The Marriage

of Heaven and Hell

Jason Whittaker
 Zoamorphosis Essential Introductions

1. Blake’s Life & Works

2. Songs of Innocence and of Experience
3. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Forthcoming
4. The Continental Prophecies
5. The Urizen Books
6. The Four Zoas
7. Milton a Poem
8. Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion
 The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell

Jason Whittaker

Zoamorphosis Essential Introductions

Rintrah Books
Rintrah Books, Redruth, Cornwall

2010

This book may be shared freely under a Creative Commons licence

so long as the author is attributed, but it may not be used for com-
mercial purposes or modiied without the author’s consent.

For full details of this licence, go to: http://creativecommons.org/

licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/.
 Contents

Citations 4

Chapter 1: The Eternal Hell 5

Revives

Chapter 2: The form & style of 11

The Marriage

Chapter 3: Swedenborg & The 17

Marriage

Chapter 4: Without Contraries 22

is No progression

Selected Reading 28
 Citations

All quotations are from David V. Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and
Prose of William Blake. Revised edition. New York, London, Toronto,
Sydney and Auckland: Doubleday, 1988. Citations are indicated by
the letter E followed by the page number in Erdman’s edition.

4
 The Eternal Hell Revives

Chapter 1: The Eternal Hell Revives

As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its

advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is The Angel sit-
ting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is
the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah
XXXIV & XXXV Chap:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human exist-
ence.
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. (E34)

illiam Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, published in 1790, is one
W of the strangest and most remarkable books ever to have been written.
Although little noticed during Blake’s lifetime (and discussion of it largely
repressed by those who had read it), it has also become one of the most im-
portant of his works to writers such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, Angela
Carter, and Salman Rushdie whose books have been greatly inluenced by its
astonishing ideas and rhetoric.
The Marriage began as a pamphlet denouncing the system devised by the
eighteenth century mystic and scientist, Emanuel Swedenborg, but it quickly
developed into a much more radical assault on the conventions of religion,
politics and morality, as well as providing ironic critiques of the theology of
Milton and the Bible. Blake’s idiosyncratic, unsettling style and his resolution to
write in the voice of the devil was also a response to the drama of the French
Revolution, a time when the entire world appeared to have been turned upside
down, when the conventions and certainties of Europe became less certain.

The Contrary Vision

As we shall see in the next chapter, The Marriage is not entirely a text that is sui
generis, but it is certainly one whose format is exceedingly rare, a factor that ac-

5
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

counts for its continuing ability to shock and stimulate generations of readers.
The editors of the William Blake Trust/Tate Gallery edition of the book offer
one of the best summaries of its effect:

The Marriage, provocative, mocking, sexy, pushy, and playful, bristles

with... rebellious optimism. Its gumption is never exposed as bravado,
and, although it hammers mercilessly on Emanuel Swedenborg and his
“angelic” followers, the mockery is never disillusioned but youthfully,
cheerfully antagonistic to foolish conventionality. (Eaves, Essick, and
Viscomi 116-7)

After the Argument, which introduces one of Blake’s mythological igures,

Rintrah, the just man driven from the paradise that he creates by a villain of
false humility who prefers to steal the labour of others than disturb his ease,
Blake establishes the key motifs of The Marriage in the plate cited at the begin-
ning of this chapter. While the structure of The Marriage has often deied critics
– S. Foster Damon called it a “scrap-book of Blake’s philosophy” (Damon 88)
and Michael Ferber thought it a “structureless structure” (Ferber 90) – many
have understood immediately the intellectual signiicance of Blake’s satire, ex-
posing conventional folly through a system of dynamic contraries. Contraries
– attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate and, of course,
heaven and hell – display a signiicant element in Blake’s thought: one is not
simply the negative or absence of the other. As he was to write in Milton a
Poem, “Contraries are Positives / A Negation is not a Contrary” (E129). Blake’s
contraries share some features with those of other dialectical philosophers,
from ancient Heraclitus through to Hegel writing after him, but – on the face
of it, at least – he rejects what can be seen in all those writers as a tendency to
subordinate one antinomy to another.
For a truly dynamic system, Blake argues that the opposing elements of
human experience must engage equally with each other. Blake’s attempt to
avoid the hierarchy of one term over another which is typical of the exercise
of power is compelling but ultimately fails: if this is the marriage of heaven
and hell, then too often, as critics have noted, it is devils who triumph over
angels. When Harold Bloom attempted to demonstrate the dialectical progress
that he argued was evident in the text, he did so “in a spirit of tentativeness,
respecting its innate trickery” (Bloom 501).
Much of this is due to the extremely important nature of Blake’s struggle
with notions of good and evil. John Howard saw The Marriage as “Blake’s
prophetic testament on evil and the way to escape it” (Howard 61), which
is to work by removing orthodox opposition to sensual enjoyment using his

6
 The Eternal Hell Revives

“infernal method of printing” which espouses irony, humour and provoca-

tion to subvert systems of codiied morality. One means by which Blake does
this is to deny the existence of evil – at least as it is commonly understood.
Sensual enjoyment is not a negation of being in the Augustinian notion of
evil but rather its very fulilment. Yet here arises an important conceptual dif-
iculty for Blake’s own system, for the temptation then is simply to invert the
traditional hierarchies of good and evil, heaven and hell – to declare, as Satan
does in Paradise Lost, “Evil, be thou my good” – so that frequently the angels
appear as little more than privations of his diabolical heroes. It may be such
radical subversion was necessary in the revolutionary contexts of 1790, and
the importance of striking against his conservative enemies did not provide
him with the luxury of that subtlety of the contrary states of the human soul
he was later to demonstrate in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Nonetheless,
this relative failure to achieve a true marriage does indicate the considerable
dificulty that Blake had, not merely to oppose one system to another in a spirit
of rebellion but to break free of systems altogether.

