 5:18). A thought is wholly true only the first time it is said. At second hand, it is just that much nearer falsity; and at third hand it may have completely reversed its meaning. “Christs crucifix shall be made an Excuse for Executing Criminals” (FZ, end of Night iv, K 380, 904). But Blake’s reader cannot accept passively what Blake writes, as he cannot understand it. He must dig, participate actively; thus Blake’s thought is kept living and his ideas fresh. “[Symbolism] address’d to the Intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding, is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry” (To Butts, 6 July 1803).
Therefore, to rouse the Intellectual Powers while baffling the Corporeal Understanding, Blake deliberately confused his prophetic books. He introduced flat contradictions, which can be resolved only when the meaning is understood; then they turn out to be clues. He furnished some definitions. Jerusalem is Liberty, he tells us twice (J 26:3; 54:5), but to understand her, you find you have to think out exactly what Liberty really is. Other definitions turn out to be only extended applications. System there is, but it must be discovered. Narrative there is, but it is a dream narrative which does not obey the conventional rules for story-plotting. None of it makes sense until we apply it to the workings of the human mind.
“I give you the end of a golden [intellectual] string, | Only wind it into a ball, | It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate | Built in Jerusalem’s wall” (J 77). Blake scattered his clues broadcast throughout his writings. They form a prodigious jigsaw puzzle. Pieces are missing; pieces which ought to belong don’t quite fit. Nevertheless, assembling what we can, we find that not only does a section fit together, but that it also makes amazing good sense which might have been obvious from the first.
Thus Blake, secure behind his symbols in a time of severe thought-control, was free to write whatever he chose. He could say what he thought of George III and all kings; he could prove to his own satisfaction that the Decalogue was not written by the true God; that the Christian cult of chastity had blighted our world for eighteen centuries; and that the congregations of most churches were really worshipping the Devil. Furthermore, he was inciting his readers to agree with him.
But you need not believe a word he says; you will not—indeed, you cannot—until you discover what he is talking about. Even then, you will not believe him unless you know of yourself that he is telling a truth. “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d” (MHH 10). Real faith is the opening of the eyes to self-evident truths; it is not closing them to inconvenient facts.
Blake had no desire to found a new religion. “I know my power,” he said, through the mask of Milton, to the great error Satan, “thee to annihilate and be a greater in thy place . . . till one greater comes and smites me as I smote thee” (Mil 38:29). He was no authoritarian. He wanted nobody to take anything on his say-so; he challenged opposition, for in the great warfare over ideas, “Opposition is true Friendship” (MHH 20). “Religion” was generally a bad word with him; in his millennium, “the dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns” (FZ ix:855—the last line of the epic).
The purpose of this dictionary is to make things easier for his readers by gathering together the clues scattered through his writings. These gatherings most often have shed welcome light. At other times, when the meaning has not made itself clear, I have at least laid out the material for future scholars. Some articles which contain material not readily available are rather extensive. Others, such as those on Painting and Poetry, which might have been whole books, are limited to what Blake himself said on the subject; consequently they may seem inadequate.
As Blake saw everything in human terms, practically anything might be a symbol; but it has not been feasible to write an article on every noun, especially as many of them have little or no symbolic significance. Blake, who was a painter and a poet as well as a mystic, often used objects solely for their poetic values. “Silver,” for example, may be only a color (“wash the dusk with silver,” PS, “To the Evening Star” 10; “[wings] silvery white, shining upon the dark blue sky in silver,” FZ viii:11), or a sound (“silver voices,” FZ v:24), or money (“the gold & silver of the Merchant,” J 64:23). It may indicate temperament (“girls of mild silver or of furious gold,” VDA 7:24). But eventually and fundamentally, as the metal of Luvah, it signifies Love. It is also convenient to remember that “gold” signifies “intelligence.” Winding up the golden ball means using one’s head. It is generally safe also to assume that Water is Matter, as in Noah’s Flood, but the fountains of the Holy Ghost and the rivers of Eden are not. One must obey common sense. Blake’s symbols are not mechanical or inflexible.
