While there is no official record of him ever joining the Moravians, Schuchard is convinced that he attended Zinzendorf’s sermons while visiting London. Swedenborg was a scientist, theologian, and mystic hailing from Sweden. Zinzendorf’s fascination with the Kabbalah was shared by his contemporary Emanuel Swedenborg. RELATED: 5 Legendary Artists and Writers Into Mysticism and the Occult In addition to adopting Jewish mysticism into the liturgy, Zinzendorf also encouraged the congregation to commune with God via the classical arts, such as painting and sculpting-which had a huge impact on the young Blake. “Most striking to Zinzendorf,” writes Schuchard, “was the Kabbalists’ further belief that the human couple could replicate the sacramental intercourse on earth, thus giving their humble bedroom a cosmic spiritual significance.” As such, Zinzendorf began instructing the congregation in Kabbalistic meditations with the intention of opening a “path to an ecstatic visionary marriage with the and with God.” Zinzendorf also held a deep affinity for the Kabbalah. Indeed, even Blake’s mother was enraptured with the blood and wounds upon applying to the congregation, in which she wrote: “My dear Brethren & Sisters,…at the love feast our Savior was pleased to make me Suck his wounds…and I trust will more and more till my fraile nature can hould no more.” Many of his sermons dealt with sucking of Christ’s side-hole puncture wound, which serves as a symbol of a vaginal or womb-like portal birthing purified souls. Zinzendorf wrote many sexually charged hymns for the congregation to sing for the purpose of entering liturgical ecstasis. ![]() An off-shoot of Methodism, the Moravians were led by the charismatic Count Nicoulas von Zinzendorf, who preached of mystical marriage, blood-and-wounds mysticism and antinomian sexual practices. It was in this melange of unorthodox spiritual practice that William Blake was cultivated and grew to become a major luminary.īlake’s mother belonged to a radical Christian sect known as the Moravian Church. It’s a fascinating trip down a wild intersection of spiritual paths, where men and women congregate in occult salons and clandestine temples to explore radical Christian mysticism, antinomian sexuality, Kabbalah, Freemasonry, Tantric yoga, animal magnetism, and more. Her book examines the mystical underground of 18th century England that Blake was born into. In spite of Blake’s popularity among the counterculture, Schuchard states in William Blake’s Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision that his life is easily “sanitized” by biographers looking to fit him within an acceptable social narrative (“You shall not bring me down to believe in such fitting & fitted I know better,” Blake once wrote). To gain a more vivid portrait of Blake, Schuchard argues, requires that we betray most common perceptions about Enlightenment era rationalism and propriety. RELATED: How Hermetic Initiates Used Magick to Study Reality Aldous Huxley titled his psychedelic classic Doors of Perception after a famous passage from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Blake’s radical politics, prophetic visions and esoteric cosmology made him a perfect match to be a symbol of the 1960s counterculture, which itself could be seen as an immanentization of his worldview. ![]() Yeats’ scholarship renewed interest in Blake within the literary community, and throughout the 20th century Blake grew to canonical heights. His 1788 tract All Religions are One maintains the Poetic Genius as its first principle: ![]() This is easily apprehended in Blake’s concept of the Poetic Genius, a sort of universal life source from which all forms emanate. In a 1893 essay entitled “William Blake and the Imagination,” Yeats argued that Blake had been influenced by Christian mystic Jacob Boehme and from early alchemists that “imagination was the first emanation of divinity.” His legacy drifted into near obscurity following his death, until interest in his work was revitalized more than a century later through the scholarship of poet (and Golden Dawn member) William Butler Yeats. The Romantic-era poet and engraver William Blake was a highly controversial and idiosyncratic figure in his time, during which his work was met with only moderate success. But according to the research of Marsha Keith Schuchard, he was even stranger than that… William Blake is best known for his radical politics, prophetic visions, and esoteric cosmology.
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