Reason and Energy

If the relationship of good and evil is a fundamental moral concern of The
Marriage, then the metaphysical origin of conventional dualism also has an
important role to play, and this Blake traces to what he considers its source in
the split between body and soul, outlined most clearly in plate 4:

All Bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of the following
Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy. calld Evil. is alone from the Body. & that Reason.
calld Good. is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Ener-
gies.
But the following Contraries to these are True
1 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a
portion of Soul discernd by the ive 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 (E34)

The origins of good and evil lie in religions and the errors of their sacred
codes, fundamental to which is the separation of soul and body, the latter
7
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

being repressed in the service of the former. However, religious folly, which
denies the true nature of humanity by denying the body, is also served by phi-
losophy. Since Plato’s division of reason from appetite at least, philosophy had
been complicit in the error of dualism and this is an important area in which
Blake distinguishes himself from Enlightened anti-religious commentators:
Cartesian dualism may have been an extreme version, but to Blake most if not
all Enlightenment philosophers had mistakenly deposed a theistic god, only
to replace him with deistic reason that was equally effective in repressing the
desires and energy of the body, forgetting the origins of intellectual life that
lay in those desires.

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 en-
larged & numerous senses could percieve.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country. plac-
ing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d
the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from
their objects: thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounced that the Gods had orderd such
things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. (E38)

Robert Essick has noted the ways in which politics, science, the Bible, and
linguistics collide in Blake’s work during the 1790s (Essick 189), and though
this was particularly the case following the publication of Thomas Paine’s
The Age of Reason in 1794, the beginning of the decade saw a surge in biblical
exegesis that spread the fruits of Enlightenment criticism. Much of what Blake
writes in plate 11 above would not look entirely out of place in David Hume,
Voltaire, Pierre Bayle or Constantin Volney, but Blake’s attitude to perception
creates an important distinction from such igures: for them, reason operates
upon the faculties of sense as a higher order, ordering and categorising sense
impressions. However, for Blake the role of energy and imagination as the
animating motivation of such systems of categorisation (whereby poets placed
cities and countries under mental deities) returns the desires of the body to the
highest capabilities of which humanity is capable.
Blake’s inal statement, that “All deities reside in the human breast”, can be
read as remarkably close to atheism: however, it is more accurate to emphasise

8
 The Eternal Hell Revives

that in this and his other works he emphasises again and again the divine nature
of humanity. God is a creation of imagination, and Blake appears to have no
problem with conceiving of man as the creator of God. Man’s mistake is to
apotheosise his reason, abstracting a system of mental deities as separate from
the material world and projecting it onto the heavens. Plate 11 explicitly attacks
priestcraft, denounced by many Enlightenment philosophers as that scheme
by which God was removed to the heavens from where he could still meddle
in human affairs. The radical nature of Blake’s critique is that ultimately he
sees little difference between such abstraction and that of the philosophers
themselves, who removed the divine entirely from the universe and, through
Deism, contented themselves with a prime mover which, like Newton’s Pan-
tocrator, established an immutable system of nature that imposed upon the
passive perception of mankind. Both priest and philosopher forgot that all
divine energy resides in the human breast, not in an abstract out there, whether
heaven or the origin of the universe.

Revolutionary Satire
While Blake’s Marriage may have begun life as an anti-Swedenborgian pamphlet,
it very quickly transformed into a much more wide-ranging satire as the events
of 1790 unfolded. David Erdman was one of the irst critics to trace in detail
the connection between The Marriage and the events of the French Revolution,
although unfortunately the fact that he dates its composition between 1790 and
1793 means that he frequently looks for allusions that are simply not there,
seeing the inal “Song of Liberty”, for example, as a celebration of “the casting
out of French monarchy and the rout… of Brunswick’s starry hosts” at the
end of 1792 (Erdman 192).
By contrast, if we view Blake as being inspired into a new way of thinking
by the progress of the Revolution in 1789-90, it is possible to understand more
profoundly what Eaves, Essick and Viscomi recognise as the optimism of his
diabolic support for what was taking place in France. After the meeting of the
Three Estates in 1789 and the formation of a new National Assembly at the
end of that year, which brought with it the promise of potential republicanism
or at the very least constitutional monarchy, the Revolution was largely still in
its benevolent phase. Certainly there had been the Great Fear of the Summer
of 1789, which betokened the potential tyranny that would come, but the brief
its of violence that occurred, such as the storming of the Bastille, could still be
presented as part of the progress of France towards enlightened government.
Feudalism had been abolished and in May the Assembly had even renounced
any involvement in wars of conquest. With the exception of Edmund Burke,
perhaps, few suspected that the Revolution itself would lead directly to despot-
9
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

ism, and even he could not have realised just how bloody the Terror would be
when it was unleashed in 1793.
As such, Blake’s Marriage is a joyful manifesto, one which celebrates fully
the revolutionary fervour that had exploded in France. Announcing himself as
being of the devil’s party, he launched into radical visions with an exuberance
that rapidly disappeared from his illuminated books as the decade progressed.
There is little of that exultation in texts such as The [First] Book of Urizen or
The Book of Ahania where the innocence of his diabolism is tempered by the
knowledge of revolutionary violence. Peter A. Schock has observed the ways
in which the igure and mythology of Satan was used by both radicals and
conservatives in the early years of the Revolution. His argument, like that
of Erdman, suffers slightly from the current understanding that The Marriage
was published in 1790 (thus removing some of the immediate sources that he
draws upon), but it is clear that British propaganda against Satanic rebels made
Blake increasingly proud of his diabolism – at least until it became no longer
safe to display such partisanship publicly (Schock 446).
Richard Cronin notes the dificulty of determining who The Marriage was
actually written for, building on Howard’s observation that it could have been
the circle around Joseph Johnson, which included Thomas Paine, Mary Woll-
stonecraft and Joseph Priestley. Cronin suggests that Blake had turned against
the Swedenborgians when they abandoned the more revolutionary aspects of
their founder’s ideals and increasingly declared themselves in favour of the
political status quo (Cronin 48-51). Yet the Johnson circle, as Cronin observes,
was not itself amenable to the wilder lights of fancy that Blake indulged in
and, in Jon Mee’s words, The Marriage does not represent a retreat from con-
ventional Christianity into Deism but rather a move into “radical enthusiasm”
that would have been denounced by the rationalists gathered around Johnson’s
table (Mee 53).
The Marriage, then, responds with energy and optimism to the events of
1789-1790. Although Blake had originally sought to mock the tenets of a
fashionable but still slightly obscure sect in London, he quickly expanded his
vision to politics, religion, and literature, easily sweeping in literary giants such
as Milton. In tone and style, if not always in content, The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell is sometimes reminiscent of his earlier satire of the 1780s, the unpub-
lished An Island in the Moon, mixing raucous Augustan comedy with matters
of import. As the dawn of Revolution turned into the bloody sunset of the
Terror, it was a mood that was largely to disappear from his writing for more
than two decades.