I have included some material which might not seem to need explanation to British readers. A foreigner could search in vain for Blake’s “Pancrass” in map, atlas, and gazetteer; whereas every Londoner knows that “Pancrass” was a saint, and “St. Pancras” is an important railway station. Moreover, since Blake’s day, London has expanded enormously, absorbing and destroying the outlying villages which the boy Blake loved. I have included all Biblical characters and place-names, for even the Biblical scholar cannot always identify quickly such names as Araunah, Eliakim, or Uzzah, and especially those Hebrew terms not used in the King James translation.
As a Blake Concordance is in preparation, I have not included items which have no particular symbolic significance, such as Nerves, Nightingale, and the Nile. I have omitted historical characters in King Edward the Third and The French Revolution, incidental characters in Poetical Sketches and An Island in the Moon, and Blake’s contemporaries in the arts, such as Sir Joshua Reynolds.
It is not the intention of this book to compile digests of the works of other scholars or to confute their theories. I have felt it better to make a new start and to attempt to present fresh evaluations of Blake’s symbols.
But Blake cannot be contained in any dictionary. Even his simplest and clearest statements have vast implications behind them. I have merely untied some knots and shaken out some tangles in the Golden String. When a final answer has not been possible, I have tried to assemble the material for others to work on. The important thing to remember is that he was always writing about the human soul.
A
BLAKE
DICTIONARY
NOTE All textual references, unless otherwise indicated, are to The Complete Writings of William Blake, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, London and New York, 1957. (It is not the “Centenary Edition.”) This is the only edition containing all Blake’s writings, with numbered lines. I have followed this numbering, which goes by the plates (not by chapters); thus the lines in Jerusalem, Chapter iii, “‘Doth Jehovah Forgive a Debt only on condition that it shall | be Payed?’” will be located as J 61:17. However, in the cases of Tiriel and The Four Zoas, which Blake never published, and which consequently have no plate numbers, references are given by section and line; thus a line from Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas, “But in the Wine Presses the Human Grapes sing not nor dance,” is located as FZ ix:748. In quotations from Blake’s prose, and from poems whose titles do not appear in the Table of Contents of The Complete Writings, I have given the Keynes pagination. Names are usually spelled as Blake himself spelled them.
Abbreviations
Ahan The Book of Ahania AllR All Religions are One Am America, a Prophecy Aug Auguries of Innocence
Bentley G. E. Bentley, Jr., Vala, Oxford, 1963
Bishop Morchard Bishop, Blake’s Hayley, London, 1951
Blunt Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake, New York, 1959
BoL The Book of Los
Bryant Jacob Bryant, A New System, 3rd ed., London, 1807
Chron Chronicles Col Colossians Cor Corinthians
CR Crabb Robinson, in Arthur Symons, William Blake, New York, 1907
Damon S. Foster Damon, William Blake, His Philosophy and Symbols, London and New York, 1924
DesC A Descriptive Catalogue Deut Deuteronomy
EG The Everlasting Gospel
Ellis and Yeats E. J. Ellis and W. B. Yeats, eds., The Works of William Blake, London, 1893
Eph Ephesians
Epig Epigrams, Verses, and Fragments from The Note-Book (ca. 1808–11)
Erd David V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet Against Empire, Princeton, 1954
Eur Europe, a Prophecy Exod Exodus
Ezek Ezekiel
FQ Spenser, The Faerie Queene FR The French Revolution
Frye Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry, Princeton, 1947
FZ The Four Zoas
Gal Galatians Gen Genesis
Geof Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Britonum GhA The Ghost of Abel
Gil Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, London, 1st ed., 1863; 2nd ed., 1880 (2nd ed. referred to unless otherwise specified)
Gleckner Robert F. Gleckner, The Piper and the Bard, Detroit, 1959
GoP The Gates of Paradise
Goyder George Goyder, Introduction to William Blake’s Illustrations to the Bible, Geoffrey Keynes, comp., London, 1957
Harper George Mills Harper, The Neoplatonism of William Blake, Chapel Hill, 1961
Heb Hebrews
Illustr Job Illustrations of The Book of Job Invented & Engraved by William Blake IslM An Island in the Moon
K Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Complete Writings of William Blake, London and New York, 1957
