The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Title Page, Plate 1

Plate 1 is the title page and consists only of the title and an illustration. The design shows the Blakean Hell, that is, the fiery creative energy surging up from the abyss below the surface of the earth. Two nude figures embrace at the bottom of the abyss, likely a Devil and an Angel, thus showing the marriage of Heaven (reason) and Hell (energy and desire). Other smaller embracing figures as well as single figures rise up in the flames. They are ready to invigorate the dullness and passivity of the cloudy surface world—the “Heaven” of the “good,” as opposed to the “Hell” of the “evil” below it—which lacks energy.

The illustration shows a couple walking sedately and a man who kneels as he plays a musical instrument while a woman reclines in front of him. The trees are leafless, but there is also a group of soaring birds in the top right-hand corner, likely representing the liberated, expansive senses or the imagination. The letters HEAVEN and HELL are written in stern-looking capital letters, but the letters of MARRIAGE are in a more elaborate and decorative script and suggest dynamic interaction.

“The Argument,” Plates 2-3

A free-verse poem titled “The Argument” begins on Plate 2. The title suggests that it will be a summary of the argument to be pursued in the book. The details of the argument are a little obscure, however, although the outline is clear.

It begins with Rintrah, who is a figure of Blake’s invention. He likely represents the righteous wrath of a prophet who opposes the false religion that, as “The Argument” will state, usurps the true path in life. “The Argument” tells of how the “just man” (Plate 2) walked the “perilous path” (Plate 2) of life, and for a while he succeeded, as the positive imagery of roses, honey bees, a river and a spring, and life seemingly emerging from “bleached bones” (Plate 2) suggests. The bones are likely a reference to the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, Chapter 37, in which the Lord clothes with flesh a collection of dry bones in a valley.

However, a second figure then emerges in opposition to the just man. This is the “villain” (Plate 2) who drives the just man into “barren climes” (Plate 2). In the next line, a figure similar to a villain appears. This is the “sneaking serpent” (Plate 2) who “walks / In mild humility” (Plate 2), and the just man is forced into the “wilds / Where lions roam” (Plate 2). The sneaking serpent, with his fake humility, is likely the Church and its representatives, who teach a false doctrine that runs contrary to what the just man knows to be the truth. Thus, “The Argument” sets forth a symbolic version of the tension between the contraries of reason and energy that will form the substance of much of the text that follows.

In Plate 3, Blake begins to make his case in prose, which he will continue to do until the poetic verses of “A Song of Liberty.” His satire is aimed at the work of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), an 18th-century Swedish theologian, scientist, and mystic philosopher. Swedenborg claimed to have had a spiritual awakening that enabled him to talk to the inhabitants of Heaven and Hell, including angels and devils. These conversations enabled him to develop new teachings about religion. Swedenborg believed that a Last Judgment had occurred in the spiritual world in 1757, which restored the balance between good and evil. This Last Judgment would have an effect on earth, inaugurating an age in which people would have a renewed understanding of religion. He inaugurated his New Church in that year, and a branch was founded in England in 1788. Blake and his wife Catherine attended an open conference of the church the following year.

Although he did not join the church, Blake was, for a while, an enthusiastic follower of Swedenborg. About a year before Blake started writing The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he thoroughly annotated one of Swedenborg’s books, The Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom. However, he grew disillusioned with the Swedish seer and ridiculed him in The Marriage, beginning with Plate 3: “As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up.” The reference to 33 years is to the time between the founding of Swedenborg’s New Church in 1757 and Blake’s date of writing in 1790. Christ was also believed to be 33 years old when he was crucified, and Blake also happened to be 33 years old when he began writing The Marriage. The “linen clothes” (Plate 3) refer to the grave clothes discarded by Christ at the resurrection, so the implication is that Swedenborg’s teachings are out of date and no longer needed. Blake has his own ideas about the new age that is now upon humanity. He refers to it as the “dominion of Edom.” The Edomites were descendants of Esau, who was cheated out of his birthright by his brother Jacob (according to the book of Genesis). They will now come into their birthright, says Blake. He draws on the book of Isaiah, Chapters 34 and 35. Chapter 35 refers to the flourishing of God’s kingdom; the land will blossom and the glory of the Lord will be seen. (Chapter 34 actually refers to the destruction of Edom, which was a traditional enemy of Israel. The dominion of Edom is a reference to Isaiah, Chapter 63, when the Messiah comes from that kingdom and restores the land of the Israelites to them.)

