The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  By the time Ann’s skeletal remains were exhumed fifty-six years later to see if she was actually inside her coffin, the Shaker community had more than six thousand members living in nineteen different settlements. This was to be the movement’s high-water mark. In 1863, midway through the Civil War, President Lincoln, in recognition of their pacifist views, exempted them from combat, making them history’s first official conscientious objectors. But gradually, what many people saw as the big drawback of Shakerism—the insistence on celibacy—led to a slow decline in converts. In 1965 they voted to accept no new members. Today there are only three Shakers left, in the last Shaker settlement at Sabbathday Lake, near New Gloucester in Maine. They have the distinction of being America’s smallest religious or ethnic minority.

  For all Ann Lee’s strangeness, her emphasis on equality for all—particularly women—and a democracy based on social justice and religious tolerance were well ahead of their time. Her view of life after death, like everything else, was bracingly clear: Give up sex—the curse that had afflicted humanity since Adam and Eve—and you would be saved. As she had seen hell and could describe it in detail, who would dare risk not believing her?

  Another regular visitor to hell was the English poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827). Unlike Ann Lee’s hideous vale of torments, Blake’s hell, though the opposite of heaven, was its equal—and every bit as necessary:

  Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.

  These insights are from his visionary work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, published in 1790. Unlike Ann Lee, Blake didn’t descend into hell like an eagle; he sauntered around it like a tourist: “As I was walking among the fires of hell… I collected some of their Proverbs….” Just as the proverbs of different countries give a clue to their character, so the “Proverbs of Hell” would provide a better idea of the place than describing what the locals were wearing, if anything. The bits of “infernal wisdom” he collected there would have appalled Ann Lee:

  “The nakedness of woman is the work of God.”

  “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”

  “Damn braces: Bless relaxs.”

  “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

  Blake was a favorite of the Beat poets of the 1950s and the hippy movement of the 1960s. For him, full expression of sexuality—for both men and women—was an essential part of worship. The spirit and flesh were one; Blake had no time for the concept of sin or for the denial of passion. In his notes on his (now lost) painting A Vision of the Last Judgment (1810) he writes:

  Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings.

  To Blake, the afterlife was neither remote nor frightening. In a letter to his patron and collaborator (the wealthy and popular writer William Hayley) in 1800, Blake comforted him on the loss of his young son:

  I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate.

  Blake’s younger brother Robert had died of consumption when he was twenty-five, a loss that affected Blake deeply. In a scene reminiscent of Cuthbert’s vision of the death of St. Aidan, Blake observed his brother’s released spirit ascend through the ceiling “clapping its hands for joy.” Robert regularly visited Blake in dreams. One such encounter produced a brilliant advance in printing technology. In the eighteenth century, pictures called etchings were printed in the following way: Copper plates were covered with wax. The artist scratched a picture in the wax with a needle and then dipped the whole thing in acid. The acid bit into the exposed metal but left the wax alone. The wax was then removed by applying heat to melt it, and the copper plate was inked. After being wiped to remove excess ink, so there was only ink in the indented lines, the plate was then pressed onto paper, providing a print of the original picture. Robert’s idea reversed the process. The artist painted directly on to the copper using varnish. When the plate was dipped in acid, the acid cut away the metal around the acid-resistant varnish, leaving the picture standing out in relief. Dispensing with the wax speeded the whole thing up, and painting in varnish gave the artist far more freedom of expression than scratching away in wax. Blake’s invention could have made him a great deal of money; instead it brought him only delight and immortality. Relief etching allowed him to “body forth” the visions of his imagination and create his illuminated books, the striking combinations of poetry and images for which he is now famous.

  Today, Blake is known as one of England’s most original artists and thinkers, but this was far from the case during his lifetime. He mounted only one exhibition of his work, in 1809. He sold nothing at all and attracted only one review. The Examiner dismissed him as “an unfortunate lunatic” who had published “a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain.” It was a view widely held. On being shown some of Blake’s drawings, George III shouted “Take them away! Take them away!” Even the poet Wordsworth thought he was mad—although, to be fair, he qualified this by saying “there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron or Walter Scott.”

  How mad was Blake? It sounds as if he might have had bipolar disorder. He suffered from debilitating fits of gloom alternating with periods of visionary intensity and high productivity. At the age of four he saw God’s head leaning in at a window. As an eight-year-old, on Peckham Rye, he saw a tree full of angels. Blake’s images have a verve and simplicity that makes them feel both wild and oddly real. Today we think of him as imaginative rather than mad.

  In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake dines with the Old Testament prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. He asks them how they dare assert that God spoke to them. Isaiah answers that he “saw no God, nor heard any” but that he had perceived “the infinite in every thing.” The voice of God, continues the prophet, is nothing but “the voice of honest indignation.”

