Introduction: Blake and Milton

The relationship between Blake and Milton was complex and multi-dimensional - indeed, multi-generational. Milton lived a century before Blake (he died in 1674, while Blake was born in 1757) but that didn’t stop Blake from ‘conversing’ with Milton in his imagination or, as we’ll see, from Milton’s spirit itself appearing to Blake like a hyperlink between eras. As he told the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson in 1825, ‘I saw Milton in imagination, and he told me to beware of being misled by his Paradise Lost. In particular he wished me to show the falsehood of his doctrine that the pleasures of sex arose from the fall’ (recorded in Symons, William Blake, 1907). This seems to have been typical of the way that Blake’s mind worked, and how he transversed domains. Note the word ‘imagination’ in that conversation as well - a key part of this sort of communication, as we’ll see.

Milton probably influenced Blake more than any other single writer. As Blake scholar S. Foster Damon remarks, ‘Milton, in Blake’s opinion, was England’s greatest poet’ and Blake illustrated works by Milton more than any other author. These include remarkable visual designs for six of Milton’s major poems: Comus (illustrated by Blake in 1801 and again in 1815), On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (1809, and again 1815), L’Allegro and Il Penseroso (1816-1820), as well as his series of watercolours for Milton’s most famous work Paradise Lost (1807 and again 1808, and then again for John Linnell in 1822) and Paradise Regained (1816-20). In all, Blake made over a hundred images and illustrated plates relating to Milton’s work – a remarkable outlay of time, energy, and indeed expense (the fifty copperplates he used for Milton a Poem alone were not cheap, and Blake was struggling financially throughout this period, so it’s a telling investment of his life in this relationship). Clearly there was something in the work of the earlier poet that both fascinated and galvanised Blake, and through this intense imaginative and personal engagement Blake transformed not only his own work but also our perception of Milton’s vision and legacy, radically altering English literature itself in the process.

That nature of such engagements and interactions is intriguing in itself. What is going on? As someone who’s been deeply influenced by another author myself (in my case, by Blake - an influence that started when I came across his work as an undergraduate, and has been permeating my life ever since - ‘like wine through water,’ in Emily Brontë’s fine phrase), I’m interested in what exactly is happening through such encounters – why are we drawn to particular writers or texts, what are we looking for, or doing, when we return to them again and again, how do they affect us? Damon mentions that ‘the challenge of Milton’s ideas inspired Blake over and over’, underlying this process of constant re-engagement, perhaps like re-charging a battery, or deep-sea diving to discover more of what seems like a living text or a living coral – or perhaps it’s more like alchemy, a process of laborious but magical transmutation, a continual wrestling with the prima materia of Milton, clarifying it, dissolving it, transforming it, absorbing more and more of it and allowing it to operate on one’s mind and imagination, slowly altering one’s own vision.

We call it by a simple word, ‘influence’, as if that explains it – ‘Blake was influenced by Milton’. But when you look at it, the whole process of ‘influence’ is a rather strange and mysterious phenomenon - how we can be profoundly altered, affected and animated by another, separated in space and time - indeed, often by and through authors long since dead. The word itself has strong astrological and occult origins, ‘influence’ originally referring to a ‘streaming ethereal power from the stars,’ from the Old French term influence signifying an ‘emanation from the stars that acts upon one's character and destiny’. In Latin, influere literally means ‘to flow into, stream in, pour in’ – a flowing or wave-like phenomenon which in some ways resembles what Einstein called ’spooky action at a distance’. (Interestingly, Einstein came up with the phrase to describe the phenomenon of quantum ‘entanglement’, in which two particles remain connected even when separated by vast distances – another form of subtle ‘influence’ perhaps – and one which also appears to be non-local and non-causal in nature - as Blake seems to have experienced the action of Milton on him, at a distance.)

This link with astrology and the ‘streaming power from the stars’ is particularly striking in the case of Blake, as he himself illustrated the occasion when he suddenly felt the full force of Milton’s spirit actually entering his body like a ‘comet’ or ‘falling star’ :

Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star,
Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift:
And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enter'd there

As psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist notes, Blake’s depiction suggests an instance of actual neuropsychological experience, where the left side of the body is directly correlated to specific areas in the right hemisphere, ‘thereby gaining literally direct access to the right hemisphere’. ‘And so thunder-struck was he by the experience,’ McGilchrist adds, ‘that fortunately he illustrated the event’ (The Master and his Emissary). This embodied connection is of particular interest to this present piece, which explores the connection between Blake and Milton precisely through the physiology of the right hemisphere of the brain, that area which McGilchrist suggests may have been the nexus or portal between the two poets, the moment of communication.

However one interprets this moment of ‘entering’, it seems to have been an unexpected and in many ways overwhelming encounter, one which gave rise to both the birth of the poem itself, a work of revelatory writing and indeed re-writing, and which also involved a process of mutual transformation between the two figures, fused momentarily through this communion or sense of ‘ecstatic’ experience (and Blake deliberately depicts it in the form of a trance-like or shamanistic gesture of surrender, with the head flung back and the whole body seemingly in a state of excited rapture and openness. For more on this connection, see ‘Trance, posture, and tobacco in the Casas Grandes shamanic tradition’, 2023, where Myerhoff records ‘West Mexican Wixárika (Huichol) shamans adopting a “birdlike” posture (standing on one foot with arms outstretched and head held back) and standing motionless during trance.')

Milton a Poem took six years to complete and is widely seen as one of Blake’s most important illustrated works. Everything about it is unusual - even calling it ‘Milton a Poem’ – making the author of a poem the title of a poem, is unexpected, and draws attention to this aspect of synchrony and mutual interpenetration (an ‘interworld’, as Merleau-Ponty calls it, in which self, other and world are revealed as being ontologically interdependent). It also, through the same process but in reverse, suggests that poets themselves are kinds of poems, which can be reorganised and drawn upon, re-imagined, re-written - that nothing is fixed, or final, or dead, or separate.

Indeed the title ‘Milton a Poem’ might itself work on this double level: it can be read as signifying that the Poem is about the person Milton; or that Milton is a Poem, a figure to be ‘read’ and engaged with, imagined with, like his work. This will indeed be a recurring theme of this post: the process of how to re-write the html of one’s culture. Not only how Milton, for example, in Paradise Lost profoundly re-imagines the Bible - itself a work of constant self-updating, and reflexive exegesis - or how Blake in turn re-imagined Milton, but how all works of imagination participate in this vital and exciting process of constant dissolving and re-creating or trans-forming (as indeed, one might say, life does itself).

For both Milton and Blake, all true art and all true artists are necessarily radically anti-authoritarian, anti-author even, their business being (as Blake famously put it) not to be enslaved by another’s ‘system’ but to re-create it. Thus, in the experience of transfusion or inflowing which lies at the heart of Blake’s (poem of) Milton, is an interaction which, in Blake’s mind, transforms both the imaginative body of Milton (re-coding and ‘correcting’ his work), and altering Blake’s own mode of perception and his own imaginative body in the process.

Although Milton had died a hundred years before Blake was writing – or had lived ‘One hundred years’ in ‘Eternity’, as Blake nicely puts it at the start of his poem, deftly removing time from the picture - that didn’t stop Blake from conversing with Milton in his imagination, as we’ve seen, and indeed this ‘influence’ of the one on the other seems to have started early in Blake’s own life. In a letter to his friend John Flaxman in 1800 Blake recalled that ‘Milton lov’d me in childhood & shew’d me his face’, and as Damon notes, this connection ‘continued for the rest of his life ... Milton was to Blake’s poetry what Michelangelo was to his painting.’

Why Milton? Northrop Frye perhaps encapsulates the attraction best: Milton for Blake ‘represents an imaginative penetration of the spiritual world unequalled in Christian poetry’ (Fearful Symmetry). He was already regarded as one of England’s greatest writers, celebrated as a powerful prose-writer, polemicist, pamphleteer, public official (he served in the ‘Commonwealth of England’ governing structure from 1649-1660, when England was briefly governed as a democracy) and of course as a poet – of international repute even before his magnum opus Paradise Lost elevated him into a figure of enduring historical importance - and, sadly, into the subject of endless A-level examination essays, where since 1951 he has largely been interred in the educational curriculum.

Milton was himself someone of marked anti-establishment tendencies - in his prose works he advocated for the abolition of the Church of England, the execution of Charles I, the complete freedom of the press (including unlicensed printing of all works), and famously supported the revolutionary cause during the English Civil War. All of this won him both an army of detractors (after the Restoration he briefly had to go into hiding and some of his writings were burned) and of admirers – including later imaginative free-thinkers such as Blake and Shelley, as well as writers from William Wordsworth to Philip Pullman, whose wonderful His Dark Materials trilogy is named after a line from Paradise Lost, and who has spoken of Milton as ‘our greatest public poet’ (Pullman’s own work was, he said, ‘a version of Paradise Lost in three books for teenagers’, ‘Claire Tomalin and Philip Pullman on John Milton’, 2017).

But of these it was perhaps William Blake who was the earliest and the most powerful voice to recognise Milton’s extraordinary importance over multiple domains (psychological, cultural, political, and spiritual), as well as one of the first to illustrate his work, and to define the terms – the lens - through which we often see Milton today (for example, his famous ‘pro-Satan’ reading of Paradise Lost and of Milton himself as being ‘of the Devil's Party without knowing it’, thereby for the first time establishing readings of literary works in terms of both their conscious and unconscious elements and forces). We shall encounter these dynamics later again in the study of Blake’s reading of Milton’s Nativity Ode, which reveals a similarly divided Milton, in terms of where his actual sympathies lay.

Milton was therefore someone known as much as a public figure and persona in his day as a literary poet, someone deeply involved in reimagining wider forms: what it meant to be English, for example, explored in his influential history of Albion, Defensio pro Populo Anglicano in 1652 (‘Defence of the British People’), as well as his 1670 History of Britain, which included early accounts of Britain, popularising stories of King Arthur, Canute, the Druids, Lud, and Alfred), and how we should see and understand our relationship with publishing, with books (his Areopagitica remains one of the greatest defences of liberty of expression and an unlicensed press in the English language). What makes Blake’s engagement with this figure so unusual was the way in which he effectively hacks into key elements of Milton’s text and amends them, a process which forms the basis of his engagement with his Nativity Ode in particular.

Milton Regained: Blake’s Rewriting of Milton

Blake clearly responded to Milton’s vision very positively from an early age, but by the time he was writing The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790, when he was 33) Blake was beginning to engage with and indeed challenge many of his key influences much more extensively - not only Milton, but also Swedenborg, the Bible, Jacob Behmen, Enlightenment philosophy, the established Church, orthodox morality, and the education system all come under increasing fire and attention in this comprehensive imaginative process or program of reimagining who exactly we are as human beings and what is our relationship with reality. As Damon observes:

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake for the first time disagreed with his idol. His book may be compared to The Christian Doctrine [Milton,1655-1660]; but where Milton consolidated the old system, with important alterations, Blake demolished it entirely, and proclaimed a totally new view of the universe, incidentally suggesting broadly that Milton’s Messiah is really Satan, and hinting that the real Messiah, the tempter, is what Milton considered the Devil. But Milton ‘was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it’. (Damon, A Blake Dictionary)

Blake went even further in Milton a Poem, ‘a study of Milton’s spiritual development, an analysis of his errors, and an account of his relationship to Blake’ (Damon, ibid). As Johnson & Grant note, ‘in this prophecy Blake reconsiders at length his epigrammatic criticism of Milton's theology and artistic psychology as set forth in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Among the ideas in the earlier critique is that Milton's image of God is too rationalistic, his vision of Hell contains all the energy, and his conception of the Holy Spirit is nonexistent’ (Blake’s Poetry and Designs). These are all key aspects which will inform his treatment and re-vision of Milton’s schema in his Nativity Ode, notably its overly ‘rationalistic’ framework, as we’ll shortly see.