Blake then lays out his core beliefs, which stand in contrast to the religious orthodoxy of the time. Existence is made up of “Contraries,” which in their interaction propel life forward. Although Blake lists three sets of contraries—attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, and love and hate—in practice, he is most interested in one pair: reason and energy. He seizes on the conventional dualistic thinking in which the religious split two major principles in life into good and evil, which Blakes thinks is an error. The religious equate good with the passive acceptance of reason, and evil with the active power of energy. Obediently following the dictates of reason—the good—leads to Heaven in conventional thinking, while following energy—evil—leads to Hell. Writing during what was called the Age of Reason, Blake was acutely aware of the dangers of exalting one human faculty over another. He wanted to experience the totality of life rather than an abbreviated part of it. Religious meekness and piety in accordance with the teachings of the Church was to Blake a denial of life and also a means by which the authorities of both Church and State exerted control over others.

“The Voice of the Devil,” Plates 4-6

Plate 4 announces “The Voice of the Devil.” The voice is ironic, since it is devilish only when heard by the conventional Angels. While Blake has stated his belief in contraries, in practice he seems to be almost entirely on the side of one of those contraries—energy rather than reason. Blake, however, was not “against” reason or rational thinking; he just thought that it should not dominate the other faculties. Since reason had long been supreme, it had become, in effect, tyrannical, and it was time to redress the balance.

Full of exuberant confidence in the truth he believes he has discovered, Blake, in his role as the voice of the Devil, states in Plate 4 that “[a]ll Bibles or sacred codes” have been the source of a series of errors. He sets out three errors and offers three corrections to them.

The main point, carrying on from what he has said in Plate 3, is that religion or “sacred codes” (Plate 4) have been dualistic. They have made the mistake of splitting life into two opposing principles, especially body and soul. Second, the soul is regarded as good and is associated with adherence to reason. The body, as the opposite of the soul, is associated with evil. Third, following one’s natural energies (that is, impulses and desires) leads to eternal punishment by God.

Blake’s Devil then refutes these three errors, one by one. He sees the body not as the opposite of the soul but as an expression of the soul, or the divine level of life. The body is able to experience and perceive soul through the five senses. The senses are therefore a window into infinity, although, he adds, not the only one. (The imagination too can perceive infinity, although Blake does not say that here.)

Blake’s Devil then sets out the ideal relationship between reason and energy; energy is the eternal joy of life as it expresses itself in physical form, while reason, the thinking mechanism, is the “bound or outward circumference of Energy” (Plate 4). He means that energy, desire, spontaneity, and impulse come first as the spur to action and experience; reason comes later—reason can think and reflect; it can evaluate, and make distinctions and categories, but the energy of natural desire is where the joy of life is to be found. The prophetic Devil makes this clear in the aphorism that follows: “Energy is Eternal Delight” (Plate 4). This is a correction to the third error, that God will punish people eternally for following their energies.

In Plates 5 and 6, Blake turns his attention to his literary hero, the 17th-century poet John Milton, author of what is widely considered the greatest epic poem in English, Paradise Lost. First, however, he makes the point that, in a sense, those who find themselves subject to reason and restraint have only themselves to blame, because their desire is weak and easily restrained. It becomes passive and is only a shadow of its former self.

He then offers a deliberately provocative view of Milton’s epic about the fall of mankind. The true hero of the epic is not God or the Son of God—the Messiah—but Satan, the rebellious, fallen angel. Blake sees Satan as a spirited, fiery, commanding figure who embodies the kind of energetic desire that Blake lauds. Satan prefers freedom to accepting the dictates of an arbitrary, despotic God. The angels and the Messiah, on the other hand, are less interesting or exciting figures.

Blake takes the view that Milton’s poetry is better, more authentic, when he writes about Satan. When Milton turns to the Messiah, his poetic powers do not flow so freely; he holds himself back. As Blake famously puts it, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (Plate 6).