  “Honest indignation” describes Blake to a tee. Short, stocky, and ginger, as a small child he had such a temper and hated rules so much that his father didn’t dare send him to school. Instead, William was educated at home by his mother and his own reading. “I have a great desire to know everything,” he once remarked. He had an exceptional gift for languages, teaching himself Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as well as some French and Italian. His natural intelligence (and his sudden insights) meant that he never felt intellectually intimidated by anyone. His scribbles in the margins of other people’s works are always lively and often very funny. Annotating the rather pompous Discourses of the great artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, Blake peppers the pages with exclamations like: “Villainy!” “A Fine Jumble!” “Liar!” but can be generous when he agrees with a passage: “Well Said Enough!” In one of his own notebooks, Blake suddenly goes off on a tangent about Jesus’ nose:

  I always thought that Jesus Christ was a Snubby…. I should not have worship’d him if I had thought he had been one of those long spindle nosed rascals.

  What really got Blake’s honest indignation going was injustice. No less than the Shakers, he was enraged by the class system, by slavery, and by the urban poverty he saw around him in London. The values of his society seemed to him to be upside down. What mattered in England was not

  whether a man had talents & Genius, But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass & Obedient to Noblemen’s Opinions in Art & Sciences. If he is, he is a Good Man. If not, he must be Starved.

  Blake didn’t exactly starve, but he cer
tainly struggled to make ends meet. His parents were both in the clothing trade—his mother’s first husband had died, leaving her a hosiery business in Soho, and Blake was born above the shop. He had no desire to join the family firm: He was “totally destitute of the dexterity of a London shopman.” When he was ten, his parents encouraged his natural love of sketching by sending him to a drawing school in the Strand, where he was nicknamed the “Little Connoisseur.” As a teenager, he spent hours drawing in Westminster Abbey (where he had more visions of Christ and the Apostles) and set out to be apprenticed as an engraver, a relatively humble profession at the time. While casting around for the right master, his stargazing skills came in handy. He turned down one position flat, declaring: “I do not like the man’s face, it looks as if he will live to be hanged.” Sure enough, twelve years later, the engraver, William Ryland, was hanged for forgery—the last person ever to be executed at Tyburn.

  Blake showed great talent as an engraver and soon received a regular flow of commissions, particularly from booksellers wanting illustrations. By the mid-1780s he had earned enough money to buy his own press. But the business didn’t last long. Blake wasn’t really interested in money and he lived so much in his own head that deadlines were always a problem. He couldn’t bear his clients telling him what to do, and resented the shallow tastes of “Fashionable fools.” He refused to be pigeonholed: He didn’t care for the Romantic school’s obsession with landscape and was equally contemptuous of Neoclassical life drawing, which he described as “looking more like death, or smelling of mortality.” Blake had honed his technique by relentlessly copying the works of the Renaissance masters—Dürer, Michelangelo, and Raphael—but his subject matter came directly from his own luminous daydreams. For him, the visible world was just the outward “mortal” manifestation of an eternal reality. Where others saw the sun rising as “a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea,” Blake saw “an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty.’ ”

  Wondrous as all this was, it wasn’t exactly commercial. He and his wife, Catherine, lived from job to job, subsidized by handouts from friends, for the whole of their married life. When Blake met Catherine (or Kate, as he always called her) in 1781, he was recovering from rejection by another woman and was vague and distracted. She, on the other hand, was instantly smitten—so much so that she fainted on being introduced to him, knowing instantly that this was the man she was meant to marry. They were wed within the year.

  Catherine was illiterate: like Ann Lee, she signed her wedding contract with a cross. She ran the household and made Blake’s clothes; he taught her to read and write and she learned to help him with his engraving and coloring. They had no children, but it was a warm and happy marriage. In periods of financial hardship, she would put an empty plate in front of him at mealtimes as a hint, but she supported him through all his mood swings, missed deadlines, and aborted grand plans. In forty-five years, they spent less than a fortnight apart.

  Not that there weren’t tensions. During some of Blake’s more fevered raptures, Catherine would sit up at night and keep him company; at others, she would leave him to it. In the long and painful gestation for the most ambitious of his prophetic books, Jerusalem (1820), she confessed to one of his fellow artists: “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.”