This ability to take on and amend the ‘errors’ of current systems is one of Blake’s most characteristic, and electrifying, qualities. Many might perhaps think this arrogant, or hubristic, but Blake has no time for those who meekly subject themselves to authority of any kind (even to an author or ‘author-ity’ such as Milton), and he moreover believes it a spiritual duty to engage with – to participate in and help transform – the visionary insights that we have been given. As Damon remarks, ‘humility is considered a great virtue in all authoritarian religions, as it means submission to the authorities. Blake hated it, because it means the sacrifice of the God within man, the sin against the Holy Ghost. Forced humility is spiritual murder’ (Damon, op cit.). This is also a quality, interestingly, that he sees in Jesus: ‘Was Jesus humble?’, he directly asks in The Everlasting Gospel (1818), before answering it:

This is the Race that Jesus ran
Humble to God Haughty to Man
Cursing the Rulers before the People
Even to the temples highest Steeple

- Blake, The Everlasting Gospel

Blake is not so much interested in the author as author, as ego (‘Selfhood’ in Blake’s terms), or in the reverence towards the writer or the old ways or the established Law - he is interested in the quality and truth of the vision being communicated, and when those visions and truths are as vital and extraordinary as Milton’s, this becomes an urgent work of imaginative optometry. He described something of this process in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, effectively setting out his modus operandi:

I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a cave’s mouth; within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave …

Imaginative perception, for Blake, requires this constant process – of clearing away, dissolving – getting rid of the clutter and accumulated ’rubbish’ and layers of deadening familiarity which obscure our vision of reality and who we truly are. As he says, speaking of his creative approach: ‘this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid’.

We are all both liberated and limited by our age and times, and Milton was no exception: while his poetry is filled with the most remarkable and revelatory insights into the human condition and the nature of the ‘fall’ that has happened within human consciousness, his work also betrays certain negative and regressive elements of the period in which he was living – a Puritanical attitude to the body and to sex, for example, a traditional and often misogynistic attitude towards women, and an unwarranted and dangerous elevation of ‘Reason’ as the central ideological function or ‘God’ within our reality. ‘Milton was a traditionalist in accepting Reason as man’s supreme faculty,’ notes Damon, and ‘in elevating Reason, Milton had mistaken Urizen for God.’ This was one of the central ‘errors’ which Blake hoped to engage with and transform, redeeming – to use perhaps an appropriate word in this context – Milton’s work and vision from these defective perceptual and relational structures. For ‘Milton's presentation of Christian mythology was perhaps more influential than that of the Bible itself,’ observe Johnson & Grant, noting the importance of this task, and drawing our attention to this constant process of how we often see reality through others’ eyes: we tend now to think of the Bible, for example - our images of the story of the Garden of Eden, of the tempting serpent, of a Paradise lost, of the Fall etc - through Milton’s work rather than that of the Book of Genesis itself, and in turn we often now read Milton through Blake’s eyes, as being of the ‘Devil’s party without knowing it’.

It’s a constant, necessary, process – the process of transmission or influence itself: as Johnson & Grant again observe, ‘Milton: A Poem is concerned with prophetic succession or how the role of a major poet is transmitted from the leading spirit of one age to the next, and how all people are influenced by the arts.’ I cite Johnson & Grant, they cite Blake, Blake cites Milton, Milton cites the Book of Genesis … it is not so much a process of endless disappearing lineages but of mutual inter-action and inter-dependency, call-and-response, and the process of transformation works both ways since the observer and the observed are not separate (either in time or space, in the moment of actual engagement and entanglement) but deeply entwined and interwoven. Works of the ‘past’ can be forever altered by subsequent perceptions of them; and this process allows Milton to ‘re-turn’ to Earth, to England, to the culture he himself once participated in and altered, to alter his own work – almost as if Blake is like a medium (through his ‘media’ - literally meaning an intermediate agency), working on and editing Milton’s spirit and imagination as it operates within him.

I personally think this is a neat idea: rather than simply ‘cancelling’ Milton, as might perhaps be considered in today’s rather dissociated, censorious, and judgmental climate – one in some ways as puritanical and hyper-rationalistic as Milton’s own - Blake offers an alternative, and surely more integrative (as well as far more imaginative and humane) option: we can personally engage with and revise, re-imagine, our ‘influences’, through creative acts - we can participate through imaginative processes of vision and re-vision, if the vision is worth saving, as Milton participated and revised his influences, rather than simply eject, disavow, or dismiss them. We can all re-code our cultures.

As Johnson & Grant observe, ‘the new Milton at the end of the poem is Milton as Blake reimagined him, a reintegrated and regenerated person at one with his better self.’ Northrop Frye puts this process even more eloquently:

Milton’s imagination was the real Milton, and a deliberate and conscious attempt to recreate his vision, as Paradise Lost was a deliberate and conscious attempt to recreate the vision of the Book of Genesis, is the rebirth of the real Milton into the imagination of the poet who makes this attempt …

When Milton reincarnates himself in Blake and Blake’s imagination is purified, Satan is cast out of both of them at once and revealed for what he is. He is a lot of things, but fundamentally moral virtue, the alternative ‘good’ of passive conformity which the world offers the imagination. (Fearful Symmetry)

This process of ‘reimagining’ or ‘reincarnating’ is the process which, I believe, not only Milton and Blake, but also Jesus himself (according to Blake) – the figure at the heart of the Nativity Ode – participated in, and indeed instantiated. It is, I suggest in this post, the fundamental activity and function of the imagination itself, and a revolutionary activity which, Blake maintained, we are dangerously close to losing in our increasingly fixed, literalised, authoritarian, deadened and dogmatic society.

Blake termed this deadening state of non-imagination ‘Urizen’, whose compasses define and fix in ever tighter ratios and algorithms the limits of what is possible. In his remarkable illustrations of Milton’s Nativity Ode, Blake places these compasses right above the stable in which Jesus (for Blake the instantiation of this imaginative process of release and vision itself ) is born – hanging ominously over the re-emergence of this principle into history. It is to the study of this Ode, and Blake’s radical re-visioning (aka ‘correction’) of it, that the remainder of this post now turns.

Milton’s Nativity Ode

‘On the Morning of Christ's Nativity’ (also popularly known simply as the ‘Nativity Ode’) was Milton’s first major work, written in December 1629, shortly after celebrating his own birthday earlier that month (on 9^th December, when he was 21: the poem therefore in a way simultaneously celebrates his own birth and coming of age - perhaps even his coming of age as a poet - and the birth of Jesus). There is indeed a curious, and intriguing, reflexivity and self-fulfilment about the whole process: Milton is celebrating the nativity through the poem but also his own entry into the cultural world, with the poem itself examining the universal or archetypal significance of the incarnation and issues of transmission and ‘prophetic succession’, as Johnson & Grant note. Blake took these suggestions even further, seeing in both Milton’s imaginative creation and the nativity itself the emergence of a deeply cosmic process. The Nativity Ode almost represents the birth of itself as a work of art – a sort of endless self-generating or self-inspiring process of coming-into-being or unfolding.

As Naomi A. I. Billingsley remarks, ‘Since for Blake, Christ is the source of artistic activity, if he conceived of this commission as a coming of age as an artist, then it is a kind of birth as Christ – Blake’s own realisation of the Human Form Divine’ (‘The Visual Christology Of William Blake’, 2016). One therefore has a sense that the emergence or birth of ‘X’ signals also the birth or emergence of the painting of the emergence of ‘X’ – emerging into or through this world, through the very process of inspiration. Perhaps indeed (as Blake so regularly embodies his work in the physiology of the human body and in particular the human brain), through the medium of angelic wings within the brain, left and right, enfolded and unfolding, mediating this emergence or nativity.

From out the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministry
The Eternal Great Humanity Divine planted his Paradise

- Blake, Milton a Poem

Blake’s engagement with Milton’s Ode is notable for three reasons: first, as a vivid and beautiful example of this process of re-writing, re-vising, and re-imagining a cultural text or code; secondly, Blake sees in Milton’s work what is potentially so significant about it (both it’s choice of subject matter, and the way Milton deals with it: Milton chooses, at the age of 21, to focus his imaginative energies not on some fable from the classical world, as was popular in the seventeenth-century, but on the emergence of a potentially new kind of mythos, signalling a shift in his own visionary mind which would eventually culminate in Paradise Lost); and thirdly, Blake’s subtle but trenchant critique of how Milton goes about doing this, and in particular how Milton ends up (according to Blake) basically presenting Christ as simply a new Apollo, another reiteration of the old deification of Reason: order, light, militarism, and dominion.

As S.C. Behrendt observes in his excellent study of Blake’s images here: ‘Blake discerned in the Ode a significant aspect of the intellectual and aesthetic development of John Milton, an aspect that he underscores in his designs. Signalling Milton's choice of a Christocentric mythology over a pagan one, the Nativity Ode itself constitutes his declaration of poetic independence. His act of choice constitutes his act of faith, in which the young poet-prophet invites his readers to participate’ (Behrendt, ‘Blake's Illustrations to Milton's "Nativity Ode"‘, 1976). That is to say, what Blake is interested in – and thinks or sees that Milton is also interested in - is the relationship between two different kinds of myths, two different ways of seeing the world: the imaginative or the natural (or rational), the Christo-centric, or Pano-centric, in Behrendt’s terms. We will explore this choice of perception, and what their implications are for us as humans and our relationship with the world, more later in the post.

But Behrendt is also acute in noticing that ‘William Blake's two sets of illustrations to Milton's Nativity Ode constitute the first extensive attempt at illustration of the poem and represent the fullest critical appreciation to that time of what Milton had attempted in his Ode. They present a critical reading of the poem which is both interpretive and corrective, and which sets out to liberate the poem from the errors of previous criticism.’ The depth of Blake’s criticism of Milton will become apparent, but it is notable that Blake’s treatment is both historically original – ‘the first extensive attempt at illustration of the poem’ – and remains perhaps the most trenchant and radical ‘criticism’ or ‘corrective’ of it. In an age where we are either outrightly turned off by the whole Christian mythos or else numbed by the familiarity of the Nativity scene - we hardly even see or pay attention to the legions of military angels, for example, either in the Ode or the many Christmas carols referencing them, amassed around the manger, ready to kill and conquer in the name of the infant shown asleep at the centre – Blake’s visualisations are both shocking and liberating, redeeming (again that word) the image from the suffocation of the orthodox framework in which these potent archetypes and images have become ossified and irrelevant.