K Census Geoffrey Keynes and Edwin Wolf II, comps., William Blake’s Illuminated Books: A Census, New York, 1953
K Studies Geoffrey Keynes, Blake Studies, London, 1949
Lam Lamentations Laoc Laocoön plate
LJ A Vision of the Last Judgment
“LJ” “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” Rosenwald version as reproduced and keyed in the Illustrations at the end of this book
Malkin Benjamin Heath Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs of his Child, London, 1806
Marg Vala H. M. Margoliouth, ed., Vala, Blake’s Numbered Text, Oxford, 1956
Marg WB H. M. Margoliouth, William Blake, Oxford, 1951
Matt Matthew
MHH The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Mil Milton, a Poem
Miner Paul Miner, “William Blake’s London Residences,” New York Public Library Bulletin, November 1958
NNR There is No Natural Religion Numb Numbers
On Swed DL Annotations to Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom
On Swed DP Annotations to Swedenborg’s The Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Providence Phil Philippians
PL Milton, Paradise Lost PS Poetical Sketches PubA Public Address
Rev Revelation
Roe Albert S. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy, Princeton, 1953
Rom Romans
Sam Samuel
SoE Songs of Experience SoI Songs of Innocence SoL The Song of Los
Song of Sol The Song of Solomon
Symons Arthur Symons, William Blake, New York, 1907
Thel The Book of Thel Thess Thessalonians Tir Tiriel
To Butts Letter to Thomas Butts
Ur The Book of Urizen
VDA Visions of the Daughters of Albion
Wilson Mona Wilson, The Life of William Blake, London, 1927
A
ABARIM is a mountain range east of the Dead Sea. From Mount Abarim, Moses beheld the Promised Land (Numb xxvii:12).
It is one of the six mountains surrounding Palestine which are equated with Milton’s Sixfold Emanation, his three wives and his three daughters (Mil 17:16).
ABEL, the second child of Adam and Eve, was killed by his brother Cain.
Blake was not interested in the victim of this first of murders, but he was very much interested in the result: the desire for vengeance on the criminal, which became the lex talionis, “life for life” (Exod xxi:23), a law abrogated by the Forgiveness of Sins. This voice of Abel’s blood crying to the Lord (Gen iv:10) Blake personified as the “ghost of Abel,” which Eve instantly recognized as not the real Abel at all (GhA 13), who she perceives is still living, though terribly afflicted.
Therefore, in A Vision of the Last Judgment (K 606), “Abel kneels on a bloody cloud descriptive of those Churches before the flood, that they were fill’d with blood & fire & vapour of smoke.” See Illustrations.
In the painting illustrating Hervey’s Meditations Among the Tombs (see Illustrations), both Abel and Cain flee from the Serpent, as though Adam and Eve’s division of things into Good and Evil were carried out in their progeny.
ABERDEEN is a county of Scotland which, with Berwick and Dumfries, is assigned to Judah (J 16:54). With the rest of Scotland it is assigned to Bowen (J 71:46).
The ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION is a mysterious apocalyptic phrase used by Daniel (ix:27; xi:31; xii:11), and quoted by Jesus: “But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains” (Mark xiii:14; Matt xxiv:15–16).
“This is the Spectre of Man, the Holy Reasoning Power, and in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation” (J 10:15). It is also “State Religion, which is the source of all Cruelty” (On Watson, K 393). It is the enemy of Holy Generation, birthplace of the Lamb (J 7:70). But it is also the flesh: “These are the Sexual Garments, the Abomination of Desolation, hiding the Human Lineaments as with an Ark & Curtains, which Jesus rent & now shall wholly purge away with Fire till Generation is swallow’d up in Regeneration” (Mil 41:25).
ABRAHAM (Abram), the great patriarch, was born in Ur, a city of Chaldea. Under divine command, he fled with his family from the idolaters to Canaan, where God promised him that he should be father to a great nation, and changed his name from Abram (“father of elevation”) to Abraham (“father of multitudes”).
were not a reminiscence of Banquo’s ghost. To Blake, his flight meant his renunciation of such sacrifices (as exemplified by his substitution of a ram for Isaac), which started a new era in religion.
“Abraham was called to succeed the Druidical age, which began to turn allegoric and mental signification into corporeal command, whereby human sacrifice would have depopulated the earth” (DesC V, K 578). Even until his time the “blood & fire & vapour of smoke” of the earlier churches were not extinguished (LJ, K 606).