10
 The Form & Style of The Marriage

Chapter 1: The Form & Style of

The Marriage

A s it is not clearly dated on its title page, for some time there was consider-
able confusion as to when Blake had actually published The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, with scholars selecting dates between 1790 and 1793 accord-
ing to contextual hints that they sought in the text. It is now accepted that
Blake completed all twenty-seven of the plates in the book in 1790, printing
most of the extant copies that survive in that year, although he produced
three more in the mid-1790s and another two richly illuminated versions in
1818 and 1827.

The Evolution of The Marriage

In the course of bibliographical work over the past two decades to establish
the actual date of publication of The Marriage, Joseph Viscomi in particular
has drawn attention to the unusual – convoluted, even – history of its printing.
Eaves, Essick and Viscomi observe in their introduction to The Early Illumi-
nated Books that “there are clear indications that the Marriage was not begun and
inished overnight”, including different shaped letters (particularly lower-case
g’s with serifs on the left, right or missing) and text that is in upright roman
script in some places but slanted italics elsewhere. They conclude, however,
that “the best evidence suggests that the twenty-seven plates of the Marriage
took him months rather than years.” (Eaves, Essick, Viscomi 114)
In three essays published in the late 1990s, Viscomi traced the evolution
of The Marriage’s publication, drawing on some of the observations that irst
appeared in Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), where he had argued that it
was probably printed shortly before he began etching plates for C. G. Salz-
man’s Elements of Morality in October 1790 (Viscomi 1993 259). In the irst of
his three related essays, Viscomi proposed that The Marriage had developed
through four to six distinct printing sessions, suggesting that Blake did not
have a completed manuscript before he began work (Viscomi 1997 58-9).
The subsequent essays draw upon this technical insight to make observations
about how plates 21-4 were intended as a separate pamphlet (1998) and the
connections between references to printmaking in the text and Swedenborg

11
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

(1999). At this point, it is the irst essay on the evolution of the printing process
that is most relevant.
By measuring impressions on copies of The Marriage, Viscomi established
that plates 21-4 had been cut from the same piece of copper and were prob-
ably produced as a separate pamphlet before work began on the rest of the
book. Indeed, one early copy of The Marriage, Copy K, consists only of these
four plates which begin with the line “I have always found that Angels have
the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise” and conclude with “I have
also: The Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no.”
(E42-3)
Through his meticulous reconstruction of the plates, Viscomi is able to
propose that Blake used seven plates to print the entire Marriage, cutting larger
sheets of copper to make the smaller pages of his book. He is also able to sug-
gest a chronology for the sequence in which The Marriage was composed, some
parts of this chronology (such as the original, anti-Swedenborgian pamphlet)
being more irmly established than others. As such, Viscomi’s argument is that
Blake composed his book in the following order of plates: 21-4, 12-13, 1-3, 5-6,
11, 6-10, 14, 15, 16-20, 25-7 (1997 48). That Blake then chose to rearrange his
plates into the order in which we typically read them now (plates 1-27), extend-
ing what began as a pamphlet into a much more ambitious literary work, has
important consequences for the fragmentary nature of this remarkable book.
“Blake appears to have changed his mind about publishing an independent
pamphlet – and/or a series of individual pamphlets to constitute a Bible of
Hell – deciding instead to publish a group of interrelated variations on a set of
themes, nearly all of which are raised in some form or another in the original
pamphlet.” (Viscomi 1997 60)

The form of The Marriage

Viscomi’s careful and technically intricate set of essays offers a compelling
insight into the development of Blake’s ideas, how the disjointed and appar-
ently arbitrary nature of The Marriage emerged from a series of interrelated
pamphlets. Nonetheless, while this explains how the book came to be printed
in the form in which it comes down to us, as Viscomi himself observes it does
not explain the very strong reactions which readers have had when reading this
very strange text.
Aside from occasional notices of sale, there was little in the way of response
to The Marriage in Blake’s lifetime, and if his original intention of provoking
a reaction among Swedenborgians met with any success there is no record of
this. Of his later acquaintances such as John Linnell and Samuel Palmer who
read the book, they left few comments and the reason why may be gathered
12
 The Form & Style of The Marriage

from a letter which Palmer sent to Anne Gilchrist in 1862, in which he recom-
mends she censor the text:

I think the whole page at the top of which I have made a cross in red
chalk would at once exclude the work from every drawing-room table
in England. Blake has said the same kind of thing to me; in fact almost
everything contained in the book; and I can understand it in relation to
my memory of the whole man, in a way quite different to that roaring
lion the “press,” or that red lion the British Public. (Cited in Bentley
431)