The Secret Child: Blake’s ‘Europe a Prophecy’ and Milton’s Nativity Ode

Blake started to engage with Milton’s Nativity Ode as early as 1794, when he alludes to the work in his poem Europe a Prophecy, exploring the contemporary landscape (both inner and outer, psychological and political) following the French Revolution of 1789, which seemed to usher in not the promised new world order, but merely a repetition, in a new form and language, of the old structures of oppression and control. This theme of revolutions turning out to be simply that – revolutions - literally a rotation, a reiteration, another circular re-turning of the same underlying cognitive wheel (revolven, "to bend around, happen again, return; go over, repeat") lies at the heart not only of the French ‘revolution’ but of the Nativity Ode itself, as we’ll see.

Blake is asking, why did the revolution in France not bring about its promised ends of freedom, equality and fraternity, but simply another round of conquest, violence, and division? Wordsworth had captured that early promise, that giddy moment, when a new world seemed about to come into being, in his 1809 poem ‘The French Revolution, as it Appeared to Enthusiasts’ (later reworked as The Prelude, 1850): ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!’ It was a time, after all, he remembered, ‘When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights’. And for Blake that is the real clue: it is precisely the elevation of the purely Rational, the instrumental, the controlling mindset – in however glorious a guise (and Lucifer himself was the original ‘light-bearer’) that made the revolution simply another reiteration of the ancien régime, because underlying both orders was the concept of the supremacy of a dissociated and disembodied Reason, whether that was the old God of Reason (Logos, Apollo, the Platonic nous) or the new Gods of Reason of the scientific Enlightenment and the French Revolution itself, where a ‘Goddess of Reason’ was carried through the streets of Paris, proclaiming and embodying this new ideal – but in many ways vividly exemplifying the return of the old in a new form - a new version or upgrade of the old underlying program.

As I suggest in my book The God of the Left Hemisphere, ‘Blake’s critique of both orthodox religion and post-Newtonian science as sharing a common Urizenic basis (which I term R1 – orthodox Religion - and R2 – the age of Reason - to denote this common underlying structure to both systems) helps to explain his contention that both systems of thought, for all their apparent surface differences and antagonisms, in fact obey the same basic program and are expressions of the same power’:

For whilst religion and rationalistic science are supposed to be at loggerheads, symptomatic of a ‘two cultures’ divide, what they resemble more, according to Blake’s cognitive framework, are different versions of essentially similar systems—Mac versus PC (Apple Mac OS versus Microsoft Windows)—battling it out for supremacy of the left brain. Indeed, perhaps it is because of this competitive rivalry that the infighting between the two can be so intense. (Chapter 6, ‘Urizenic religion and Urizenic reason: R1 and R2’)

In his poem Jerusalem, for example, Blake draws our attention to the deep links between the two systems of thought through Urizen’s remarkable declaration: ‘I am God O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power!’ Urizen’s emergence and deification amongst many cultures as the powerful, ordering, dividing ‘God’ of popular religion is similarly alluded to by Blake as ‘The Net of Religion’ which Urizenic consciousness casts over the brains of men (The Book of Urizen 25:22). The figure of ‘Urizen’, with his measuring compasses unites both aspects, allowing us to see the nature of the dominant, and domineering, ‘God’ within the human brain which is running both systems - R1 and R2, religion and rationality, the old order and the ‘new’ order.

Blake sees in Milton’s presentation of Christ, as the central figure of the Nativity Ode, merely another iteration of this mistake: Milton ostensibly celebrates the birth of Jesus as a revolution, as signalling the end of the old era of pagan deities, of the old Apollos and Sun Kings, but in fact underlying this presentation and rhetoric are all the old programs and associations which sustained and generated Apollo, the glorious Sun God and god of imposed order, conquest, and militarism (with his narrow-focussed arrows and constant battles with the ‘dragon’ – the embodied world of energy, with which he is now at constant war, and which he always seeks to ‘conquer’ and triumph over).

Thus around the sleeping, tiny, figure of Jesus, Milton presents the vast array of military might that will actually ensure the continuation of the old system and old ways of thinking – of peace through conquest, the Roman concept of ‘pax Romana’, which is exactly the system that Jesus’ own teachings and life sought to dissolve and transcend, through concepts such as forgiveness, non-judgment, and compassion for one’s enemies. Instead, in this Nativity Ode, we merely have the appearance of a new infant Caesar, surrounded by his armed guards of cherubim and seraphim:

The helmed Cherubim
And sworded Seraphim,
Are seen in glittering ranks with wings displaid,
Harping in loud and solemn quire …

And all about the Courtly Stable,
Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable …

And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright

This is also why there’s such a surprising number of references to armed angels in many traditional ‘Christmas carols’ – led (or ‘marshalled’, perhaps one should say) by the new ‘King’ of peace – signalling the new iteration of the pax Romana program, of peace though conquest: armed peace.

Glory to the newborn King

God of God, light of light

Angels from the realms of glory

O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant!

Joyful, all ye nations, rise,
Join the triumph of the skies;
With th'angelic hosts proclaim,
’Christ is born in Bethlehem!’
Hark! the herald angels sing,
’Glory to the newborn King’

These angelic or heavenly ‘hosts’ literally refer to the army of God (in Hebrew, צבאות ‘armies’), who are often mentioned in the Bible in typically militarised terms, referring for example to their ‘encampments’ and command structures (‘Cherubim’ and ‘Seraphim’ denote specific levels of rank). Even the ‘heralds’ are military - from the Frankish hariwald meaning ‘commander of an army’, and the Proto-Germanic harja (‘army, war’), hence an official at a tournament of arms or messenger between leaders, especially in conflicts. This is the background to the Nativity story and Milton’s Ode, which Blake is now foregrounding - literally.

Even the wonderful circle of angels that Blake draws for ‘The Annunciation to the Shepherds’ illustration, on closer inspection, turn out to be helmeted and armed, with slashes of crimson red in the ‘light’ just to underscore the point:

The whole Nativity scene is soaked in these references: indeed, perhaps the best-known appearance of the Bible’s famous ’heavenly hosts’ is in the story of the Nativity, where the angel Gabriel (Hebrew גַּבְרִיאֵל, Gaḇrīʾēl, and Assyrian, meaning ‘strength, or stronghold’ – literally, God’s strong man) announces the birth of Jesus to the startled shepherds in the field: ‘And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”’(Luke 2:13–14). Milton alludes to these squadrons of God repeatedly in his Ode, and Blake picks up on this aspect, presenting his angels with helmets and spears, surrounding the stable. ‘Milton’s Christmas story has an epic metaphysical violence as its theme’, observes Ed Simon (‘John Milton’s Strange Christmas Poem’, 2017). ‘For Milton—and Christianity for that matter—Christ was coming to conquer. In Milton’s Advent, Christ vanquished the demonic pagan “gods that were suddenly destroyed in their own shrines”’:

The year 1629 [when Milton wrote his Ode] was an auspicious one: England was on the verge of civil war, and Milton would go on to become a propagandist for the parliamentary cause. The civil wars were precipitated by the Puritan’s desire to abolish the superstitious ‘Romish’ practices of the royal Stuarts …. what Milton presents is a strange meditation on the paradox of the implicit violence at the center of Advent. (ibid).

It is helpful to see this context for Milton’s poem I think, as a ‘meditation on the paradox of the implicit violence’, a context which also clearly fed into and influenced his later portrayal of the ‘war in Heaven’ in Paradise Lost, with Milton’s equally ambiguous stance there towards a victorious but noticeable remote and even tyrannical ‘King’ - Reason restored to its Sky God home (‘The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, and the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah’ - Blake), and a rebellious and energetic army challenging its right to rule quashed and defeated.

So too in his Nativity Ode, one feels that for all its superficial celebration of the birth of Christ, in ‘conquering’ the old gods, it is with these old gods that Milton’s actual imaginative sympathies and life lie:

The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
Will hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathèd spell,
Inspires the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o’er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
Edgèd with poplar pale,
From haunted spring, and dale
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

Milton’s remarkable sympathy for the devil here – for the old, retreating gods and goddesses – was I think linked to his subliminal recognition of the downside of his ideology of peace through conquering, and the nature of this new ‘Prince of Light’ he was ushering into being – the price that was paid for this sort of ‘Christ’ to triumph. The emotion is all with the faded, conquered old gods – indeed, the infant Jesus barely gets a look in (he finally makes an appearance, in this poem ostensibly about him, in verse 20 of this 31 stanza ode - ‘The Babe lies yet in smiling infancy,’ - and then is quickly forgotten, as Milton returns to his beloved classical myths, and his lively descriptions of ‘Th'old Dragon’, ‘mooned Ashtaroth’, and ‘sullen Moloch’).

‘In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.’ This is not so much a birth – a Nativity – it’s a Funeral. Milton’s ‘unconscious’, his sympathy, is with the defeated ‘devils’, with the retreating, mournful oracles and nymphs (‘he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it’, as Blake astutely saw). As in Paradise Lost, he’s meant to be justifying the ways of God to man, but ends up mourning the Devil.

So too in his Nativity Ode, it feels like an immense sadness that Jesus Christ is born – descended from heaven’s King – a descent which involves the loss of the whole animated world (‘The parting Genius is with sighing sent’). I think Blake’s sympathies are also with this disappearing ‘Genius’, and this is partly why Blake liked Milton so much – he was a fully contrary, if unconsciously contrary, writer. For in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake had suggested that this animated ‘pagan’ world actually was more in touch with our imaginative life and sources than the later, abstracted and rationalised, dissociated ‘deities’ which subsequent priest-based religions told us to worship:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive.

And particularly they studied the Genius of each city and country, placing it under its Mental Deity;

Till a System was formed, which some took advantage of, and enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realise or abstract the Mental Deities from their objects—thus began Priesthood.

And again in his early work All Religions are One (1788) he tersely observes that ‘The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation’s different reception of the Poetic Genius’. For Blake (and unlike for Milton), Jesus did not come to annihilate the Poetic Genius, but to release and realise it, to ‘correct’ or re-imagine the relationship between us and the living world, and each other, and between the human and the divine, in order to re-integrate the ‘Poetic Genius’, not to banish it even further.

Just look how Milton depicts the conquering of these old myths and gods, the triumph of the skies, the relationship between the new ‘god’ and the old:

It was the winter wild,
While the heaven-born child
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;
Nature, in awe to him,
Had doffed her gaudy trim,
With her great Master so to sympathize:
It was no season then for her
To wanton with the Sun, her lusty Paramour.

Only with speeches fair
She woos the gentle air
To hide her guilty front with innocent snow,
And on her naked shame,
Pollute with sinful blame,
The saintly veil of maiden white to throw;
Confounded, that her Maker’s eyes
Should look so near upon her foul deformities.

The language is of conquering, inferiority, submission, the ‘foul deformities’ of the defeated; of sexual sin, of shame, of guilt, pollution. God/Christ sends down ‘meek-ey'd Peace’ to allay (‘foul’) Nature’s fears, but the very descent of this sort of (imposed, from above, puritanical) ‘Peace’ is intrinsically dividing and brutal – Blake depicts this supposed ‘Descent of Peace’ as a sort of acrobatic, twisting angel, reflecting and almost uniting in its angular-winged form the Compass-shape of the stable itself, denoting this angel’s actual origins and attitude.