  There is a persistent rumor about Blake’s marriage that he tried to persuade Catherine to experiment with a more open relationship, perhaps through the introduction of a young unmarried woman as a sexual partner, and that she rejected this tearfully. A strong sexual element runs through all Blake’s work, and his nonconformist religious background may have instilled in him some radical ideas. London in the 1780s was home to a number of religious groups known as antinomians. The term means, literally, “lawless” and it was used—usually as a term of abuse—to describe extreme Protestants whose belief in “justification by faith alone” meant that they were supposedly able to ignore normal morality. His mother had been brought up as a Moravian, the oldest of the Protestant sects, founded in the late fourteenth century in the area of central Europe after which it was named. His father was a follower of Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the Swedish scientist, theologian, and mystic. There is some evidence of open marriages being tolerated among both Moravians and Swedenborgians. The recent discovery and publication of Swedenborg’s Spiritual Diary has inflamed this further. Swedenborg—who was a Moravian for a while—practiced an intensely sexual mysticism. He had researched in detail the attainment of spiritual ecstasy by delaying orgasm, as practiced by some Kabbalistic Jewish sects and by the Tantric school of Buddhism.

  How much Blake was aware of this we shall never know: The more pious-minded of his friends destroyed most of his explicitly erotic drawings and manuscripts after his death. What we do know is that Swedenborg’s best known work, Heaven and Hell (1758), was a major influence on Blake. One of Blake’s engravings shows a female figure whose vulva has been translated into an altar, with an erect penis standing like a holy statue at its center. This is a visual representation of Swedenborg’s idea of sex as a religious sacrament.

  Blake was unambiguous on the importance of sex in marriage:

  Abstinence sows sand all over

  The ruddy limbs & flaming hair

  But Desire Gratified

  Plants fruits of life & beauty there

  In a wife I would desire

  What in whores is always found

  The lineaments of Gratified desire

  One day, Blake’s friend Thomas Butts came across Kate and William sitting naked in their summerhouse in Lambeth reading each other Paradise Lost. Blake—far from being embarrassed—welcomed him in, saying, “It’s only Adam and Eve you know!”

  In 1800 William Hayley encouraged the Blakes to move near him at Felpham on the Sussex coast. At first it was a refreshing change (“Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more spiritual than London,” Blake wrote), but it was also wartime. The coast was under threat of a Napoleonic invasion and the towns and villages were full of soldiers. One day, Blake found one of them, John Scolfield, lurking in his garden. His assertive streak and his dislike of authority took hold. Blake accosted the soldier and “taking him by the elbows” manhandled him down the street. A fight followed, cheered on by a number of Scolfield’s comrades, who were drinking in the Fox Inn. When it turned out Blake’s gardener had invited Scolfield into the garden, Blake was formally charged with assault and—a much more serious matter—sedition: During the tussle he had yelled “Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves!” Given the delicate military situation, a conviction might well have cost Blake his life.

  The jury acquitted Blake (the locals didn’t like the drunken squaddies any more than he did), but he plunged into a depression. By the time he appeared at Chichester assizes in 1804, he had fallen out with William Hayley and he and Kate had moved away from Felpham. Ironically, it was while he was awaiting trial for treason that Blake penned the preface to his prophetic poem Milton, which contains his most famous lines, the hymn now sung as “Jerusalem,” sometimes called England’s other national anthem. Blake had loved to ride across the Sussex downs: “England’s green and pleasant land” was his tribute to the magnificent view from Trundle Hill above Chichester.

  Blake died in harness, having spent his last shilling on a pencil to keep working on his illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. He had been complaining for some time of “shivering fits & ague” and the “torment of my stomach.” The most likely cause of death was liver damage resulting from fifty years of inhaling toxic copper fumes as he toiled at his engravings. Catherine was with him, and his very last act was to ask her to pose for him: “Stay Kate! Keep just as you are—I will draw your portrait—for you have ever been an angel to me.” One of his younger admirers, the painter George Richmond, was there too:

  He died… in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he
had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ—Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.

  He and Catherine had always enjoyed singing together, both old ballads and his own songs, many of which had the simplicity of Shaker hymns. After his death, Catherine lived off his work and kept in close contact with him, “consulting Mr. Blake” before agreeing to any deal. She herself died four years later, calling out to him “as if he were only in the next room, to say she was coming to him, and it would not be long now.”

  It took most of a century for Blake’s reputation to rise to the summit of English art and letters. These days, his Songs of Innocence & Experience are recognized as classics and “The Tyger” is the most anthologized English poem of all time. The longer, prophetic poems may be read less often, but the illustrations that accompany them are exhibited all over the world as masterpieces of spiritual art; few people have ever transformed their mystical experiences into such simple and instantly recognizable images. Blake’s philosophy also seems to resonate deeply with the modern age. The last line of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “For everything that lives is holy,” reaches out far beyond a narrow Christian interpretation. It would do very well as the slogan for a contemporary environmental charity. But Blake was never a conventional Christian. As he once remarked, relishing the paradox: “Jesus is the only God… and so am I, and so are you.”