Thread 24643870

Going to read all of William Blake's prophetic books. What am I in for?

>>24643870 (OP)
Kino schizophrenia.

>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 shown in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the Comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire
>Know that after Christs death, he became Jehovah.
>But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five 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 Devil's party without knowing it

>>24643870 (OP)
Alan Moore with fewer pictures.

Blake was a heretic who's burning in hell right now.

>>24643870 (OP)
Prophecy.

>>24644057
Why do you reject Urizen's reason?

>>24643870 (OP)
a mental upgrade

I don't get it.

Entertaining mystical schizophrenia and sumptuous, brilliant world-building.

>To Blake, the French promoted a bad idea of reason, and he was disappointed when there was not a sensual liberation.
a what now

gnosticism + original characters donut steel + angry polemics against Emanuel Swedenborg

was bro cookin?

>>24646692
>Women the comforters of Men become the Tormentors & Punishers
He tried to warn us

>>24643870 (OP)
Read Frye's Fearful Symmetry first, it gave me such a better understanding of what exactly was going on in Blake's works. I tried rawdogging Jerusalem and it was a pleasant read but I didn't grasp it fully until I read Frye.

>>24646692
Blake was the greatest poetic genius of his time, possibly of all time.

>>24643870 (OP)
/x/

>>24646708
Good shout thank you
>>24646718
lol

>>24646718
>symmetr-eye

>>24646422
Prisons are built with bricks of law, brothels with bricks of religion.

Orc is literally me

I never liked his art. Especially not that stupid mixture of biblical nonsense and the Laocoön sculpture.

>>24643990
Alright, time to check out some Blake then.

>>24643870 (OP)
The ravings of a very sweet neurodivergent man

>>24648988
truth-tellings*

>>24648094
His men look great, the women are something else. Maybe it's accurate for his time?

ah! insane, she said, like William Blake I'm progressing through to new vistas, I'm cutting my way through the thicket, towards new and secret gardens of my own design, and when we get there, at the heart of that garden they'll be nothing but beauty.

Imagine the freaky puritan sex he and his wife got up to

>>24643990
>fewer pictures
Quality > quantity

>>24643870 (OP)
Heresy

>>24651421
>loving Jesus is heresy

>>24646708
>Frye's Fearful Symmetry
does this rhyme

>>24652377
The way I love Jesus it is.

>>24643870 (OP)
You're in for a good time anon, pay particular attention to the Book of Thel and America: A Prophecy. Just try and make sure you're in a good mental place when you read through him, I read him during a bout of bad mental health and alcohol abuse, and I believed that he was a prophet sent to combat the Lemurian time insurrection led by Burroughs and Land. At times, I believed I saw lemurs and other strange entities subvert the temporal order (as established in Thel) and visit my time to try to sway me towards magic. Now that I'm sober, I'm pretty sure all that's untrue, but I still sometimes find myself dwelling on my service in the Time War.

>>24654251
>the Lemurian time insurrection led by Burroughs and Land.

How does it compare to >>24655031

>>24656548
Blake would cry if he knew about Mormonism. Even the prudes in his day would be shocked.

>>24655308
I read the story The Lemurian Time War by CCRU during this episode of mild psychosis and sleep deprivation, and became convinced that it was describing a real rebellion against the Triune God (and the prophet Blake, as I believed at the time). In short, I believed that there was a great Time War occurring between the One God Universe (led by God and to a lesser extent, Blake) and the Magical Universe (led by the Lemurians, Capital-as-AI, Land, and Burroughs). The war was fought over time itself, as God sought to maintain linear temporality while the Lemurians sought to break linear time and create other temporal models. I "fought" on the side of the One God Universe (ie I wandered around my yard, hopped up on an obscene amount of caffeine and nicotine, looking for time anomalies), and there were times I really thought time-travelling entities were out to kill me. I still have moments where I wonder if I was onto something, but then I remind myself that I was a fucking retard who took a Romantic schizo and a Sinophile methhead too literally.

>>24657356
And some people think you can’t lead an interesting life without money.

undoubtedly one of the most utterly KINO images in art

>>24643981
sounds pretty heterodox, was blake a gnostic or something?

>>24658231
I love how modern audiences get Blake completely backwards. They see his depictions of Urizen and Newton (pic related) and think he is portraying them positively. Newton here is clearly depicted taking a shit on a toilet, crouched down, with his eyes cast down into the ground, at the bottom of the sea. All of Blake's positive depictions are figures facing upwards towards heaven, leaping and liberated from gravity, usually radiating with a sort of joy, totally unlike Urizen who is again crouched over, gazing downwards into a dark world. Not only that, but the preface of Jerusalem being the unofficial "anthem" of England despite Blake's regular criticism of the British government is also hilarious. Blake always wins, even his sworn enemies love him.