It is to be a ‘Peace’ therefore to be maintained through the presence of these sharp-pointed ‘angels’ and ‘helmed Cherubim’ waiting in the background, ready to get back to work, when Jesus finally falls asleep and they can continue as usual. Indeed, it comes as a bit of a shock to realise that in Milton’s poem these older ‘pagan’ deities are not simply de-posed and defeated - but sent to ‘Hell’ (‘Naught but profoundest Hell can be his shroud’, Milton blithely remarks of the newly upturned Osiris)– a reminder of how polarising and ruthless the new god of ‘light and peace’ could be, in this framing – the compasses, the moral dividers. Nothing has actually changed at the top (perhaps reassuringly for the existing leaders and controllers, who are invested and dependent on this sort of mental structure): it’s still all about conquest, division, power, judgment, and separation – simply a New Zeus, with an onward, Christian new army, its hour come round at last, as W.B. Yeats intimates, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

In Milton’s Ode, Blake can already see what is coming. The rhetoric (or ‘content’) is of a new reign, a new god, a new order - but the underlying framework, mental constructs, and programs remain the same – Urizen still rules, so no actual change or transformation is possible, only a future of perpetual ‘revolutions’, turnings of the same old wheel. And this is exactly how Blake presents contemporary Europe in his poem Europe a Prophecy: stuck in the same old cycle. The birth of Jesus failed to transform the world, but led instead to 1800 years of dream-like suspension.

Again the night is come
That strong Urthona takes his rest,
And Urizen unloos'd from chains
Glows like a meteor in the distant north …

Enitharmon slept,
Eighteen hundred years: Man was a Dream!
The night of Nature and their harps unstrung:
She slept in middle of her nightly song,
Eighteen hundred years,

Then Enitharmon woke, nor knew that she had slept
And eighteen hundred years were fled
As if they had not been

- Blake, Europe a Prophecy

Note the language here of dreams, night-time, and sleep. The sleep of Enitharmon (a figure we’ll return to shortly, she has similarities with the Virgin Mary) lasts almost two millennia – Blake here suggests the more sinister aspect to the soporific scene (recalling the ‘nightly trance’ phrase in Milton’s poem), deftly seeing in the ‘night’ time of the Nativity Ode a narcotic spell which simply goes on and on, no one ever really able to ‘awake’ or realise why.

History truly does become a nightmare from which we’re trying to awake, as James Joyce suggested. Things happen, get replaced, return - every time the promise of change, of ‘Yes We Can’, of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, of some new world order - but every time the same old Urizenic Mill constantly grinds away underneath, ensuring we remain bound to its wheels and algorithms (literally, its ‘numeral systems’). The ‘psychoanalytical’ aspect of Blake’s poem is further suggested by the litany of references to subconscious imagery and associations in his poem: moon, rest, unconscious desires … Blake’s Europe a Prophecy is itself a form of dream: Enitharmon’s 1800-year Cinderella-like ‘sleep’ state will go on and on until this underlying (psycho) dynamic is recognised and resolved, which is actually preventing imaginative awakening, and the deeper Urizenic structures and constructs (the mental compasses, the mind-forged manacles) recognised and replaced.

As Johnson & Grant note in their commentary on Blake’s Europe: ‘In the poem proper, nothing real ever happens’, just as in the last 1800 years the promised revolution has failed to materialise – all this time we’ve been living in a dream world, as Morpheus tells Neo (in mythology Morpheus is, appropriately, the son of Somnus, the god of sleep), with one revolutionary hero promising deliverance from it after the other – the English Revolution, American Revolution, French Revolution, Russian revolution Cultural revolution Velvet Revolution … Johnson & Grant continue:

The first third of the poem prepares for Enitharmon's dream, the middle portion recounts the current history of Blake's time as a nightmare when revolution is blocked, and the final section describes Enitharmon's awakening. This circular narrative structure, like the compasses in the frontispiece and the coils of the serpent on the title page, are reminders as Brian Wilkie has observed in an unpublished commentary— of the negative sense of the word ‘revolution,’ a re-turning of the cycle of tyrant and oppressed. … [indicating] that the birth of Jesus failed to result in revolutionary change but produced repressive religious and political institutions instead.

Instead of emerging from the Nativity construct as a genuinely transformative figure and agency, little baby Jesus remains smothered and mothered, swaddled in every sense, his enormous imaginative potential lost and immediately converted into the terms of the existing power structures, as Bruce Lawson notes:

Blake seems to suggest that the incarnation of Christ failed to transform society into true Christ-likeness because its meaning was appropriated by the guardians of orthodox religion—’the religion of chastity and war that Christian priests and kings were to promulgate in Europe for eighteen hundred years,’ as Tannenbaum observes: ‘For Blake ... the birth of Christ—as the orthodox have interpreted it—increases rather than diminishes the powers of the pagan deities. The old errors of paganism, along with the new ones introduced by Christianity, become a consolidated body of error’. Milton too, according to Blake, was deceived by Enitharmon's dream and thus celebrates in his ode militaristic order and chastity. (‘Blake's "Europe" and His "Corrective" Illustrations to Milton's "Nativity Ode"’, 1992)

This scene therefore heralds the start not of a new way of seeing and being but of 1800 years of the squadrons and virginity cults (symbolised in Blake’s illustration of the ‘Virgin’ Mary, and the armed guard around her) that were to spread and proliferate, in the name of God – often, indeed, in the name of the baby presented at the centre of the scene, whom they are purportedly ‘protecting’ and ‘conquering’ in his name.

Jesus becomes simply another reiteration of the God of Light/Apollo/Horus/Mithras template – the deification of the Solar Consciousness which constitutes the fundamental operating system of the left hemisphere, as I suggest in The God of the Left Hemisphere, and which Jung recognised in his linking of this figure with the rational, conscious, Ego: ‘such myths [as the ‘Creation of Light’] refer to the creation of the ego which is the light of consciousness born out of the darkness of the unconscious’, observed Jungian analyst Edward Edinger.

The Compass or the Imagination, the Left or the Right

Blake depicts this ‘appropriation’ and immediate conversion and subversion of the birth of Jesus into the old systems by placing him in a stable which, as we’ve seen, actually looks like Urizen’s compasses - powerfully but also subtly suggesting the nature of the basic mental framework or structure within which the re-emergence of imaginative vision and empathic non-domination occurs. As Lawson brilliantly observes:

It is Urizen's compass—symbol of bondage, constraint and darkened vision—that forms a subversive connection between Europe and Blake’s illustrations of the Nativity Ode. After once viewing the ‘Ancient of Days,’ it is difficult to look at the Nativity Ode design without being struck by the dominance of the compass angles which appear in five of the six plates. This diabolical shape also appears elsewhere in the Europe illuminations.

These compasses are the key to unlocking Blake’s illustrations. They are the golden compasses held by the Ancient of Days in Blake’s famous frontispiece of Europe - a poem all about this dynamic, this failed moment, as we’ve seen, and what is stopping it from properly emerging.

And they are also of course the compasses associated with Blake's Newton, ‘the paragon of materialism and rationalism that Blake abhorred’, as Lawson notes. They denote the limiting, constraining, and measuring of reality, reducing it to the measurer’s own narrow mental parameters, ‘limiting the infinite to the finite.’ For as Blake observed, succinctly contrasting the two basic modes of attention available to us (the imaginative and the rational): ‘He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only’ (There is No Natural Religion, 1788).

Interestingly, McGilchrist cites this passage from Blake in order to illustrate hemispheric difference, providing a useful neuroscientific interpretation of it in brackets: ‘He who sees the Infinite [looks outward to the ever-becoming with the right hemisphere] in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only [looks at the self-defined world brought into being by the left hemisphere] sees himself only [the left hemisphere is self-reflexive]’ (The Master and his Emissary). Reason discerns and measures the ratios of things: it constructs a virtual, self-enclosed system for itself, and then applies itself to analysing and manipulating this system. In this it can be magnificently useful, in providing a vastly simplified map of things, based on what can be quantifiably measured and literally seen – but it is, as McGilchrist has comprehensively shown, not the same as the reality and is in many ways a highly distorted and unreal model of what actually exists, and our relationship with it. But it is this program, which Blake termed ’Urizen’, which has dominated not only the human brain (for six thousand years he suggests - ie since the start of what we call ‘civilisation’), but which also dominates society, religion, philosophy, and perception itself - the very way we see the world.

However it is this unreal, representational (map-like, virtual) world which Urizen would like to keep us in – controllable, ordered, measured, ratio-nalised – and it is why the re-emergence of Jesus (for Blake) presents such a challenge for it. As Dennis Welch remarks, ‘in Europe the “crucial challenge to Urizen's compass” is Christ's birth (Tolley) … For 1800 years Urizen and his minions have been in power and the processes of liberation, initiated by Jesus' birth, have been smouldering’ (‘William Blake's “Jesus”: The Divine and Human Reality, Incarnate in the Imaginative Acts of Self-annihilation, Forgiveness and Brotherhood’, 1987).

Blake challenges the authority and dominion of this sort of ‘God’ or power (‘I am God O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power!’) within our brains, because it radically limits and distorts – shrinks - our perception of reality, erases the the sense of the sacred and the infinite (which can’t be measured, understood, or controlled by its parameters) and because it alienates us from being itself - from who we actually are (uploading us into its virtual, disembodied, representational world), destroying in the process our very existence as integrated, imaginative human beings. The process is perhaps most dramatically seen in the contrasting versions of ‘Peace’ which the Nativity Ode presents us with, and which still dominate how we see peace today.

The Descent of Peace: Pax Romana

Blake titles one of his illustrations for Milton’s ode ‘The Descent of Peace’, and this can be read in two ways. In the literal, surface, sense it denotes the sending down of ‘meek-ey'd Peace’ mentioned in Milton’s poem, to supposedly placate the recently ousted and demonised old guard of gods, including ‘Nature’ herself. But, as evinced by the way its angelic wings clearly mirror the restrictive, dividing Compass shape of the structure it's descending down into, it also suggests the degrading and corruption of Peace through this supposedly ‘new’ system – the hypocrisy of waving a ‘myrtle wand’ in one hand while armed squadrons patrol the outskirts of the stable, to denote what this sort of ‘Peace’ (one we’re all too familiar with today) is really all about.

In Jesus’ own time, this sort of imposed peace was known as the pax Romana, ‘peace through conquest’, which was the sort of peace the ancient world (eg the Roman Empire) was most familiar with. As Marcus Borg notes, the ‘first-century emperor Caesar Augustus was entitled Lord, Son of God, Bringer of Peace, and Saviour of the World’ and ‘for Augustus and for Rome, the title of Bringer of Peace, meant a specific form of peace: peace through conquest, peace through violence, peace through victory. This lay behind the famous and much-trumpeted idea of Pax Romana.’ Indeed, as he suggests in his book, The First Christmas; What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth (2008), the original birth stories of Jesus are on one level highly subversive in this context, deliberately contrasting and opposing the Caesar Augustus ‘Bringer of Peace’ symbol of the Roman empire, and a different form of ‘Peace’, which the coming of Christ for them signified:

The authors of the birth stories of Jesus deliberately challenge the rule of Caesar by applying these titles to Jesus, and offer their hearers a choice of kingdom …

Crucially, this choice of what sort of world was possible, and therefore what sort of figure was to embody it, hung on the contested term ‘peace’. Was peace to be achieved through violent victory over one’s enemies (the Roman way) or through forgiveness, non-judgement, and nonviolent resistance and withdrawal from the domination system itself (as Jesus seems to have believed and taught)?