Blake’s view of Milton won some support from readers in his time, and in modern times too. Shelley, another English Romantic poet, read Paradise Lost in much the same way. He had almost certainly never read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but in his essay “A Defence of Poetry,” he wrote the following:

Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. [...] Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy.

The First “Memorable Fancy,” Plates 6-7

The first “Memorable Fancy” begins on Plate 6. All the Memorable Fancies are parodies of Swedenborg’s Memorable Relations. Blake continues his ironic usage of religious terms and his satirical stance. Still speaking as the Devil, he immerses himself in “the fires of hell” (Plate 6), which to the conventional Angels “look like torment and insanity” (Plate 6). For Blake, of course, this means that he is immersing himself in the fire of creativity and coming up with some “devilish” wisdom, including the following lines: “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” (Plate 7). These lines sum up much of Blake’s prophetic message in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His universe fairly throbs with joy, delight, bliss, the pulsating energy of life, and he wants others to experience it as well. As he later put it in his poem America: A Prophecy (Plate 8, Line 13 [Erdman, p. 54]), “Life delights in life.”

“Proverbs of Hell,” Plates 7-11

From his excursion into “hell,” Blake distills a collection of aphorisms, the “Proverbs of Hell,” which continue into Plate 10, followed by a commentary on the role of poets in the naming of the world on Plate 11. Many of these proverbs, as one would expect, extol the virtues of energy and desire; they all purport to demonstrate wisdom about some aspect of life. The promotion of energy and desire is suggested by “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (Plate 7), which seems to advocate the untrammeled indulgence of anything one might desire. But the proverb does not mean that excess is always to be cultivated, since it is excess that leads to wisdom, which could consist of balance rather than excess. This is stated very clearly by another proverb: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough” (Plate 9).

The statement, “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence” (Plate 7), is a straightforward warning about the danger of suppressing desire. Similarly, “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” (Plate 10), is a more radical formulation of the same position. The proverb “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity” (Plate 7) disparages reason. Prudence may seem like a virtue to conventional Angels (the religious people) but not to a Blakean Devil. This proverb supplies an example of the weakness of desire mentioned earlier, at the beginning of Plate 5. When desire is weak (a form of incapacity), it is easy to justify not pursuing it by invoking prudence—restraint, excessive carefulness—thus invoking the scorn of the Blakean Devil.

An object of hatred and scorn throughout Blake’s literary and artistic career was the Church, which excelled at telling people what not to do and explaining how sinful their desires were. For Blake, a church was a blight on the landscape of human psychology. One of the Proverbs of Hell, “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys” (Plate 9), lays out Blake’s unvarnished views on the matter. Blake was a pugnacious, outspoken man; he did not hide behind tact or diplomacy, or the need to get along with others whom he despised. Another proverb says, “Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you” (Plate 8), and in such cases, Blake was happy to be avoided. The proverb “Listen to the fool’s reproach! It is a kingly title!” (Plate 9) suggests pride in being censured by those who are least qualified to do so. Another, softer proverb, however, suggests the natural brotherhood of man and the whole human family that was an important part of Blake’s vision: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, a man friendship” (Plate 8).

More than one proverb emphasizes the importance of authentic individual existence. Everyone must follow their own nature and not take on qualities that do not belong to them: “The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow” (Plate 8). Similarly, but expressed from a positive viewpoint, is “The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow; nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey” (Plate 9). Since everyone is different, the requirement is to know oneself and be oneself. Then, there are no limits: “No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings” (Plate 7). A man soars especially when he cultivates what Blake calls “Poetic Genius,” or imagination. The eagle crops up again as an example: “When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head!” (Plate 9). The eagle, therefore, is a symbol of the Poetic Genius and imagination.

An important theme of The Marriage is the need for an expanded perceptual mechanism that will be able to perceive the true reality of things, as suggested by the proverb “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” (Plate 7). The wise man is he who possesses the fullest power of imagination. Some years after he wrote that proverb, Blake wrote the following in a letter to Dr. Trusler: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way” (Blake, William. “[To] Rev Dr Trusler, Englefield Green, Egham, Surrey.” 23 August 1799. Arizona State University). The difference in perception lies in the imagination, the creative power that transforms perception: “As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers” (Erdman, p. 702).