Anne did, in the end, allow substantial portions of The Marriage to be pub-
lished in her husband’s Life of William Blake although with very little in the
way of critical commentary, remarking instead that “the student of Blake will
ind in Mr Swinburne’s William Blake, A Critical Essay, all the light that can be
thrown by the vivid imagination and subtle insight of a poet on this as on the
later mystic or ‘Prophetic Books.’” (Gilchrist 68) Swinburne himself declared
The Marriage “the greatest of all his [Blake’s] books: a work indeed which we
rank as about the greatest produced by the eighteenth century in the line of
high poetry and spiritual speculation” (Swinburne 204) and, in contrast to the
majority of nineteenth-century commentators, saw the variety and audacity of
its paradoxes, heresies and eccentricities as examples of Blake’s writing at its
most profound.
The content alone was not all that caused early critics apart from Swinburne
to falter in their assessment of The Marriage. As the editors of the Blake Archive
observe, Blake’s heterodox perspectives further disorient readers through a
radical combination of genres – poetry, prose, cultural history and Menip-
pean satire. This latter form, which began to be applied to The Marriage by
Blake scholars in the 1990s, originated in the now lost works of Menippus, a
Greek Cynic and satirist who lived in the third century BC and whose texts
inluenced classical writers such as Varro and Lucan (and whose inluence on
Blake Leslie Tannenbaum noted in the 1970s). Menippean satire combined
different genres and styles of writing as well as rapidly shifting viewpoints, a
miscellany or medley of positions and situations that can be observed in such
writers as Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll. “In philosophy, Menippean satire
is a method for analyzing propositions, clearing off conceptual confusion, and
discrediting intellectual mythology.” (Kaplan 21)
Dustin Grifin remarks, with some justice, that “although Blakeans have
seen the Marriage as prophetic satire, they have by and large done little more
than label it a ‘Menippean satire’.” (Grifin 57) Part of the reason for this is

13
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

due to the revision of our understanding of The Marriage’s evolution in the

light of Viscomi’s careful bibliographical work: Blake did not set out to write a
miscellany; rather one emerged during the rather complex schedule of etching
different plates. Nonetheless, if he did not intend to produce a Menippean
satire Blake appeared happy enough with the inal disjointed form of his book.
The startling variations that occur from plate to plate, or section to section,
serve as intellectual shocks to the reader that prevent him or her from settling
too comfortably in the precincts of hell or the ields of heaven.

Proverbs and Fancies

Despite the incongruities in the production and form of The Marriage, it
must also be recognised that as well as strong thematic consistencies running
throughout the entire text there are also repeated formal motifs that provide
some coherence to the structure of the book. For Martin Nurmi, the book
“developed according to no traditional logic or plan” (Nurmi 51) and yet, as
John Howard suggests, “Blake’s infernal philosophy emerges from what is
supericially a disjointed collection of heterodox thoughts and fanciful experi-
ences”, and that “the work has a unity, though it escapes the reader at irst”
(Howard 61).
This formal unity is most evident in the series of Memorable Fancies. These
comprise the greater part of The Marriage and while the situation and perspec-
tive of each one can be radically different (whether dining with the prophets
Isaiah and Ezekiel, for example, or witnessing an angel and devil conversing
over the true nature of Jesus), after only a few encounters the sudden punctua-
tions of each of these fantasies leads the reader to expect tumult and disorder.
This anticipation of anarchy itself provides an unusual form of coherence, an
act of imaginative reading whereby we are expected to make intellectual leaps
between each scene in a form beitting Menippean satire.
The irst of the Memorable Fancies offers a short prologue to the section
of The Marriage that has become the most famous:

As I was walking among the ires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments
of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity. I collected
some of their Proverbs: thinking that as The sayings used in a nation,
mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell, shew the nature of Infernal
wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments.
When I came home; on the abyss of the ive senses, where a lat
sided steep frowns over the present world. I saw a mighty Devil folded
in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding ires
he wrote the following sentence now percieved by the minds of men,
14
 The Form & Style of The Marriage

& read by them on earth.

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses ive? (E35)

Many of the individual proverbs that follow, such as “The road of excess
leads to the palace of wisdom” or “Prisons are built with stones of Law,
Brothels with bricks of Religion”, have become memorable in their own right,
detached from the immediate contexts of the work in which they irst ap-
peared. These maxims obviously have their roots in biblical proverbs such as
those found in Ecclesiastes, but whereas the general tenor of the older sayings
is conservative in character that of those in The Marriage is deliberately pro-
vocative and disturbing. Probably only the aphorisms of Nietzsche approach
Blake’s for boldness, but in their economy, vividness and sustained wit Blake’s
proverbs are without peer in the literature of any language.
The Memorable Fancy that precedes the Proverbs of Hell also indicates the
important transformation of perception that Blake expected to accompany the
act of reading: as another famous adage expresses it pithily, “If the doors of
perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: ininite.”
Thus, according to traditional theories of experience espoused by Enlight-
enment philosophers such as John Locke, perception was largely a passive
affair in which the external world illuminated the closed cave of human senses.
Blake, however, unfolds the cave, opens up the abyss so that the bird becomes
an “immense world” when understood by the imagination. Rather than the
operation of transcendant reason organising passive sense impressions, active
imagination proceeds from the desires of the body. Such an understanding is
indicated in the following Memorable Fancy in which the narrator sits down
to dinner with Isaiah and Ezekiel:

I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert. that God spake to
them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be
misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer’d. I saw no God. nor heard any, in a inite organical
perception; but my senses discover’d the ininite in every thing, and as I
was then perswaded. & remain conirm’d; that the voice of honest indig-
nation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.
Then I asked: does a irm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?
He replied. All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination
this irm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of
a irm perswasion of any thing. (E38-9)

15
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

As such, the form and structure of The Marriage is designed to compel

this perception of the ininite in everything, the “irm perswasion” that it is
imagination that shapes the world rather than vice versa, a conscious reforma-
tion that, as Gross remarks, is a vital, libidinous and necessary response to
the grinding development of political systems of his day (Gross 176). Blake’s
point is polemical and contentious – deliberately so – but the important point
here is that by refusing the conventions of an orderly narrative, the support
of rational, organised, and also restricted thought, the book brings reason to
the the abyss of senses so that by falling into the precipice of rational thought
it will be forced to take light, for “No bird soars too high. if he soars with his
own wings.” (E36)

16
 Swedenborg & The Marriage

Chapter 3: Swedenborg &

The Marriage

or new readers of The Marriage, the various allusions within the text to
F Emanuel Swedenborg are usually somewhat opaque and disconcerting.
Although Swedenborg’s writings were popular and widely known in the late
eighteenth century, they became unfashionable and esoteric during the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. It would not be unfair to comment that most
people who have heard of Swedenborg today have done so because of what
Blake writes in The Marriage in particular.