In one way Borg is right: there is something potentially radical and different about the whole story of Jesus, but in another way he, like Milton (for Blake) can’t see a deeper similarity between the sort of Peace characteristic of Roman empire, and the sort of Peace characteristic of the Christian (Catholic) Church with its continual history of ‘peace through conquest, peace through violence, peace through victory’ – the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holy Wars, the religious conflicts in France, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Scotland, Holland, England, Sweden, Denmark, Spain - the Roman Empire simply became the ‘Holy Roman Empire’. The point is, this was not some unfortunate accident - it was written into the code of the Nativity myth from the start, with its patrolling armed angels, its attitude of triumphant conquest and glory over the previous religions, and above all by the equation of God with Reason in both systems. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, the angel Raphael instructs Adam that ‘the soule Reason receives, and reason is her being’, an instruction Adam duly reiterates to Eve:

But know that in the Soule
Are many lesser Faculties that serve
Reason as chief

‘Our Reason is our Law’ Eve, in turn, instructs the serpent (who perhaps knew better, and remains silent). This model of ‘reason’ as the quality that both differentiates us from the rest of reality and all other beings, defines us as ‘spiritual’ beings (reason as the ‘soule’ of our being), and the one that also underwrites the political system of control through which the God of Reason reigns, is made clear in Book X of the poem, as the fiercely militaristic and self-righteous ‘angel’ St Michael puts it:

Since thy original lapse, true liberty
Is lost, which always with right reason dwells,
Twinned, and from her hath no dividual being.
Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed,
Immediately inordinate desires
And upstart passions catch the government
From reason, and to servitude reduce
Man, till then free.

You can see where Blake gets his idea of angels as having ‘the vanity to speak of themselves as the Only Wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning’ – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake could see that this dissociative and divisive split between a pure, abstract, disembodied ‘spiritual’ Reason and the rest of the body – indeed the rest of creation – could not end well, and would simply result in continual self-suppression and self-division. Reason is not our pre-eminent faculty, it is simply one tool in the tool-box. And elevating it to a cosmic principle is like putting the domineering, judgmental, and often pathological and delusional left hemisphere on a pedestal.

Blake believed that there was a much deeper, more integrative, more compassionate, and more imaginative faculty or process within us, which truly was in touch with both reality and the divine, and he sensed that Jesus believed that too – indeed that he embodied or incarnated this way of seeing reality in a peculiarly intense and memorable way. Peace, Jesus suggests through his metaphors and parables, is not to be found through conquering but through loving one’s enemies, not invading them; through refraining from judging, through humbling ourselves not glorying ourselves, through seeing gently, and flexibly – a very different way of seeing from the imperial Roman way – and one which seems as far off now, in the age of internet trolling and highly divisive and dogmatic, unforgiving politics, cancel cultures and forever wars, as when Jesus first proclaimed it two millennia ago, in the Middle East.

And Jesus’s attitude towards peace was manifest not simply in the content of his words, but also in their forms. He did not speak in dogmatic statements or abstract precepts, he spoke in metaphor and parable - forms which, as Borg suggests, are invitational and imaginative, not prescriptive and literalising. ‘His parables were subversive stories’, Borg remarks, ‘they subverted conventional ways of seeing life and God. They undermined a “world”, meaning a taken-for-granted way of seeing “the way things are”. Jesus’ parables invited his hearers into a different way of seeing how things are and how we might live. As initiations to see differently, they were subversive. Indeed, perhaps seeing things differently is the foundation of subversion’ (Borg, The First Christmas).

Thus, in the ‘conventional wisdom’ (which Borg defines as ‘the dominant consciousness of any culture’) of his own day, ‘God is imaged primarily as lawgiver and judge’ – enforcing the dominant ideas of judging, of assessment, rules, and following orders. Jesus simply said ‘judge not, lest ye be judged’ , thereby eradicating in one brief line the whole import of the Book of Genesis. As Damon rematks:

‘Judge not’ (Matt vii:1) reverses the serpent’s ‘Ye shall be as gods [judges], knowing good and evil’ (Gen iii:5) … Our heavenly Father does not judge: he gives his sun and rain impartially to the good and evil; we should imitate him (Matt v:45–48; On Dante, K 785).

In the statement recorded in John 8:7 ( ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’) Jesus effectively annihilates the basis of both the conventional legal and judicial systems, moreover implying that God is not interested in judging either - ‘he gives his sun and rain impartially to the good and evil’ – again, a teaching which dissolves virtually every religious teaching or moral system, which are all based on Urizen’s compasses - on systems of division (good/evil), judgement, rule from above, control, measurement, and comparison. None of that is important, suggests Jesus - what is important is how we treat each other, how we relate, and how we participate in the divine, which is everywhere.

As a teacher of wisdom, Jesus was not primarily a teacher of information (what to believe) or morals (how to behave), but a teacher of a way or path of transformation. A way of transformation from what to what? From a life of conventional wisdom to a life centred in God. (Borg, op cit.)

While Urizen’s explicit ideology, like that of Augustus Caesar or the orthodox Church, is therefore one of harmony and peace, this is achieved and formulated through the old ideas of uniformity and homogeneity, laws and orders – a ‘peace’ achieved by making everything the same, and making everyone worship the same thing.

Lo! I unfold my darkness: and on
This rock, place with strong hand the Book
Of eternal brass, written in my solitude.

One command, one joy one desire,
One curse, one weight, one measure
One King, one God, one Law.

This is from Blake’s ‘Book of Urizen’ – and books themselves are for Blake always problematic entities, associated with this sort of slavish, learning-by-rote, rationalistic, passive thinking and seeing – which is partly why he tried to make his own illuminated works as diverse (‘particular’), idiosyncratic and unexpected as possible – reading one of Blake’s printed books is more like passing through some fantastical garden, in which if you look back at a flower or plant it has already slightly changed colour or form, than say going into a library.

To sum up: Blake sees the Nativity not as an isolated event in history, as something having occurred once, 1800 years ago, but as a defining template for those ensuing millennia: as Billingsley remarks, ‘The poem [Europe] is a commentary on the contemporaneous situation in Europe, recast as a universal narrative which parodies Milton’s Nativity Ode. It begins with the descent into the world of ‘the secret child’ (3:2), who represents both Christ and Orc, inaugurating the possibility of the world being restored to life. However, for eighteen-hundred years, the true meaning of this ‘secret child’ had been perverted; at the end of Europe, Los rallies his sons to overturn this degenerate state. Thus, The Ancient of Days is an anti-icon to the ‘secret child’ Christ, the terrifying embodiment of the consequences of a worldview governed by Urizenic Reason rather than Christ-like Imagination’ (op cit.).

Blake understands the underlying codes operating behind Milton’s poem: that this is the birth of the figure who would later become the oppressive Messiah of Reason of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and indeed the modern Church, whose kingdom is based not on poverty or forgiveness of enemies but on military strength, the ejection of enemies, and the demonisation of anyone who disagrees.

The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, and the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah.

And the original Archangel, or possessor of the command of the Heavenly Host, is call’d the Devil or Satan, and his children are call’d Sin and Death. But in the Book of Job, Milton’s Messiah is called Satan. For this history has been adopted by both parties.

It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out; but the Devil’s account is, that the Messiah fell, and formed a Heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.

Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

- Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Birth of Jesus and the Right Hemisphere

We are already perhaps beginning to see what an unusual figure Jesus was in the conventional wisdom and domination systems of his own time, and how he aligns himself not with rationalistic, priestly, or dogmatic modes of being, seeing, or talking but with metaphorical, imaginative, and culturally subversive ones. And that he saw his own life, or ministry, in terms of re-writing the code of his culture (‘Ye have heard that it was said … But I say unto you’ ), just as Blake is re-writing his.

In this, both Jesus’s and Blake’s work draw heavily on what we now know about the ‘right hemisphere’ of the brain, and it is this connection between the figure of Jesus (or at least Blake’s image of Jesus), and the right hemisphere which is perhaps most startling and revelatory.

In this final section I will therefore explore a number of aspects which demonstrate this connection, which are also ones that are found, interestingly enough, in both Milton’s Nativity Ode and in traditional depictions of the birth or emergence into this world of Jesus. The Nativity image or scene contains or holds two possibilities, two worlds, two ways of seeing and being, and we are being presented in a sense with a choice: which one do we chose to operate and incarnate within ourselves, and why.

i. The Stable of the Heart

Blake’s illustration of the Nativity scene follows Milton (and the gospel of the Luke) in imaging the birth of Jesus in a humble manger (‘And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn’ – Luke 2:7). As Borg notes:

There are ‘no swaddling clothes, no stable, no manger, no angels singing, no shepherds’ in Matthew, Mark or John. Luke adds them to emphasise ideas of the dispossessed and lowly – a different kind of ‘kingdom’. (The First Christmas).

This whole scene therefore is a construct, a code, there to suggest ways of seeing the nature of the divine, and perhaps a new way of seeing this ‘birth’ – not in terms of palaces, thrones, and imperial kingdoms, but rather of the divine merging out of something unexpected, something lowly, mundane, humble.

But as with all things in the Nativity ode, that word ‘humble’ (as with the word ‘peace’) can be taken in two different and opposing ways: the way that Urizen (the current domination system) takes it, as signifying obedience, deference to authority, and knowing your place – amongst the cattle and the hay: in ‘a lowly cattle shed,’ ‘with the poor, and meek, and lowly’ . And just to make the implications of the Nativity Message explicit, the traditional carol enjoins us: ‘Christian children all must be / Mild, obedient, good as He.’ That is: be a good little boy, like baby Jesus, and Obey your Mum’ (deftly bypassing what Jesus actually said about his mother).

But there is also another way we can understand the image of humility, which is more in line with how the right hemisphere functions and sees the world, in terms of surrender and mutual interdependency. Whereas ‘the left hemisphere is competitive,’ notes McGilchrist, ‘and its concern, its prime motivation, is power’, the right hemisphere ‘pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation’.

Indeed, as the recent psychoanalytic work of work of Wooodcock, Wilson, and Sinha suggests, humility is a quality that emerges in interactions with others: it is what allows the self to ‘pay attention’ to the reality of this ‘other’. The paradoxes of humility therefore works both ways: the left hemisphere, by making itself ‘powerful’ in relation to its environment by manipulating it, also deprives itself of essential connection with it, and becomes ultimately ‘impotent’ and self-referring; the right brain, by being strongly relational and less egoic, more self-effacing and humble, paradoxically expands, grounds, and strengthens its sense of relationship with reality. As Jesus put it, ‘whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it’ (Luke 17: 33), thereby placing humility and receptivity at the heart of personal redemption. Jesus’s sayings often draw on a profound understanding of right hemisphere ways of seeing and knowing in which the first shall be last, the meek the truly blessed, and the poor the truly wealthy.