It is this expanded vision of the truth, facilitated by imagination, that lies behind the proverbs that show such delight in the universe, the workings of time and eternity, and the existence of the human race: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time” (Plate 7); “To create a little flower is the labor of ages” (Plate 9); or “Where man is not, nature is barren” (Plate 10). Readers will find their own favorites among many more of these proverbs.

Plate 11 presents an imaginative account of the degeneration of knowledge over the long course of time. In effect, Blake tries to trace the process by which the Devils, those who recognize the importance of the body and energy, were enslaved by the Angels, followers of reason and the Church. In ancient times, seers or poets cognized the essential nature of natural objects and phenomena such as woods, rivers, trees, and even cities and countries, and named them accordingly. There was a connection between name and object. Each object had, in a sense, its own deity, which was contained in its name, and the poets—those who had the most highly developed imaginative faculty—felt within themselves the connection to nature because of it.

Gradually, however, this original knowledge and understanding began to decline, and an emerging class of priests systematized it, severing the connection between deity and object. The gods became mere abstractions or ideas and the priests then developed forms of worship out of the ancient naming stories told by the poets. The priests used this system to gain control over other people and, in effect, enslave them in a system of beliefs. Eventually, the priests said that the gods themselves had arranged things in this way. But there was a steep price to pay. The vital knowledge that “[a]ll deities reside in the human breast” (Plate 11)—that it was the imagination of the poets that put the world and its deities into words, and that people have a fundamental connection to such deities that exists outside the bonds of religion—was lost.

The Second “Memorable Fancy,” Plates 12-14

Plates 12 and 13 present a playful and imaginative “Memorable Fancy,” followed by a description of an oncoming apocalypse on Plate 14. Blake’s speaker, who can be identified as Blake himself, has dinner with the two Old Testament prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel, and he questions them about various matters. They answer as if they were perfect Blakean “Devils,” confirming everything that Blake believed about poetry, creativity, and the need to expand perception. Isaiah, for example, says he “discovered the infinite in every thing” (Plate 12). He also sounds very Blakean when he says that “the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God” (Plate 12), which could easily be a Proverb of Hell. He also lauds the poetic imagination.

Ezekiel says that the Poetic Genius was the God of the Israelites, and the Israelites despised other nations who had different ideas about the gods. Now, however, the Jews have emerged victorious, since everyone acknowledges their moral code and worships their god. In saying, through his chosen mouthpiece, that the God of the Old Testament is the Poetic Genius, Blake affirms that this principle, which he would later call the Divine Imagination, is the most potent of all creative gifts—and true poets possess it in abundance.

Readers may wonder about the intriguing details that Blake presents about the two prophets in the final two paragraphs of this plate. Did Isaiah really go naked and barefoot for three years? The answer is yes, as he states in Isaiah, Chapter 20, Verses 2-4. The Lord commanded him to do so in order to show the Egyptians what their fate would be. (The Egyptians were later led away naked as prisoners, to their dismay.) This is a rather different answer than Blake’s Isaiah gives as his reason, which he says is “the same that made our friend Diogenes, the Grecian” (Plate 13). Diogenes was a Greek philosopher who was known to embrace poverty and often begged for his food. The historical Isaiah, however, could not have known about him, since Diogenes lived in the fourth century BC, about 400 years later than Isaiah. Blake, of course, cared little about such historical niceties.

As for Ezekiel, did he really eat dung? The answer is no. The biblical Ezekiel tells this part of his story, to which Blake also alludes, in Ezekiel, Chapter 4. Ezekiel is in exile in Babylon. The Lord commands him to make a model of Jerusalem, which is about to be besieged. The Lord then tells him to lie on his left side for 390 days, to represent the number of years Jerusalem would be held captive. Then he was to lie on his right side for 40 days, which would be the length of the kingdom of Judah’s captivity. He was to eat only sparingly, to symbolize the hardship and deprivation that the people of Jerusalem would have to endure. He was to bake bread using dung as fuel. At first, the Lord told Ezekiel that he was to use human dung, but when the prophet protested, he was allowed to use cow dung instead.

Blake is not interested in the historical details, however. He has his own purposes. His Ezekiel explains that he performed these acts because he wanted to raise “other men into a perception of the infinite” (Plate 13). This is close to what Blake’s Isaiah says, and it is a succinct description of one of the main themes of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake will return to it in the next plate.