Thus in the cycle of the Twenty-seven Churches, Abraham is the twenty-first, and the first of the last septenary, “the Male Females” of Moral Virtue (Mil 37:41; J 75:16). Los created him as one of the prophets to offset the Satanic kings (J 73:41). His children were the Hebrew Church (LJ, K 610), and he himself was an ancestor of Jesus (J 27). Reuben, however, “enroots his brethren in the narrow Canaanite” (the merchants) “from the Limit Noah to the Limit Abram” (the preceding cycle of the Twenty-seven Churches); but in Abram’s loins, “Reuben in his Twelve-fold majesty & beauty shall take refuge as Abraham flees from Chaldea” (J 15:25–28).
Jerusalem, Plate 15, depicts the flight of Abram from Chaldea, opposed by the vegetated Reuben.
An ABSTRACTION is a generalization based on reality, but which when substituted for reality becomes hostile to humanity. In Blake’s writings, “abstract” usually can be translated “non-human.” It is “opposed to the Visions of Imagination” (J 74:26).
Orthodox religion is such an abstraction. Priesthood “enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects” (MHH 11). The parson with his “nets & gins & traps” surrounds the farmer “with cold floods of abstraction, and with forests of solitude” in order to take his money and build “castles and high spires, where kings & priests may dwell” (VDA 5:18).” And this is the manner of the Sons of Albion in their strength: they take the Two Contraries which are call’d 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).
As abstractions are the invention of logic, Urizen is the great abstracter. At the very beginning he is “unknown, abstracted” (Ur 3:6), and at the end, Albion bids him “come forth from slumbers of thy cold abstraction” (FZ ix:129). Fuzon, in denouncing Urizen, calls him “this abstract nonentity” (Ahan 2:11). “The Human Abstract” (SoE) describes the origin and growth of his Tree of Mystery. When Orc begins to reptilize under Urizen’s influence, he turns “affection into fury, & thought into abstraction” (FZ vii:155).
Blake learned early from Lavater (K 86) that “all abstraction is temporary folly”; and he complained later to Butts (11 Sept 1801) that “my Abstract folly hurries me often away while I am at work, carrying me over Mountains & Valleys, which are not Real, in a Land of Abstraction where Spectres of the Dead wander.”
ACHITOPHEL (“Ahithophel” in the King James Version) was the wise counsellor of King David. However, he conspired against him with Absalom, and when he knew that the conspiracy had failed, he hanged himself (II Sam xvii:23). Blake ranked him with Caiaphas, Pilate, and Judas: “Achitophel is also here with the cord in his hand” (LJ, K 608).
her as the eleventh daughter of Los and Enitharmon, in the line from Ocalythron to Mary (FZ viii:365). In the revised list of the Maternal Line, she is a daughter of Vala, second in the line from Cainah to Mary (J 62:9).
ADAM (“red earth”) was the first human being. His creation was a comparatively late episode in the general fall of man (Albion). “Satan & Adam & the whole World was Created by the Elohim” in Albion’s “Chaotic State of Sleep” (J 27).
In Blake’s day, the first two chapters of Genesis were read as a consecutive tale, not as two independent accounts of the same event. Consequently, there were two stages of Adam’s creation: the first, when he was made in the image of God (Gen i:27); the second, when he was made of the dust (Gen ii:7). Later, the Lord was to repent “that he had made Adam (of the Female, the Adamah) & it grieved him at his heart” (Laoc, K 776—revised from Gen vi:6; see ADAMAH).
Adam originally contained both sexes. Blake confused Crabb Robinson on this point by talking of “a union of sexes in man as in Ovid, an androgynous state” (CR 263, 296). This theory, which Blake might have got from Plato, seemed indicated by the text “And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Gen i:27). The sexes were not separated until the creation of Eve, when Adam was “divided into Male and Female” (Blake’s MS. Genesis, Chap. ii; Damon 221). But it was Jesus himself who divided the sexes in creating Eve (J 35 [31], illustr.) that “Himself may in process of time be born Man to redeem” (J 42:34).
Blake made much of the statement that the Elohim was the creator of Adam, for he was not the supreme Jehovah (CR 298), but was only the third Eye of God. See ELOHIM. “[The Eternals] sent Elohim, who created Adam to die for Satan. Adam refus’d, but was compell’d to die by Satan’s arts” (FZ viii:401). But first the merciful Jesus fixed two limits to the Fall. “The Divine hand found the Two Limits, first of Opacity, then of Contraction. Opacity was named Satan, Contraction was named Adam” (Mil 13:20). This event took place between the failure of the second Eye and before the coming of the third. Jesus found these two limits in Albion’s bosom “while yet those two beings were not born nor knew of good or Evil” (FZ iv:271–74). They are to be found in every individual man (J 42:30; see also J 35:1; 73:28).