This form of humility is also intimately interconnected with empathy, and creativity - again qualities that we find in Blake’s understanding of the importance both of the Nativity image and of the figure of Jesus himself. Just as Blake saw himself not as the author of his works but simply as a conduit, a ‘Secretary’ (letter to Thomas Butts, 1802) through which this much vaster and more mysterious process and agency was allowed to come through, to enter in – so too this ‘other-regarding’ aspect of the right hemisphere’s mode of being is radically receptive and open, allowing both sympathy, community and integration of all sorts to blossom. As McGilchrist observes, ‘the capacities that help us, as humans, form bonds with others – empathy, emotional understanding, and so on – are largely right-hemisphere functions’. The right hemisphere has ‘an affinity with whatever is living’ (whereas the Urizenic left hemisphere ‘has an equal affinity for what is mechanical’, such as the dead codes of conventional wisdom):

The right temporal region appears to have areas not only specific for living things, but additionally for all that is specifically human. Such judgments of ‘humanness’ are separate from the right hemisphere’s superior ability to recognise faces …

Because of the right hemisphere's openness to the interconnectedness of things, it is interested in others as individuals, and in how we relate to them. It is the mediator of empathic identification. (The Master and his Emissary)

These are all traits which Blake strongly associates with the figure of Jesus, who he sees as embodying, and living out, all of these qualities in a peculiarly profound and moving way. As Dennis Welch notes, for Blake Jesus becomes an instantiation or emblem of ideas of inter-action and inter-dependency, selfless love, and self-sacrifice: ‘These relationships constitute the Body of Imagination, which literally becomes incarnate … where Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love appear as the “human heart,” the “human face,” and “the human dress”, and in this Blake is following the example of Christ, whose Incarnation was a continuous self-annihilation - a form of dying into life, becoming one with it and realizing his identity through it’:

According to Blake's mature vision, then, ultimate reality is both human and divine, encompassing space and time, infinity and eternity. This reality, which he calls 'Jesus,' is incarnate in the imaginative acts of self-annihilation, forgiveness, and brotherhood.

Being born in a stable, in a living context directly relating him to the animals, the shepherds (‘an affinity with whatever is living’), and in a relationship of profound care and mutual entanglement (the infant-mother image), all suggest and evoke inter-dependency, self-sacrifice, and a radical groundedness: the true sense of ‘humility’ (from the Latin word humus, meaning ‘from the earth’ – which also underlies our word ‘human’). Jesus emerges from a stable, a manger of the heart, a relationship, a bond, a living web - again positioning him at the centre of a whole nexus of right-hemisphere aspects.

ii. Stillness and Silence

The stable is also a scene of profound stillness and silence – one of the most touching aspects of our traditional Christmas carols I think: ‘silent night, holy night’, ‘O little town of Bethlehem how still we see thee lie’. A hush seems to descend over the scene, and this again points to a characteristic feature of the right hemisphere, which is that it is largely silent, non-verbal.

Both the Nativity scene and the right brain are places of wonderful, mysterious, stillness, silence, and darkness – ‘the secret still darkness’ which Meister Eckhart beautifully refers to in his Sermon on the Nativity (Sermon 1, often called the first of his four Christmas sermons). As I suggest in my recent post here, The Tao of Blake, Blake repeatedly associates the imagination (such as his figure of ‘Urthona’) with darkness, and rationalising ‘Urizen’ with Light, so to imagine Jesus as being ‘born’ into this world through the portal of a silent, dark, relational, and unexpected domain is both deeply affecting and appropriate.

iii. The Brain as Domain

Indeed, that this imaginative principle should emerge into the world through the brain is one of Blake’s most original and breathtaking suggestions. But Blake persistently locates the origins of these mental images and constructs, these powerful agencies and forces (Urizen, Los, Urthona, Enithramon, Jesus, Albion, and so on) within the actual networks and processes of the human brain itself.

If it’s unexpected to find the birth of Jesus within a lowly manger, instead of a palace, it is perhaps even more unexpected that the location of Jesus’ birth, for Blake, should be within the human body itself – but then, where else would the human imagination arise or come into being? Where else did the Nativity scene originate? At the start of Milton a Poem, Blake urges the inspiring muses (the ‘Daughters of Beulah’) to emerge and arise out of ‘the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministry/ The Eternal Great Humanity Divine planted his Paradise’, and to descend ‘down the Nerves of my right arm’ so he can write his poem.

Similarly, in The Four Zoas the figure of Urizen is repeatedly associated by Blake with the human brain, and indeed that is where he is located. Los (‘the expression in this world of the Creative Imagination’, as Damon neatly glosses it), who shares this location with him, specifically describes Urizen’s world as being within ‘the Brain of Man’:

I see the shower of blood: I see the swords & spears of futurity
Tho in the Brain of Man we live, & in his circling Nerves.
Tho' this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain.
Where Urizen & all his Hosts hang their immortal lamps

- Blake, The Four Zoas

This is surely extraordinary. No other writer in human history until Blake invoked the sources of their work in such an embodied, bold, or ‘internalised’ way – thereby also negating the need for any external authority yet again - any external deity, author, or source. And yet even in Meister Eckhart there’s an awareness that whatever the meaning of the Nativity signifies, the event or occurrence it points to is ultimately ‘within’. As Blake scholar Mark Vernon suggests, Eckhart offers a corrective to the way Christianity and indeed Christmas is usually articulated today. ‘Where does this birth take place?’, asks Vernon: ‘Not in Bethlehem, not in a stable, not around 4BC, not even from Mary, but primarily “in the very purest, loftiest, subtlest part that the soul is capable of”.’ The quotation, Vernon explains, is from Meister Eckhart’s Christmas Sermon, where he describes the Nativity as ‘the eternal birth’ – ‘because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature’, and Eckhart cites St. Augustine to support this reading: ‘What does it avail me that this birth is happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters’ (from Augustine’s Confessions).

Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature … We shall therefore speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us … (Meister Eckhart, Sermon One)

‘Our living bodies’, Vernon helpfully glosses on this passage, ‘are manifestations of our souls’, re-translating the rather problematic (in our materialistic culture) word ‘soul’ as psyche – an animating spirit, or source of energy and vitality within us, that which makes living things living, and as such fundamentally united with ‘body’ itself. As Blake remarked, ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).

This in turn takes us back to the Nativity scene as the place of embodiment or incarnation itself, which again relates closely to right hemisphere processes and functions (again there’s a curiously self-generating or fractal aspect to the whole process: the emergence of Jesus, or the Imagination, in an imaginative image or scene, emerging from the imaginative centres of the human brain, to transform how we perceive the world - including how we perceive the human brain and body of course.) As McGilchrist remarks, drawing these interconnections together, ‘the “lived” body, the spiritual sense, and the experience of emotional resonance and aesthetic appreciation are all principally right-hemisphere-mediated’ (The Master and his Emissary), and this ‘mediating’ aspect of the right hemisphere – and of the human body itself (an intermediary dimension through which multiple other domains also meet and are transformed – ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, ‘observer’ and observed’) is inextricably linked with not only our ‘emotional’ or affective life, but also our ‘aesthetic appreciation’ (our imaginative life), McGilchrist suggests, and indeed our ‘spiritual sense’:

Emotion is inseparable from the body in which it is felt, and emotion is also the basis for our engagement with the world … In keeping with its capacity for emotion, and its predisposition to understand mental experience within the context of the body, rather than abstracting it, the right hemisphere is deeply connected to the self as embodied.

It is only the right parietal lobe that has a whole body image. Importantly this body image is not just a picture. It is not a representation (as it would be if it were in the left hemisphere), or just the sum of our bodily perceptions, or something imagined, but a living image, intimately linked to activity in the world - an essentially affective experience. (ibid., italics added)

This is particularly striking in relation to the figure of Jesus, because one of the central aspects of the whole mythos of his life is the focus on incarnation – on bringing the living body and the spiritual sense, the human and the divine, together. Or perhaps one should say, finally together, again – after 2000 years of alienated God-in-the-sky Urizenic culture. The parables and poetry of Jesus were intended to bring us back to ourselves - and radically back to ourselves. He makes the human body the place of the sacred – the true temple, to use another metaphor (and one with perhaps appropriately physiological aspects to it). Jesus’ whole life, for Blake, embodies this embodiment, this empathy, this affective reaching out - healing the blind, the sick, washing the feet, laying the hands, touching, walking, etc – it is our estrangement from our bodies, he suggests - our dissociation - that has made us so unwhole, so self-divided – and he made its restoration and integration fundamental both to his practice and to his whole vision of what constituted ‘reality’ for him. Perhaps in the modern age the ideas of Merleau-Ponty come closest to this holistic vision of ourselves, as McGilchrist observes:

The concept of what may be called the ‘lived body’, the sense of the body not as something we live inside, not even as an extension of ourselves, but as an aspect of our existence which is fundamental to our being, could be seen as the ultimate foundation of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. (The Master and his Emissary)

Jesus radically brought these two aspects together - the fundamental importance of the body (‘fundamental to our being’), and the equation of the human and the divine – but he also saw that to live a truly integrated, embodied, sacred life, we must inhabit this ourselves in our lived practices, our parables, our permissions. Or to put in the crude way that it’s traditionally been put, he realised that he was the ‘son’ of god (interestingly, Blake was himself once asked what he thought about the possible divinity of Jesus Christ: ‘he said “He is the only God” But then he added—"And so am I and so are you”’ (‘Extracts from the Diary, Letters, and Reminiscences of Henry Crabb Robinson’, 10th December 1825).

For Blake, the idea that everything is alive, and animate, and sacred, including the human body itself, is, as we’ve seen, the original state of human consciousness, before ‘divinity’ and ‘gods’ started to get abstracted and projected outwards, slowly separated off and put into natural ‘objects’ (as in the early pantheist myths and stories of the ‘pagan’ world), and then - which was the really disastrous move - removed completely from both the human body and the living world: ‘Till a System was formed, which some took advantage of, and enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realise or abstract the Mental Deities from their objects—thus began Priesthood’. Jesus, for Blake, is merely restoring this original vision, reintegrating the bodily and the spiritual - and in the process making the need for any kind of priesthood, church, or religion absolutely redundant.

This emphasis on divinity as embodiment or incarnation is indeed one of the striking and unusual features of the mythos of Christianity, as McGilchrist observes:

The 2,000-year old Western tradition, that of Christianity, provides, whether one believes in it or not, an exceptionally rich mythos for understanding the world and our relationship with it. It conceives a divine Other that is not indifferent or alien – like James Joyce’s God, refined out of existence and ‘paring his fingernails’ – but on the contrary engaged, vulnerable because of that engagement … At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process. (The Master and his Emissary)

In many spiritual traditions, man’s alienation from the world finds expression in the concept of an alienated or abstract ‘God’. But an abstract and impersonal God, Blake maintained, is the invention of the rationalising Spectre, and is the sort of God invoked and adored by all Urizenic religions and philosophies, from the ‘Abstract Philosophy’ of ‘Brama in the East’ to Hermes Trismegistus and the Rational Logos of ‘Pythagoras Socrates & Plato’ in the West (The Song of Los). In many ways, the history of all hitherto existing religion, as well as of philosophy, has therefore been a history of ‘Abstract Philosophy warring in enmity against Imagination’ (Jerusalem, 5:58). ‘He, who adores an impersonal God, has none’, wrote Lavater; Blake noted this passage in his copy of Lavater’s Aphorisms and commented, ‘Most superlatively beautiful’. Blake similarly sees in Jesus’ teachings, metaphors, images, and parables, and even more so in his actual life (his actual embodiment) a very different sort of God, or sense of the sacred, which was primarily relational – even caring – ‘relationship’ being for Blake (as indeed for McGilchrist) an ‘ontological primitive’, part of the deep fabric of the universe.