In Plate 14, Blake reiterates his theme of the expansion of perception and links it to an apocalyptic event he believes will happen in the near future. He mentions a common belief at the time that the world would end when it was 6,000 years old. Creation was often thought to have begun in 4004 BC, so 6,000 years would come just a couple of hundred years after Blake’s time. Blake obviously thought that was close enough. He may also have interpreted the turbulence of the American and French Revolutions as signs of the coming end.

He takes his symbolism from the book of Genesis. After God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he placed a cherub with a flaming sword to guard the way to the Tree of Life. In Blake’s interpretation, this meant that a restriction had been placed on the human ability to experience the full value of creation. When the 6,000 years are up, however, everything will change: The cherub will leave his station, and the way to the Tree of Life will reappear. The earth will not be destroyed but will be seen in a completely different light: It will be “consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt” (Plate 14). This, Blake says—as he has said many times in this book—will come about through “an improvement of sensual enjoyment” (Plate 14). This expansion of the senses (by the use of the Poetic Genius, or the imagination) will come when the belief that body and soul are separate is seen to be untrue. Here, Blake recalls the argument put forward by the voice of the Devil in Plate 4.

He then makes an analogy between this renovation of the entire earth and his own art. His contribution to the coming awakening will be accomplished “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” (Plate 14). He has in mind corrosive acids, which he used to engrave on metal plates. The creation of one of his works, such as The Marriage, is thus analogous to the great moment soon to come when the full value of creation will be revealed.

Blake then repeats his leading idea: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” (Plate 14). This will be very different from the present reality, when men and women use only a small potential of their perceptual capacities. Blake puts this better than any paraphrase can: “For man has clos’d himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern” (Plate 14).

The Third “Memorable Fancy,” Plates 15-17

In the “Memorable Fancy” that starts on Plate 15, Blake presents a visionary allegory of the process of printing, and thus the entire artistic process, from the Devil’s point of view. The chambers in which the process takes place suggest the senses and also allude to Blake’s own etching process. In the first chamber, a Dragon-Man, usually taken to be a symbol of sexual pleasure, clears out from the cavern all the accumulated misunderstandings that have attached themselves to that aspect of life. The Viper of reason in the second chamber assists in the expansion of knowledge by adorning the cave “with gold, silver and precious stones” (Plate 15), which seems to illustrate what Blake stated in Plate 4, that reason is “the bound and outward circumference of energy.” In the third chamber, an Eagle “causes the cave to be infinite” (Plate 15). Once more, then, the eagle is a symbol of the Poetic Genius or imagination, creating infinite perception. The Lions in the fourth chamber are also symbols of creativity as they melt down and cast metals to shape the final artistic product. They then pass their work on to the “Unnam’d forms” in the fifth chamber, who finish the process and hand the books to men in the sixth chamber, who arrange them in libraries.

Plate 16 describes another scenario in which reason enslaves energy. The Giants were the forms of energy that created the world perceived by the senses, and they remain its animating principle. However, the Giants have been put in chains by “the cunning of weak and tame minds” (Plate 16), that is, those subject to reason, which likes to take control of the other faculties. In this plate, Blake has a new name for these principles. They are the Prolific (like energy) and the Devouring (like reason). The Prolific and the Devouring form two classes of men, and Blake says they should be enemies. They are part of the dynamic tension on which existence depends. The Devourers tend to overestimate how successful they are in restraining the Prolific. This is because the rational part of the mind can only grasp a small portion of life while thinking it the whole.

Blake also makes explicit what he had hinted at in Plate 11 (“All deities reside in the human breast”): “God only Acts and Is in existing beings or Men” (Plate 16). This was one of Blake’s core beliefs, and he repeated it many times in his later works, such as these lines from “The Everlasting Gospel”: “Thou art a Man God is no more / Thy own humanity learn to adore” (Lines 71-72, Erdman, p. 520).

