William Blake: Marriage of Heaven and Hell Reader's Guide

2. Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Reader’s Guide

3. Key Details
• It attacks established ideas of right and
wrong
• Suggests that evil is really good
• It is a satire: of what exactly? It’s
complicated. It’s also a manifesto of
sorts.
• It attacks conventional visions of
heaven and hell – think of, for instance,
the image of a bearded God, or a devil
with a pitchfork and flames all around
going HAHAHA.
• Part of the satire is of a Philosopher
named Emmanuel Swedenborg

5. Swedenborg
Swedenborg sounds like a loon, but he was
taken very seriously by many, including
Blake. There’s a strain of Swedenborg in
early 19th century American religion that
has been retained in the modern church.
His visionary, mystic philosophy –
connected to Christian belief but
disconnected in its view of divinity – clearly
suggested to Blake the kind of
transcendence he desired.
He was sort of like an L. Ron Hubbard for
his day – mashing together parts of
different belief systems, inspired by visions
and near-occult religious practices.
However, by the time he wrote this in 1790,
Blake had largely abandoned Swedenborg.
Interestingly, the reaction happened
between 1789 and 1790. So this seems
almost like an immediate response, almost
like a South Park episode attacking a hot
topic a few weeks after it happens.

6. • Rintrah is a name and character
introduced by Blake. He has no
Mythological Precedent. In the
“Blakeverse,” he will later appear in
Milton as well.
• Think of this next section as like
Pilgrim’s Progress – Rintrah is sort of
like Christian on the “meek path”
• “Then” – a shift. This passage
resembles the Book of Ezekiel (a
prophetic book) where we see a
“Valley of Dry Bones.”
• Also, “Red Clay” is the literal
meaning of “Adam.”

7. • The villain?
• The serpent? In humility?
• Is Rintrah the villain? The Just man.
• Is the villain the enemy of the just man?
• Just go with it – it’s almost as though
Rintrah
• The framing repetition here (“Rintrah
roahs . . .”) is haunting

8. Because what this really is a framing device. It sets up a
parable. The just man has, perhaps, turned into the villain,
and become Rintrah. Meekness has turned into rage.
Notice the image, where one man reaches down to another –
are these the two men? Remember that Blake is into
contraries – Innocence and Experience, and now Good and
Evil. But Blake also wants to redefine the way we think of
these highly abstract terms.
The first plate gives an oblique picture of good and evil that
intentionally confused and conflates. Which leads us to…

9. Now we switch to prose.
Look! Swedenborg! Blake throws
shade here.
In Isaiah 34, there is a prophecy of
Israel’s dominion. Isaiah 35 is about
the redemption of the world (which
prefigures Christ’s coming)
“Without Contraries there is no
progression. Attraction and
Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love
and Hate, are necessary to human
existence.”
These contraries exist naturally, but
something springs out of them.
Good is passive, Evil is active.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. (Great!)

10. The Bible produced errors These are true
1. That man has two
real existing principles,
viz., a Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, called
Evil, is alone from the
Body; and that Reason,
called Good, is alone
from the Soul.
3. That God will
torment man in
Eternity for following
his Energies.
1. Man has no Body
distinct from his Soul. For
that called Body is a
portion of Soul discerned
by the five senses, the
chief inlets of Soul in this
age.
2. Energy is the only life,
and is from the Body;
and Reason is the bound
or outward
circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal
Delight.

11. Energy produces reason
Reason ruins everything
Reason controls energy
Even though
Energy created reason
Reason keeps us from the
“eternal delight” of
energy.
Is the devil the
same guy as
Satan, the
“fallen angel” of
Paradise Lost?
Well . . .

12. That image!
• If you restrain desire, it’s bad.
• People who restrain desire “usurp” it to keep it
from going out of control.
• If gradually over time, all of our desires have been
restrained, we become more and more passive.
We’re inured against it, as the energy weakens.
• And yeah, here’s Paradise Lost – he’s kind of
obsessed.
• (Interestingly, in Job, “Satan” is the “Adversary.”
But Blake’s translations would have taken this is
Satan.”
• Reason becomes a messiah. It’s detached, but it
can save us. Replace Reason with “Science.” Let’s
try that.

13. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, and the Governor or Science is
called Messiah.
It indeed appeared to Science as if[10] 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.
We often think science can solve all our problems. Similarly, “reason”
or “knowledge” can save us. But really what it does is harness energy,
or come up with theories to control it.

14. Things are “stolen” from the Abyss.
Think of Prometheus stealing fire.
This is what happens when reason
is the foundation for everything.
“When he prays” - John 14:16-17:
And I will ask the Father, and he will
give you another advocate to help
you and be with you forever— the
Spirit of truth. The world cannot
accept him, because it neither sees
him nor knows him. But you know
him, for he lives with you and will
be[a] in you.
In this scenario Christ wants to add
desire to reason. Think about the
Pharisees in the Gospels here –
living by the law, they’ve mastered
it. They’ve also detached
themselves from their passions.

15. BUT IN MILTON
The Father is Destiny, the Son a
Ratio (or sum) of the five senses.
The senses feel – and feeling
produces desire (or does desire
produce feeling?)
The Holy Ghost is a Vacuum (in
which nothing can exist?).
Remember Milton wasn’t a
Trinitarian. The Holy Ghost isn’t
really present in his work (we don’t
see a spirit interacting with
humans; just angels).
And then . . .

16. The most famous literary criticism about Paradise Lost. All the
volumes that come after it have to come to terms with this
statement. The point? The same many of you made when we read PL
– Milton wrote in “chains” about God and the Angels (who are dull)
because he was of “the Devils party without knowing it.”
In other words, Milton intended to make Satan the bad guy, the
fallen angel, the “archfiend,” but didn’t realize he was sympathetic
to Satan.