I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related; that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things’, which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with … our world is what comes into being in the encounter between us and this whatever-it-is. The relationship comes before the relata – the ‘things’ that are supposed to be related. What we mean by the word ‘and’ is not just additive, but creative. (The Matter with Things)

Blake puts this is in rather less abstract or philosophical terms – that is to say, in rather more embodied terms, because he believes that it is only in such particular, lived relationships that a relational ’God’ exists:

Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine:
Fibres of love from man to man thro Albions pleasant land.
In all the dark Atlantic vale down from the hills of Surrey
A black water accumulates, return Albion! return!
Thy brethren call thee, and thy fathers, and thy sons,
Thy nurses and thy mothers, thy sisters and thy daughters
Weep at thy souls disease, and the Divine Vision is darkend …
I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
Lo! we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense!

- Blake, Jerusalem

Such a God exists within - ‘within your bosoms’. The plural is instructive: this god is not a ‘thing’ (to worship) but is experienced only through our interactions, our relationships, through the ‘betweenness’ of things, which is why Blake draws attention to the living relations which constitute its mode of being, the forms through which it is manifest: the fathers and sons and nurses and mothers and sisters and daughters, which constitute its gravity, its ‘fibres’. This ‘God’ is not an isosceles triangle, or a luminescent oscillating radiation, but ‘a brother and a friend’. As I suggest in The God of the Left Hemisphere:

Blake’s God is realised in and through the bonds through which humanity itself emerges, these ‘fibres of love’: the divinity is this mode of attention we give to another, ‘from man to man’, living on and through the empathic and imaginative communions that connect and move us …

Blake’s God is one so wholly different from those we have been brought up to conceptualise about that it requires some readajustment to realise that this sense of interrelatedness is in fact where the presence of divinity resides. Blake forces us down to the ground: to ‘the hills of Surrey’, to ‘the dark Atlantic vale’, because it is here—only in the here and now, and between ourselves—where living things can find it …

‘I am in you and you in me’: if this sounds like love, it is: Blake’s God is the ground which makes love—the interpenetration between apparently discrete objects in space—possible. Blake refers to this capacity of the universe, or aspect of it, as ‘Universal Love’, the constant unconditional giving of itself (Jerusalem); it is this ‘Universal Love’ which the Urizenic ego is also terrified of and which it seeks to belittle and limit.

Again, McGilchrist provides a helpful gloss on this, connecting the ancient spiritual traditions with recent neuroscientific (embodied) findings about the nature of how our bodies are intrinsically – ineluctably, physiologically – entangled with and related to the world, and he does this through the figure of another Christian mystic:

Here I think of the saying of Meister Eckhart: ‘God loves the soul so deeply that were anyone to take away from God that divine love of the soul, that person would kill God.’ And in another place: ‘God loves my soul so much that his very life and being depend upon his loving me, whether he would or no.’ In some sense God’s very existence, Eckhart is saying, expressing it, of course, in such a way as to create maximum effect, depends on loving us (as does ours on loving God). Could it make sense to consider that this union might even be ontologically prior to those that in it are unified – the relation prior to the relata? Love is a relationship. That would mean God and the soul do not produce, but are manifestation of, the same love.’ (The Matter with Things)

This would really make relationship an ontological primitive, and to make the universe truly a responsive, relational (mutually de-pending), and imaginative whole - an imaginative place to be. The opposing view of things is forcefully put by Blake in his poem Jerusalem:

I am your Rational Power O Albion & that Human Form
You call Divine, is but a Worm seventy inches long
That creeps forth in a night & is dried in the morning sun
In fortuitous concourse of memorys accumulated & lost …

So spoke the Spectre to Albion. he is the Great Selfhood
Satan: Worshipd as God by the Mighty Ones of the Earth
Having a white Dot calld a Center from which branches out
A Circle in continual gyrations

- Blake, Jerusalem

Or one could also perhaps put it in more modern, neuroscientific terms: ‘For the left hemisphere, by contrast, the body is something from which we are relatively detached, a thing in the world, like other things (en soi, rather than pour soi, to use Sartre's terms), devitalised, a corpse’ (McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary).

Man’s ‘Rational Power’ is not relational, observes Blake, but objectifying, analytic, fragmenting, and dividing. That is its strength, and nature. But it also what makes it wholly unable to perceive either relationship or imagination in the world, and driven to convert the universe of entangled beauty and response into its own cold programs of utility, measurement, power, and self-centred separation (‘the Great Selfhood Satan’ – those two words being always synonymous in Blake’s work).

Reason reduces this whole magical, interpenetrating, self-realising cosmos to a series of accidents and mechanical incidents (a ‘fortuitous concourse’) discoverable through ratio and memory (the accumulation of dead ratios), and what it sees is therefore an entirely desacralized, unimaginative, rational world – what the seventeenth century rationalists called ‘Nature’ – in which man is simply a temporary, natural, gut (‘but a Worm seventy inches long’) governed by use, power, survival and death – the inevitable perception of a hyper-rationalising, narcissistic mental program that has gone madly out of control. It was this vision, Blake believed, that the figure of Jesus came to redeem – to restore our eyesight and reestablish the living bonds which constitute the ground of being – that in which, as St Paul observes, ‘we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). As Dennis M. Welch nicely puts it:

Failing to trust the imagination, which prior to the fall united all things including God and man, Albion (humanity) allowed reason to establish dominion within himself and thus the world of experience with all its divisions and destructive strife was created … Because of the fall this means that the individual must reintegrate his mental powers, uniting and balancing in the imagination his reason, instinct, and passions … For Blake the Incarnation is a continuous process … that 'God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men' (Welch, ‘William Blake's “Jesus”: The Divine and Human Reality, Incarnate in the Imaginative Acts of Self-annihilation, Forgiveness and Brotherhood’, 1987)

The ‘fall’ here refers to what Blake elsewhere calls the ‘fall into Division’ (The Four Zoas) - that moment or stage of our evolutionary history when the Rational Power took control of the human brain (when the ‘Emissary’ became the ‘Master’, in McGilchrist’s metaphor) – and ‘allowed reason to establish dominion’. This moment, for Blake, is recorded in the Book of Genesis, the history or record of the ascendency of this new ‘God’ or dominant function within our brains and bodies (the book both recounts the ascendancy of this new agency, and is written by it – the story of the creation of the new world it now perceives, seen in terms of a series of divisions and measurements). The ‘dominion’ granted was not of man over nature, but of Reason over man and nature (now separated off), and Blake suggests it is still in dominion there, in how we see the world and our relationship with it.

iv. The Imagination and Jesus

Blake believed (as, intriguingly, so does McGilchrist), that imagination is the one power or faculty – the one remaining aspect of our nature, in Blake’s terms - that still resists the rationalisations and conditioned memories of our alienated, rationalised, self-enclosed, representational state, and able still to dissolve these accumulated layers of memories, ratios, and conditioned ways of seeing, in order to apprehend or ‘sense’ – and indeed to participate in - the wider imaginative reality in which and through which our own bodies and imaginations come into being - hence its ability to recognise and sense it.

Neither ‘faculty’ or power’ are very suitable terms to describe what the word ‘imagination’ points to, both being drawn from the functionalist and reductive vocabulary of the left hemisphere – it is perhaps better conceived as more like a fundamental operating system of the human body, a primary embodying – en-forming or in-forming - process or field. As Blake put it: ‘the Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence Itself’ (Milton a Poem), and ‘Imagination is the Divine Body in Every Man‘ (Blake, annotations to Berkeley’s Siris).

To form a mental image of anything is the root of the word ‘imagine’ (and the Body itself is such an Image, or Form, a medium through which other forms or images are apprehended), and those who early on were able to (Persian magh, ‘to be able to’) play with or manipulate such images (Latin imago, ‘an image, a likeness’, as in the Book of Genesis, where the human form itself is said to be made in the ‘image’ or ‘likeness’ - or which comes into being in the likeness - of the primary imagination) were called ‘magicians’ - the word ‘magician’ also being linked to the word ‘magi’ – as in the story of the three Magi (wise men) who visited Jesus at his birth, according to the Nativity scene (Matthew 2:1-2), and indeed to the word ‘shaman’ (Sinitic Mγag, meaning ‘mage’ or ‘shaman’). Alan Moore (the ‘self-styled shaman of Northampton’) has therefore written that magic and imagination are closely linked, both revealing (unveiling, uncovering) a magical world to us:

I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images to achieve changes in consciousness … And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a shaman … it seemed to me bindingly obvious that creativity itself is a magical process’ (‘The Mindscape of Alan Moore’; ‘Imagination, Magick & Art’).

‘Blake actually contributed to the idea of magic’, he observes. ‘I think that Blake as a pre-Romantic was probably one of the first people to suggest that the world of the imagination is a real world’ (‘The World of Imagination is Real – Alan Moore’). Coleridge, living during the same period as Blake although born slightly later, gets closer to the sense of what imagination is though I think – suggesting not that the world of the imagination is a real world, but that the real world is a world of imagination – and that we are intimately entangled with it, through every perception and observation we make:

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.

The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space. (Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII)

‘Fancy’, then, is what the left hemisphere is stuck with, and how it sees all forms of imagination – as just another mechanical function, to do with fantasy and making things up, in its terms – ‘nothing to see here’. The ‘Rational Power’ has no ability to grasp or sense how magical, subtle, or vast the primary imagination is - probably thankfully, as it would no doubt start to colonise and monetise it; all it can do is to ridicule and marginalise any discussion of it in its mechanical, natural, universe, as being something of an embarrassing and ‘irrational’ presence.

McGilchrist helpfully points us back to the true sense of what imagination involves – he is one of the few contemporary neuroscientists and philosophers who still has an imagination, it seems – and in doing so he explicitly refers to Coleridge’s classic definition of its capabilities and processes. ‘True human creativity is inseparable from the use of the imagination’, he observes, before drawing on Coleridge’s distinction between the primary and secondary imagination to suggest how deeply ‘fundamental’ imagination is within the cosmos:

The force, then, of the distinction he is making is that between, on the one hand, imagination as we generally think of it, the creative force within the poet, in human creativity; and, on the other, imagination as the fundamental creative force in the coming into being of the whole of the world as we know it – and we can know the world only as we know it. The latter he calls primary: it reflects its nature in our daily experience of everything, in our perceptions of ourselves and the cosmos, and he takes it to be primary in the sense that it affords our only mode of access to reality. (The Matter with Things; italics added)

Of course, this will all come as a bit of a shock to the left hemisphere mode of seeing, which basically sees ‘imagination’, as it sees metaphor and myth, ‘as a species of lying’ (McGilchrist, ibid.), as a not very interesting function of the brain that is simply involved in assembling fanciful bits of stuff together, in novel combinations, and whose prime use is to entertain and distract us – ie sees it entirely, relentlessly, narcissistically, in its own terms of power and utility, which is how it sees everything. It is also the mode of seeing, unfortunately, that our educational systems have hammered into us, as Roger Sperry, who won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his pioneering work on split-brain research observes: ‘what it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere’:

Experiments show that most children rank highly creative (right brain) before entering school. Because our educational systems place a higher value on left brain skills such as mathematics, logic and language than it does on drawing or using our imagination, only ten percent of these same children will rank highly creative by age 7. By the time we are adults, high creativity remains in only 2 percent of the population. (Sperry, in Neurosciences Third Study Program, 1974).