The Fourth “Memorable Fancy,” Plates 17-22

The fourth “Memorable Fancy” is the longest. It is also the most playful and contains comic elements. Blake enters into a kind of contest with an Angel—someone who believes in all the conventional religious ideas—as to who is likely to have a better place in the afterlife. The Angel tells Blake he is bound for Hell. Blake suggests that they take a look at what lies in wait for them and see who has the most desirable prospect. Blake’s purpose in this “Memorable Fancy” is to show that reality is different in different states of mind and consciousness, which in part stem from the set of beliefs that a person holds. As he put it in his letter to Dr. Trusler, “As a man is, So he Sees” (“[To] Rev Dr Trusler”).

First, they examine the Angel’s lot. The symbolism of the journey they take is significant. The Angel leads Blake through a stable, which is not a good sign when one considers this Proverb of Hell: “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” (Plate 17). Then, they enter a church—another negative symbol in Blake’s view—and go down to the vault and then through a mill. In Blake’s work, mills often represent reason, as opposed to plows, which symbolize creative activity. They reach a cave, symbolizing limitation and confinement, and then a void. They look down on an “infinite Abyss,” over which a black sun shines. Hideous creatures appear, including huge spiders that pursue “terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption” (Plate 18). Then, a huge serpent emerges, called Leviathan. Leviathan is a symbol of evil in the book of Job, Chapter 41, and the book of Isaiah, Chapter 27, Verse 1. The monster, which is shown in the illustration at the bottom of the plate, advances on Blake and the Angel.

The Angel, presumably horrified by what he is seeing, gets up and goes away. Blake is left alone, and the scene suddenly changes. He finds himself sitting on a “pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight, hearing a harper” (Plate 19). Blake then seeks out his Angel friend in the mill, who wonders how Blake escaped the terrible scene. Blake tells him about the enjoyable experience he has just had and adds, “All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics” (Plate 19). In other words, it was an illusion that stemmed from his false beliefs.

Having established the benign nature of Blake’s eternal destination, Blake wants to show the Angel a little more of what he, the Angel, is in for. Together they fly on a fantastical cosmic journey in which Blake carries the Angel and Swedenborg’s books into the sun and clothes himself in white, representing some kind of illumination or purification. They then pass all the planets, at which point they leap into the void and find themselves back in the stable and the church. In fact, there are seven churches, which represent different forms of established religion. In the churches, chained monkeys, baboons, and the like are fighting and sometimes killing and eating each other. This brief allegory symbolizes the sectarian conflicts in which organized religions indulge. (The churches may be the seven churches of Asia mentioned in the book of Revelation, Chapter 1, Verse 4.)

The two travelers return to the mill; Blake carries a skeleton of one of the monkeys. The skeleton symbolizes Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, a work of reason and logic by the ancient Greek philosopher. The very word “Analytics” is enough to discredit it in Blake’s eyes. It is a dead work—a skeleton—because it is not animated by the Poetic Genius, or creative imagination. In Blake’s terms, it is a work by an Angel rather than a Devil.

Blake and the Swedenborgian Angel then lose patience with each other, and Blake tells the Angel that it is a waste of time talking to him, since his beliefs are mere Analytics, outdated drivel.

Immediately below this, the aphorism “Opposition is true Friendship” appears (etched out) like a Proverb of Hell. It suggests that in spite of his dispute with the Angel, Blake is being a friend, because by showing the Angel his errors, Blake is giving him an opportunity to embrace the truth. The Angel’s final words, however, in which he says his interlocutor, Blake, ought to be ashamed of imposing his own views on him—“Thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be ashamed” (Plate 20)”—suggest that the Angel is not yet ready to see the truth, in which case he resembles the man whom the harper sang about on that pleasant river bank: “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind” (Plate 19).

(In six of the nine copies of The Marriage, Blake deleted, or etched out, the aphorism “Opposition is true Friendship.”)

Plate 21 begins an attack on Swedenborg. Blake has already spoken disparagingly of Swedenborg in Plates 3 and 19, and his Memorable Fancies are parodies of Swedenborg’s Memorable Relations. In this plate, he shows his former mentor no mercy. Swedenborg, he says, has written nothing new and, worse, has regurgitated “all the old falsehoods” (Plate 22). Swedenborg’s mistake was to talk with the Angels (the conventional religious) and ignore the Devils, in whom real wisdom lies.