Emmanuel Swedenborg
Swedenborg was a remarkable igure in eighteenth century Europe, a man
of the Enlightenment and science who also gave rise to a form of mysti-
cism that appealed to many of his contemporaries. Born Emanuel Swedberg
at Stockholm, Sweden, in 1688, his father, Jesper Swedberg, was an eminent
churchman and later Bishop of Skara. Jesper’s pietist beliefs, particularly on
the importance of communication with God rather than through faith alone,
as well as the presence of angels and spirits in everyday life, were to have an
important effect on his son. After completing university at Uppsala in 1709,
Swedenborg travelled through Western Europe before coming to London
where he stayed for four years before returning to Sweden in 1715 to work on
scientiic and engineering projects.
Swedenborg worked as an assessor for the Swedish Board of Mines and
published scientiic discoveries in his periodical, Daedalus Hyperboreus (The
Northern Daedalus). For these, and other services, he was ennobled in 1718
(whereupon the family name was changed from Swedberg to Swedenborg),
and in 1724 he was offered the chair of mathematics at Uppsala, a post that
he declined.
During the 1730s, Swedenborg turned to religious and philosophical sub-
jects, publishing a series of works that attempted to demonstrate how matter
related to spirit and the inite to the ininite, such as De Ininito (On the Ininite).
Requesting permission to travel abroad in 1743 to gather source materials for
a book on the animal kingdom, he began to experience strange dreams on
his journeys and recorded them in a journal, some of those dreams forming

17
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

the basis of his later visionary works. By 1744, he was convinced that he had
to abandon his scientiic studies and devote himself to understanding God,
publishing The Worship and Love of God in London in 1745. Two years later, he
resigned his post at the Board of Mines and devoted himself to biblical studies
for ten years, publishing the inal volume of his great work, Arcana Cœlestia
(Heavenly Secrets) in 1756.
Until his death in 1772, Swedenborg travelled between Stockholm, London
and Holland, writing a number of theological works that expounded his new
theological system. In The Last Judgment in Retrospect, he claimed that the Last
Judgement had begun in 1757 (the year of Blake’s birth) and that it had been
a spiritual judgement, God having seen that the churches had lost their true
purpose. His last book, Vera Christiana Religio (The True Christian Religion), was
completed in 1770, the year after which he suffered a stroke during a visit to
London and was buried at the Swedish church in Shadwell. One of his earli-
est biographers, the Swedenborgian James John Garth Wilkinson (editor of
the 1839 edition of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience), observed of
this and other works that “Swedenborg’s philosophy attains its summit in the
marriage of scholasticism and common sense, with the sciences, of his age;
in the consummation of which marriage his especial genius was exerted and
exhausted.” (Wilkinson 67)

The Swedenborgian Church

Swedenborg’s declaration that the traditional church had lost its way inspired
some to use his voluminous writings as the foundation for a new church,
helped in part by the philosopher’s extensive travels and capacity for befriend-
ing many and varied individuals.
In an entry in his Spiritual Diary for August 27, 1748, Swedenborg had de-
clared that he would have “ive sorts of readers”: the irst type would be those
who would reject his writings entirely, the second who would take interest in
them as curiosities, the third who would accept them intellectually but not be
inluenced by his ideas, the fourth who would change some of their behav-
iour in accordance with his teachings, and the ifth who would “receive them
with joy, and reduce them to practice” (cited in Trobridge 90). Certainly some,
such as the Bishop of Gothenberg, rejected Swedenborgianism (as it was to
become) outright, but others such as the early followers C. F. Nordensköld
and Thomas Hartley considered Swedenborg’s system the right and proper
spiritual path to follow.
During his lifetime, however, he made few converts, in part because of
his unwillingness to proselytise, and where he did attract followers this was
not without dificulties: among his most prominent Swedish disciples, Gabriel
18
 Swedenborg & The Marriage

Beyer and Johan Rosén, professors at Gothenberg University, were persecuted

after accepting his doctrines in the 1760s. Throughout the 1770s and 1780s,
however, his inluence gradually spread throughout Europe, although it was in
England that he found most acceptance and made most disciples (Trobridge
94). John Clowes, Rector of St Johns, Manchester, translated Swedenborg’s
works into English and by the 1780s a small group of enthusiasts, including
William Cookworthy and William Spence, ensured that his works received a
wider audience.
Because of their isolation, Swedenborg’s followers formed societies to
share their knowledge and principles. Nordensköld established the Exegetic-
Philanthropic Society in Sweden after Swedenborg’s death (although this was
broken up in 1789), and in London Robert Hindmarsh invited sympathetic
readers to form a “Theosophical Society” in the mid 1780s. This society in-
cluded a number of Blake’s friends and fellow engravers among its number,
such as John Flaxman and William Sharp, and by the end of the decade some
members of this group went on to form the “New Church”, or “New Jeru-
salem Church”. Although small in terms of membership, Swedenborgianism
continued to spread throughout the English speaking world in the nineteenth
century, aided by Clowes’s establishment of the Swedenborg Society in 1810 to
propagate his ideas and works, and in America by the work of the missionary
John Chapman, more popularly known as Johnny Appleseed.