He pessimistically concludes that ‘our educational system and modern society generally ... discriminates against one whole half of the brain’ (Sperry, Science and Moral Priority, 1983). This educational and cultural program of systemic ‘discrimination’ against the more imaginative (‘our only mode of access to reality’) and creative right brain ensures that we remain fixed within the self-reflexive ratios and prison-like hall of mirrors of the bureaucratic, self-confined, self-contained, internally consistent, logical, Urizenic left brain. No wonder our culture, made in the image of the left brain, has such a problem with both the imagination and with the figure of Jesus.

‘My contention is’, continues McGilchrist, in what could be a literal paraphrase of Blake, ‘that imagination, far from deceiving us, is the only means whereby we experience reality’:

It is the place where our individual creative consciousness meets the creative cosmos as a whole. (It is no coincidence that the same Indo-European root, present in classical Greek, indicates both 'to know' and 'to generate or to be born.’) It is the virtual, re-presented world of the left hemisphere that is the deceit. Imagination is not, as it is sometimes conceived, the capacity to conjure the unreal, but, for the first time, to see the real - the real that is, for reasons of deeply ingrained habit, no longer present to us. It is not a means of placing something else between us and the world, but of removing the accretions that prevent us from that world's fuller realisation. To see is not just to register sense-data, but to see 'into’ the life of what is seen; and 'through' it to the greater picture that lies beyond it, is implicit in it, and makes sense of it in terms of the totality of experience. (The Matter with Things)

As the brilliant theoretical physicist Richard Feynman similarly observed, in this process of engagement with actual reality 'our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there’ (Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, 1992). ‘Imagination is the path whereby our eyes are opened so that we see something, for the first time, as it really is’, notes McGilchrist, ‘at least as close to what is as we can ever know. Imagination is literally creative: it brings everything we can know into being for us - and it is only as it is for us that we can know anything at all’ (The Matter with Things).

Blake condensed these sorts of insights into remarkably powerful and striking observations, criss-crossing metaphors to reveal the hidden relationships which for him underlie and underwrite imagination itself:

The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination, that is, God himself, The Divine Body, Jesus: we are his Members (Laocoön).

Man is All Imagination. God is Man & exists in us & we in him (‘On Berkeley’)

‘I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel’, he once remarked, ‘than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination’ (Jerusalem). This is an often-overlooked aspect to Christianity and its wider, or deeper, aspect and cultural impact: its astonishing source for multiple realms of imaginative inspiration and manifestation, which is where its real heart and essence, for Blake, lies. ‘You only have to step into St Peter’s, or Notre Dame, or Durham Cathedral,’ notes Jules Evans, ‘to see how central the arts are to Christian worship – an icon, altarpiece, stained-glass window or oratorio are ways of altering reality and opening a portal to the divine. Imagination was also an important part of Christian contemplation’:

The theologian David Ford compares Christianity to jazz improvisation. This makes sense to me. Throughout Christian history, visionaries have taken up the standard songs and stories of the Bible, and improvised new versions, according to their experience and the needs of the time. St Francis improvised a new song of poverty and love of nature; medieval nuns improvised a new song of erotic mysticism; African-Americans improvised a new song of liberation from slavery. (Evans, The Art of Losing Control, 2017).

It is, for Blake, the exploring ‘inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination’ (Jerusalem), which constitutes the living heart of Christianity, its spirituality lying within its aesthetics, its truth within its beauty. ‘Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists’ (Laocoön). This is a radical reading of Christianity indeed, but I think an intriguing and defensible one, and a beautiful and profound one – releasing it from two thousand years of mistaken emphasis on Logos, judgment, orders, dogmas, discipline, commandments, popes, rules, restrictions - all the rigid paraphernalia that ‘Urizen’, the ‘Rational Power’, had imposed upon it and turned it into - and returning it to the original, more shamanistic or magical meaning and being of Jesus. ‘The Eternal Body of Man is The IMAGINATION, that is God himself’, Blake graffitis in his astonishing engraving of Laocoön, ‘The Divine Body ישוע [Yēšūa] JESUS we are his Members’.

Why did Blake so identify or associate Jesus with vision, with imagination and creativity? Marcus Borg, the American Biblical theological and scholar, I think provides one of the best ways into this today: ‘Jesus’, he observes, ‘had a metaphorical mind’:

Not only did early Christians use metaphorical language about Jesus, but his own massage was full of metaphor. He seems to have had a metaphorical mind … In addition, Jesus taught with metaphorical narratives, that is, with parables. (Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, 2006)

Unlike Socrates, who taught in syllogisms and logically constructed formulas, or the Buddha, who tended to teach in rather abstract, purified, generalisations, Jesus spoke in vivid metaphor, in living words. ‘Apparently he valued this mode of teaching’, notes Borg: ‘more parables are attributed to him than to anybody else in his religious tradition’ (ibid.).

Even blunted by centuries of iteration and deadending church sermons, Jesus’s parables and sayings burn with electric life and still have the power to provoke and transform. His parable of the prodigal son is one of the most radical texts ever uttered (it effectively rewards bad behaviour, in terms of the Urizenic rationale and closeted morality of the day – and indeed of our day - conjuring up a vastly different sort of ‘God’ than the one being relentlessly promoted from the same pulpits by priests ‘in black gowns’, as Blake witheringly describes them and their death-leaning cult in The Garden of Love); his sermon on the mount, entirely rejecting the model of wealth, prosperity, hard work, and pragmatism, is so daring that few Christian ministers, as Alan Watts noticed, ever use it for their placid and soporific Sunday morning services.

And the gospels are filled with the most startling imaginative observations and metaphors for how to see and how to be, how to really see, how to really be: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin’; ‘Blessed are the poor’; ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’; ‘can the blind lead the blind?’; ‘render unto Caesar’; ‘the kingdom of God ... is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds perched in its branches’. And as Borg suggests, this way of talking or teaching was very deliberate:

Thus as a wisdom teacher Jesus used aphorisms and parables to invite his hearers to see in a radically new way. The appeal is to the imagination, to that place within us in which reside our images of reality and our images of life itself … as a way of teaching, the parables are invitational rather than imperatival. Most of them are invitations to see differently rather than stories that say, ‘Do this.’ (Borg, Meeting Jesus Again, 1994)

These are all key points with which to understand Blake’s own response to Jesus’s life and work. The emphasis is on actually altering our mode of perception, engaging with deep mental codes and constructs, ‘our images of life itself’ as Borg puts it – the way we’re told how things should be, the conventional wisdom of the day – and subtly re-writing or re-imagining or imaginatively dissolving them. It is the process of re-vision rather than di-vision, of imagination rather than compasses.

In both Blake and Jesus this re-writing or re-imagining seemingly operates in a way above and beyond rational consciousness (which is how Shelley observes all poetry, all imagination, works) - which is why the rational mind finds it so hard to engage with or to refute (as the learned and intellectual minds of his own day – the scribes and Pharisees of contemporary Judea – found). Blake noted wryly that ‘Christ & his Apostles were Illiterate Men’ whilst ‘Caiphas Pilate & Herod were Learned’ and left his readers to make up their own minds from this inference (‘On Thorton’).

Jesus’s mode of engagement is not to the hearer’s rationality but to their imagination, as Borg here points out. It is also Blake’s own mode of communication, as he himself was aware: ‘Allegory addressd to the Intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding’, he wrote, ‘is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry’ (letter to Butts, 1803,). Blake’s remark shows that he was consciously and deliberately bypassing the ‘Corporeal Understanding’—the rational and literal processes and programs— and aiming directly at a deeper and more complex world of meanings and relations. And he clearly believed that this was also true of Jesus, from whom he, in part, he seems to have learned this radical and subversive technique: the works of the Bible, and Milton, are so transformative because, he suggests, ’they are addressed to the Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason’ (Letter to Trusler 1799). He even brings in Francis Bacon to support him: ‘Consider what Lord Bacon says: “Sense sends over to imagination before reason have judged, and reason sends over to imagination before the decree can be acted”’ (ibid.). That is to say, the imagination – which, as McGilchrist has shown, is rooted in the right hemisphere networks of the body, where the body image and our ‘Other-regarding’ empathy is also located - is in direct communication with ‘sense’, with presence (as McGilchrist calls it – contrasted with the world of re-presentation of the left hemisphere), and that part of our brains and beings where embodied action also arises – to ‘act upon the decrees’, in Bacon’s terms (a point also made by Damásio in his 1994 book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, suggesting how reasoning requires the guidance of emotions and feelings conveyed from the body – our affective and imaginative systems – in order to act and even to think and decide. )

‘Jesus’ verbal gifts were remarkable’, observes Borg. ‘His language was most often metaphorical, poetic, and imaginative, filled with memorable short sayings and compelling short stories. He was clearly exceptionally intelligent … In contemporary terms, he was gifted as both a right-brain and left-brain thinker’ (Meeting Jesus Again, 1995). He was indeed a highly ‘right-brain’ thinker: as McGilchrist has shown, metaphor itself is a property, uniquely, of the right hemisphere of the brain: ‘Only the right hemisphere has the capacity to understand metaphor’, and ‘metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world,’ he adds, ‘because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself’:

Metaphor embodies thought and places it in a living context. These three areas of difference between the hemispheres - metaphor, context and the body - are all interpenetrated one with another. Once again it is the right hemisphere, in its concern for the immediacy of experience, that is more densely interconnected with and involved in the body, the ground of that experience. (The Master and his Emissary).

In terms of the visual language of Blake’s illustrations to Milton’s Nativity Ode, and his understanding of this deep metaphorical event as occurring within the brain and body of man, suggesting the birth or re-birth, at least potentially, of a wholly different kind of seeing and way of relating, through its imaginative figure of ‘Jesus’, we can perhaps also see the scene as both set and setting - visualising, in metaphorical form, the domain of metaphor and imagination itself.

Because where do these metaphors take place, within the human body? They arise within the human form itself – which is also perhaps a form of metaphor, or ‘likeness’. This, for me, relates it to the unexpected, ‘lowly’, dark, silent aspects of the Nativity scene, which we have touched on in this post – all aspects of the right hemisphere. Critics of neuroscience often complain (many times rightly) that to bring consciousness and mind ‘down’ to the level of material networks and processes is somehow a dreadful reduction and misunderstanding. But then, that’s only if one already has an impoverished and reductive view or model (metaphor) of what one thinks the ‘body’ is to begin with. ‘Materialists,’ notes McGilchrist, ‘are not people who overvalue, but who undervalue, matter’ (The Master and his Emissary).

To see the right hemisphere of the human body as the scene through which Jesus is born, continually (‘From out the Portals of my Brain’; ‘the eternal birth’) – as, I hope I have suggested here Blake seems to have done – is hardly a reductive exercise, and in fact opens up the human body to that sort of extraordinary, magically-infused, dimension of awareness and perception which Blake believed 6,000 years of civilised, rational thinking and oppression had shrivelled, distorted, and occluded – an act of imaginative clearing out of the stables, an expansive re-visioning and restoring of sight, so that the metaphorical blinded can now see.