On the Laocoön plate, Satan and Adam are the two sons of Yod, “the Angel of the Divine Presence” (K 775). Adam is thus the younger brother of Satan. Their relationship is shown most clearly in the illustration on Milton 33. The “Mundane Egg” (Mil 25:42) is superimposed on the four flaming Zoas, and is divided into two parts. The lower part, labelled “Satan,” is mostly in the sphere of Urizen; the infernal flames reach into the upper part, labelled “Adam.” Thus Adam is the conscious mind and Satan the subconscious, the source of Energy. See MUNDANE EGG. As the two sons of Laocoön, they are entwined with the serpents of Good and Evil, which also are killing their father. Adam struggles with the serpent labelled “Good”; and the name of his first wife, Lilith, is written there. See LILITH.
Adam and Eve remained in the state of Innocence until the Serpent persuaded Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, promising her that “ye shall be as gods [Elohim—judges], knowing good and evil” (Gen iii:5). The Original Sin therefore was judging others by moral values.
“Peleg [‘division’] & Joktan [‘who is made small,’ his brother], & Esau & Jacob, & Saul & David” (J 73:28).
The fallen Adam “is only The Natural Man & not the Soul or Imagination” (Laoc, K 776; Damon 221); he is Rousseau’s Natural Man. He is also the conscious part of the mind. As the Limit of Contraction, he is the lowest point to which man can shrink. In the illustration to Young’s Night Thoughts, “Sense and Reason Shew the Door” (iv:136), Blake followed Milton in representing Reason as Adam and Sense as Eve; but he contradicted Young by having them point upwards as well as down, and the door is Gothic, with angels for archivolts.
“Satan & Adam are States Created into Twenty-seven Churches” (Mil 32:25). None of these is named for Satan: as Error he includes them all. Adam leads the cycle, being the first of the nine from Adam to Lamech (the father of Noah, who begins the second group). These nine were mighty giants (having lived before the Flood); they were “hermaphroditic,” being self-contradictory and unsynthesized (Mil 37:36; J 13:32; 75:11). “And where Luther ends Adam begins again in Eternal Circle” (J 75:24). These churches before the Flood were “fill’d with blood & fire & vapour of smoke; even till Abraham’s time the vapor & heat was not extinguish’d; these States Exist now” (LJ, K 606).
Adam is the nineteenth son of Los and Enitharmon (FZ viii:360); he is preceded by Satan (error), Har (self-love), Ochim (woes), and Ijim (animal lusts). He is the first of the prophets created by Los, to offset the line of kings created by Satan (J 73: 41). He is reduced to a skeleton by the laws of Urizen, while Noah, the man of vision with whom he is contrasted, becomes leprous (SoL 3:6, 10; 7:20). He is equated with Scofield (J 7:25, 42); Hand and Scofield in their innocence were united as one man, Adam (J 60:16).
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake prophesied Adam’s return into Paradise (MHH 3).
The CAVE OF ADAM, obviously meaning the skull, is the place where Reuben sleeps while his senses
are being limited (J 36:5). But Blake may also have intended to refer to “the city Adam” (Adamah), which was beside Zaretan, approximately half way between that city and Succoth (Josh iii: 16).
ADAMAH is a feminine noun meaning “earth,” used in Genesis vi:6: “And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” Blake retranslated this passage: “He repented that he had made Adam (of the Female, the Adamah) & it grieved him at his heart” (Laoc, K 776). In other words, the creator of man (the Elohim) repented that he had made man with a mortal body, the mortal body being given by the female.
The ADONA is a river beside which Thel laments (Thel 1:4). The name was suggested by the river Adonis, where the Syrian damsels lamented in amorous ditties the annual wounding of Thammuz (PL i:450).
AFRICA is the first in the clockwise cycle of the four continents. It is the state of slavery, historically illustrated by Pharaoh’s oppression of the Israelites. See EGYPT. The name “Africa” does not occur in the Bible; Blake’s statement that its name was originally Egypt (Ur 28:10) would signify that the Egyptian bondage typified all slavery.