Blake and Swedenborg

Blake began reading Swedenborg’s works in the 1780s, including Heaven and Hell
(1784) and Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1788). As such, he would have prob-
ably received a general invitation sent out in December 1788 to sympathetic
readers inviting them to a conference, the purpose of which was to establish a
new church based on Swedenborg’s teachings. At the meeting in a public house
on 13 April, 1789, the Blakes were asked to sign the following paper:

We whose Names are hereunto subscribed, do each of us approve of

the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, believing that the
Doctrines contained therein are genuine Truths, revealed from Heaven,
and that the New Jerusalem Church ought to be established, distinct and
separate from the Old Church. (Cited in Bentley 50)

A manifesto of 32 resolutions, including the rejection of the notion of the

Trinity and a separation from the ‘Old Church’, was accepted unanimously,
and Bentley suggests that although Blake must have agreed to these resolu-
tions at the time his attitude quickly became ambiguous, then openly hostile.
19
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

He never attended the New Church itself, and within a year he was satirising
Swedenborgianism.
Yet The Marriage itself, while Blake’s most sustained commentary on Swe-
denborg’s teaching, is not his inal word on the subject. In Milton a Poem, he de-
scribes Swedenborg as “strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches!”
(23.50, E117), while in the 1809 solo exhibition he cited the Swedish mystic
favourably as inspiration for one of his paintings, ‘The spiritual Preceptor,
an experiment Picture’. As such, although Blake quickly came to recognise in
Swedenborgianism a return to the doctrinal bondage of the Old Church under
a new name, he seems to have held at least some of Swedenborg’s ideas in
higher regard for much of his life.
Furthermore, as David Worrall has pointed out, the initial conference at-
tended by Blake brought him into contact with radical igures who were to
work with the Swedenborgian Carl Bernhard Wadström on his project to es-
tablish a new colony in Sierra Leone. For Worrall, the colonial aspects of this
project, particularly with regard to certain applications of conjugal relation-
ships, were an important inluence on The Book of Thel, and Thel’s “rejection
of her co-option into such a community” is “implicitly, a rejection of the entire
colonization project” (17). Yet even though Blake was critical of Wadström’s
‘conjugal empire’ of concubinage, where women were expected to engage in
sexual consummation but were denied a franchise, his participation in the New
Jerusalem Church conference meant that he met with activists engaged against
the slave trade.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell offers Blake’s most extensive commentary
on Swedenborgianism, written shortly after he had joined the New Jerusalem
Church. As we have already seen, Viscomi (1997) argues that plates 21-4 of The
Marriage were originally composed as a separate pamphlet aimed at the New
Church before it developed into a much more ambitious project:

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves
as the only wise; this they do with a conident insolence sprouting from
systematic reasoning:
Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho’ it is only
the Contents or Index of already publish’d books
A man carried a monkey about for a shew, & because he was a
little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conciev’d himself as much
wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shews the folly of
churches& exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious. &
himself the single One on earth that ever broke a net.
Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth:

20
 Swedenborg & The Marriage

Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods.

And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all
religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was
incapable thro’ his conceited notions.
Thus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all supericial
opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.
Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may
from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand
volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s. and from those of Dante or
Shakespear, an ininite number.
But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than
his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine. (Plates 21-2, E42-3)

Although this extended passage is scathing in its condemnation of Sweden-

borg, particularly in denying any originality to a vision that fails to break the
old boundaries of the “religious”, Viscomi in another essay (1999) shows that
Blake was still working through many Swedenborgian principles - such as at-
titudes to anti-clericalism and the role of revelation - more sympathetically
than may irst appear.
According to Robert Rix, the general appeal of Swedenborg at the end
of the eighteenth century was his apparent ability to explain occult material
“scientiically”, which was quickly formed by some of his followers into a
social gospel combining radical Christianity and politics (Rix 47). While Blake
soon took issue with Swedenborg’s analytical approach, as well as inding that
elements of the Christianity and politics of him and his followers were not
radical enough, it is important to note, as Rix observes, that he adapted as well
as attacked Swedenborgianism.

21
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

Chapter 4: Without Contraries

is No Progression

uring the 1790s, the Enlightenment critique of religion was to advance

D rapidly into outright hostility. Critical ideas that had been the preserve of
an elite of educated philosophers or the rich echelons of society were taken
up in very different forms by a wider section of society.

The Bible of Hell

As has been noted, a considerable amount of The Marriage echoes some of the
classical Enlightenment critique of religion that could be discovered in Hume,
Voltaire and Bayle. For example, in his The Natural History of Religion (1757),
David Hume offered the following account of the origins of polytheism that
appears to share some similarities with Blake’s version of the beginnings of
religion which we have already encountered in chapter 1:

…if, leaving the works of nature, we trace the footsteps of invisible

power in the various and contrary events of human life, we are neces-
sarily led into polytheism and to the acknowledgement of several limited
and imperfect deities. Storms and tempests ruin what is nourished by
the sun. The sun destroys what is fostered by the moisture of dews
and rains. War may be favourable to a nation, whom the inclemency of
the seasons aflicts with famine. Sickness and famine may depopulate
a kingdom, amidst the most profuse plenty… In short, the conduct of
events, or what we call the plan of a particular providence, is so full
of variety and uncertainty, that, if we suppose it immediately ordered
by any intelligent beings, we must acknowledge a contrariety in their
designs and intentions, a constant combat of opposite powers, and a
repentance or change of intention in the same power, from impotence
or levity. Each nation has its titular deity. Each element is subject to its
invisible power or agent. The province of each god is separate from that
of another. (Hume 6)

The resemblances between Hume’s and Blake’s texts are that both look for
the human rather than superhuman origins of religion (at least – explicitly – in