17. Interesting that this comes on the same page:
“I” becomes a character.
I love it: “As I walking through hell one day . . .”
Genius is torment to the Angels, who think it is
insanity (Christopher Smart anyone?)
He collects Proverbs. Returns home to the “abyss of
five senses”, sees a devil “folded in Black clowds,”
and he writes this phrase:
“How do you know but every bird that cuts the
airy way / an immense world of delight, closed by
your senses five?”
(Intriguingly that phrase is adapted from a poem by
Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide in 1770.
He became a romantic icon – the beautiful young
man who was too pure and perfect for this world).
Even though if you asked me to come up with a more
stereotypical name for an 18th century man, I
couldn’t do it. “Hortense Budginham?” maybe?

18. The Proverbs of Hell!
What is your favorite nugget of infernal wisdom?
They’re all counterparts to the Old Testament Proverbs and also aphorisms that
were pretty popular in their time.
Here’s mine:
Dip him in the river who loves water.
Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps.
Joys impregnate, sorrows bring forth.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.

19. Exuberance is Beauty.
Think about this one. It seems
obvious.
Exuberance is beautiful.
But, often beauty is a matter of
containment – think of formal
poetry (a sonnet), or “realistic”
art, or a garden.

20. Our author's work is a wild paradise,
where, if we cannot see all the beauties
so distinctly as in an ordered garden, it
is only because the number of them is
infinitely greater. It is like a copious
nursery, which contains the seeds and
first productions of every kind, out of
which those who followed him have but
selected some particular plants, each
according to his fancy, to cultivate and
beautify. If some things are too
luxuriant it is owing to the richness of
the soil; and if others are not arrived to
perfection or maturity, it is only
because they are overrun and
oppressed by those of a stronger
nature.
Exuberance is Beauty.
Here’s Alexander Pope
(early 18th Century)
writing in the preface to
his translation of The
Iliad, which he responded
to in heroic couplets
(iambic pentameter,
caesuras, very formal).
Pope’s point is that
Homer is too “wild” and
“luxuriant,” and it’s not
suitable for England.

21. Our author's work is a wild paradise,
where, if we cannot see all the beauties
so distinctly as in an ordered garden, it
is only because the number of them is
infinitely greater. It is like a copious
nursery, which contains the seeds and
first productions of every kind, out of
which those who followed him have but
selected some particular plants, each
according to his fancy, to cultivate and
beautify. If some things are too
luxuriant it is owing to the richness of
the soil; and if others are not arrived to
perfection or maturity, it is only
because they are overrun and
oppressed by those of a stronger
nature.
Exuberance is Beauty. Exuberance needs to be beautified.

22. Here’s where this is going:
Ancient poets “animated.” They had
enlarged senses.
They understood the “deity” of places,
things, and people.
THEN a “system was formed.” That
system enslaved. People benefitted
from this system. And as a result, poetry
changed, and men forgot that “All
deities reside in the human breast.”

23. Back to Swedenborg
Here it is:

24. MEN created a new order.
“They” pronounced that there was a new
order and it came from God.
And eventually “We” just forgot about the old
order. And we didn’t realize that we had this
“energy” inside of this. This “deity,” this
uncommon creative capacity to create and
feel.
Remember Blake’s “Newton?” Here’s what the Tate Gallery says about it:
In this work Blake portrays a young and muscular Isaac
Newton, rather than the older figure of popular
imagination. He is crouched naked on a rock covered
with algae, apparently at the bottom of the sea. His
attention is focused on a diagram which he draws with
a compass. Blake was critical of Newton’s reductive,
scientific approach and so shows him merely following
the rules of his compass, blind to the colourful rocks
behind him.
•

25. So from here…
He eats with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. (it’s unclear
but, at this dinner, Ezekiel may have been eating dung.)
He goes to a “Printing house in hell.” Sees a Viper, Lions,
“Men who . . . Took the forms of books & were arranged in
libraries.”
Sees an angel who tells him hell is awful, so they go down
there and first it’s intense (“a cataract of blood mixed with
fire and not many stones throw from us appeared the scaly
fold of a monstrous serpent.”
He wrestles with the angel (a la Jacob) and they end up at an
altar, where he opens “the Bible and lo! It was a deept pit
into which descended driving the Angel before me.”
The Angel ends up holding a book of Aristotle’s Analytics,
which “I” opposes. It’s an attempt to “analyze” the world,
which kills it’s beauty and energy.
And then:

26. This is from an earlier version than what
you read. You can see them all here:
http://www.blakearchive.org/work/mhh
You’re reading Copy I. This is Copy B.
“Opposition is True Friendship.”
This phrase doesn’t appear in most of
the copies.

27. Keep reading from here. More angels. More attacks on law and
oppression. More questions about where divinity lies, and how much
of it man can have, and what religion means.
And then a song of liberty, which concludes with “Everything that lives
in Holy.” Which it seems like earlier he challenged. But let’s end with
this. . .

28. Here’s Anne Kostelanetz Mellor on
this image, of Nebuchadnezzar, the
most powerful king of Babylon,
Israel’s great oppressor (remember
Daniel?)

29. Strikingly, Nebuchadnezzar’s fall is not because
of mania, but rationalism. He has attempted to
make order of the world and it has failed him.
He has used that order to oppress and now he
suffers for it. This image contrasts the “infernal
or diabolical sense that the world shall have if
it behaves well.” Rather, here is a man haunted
by order, rather it’s opposite.