Blake suggests that Swedenborg’s works are inferior to those of Paracelsus (1493-1541), a Renaissance physician and alchemist, and Jacob Behmen (1575-1624), a German mystic, seer, and metaphysician. Behmen (Jakob Böhme, also written Boehme in English) had some followers in 18th-century England, and Blake read his work in English translation. Boehme may well have supplied him with his ideas about the necessity of contraries.

The greatest works, though, according to Blake, were written not by religious mystics or philosophers but by poets, and he singles out Dante and Shakespeare.

The Fifth “Memorable Fancy,” Plates 22-24

The fifth and last “Memorable Fancy” begins near the bottom of Plate 22. It features yet another argumentative (and sometimes comic) encounter between a Devil and an Angel. The Devil says that the worship of God consists in loving and honoring the divine qualities in men; for God exists only in men, especially the greatest men. The Angel is horrified and insists that God is a single being, manifesting in Jesus Christ, who gave his sanction to the 10 commandments.

The Devil (Blake in his familiar disguise) has little patience with this and calls the Angel a fool. He then takes up an extreme antinomian position. Antinomianism literally means “against law.” In Christianity, antinomians believed that because they had received the grace of God, they no longer had to observe the strictures of the Law of Moses as described in the Bible.

The Devil marshals an unusual argument in support of his position, claiming that Jesus himself broke all the 10 commandments. He deliberately goads the Angel with the statement “no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules” (Plates 23-24). This is in line with what Blake has laid out so far in his satire. Impulse is an expression of energy; rules are examples of the restrictions of reason.

From polemics, Blake switches to humor. Unlike in the previous “Memorable Fancy,” the Devil succeeds in converting the Angel, who becomes a Devil. He and Blake become friends and “often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense” (Plate 24).

The final “Memorable Fancy” ends with the aphorism “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression” (Plate 24), reiterating the antinomian antagonism to the belief that there should be one set of rules for all to be held accountable to.

“A Song of Liberty,” Plates 25-27

“A Song of Liberty” consists of 20 numbered verses and a Chorus that symbolically describe the political turmoil of the day and proclaim the dawn of liberty. Blake introduces some new mythological characters that he will develop more fully in later works. In “A Song of Liberty,” he does not name these characters but just briefly sketches what they do. The “Eternal Female” (Verse 1) (later named Enitharmon) is giving birth to the fiery revolutionary spirit, called Orc, the “newborn terror” (Verse 7). Orc’s first manifestation was in the American Revolutionary War (Verse 2), and Orc is now spreading to the countries of Europe. These include France and the Catholic powers of Spain and Italy, who are about to throw off, or are being commanded to throw off, the old, repressive order.

Notably, however, Albion (England) is “sick silent” (Verse 2), which can refer both to the American War and the situation in the early 1790s, when its conservative government fears and opposes the French Revolution. Orc confronts the “starry king” (Verse 8), who is an early version of Urizen, or reason (the word sounds a bit like “your-reason”), who has long exerted a tyrannical influence. Stars are a negative image in Blake’s works when they are associated with a Urizenic (reason-bound) universe that does not honor or even recognize the Divine Humanity. The king hurls Orc into the “starry night” (Verse 10), and Orc falls into the sea like the sun, but, like the sun, he will rise again. Then the king and all his cohorts fall (Verse 15) into “Urthona’s dens” (Verse 16). Urthona, unidentified here, becomes in Blake’s later works the eternal form of the creative imagination, whose temporal form is Los, but he does not carry that meaning here. He seems to be a spirit whose abode is deep in the earth.

The king issues his “ten commandments” (Verse 18) in a desperate attempt to hold on to power. The reference to the commandments links him to the Old Testament Jehovah and Moses, giver of the moral law, a thoroughly negative image for Blake. Orc arises, however, stamps the “stony law to dust” (Verse 20) and announces the end of “Empire” (Verse 20), likely a reference to the results of the American War.

A Chorus sings of the new liberation, in which priests—the reactionary forces of religion—will no longer oppress the “sons of joy” and restrict the free flow of natural human desire.

The Chorus ends with the ringing affirmation that “every thing that lives is Holy” (Plate 27), a declaration that resounds like a leitmotif in Blake’s works of the 1790s; it is repeated word for word in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) and America: A Prophecy (1793), the message being that life is inherently valuable and spiritual, and is not made so via religion.