22
 Without Contraries is No Progression

polytheism), and Hume’s combative vision of the natural world appears to

share features with Blake’s universe of contraries. The differences, however,
are more profound: for Hume, the beginnings of religion are fear, war, famine
and privation – faced with uncontrollable nature mankind takes refuge in the
whims and caprices of human projections, a position that was espoused as one
of the three principles of history by Giambattista Vico in his Scienza Nuova
(New Science 1725). While Blake does not spell out the motivating desire that
leads to religion in plate 11 of The Marriage, by placing its origins in the words
of poets immediately he conveys a very different source for religious senti-
ment than fear, for it is priests not poets who “choose systems of worship
from poetic tales” (E38) and so corrupt the original impulse. Likewise, the
contrarian nature of Blake’s angels and devils is not that of domination and
extermination through war, the subordination of one opposite to another,
but argument and intellectual ight whereby angels may become devils (and,
presumably, though it must be admitted Blake offers no concrete examples of
this in The Marriage, devils transform into angels).
While Blake, like the philosophes, has no truck with conventional organised
religion, he does not strike camp with the philosophers. In his irst experiments
in illuminated printing, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion,
he had critiqued the use of reason as suficient to explain religion, choosing
instead imagination as its source: “Conclusion, If it were not for the Poetic
or Prophetic character. the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at
the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same
dull round over again.” (E3) To depend on reason alone, as Hume and others
had done, is to submit to the dull round in which mankind must ultimately
acquiesce to a Deism in which the original creator (or creators) is resigned to
rule according to either the iron laws of necessitarianism or fear. While Blake
maintained this position throughout his life, he could, however, understand the
signiicance of contemporary attacks on superstition and priestcraft. In his an-
notations to Robert Watson, Bishop of Landaff ’s An Apology for the Bible (1797),
written in response to Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794-5), Blake observes that
“It is an easy matter for a Bishop to triumph over Paines attack but it is not so
easy for one who loves the Bible” (E611), indicating that while Paine’s Deism
troubled him greatly he also recognised the need for such revolutionary attacks
on organised religion.
Blake was to decide that, according to E. P. Thompson, Paine had not un-
derstood the Everlasting Gospel but was correct in his assault on moral law
(Thompson 60), but his radical sympathies with Paine are indicated by an
observation near the beginning of his copy of An Apology for the Bible: “I have
been commanded from Hell not to print this as it is what our Enemies wish”

23
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

(E611). What is more radical than Paine, and which continues to make The
Marriage such a remarkable text, is that not only does not Blake remark himself
as aware of being of the devil’s party but recruits the fount of Christianity to
the same cause:

Once I saw a Devil in a lame of ire. who arose before an Angel that
sat on a cloud. and the Devil utterd these words.
The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each ac-
cording to his genius. and loving the greatest men best, those who envy
or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.
The Angel hearing this became almost blue but mastering himself he
grew yellow, & at last white pink & smiling, and then replied,
Thou Idolater, is not God One? & is not he visible in Jesus Christ?
and has not Jesus Christ given his sanction to the law of ten command-
ments and are not all other men fools, sinners, & nothings?
The Devil answer’d; bray a fool in a morter with wheat. yet shall not
his folly be beaten out of him: if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you
ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his
sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sab-
bath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murderd
because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery?
steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he
omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his
disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against
such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without
breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from
impulse: not from rules.
When he had so spoken: I beheld the Angel who stretched out his
arms embracing the lame of ire & he was consumed and arose as
Elijah.
Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend:
we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense which
the world shall have if they behave well (E43-4)

As philosophers and priests looked for the origins of religion in fear and
reason, Blake’s source was very different Jesus Christ was the “greatest man”
because he “acted from impulse: not from rules”. In his later works, particularly
Milton and Jerusalem, Blake linked deistic Natural Religion and pious Moral Law
as twin pillars of repression, the gods of this world as it were; as Christ opposes
such worldly deities which comprise our mind-forg’d manacles, then the only

24
 Without Contraries is No Progression

option for both Blake (and Christ) to ally with the devil and produce the “Bible
of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no” (E44).

Of the Devils party

While much of The Marriage was written as a counter-argument to Swedenborg,
for the majority of readers it is Blake’s argument with Milton that has proved to
be more stimulating and controversial, taking on as he does one of the greatest
poets in the English canon.
On Plates 5 and 6, Blake provides a summary of his response to Paradise Lost
which has become one of the most famous readings ever to have been made
of the poem, even more remarkably so considering its brevity:

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be

restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the
unwilling.
And being restraind it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the
shadow of desire.
The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or
Reason is call’d Messiah.
And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the
heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan and his children are call’d Sin
& Death
But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan.
For this history has been adopted by both parties
It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out. but the Devils
account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole
from the Abyss
This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send
the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Je-
hovah of the Bible being no other than he, who dwells in laming ire.
Know that after Christs death, he became Jehovah.
But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the ive
senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!
Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels
& God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true
Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it (E34-5)

Here Paradise Lost provides a speciic textual example of the more philosophi-
cal statement that precedes it: as the narrator has inverted the relationship be-
tween energy and reason to explain the error of biblical codes, so this diabolical
25
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

reader (the section is titled “The voice of the Devil”) now performs a similar
reversal of the typically reception of Milton’s account of the war in heaven,
ascribing the role of heroic messiah to Satan and concluding with his famous
assertion that Milton was “of the Devils party without knowing it.”
Readings of Milton by the Romantics generally, and Blake in particular,
have been well-discussed, providing for Blake a role model for the sublime and
religious verse (see, for example, Newlyn, Wittreich and Dunbar). At the time
of writing The Marriage, it is not necessarily the case that Blake’s knowledge of
Milton extended much further than Paradise Lost, although he draws on images
from the ode On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity in Europe A Prophecy. A more
extensive demonstration of his knowledge, however, is clear after 1800, not
only in his composition of Milton a Poem but also the series of illustrations to
Milton’s works undertaken for a number of clients and covering a very wide
range. In this he was almost certainly stimulated by William Hayley who was
working on completing Cowper’s edition of Milton while Blake was at Fel-
pham (having written a Life of Milton in the early 1790s). Of these illustrated
works, Dunbar remarks that they show how “Blake’s relationship with Milton
never became a slavish, one-sided affair” but was instead “a lively, stimulating,
intimate, intense, and provocative kinship of mind and spirit” (Dunbar 1).
It is important to note that Blake’s comments on Milton in The Marriage do
not represent his whole opinion of the poet, which indicated much greater
complexity in the nineteenth century. Not that he necessarily became less criti-
cal of the epic poet: if, as Lucy Newlyn points out, Milton is more important in
Blake’s works after the return from Felpham then his concerns have also deep-
ened, for he saw that “the classicist had won out over the Hebrew prophet”
(Newlyn 260), impairing Milton’s poetic craft and corrupting it to the services
of war.
While being aware, then, that Blake’s response to Milton is much more
complex than the few lines from The Marriage cited previously would indicate,
there is a pugnacious attitude that runs through all his references to the poet.
Although being much more receptive to Milton’s revolutionary credentials than
many writers of the eighteenth century, Blake has little time for the hagiogra-
phy that had attended the epic creator of Paradise Lost. The irony of the rebuke
to one who could only write at liberty when writing of the devil’s party should
not be forgotten (after all, this is not Blake’s voice, but that of the devil); it is
also quite clear from Milton a Poem that Blake does not regard Satan as the hero
of Paradise Lost. However, the remark in The Marriage draws attention to the
unconscious energies of Milton’s work and seems especially perceptive insofar
as it draws attention to the repressed features of the poet’s life: the pamphleteer
of political liberty could also serve a republican dictatorship, the theological