>>24658264
His cosmology is very gnostic but his endgame is more hippie anarchist free love

>>24658306
What about the Tyger? Its eyes are cast straight ahead.

>>24658306
>All of Blake's positive depictions are figures facing upwards towards heaven, leaping and liberated from gravity, usually radiating with a sort of joy
uh oh

>>24658306
>They see his depictions of Urizen and Newton (pic related) and think he is portraying them positively.
Did they really? I always thought he hated Newton especially.

>>24643884
rage and boredom and contempt and the inner struggle not to be the philistine left behind, you'll inwardly hate it, but unless you're a tolkein-head and have a sense of childlike whimsy about being swept up in fantasy worlds and so on, you'll hate it.

>>24658306
the image is still KINO, simple as

>>24658306
>>24660232
Why did he hated Newton so much?

>>24661289
Blake really hated what would be called today scientism, and Newton was the epic science guy par excellence. In Blake's poems Urizen/Reason/YHWH is the villain and the hero is Orc/Passion/Lucifer

>>24658568
>>24661365
>Christkek (somehow)
>anarchist hippie free love
>God bad, Lucifer good
This Blake fella you're telling me about sounds like a bit of a midwit

>>24662104
You'll understand once you get pilled, it's all very simple.
YHWH = Law = Repression
Lucifer = Rebellion = Art
Jesus = Love = Salvation
Jesus forgives all, therefore Jesus and Lucifer are buds in the fight against stern angry nobodaddy

What’s the best edition of Blakes work

>>24662189
I’ve been utilizing this one. Reading Frye’s book on Blake really helped me get oriented, and S Foster Damon’s Blake dictionary has been really nice to have on hand while going through pic related. It’s great, but sooner or later you’ll want to have access to the illuminations, since the images are just as integral to the meaning of Blake’s prophecies as the words.

>>24662219
Oh, this looks ni-
>commentary by Harold Bloom
Into the fucking trash it goes

>>24662315
Bloom might be stupid but he is absolute kino too

>>24643870 (OP)
Is there no complete version online?

>>24662112
so it's just gnostic larp

>>24663115
Wikisource

>>24663171
Oh, it's in separate books

>>24663121
It's ELEVATED gnostic LARP

When he criticized marriage and "advocated for free love" did he advocate like a 1968 sexual revolution sort of free for all or did he simply think that relationships should not need the sanction of any earthly church?

>>24664848
>So why did Mrs Blake cry? They were going through what is nowadays called a rough patch in their marriage. Mrs Blake, or was it Mr Blake?, couldn't produce a child. She miscarried the only conception they had together. The arrival of Count Cagliostro in London - a refugee from the Bastille, didn't help. After his departure the Swedenborgians struggled to comprehend the positive visionary experiences as well as the negative sexual gossip. William and Catherine Blake were serious students of Swedenborg. However, their unity was shattered when disputes arose over theories of conjugal love and concubinism. Many adherents claimed that the advocacy of concubinage opened the floodgates of immorality. Blake, of course, saw it as liberating and he eventually proposed to his exhausted and unhappy wife that he add a concubine to their "poor and shifting establishment." This did not happen, as over the next three years Blake struggled against the forces of repression both in his wife and in general society which "blocked the sexual path to the spiritual vision." She was not helped by their change of address to a house South of the Thames where they became close neighbours to several Swedenborgians sympathetic to Blake's increasingly radical views. Some of these views undoubtedly produced much distress in Catherine. In an illustration done during this time Blake produced the well-known portrait showing a man and his wife bound back to back, the man in leg irons, his mouth wide in horror.

>His conversation on social topics, his writings, his designs, were equally marked by theoretic licence and virtual guilelessness; for he frankly said, described, and drew everything as it arose to his mind. 'Do you think,' he once said in familiar conversation, and in the spirit of controversy, 'if I came home and discovered my wife to be unfaithful, I should be so foolish as to take it ill?'

>>24664913
Uhh...yeah, I was afraid that it would be the former.

you'll cast off the mind-forg’d manacles

>>24662112
The synthesis between the Christian transcendence and the Pagan immanence has always been the question. If it is possible, even.

The Atonement x the fire stolen from the Gods.

If it haunted Sir Blake he was certainly High IQ