26
 Without Contraries is No Progression

freethinker ended with a vision of God as predestinarian tyrant, and the bibli-
cal prophet was seduced by the possibilities of neoclassical militarism.

The Song of Liberty

Ultimately, Blake does not simply invert the marriage of heaven and hell simply
to place Satan in the role of Messiah. The whole of The Marriage is a satirical
rebuke to Milton’s pomposity and autocracy that deploys a playful energy to
indulge the unconscious desires that Milton dares not indulge and so – ironi-
cally – renders more dangerous in their repressed perversity: “He who desires
but acts not, breeds pestilence”, as one of the Proverbs of Hell has it.
It is this sense of play that remains with the reader long after the conun-
drums of Swedenborgianism, or the subtleties of arguments with Milton have
been settled. The ideas of The Marriage are astonishing, and Swinburne was
surely right to number this book among the most profound produced in Eng-
lish literature, but those ideas ferment and proliferate because presented the
boldest, liveliest and most vivacious style possible. Blake ends his satire with “A
Song of Liberty”, heralding in his prophetic voice the power of revolutionary
forces unleashed in France, searching for the day when “Empire is no more!”
Although that declaration was premature, the line with which The Marriage
concludes demonstrates just how far his vision was able to see beyond what
would become factional power struggles within the French National Assembly
and between the nations of Europe: “Everything that lives is Holy” (E45).

27
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

Selected Reading

Bentley, Jr, G. E. Blake Records. Second edition. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2004.
Bloom, Harold. “Dialectic in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, PMLA, 73.5
(1958): 501-4.
Cronin, Richard. The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth.
London: Macmillan, 2000.
Damon, S. Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. London: Houghton
Miflin, 1924.
Dunbar, Pamela. William Blake’s Illustrations to the Poetry of Milton. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1980.
Eaves, Morris, Essick, Robert N., and Viscomi, Joseph. The Early Illuminated
Books. London: The William Blake Trust/The Tate Gallery, 1993.
Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. Third edition. Princeton: Prin-
ceton University Press, 1977.
Essick, Robert N. “William Blake, Thomas Paine, and Biblical Revolution.”
Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 189-212.
Ferber, Michael. The Poetry of William Blake. London: Penguin, 1991.
Grifin, Dustin H. Satire: A Critical Introduction. Lexington: University of Ken-
tucky Press, 1994.
Gross, David. “Ininite Indignation: Teaching, Dialectical Vision, and Blake’s
Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, College English, 48.2 (1986), 175-86.
Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Madi-
son, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984.
Hume, David. The Natural History of Religion. Whiteish, MT: Kessinger, 2004.
Kaplan, Carter. Critical Synoptics: Menippean Satire and the Analysis of Intellectual
Mythology. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2000.
Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the
1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Newlyn, Lucy. Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993.
Nurmi, Martin K. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Reprinted. New York:
Haskell House Publishers, 1982.

28
Rix, Robert. William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity. Farnham: Ash-
gate, 2007.
Schock, Peter A. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Blake’s Myth of Satan and
Its Cultural Matrix”, ELH 60.2 (1993): 441-70.
Tannenbaum, Leslie. “Blake’s News From Hell: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
and the Lucianic Tradition”, ELH 43.1 (1976): 74-99.
Thompson, E. P. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Trobridge, George. Emanuel Swedenborg: His Life, Teachings and Inluence. London:
Frederick Warne & Company, 1907.
Viscomi, Joseph. “The Evolution of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell”. Huntingdon Library Quarterly 58 (1997).
Viscomi, Joseph. “In the Caves of Heaven and Hell: Swedenborg and Print-
making in Blake’s Marriage”. In Steve Clark and David Worrall (eds.)
Blake in the Nineties. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999: 27-60.
Viscomi, Joseph. “The Evolution of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. In
Essick, Robert N. (ed.) William Blake: Images and Texts. San Marino, CA:
Huntington Library, 1997: 5-68.
Viscomi, Joseph. “Lessons of Swedenborg; or, the Origin of Blake’s The Mar-
riage of Heaven and Hell”. In Robert Gleckner and Thomas Pfau (eds.) Les-
sons in Romanticism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998: 173-212.
Wilkinson, James John Garth. Emanuel Swedenborg: A Biography. Reprinted.
Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2008.
Wittreich, Jr., Joseph Anthony. Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton. Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin, 1975.
Worrall, David. “Thel in Africa: William Blake and the Post-colonial, Post-Swe-
denborgian Female Subject”. In Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki (eds.)
The Reception of Blake in the Orient. London and New York: Continuum,
2006: 17-28.
T he Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of the strangest and most
remarkable books ever to have been written. Although little
noticed during Blake’s lifetime, it has gone onto become one
of the most important of his works for later writers and artists.
This book explores the origins and contexts of The Marriage and
Blake’s extraordinary original ideas on religion, politics and
philosophy.

Jason Whittaker is Professor of English and Media Arts at

University College Falmouth, and the author and editor of a
number of books and articles on Blake, including William Blake
and the Myths of Britain (Macmillan 1999), Radical Blake: Inluence and
Afterlife from 1827 (with Shirley Dent, Palgrave 2002), and Blake,
Modernity and Popular Culture (with Steve Clark, Palgrave 2007).

Rintrah Books