Post #23. The Visionary of Lambeth: William Blake and the Spiritual Realities of London
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In the same city where the cynical aristocrats of the Hellfire Club performed their blasphemous rites, a man of humble birth was experiencing a different and far more profound reality. William Blake, a poet, painter, and engraver, was a visionary in the truest sense of the word. For him, the spiritual world was not a matter of belief or speculation; it was a directly perceived reality. He saw angels in the trees of Peckham Rye, the ghost of a flea, and the ancient, mythological Albion on the hills of London. Blake’s London was not the mundane, material city of the Enlightenment; it was a living, breathing, and often terrifying spiritual entity.
A Prophet in the Modern Babylon
Blake was born and lived almost his entire life in London, and the city is the central character in his complex, personal mythology. He saw it not as a centre of progress and enlightenment, but as a new Babylon, a place of spiritual oppression, of “dark Satanic Mills,” where the human imagination was crushed by the forces of materialism and industrial capitalism. His famous poem “London” from Songs of Experience is a devastating portrait of a city in spiritual crisis:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
For Blake, the “charter’d” streets and river were not just a matter of property rights; they were a symbol of the imprisonment of the human spirit. The “mind-forg’d manacles” he heard in the cries of the chimney-sweeper and the soldier were the chains of a false, rationalist consciousness that denied the reality of the imagination.
The Radical Visions of William Blake
Blake believed that most people saw the world with only a single, material vision. He, on the other hand, claimed to possess a “fourfold vision,” an ability to see beyond the physical world to the deeper, spiritual realities that lay behind it.
Single Vision (Ulro): The world of pure materialism, of science without spirit, the dead world of the Enlightenment.
Twofold Vision (Generation): The world of emotion and passion, of good and evil, the world of ordinary human experience.
Threefold Vision (Beulah): A state of poetic inspiration, a pastoral, dreamlike state of innocence and love.
Fourfold Vision (Eden): The highest state of consciousness, a state of divine, prophetic imagination, where the human and the divine become one.
Blake’s art and poetry were an attempt to awaken his fellow citizens to this fourfold vision, to break the “mind-forg’d manacles” and to liberate the divine imagination that he believed lay dormant in every human being.
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A Personal Mythology: The Zoas and the Fall of Albion
To express his complex vision, Blake created his own intricate mythology, a cast of divine and demonic figures who represented the different faculties of the human psyche. The central myth is the story of the fall of the primal man, Albion (who is also England and, more specifically, London), and his four “Zoas” or faculties:
Urizen: Reason, the “Ancient of Days,” a tyrannical, law-giving god who represents the oppressive force of rationalism.
Tharmas: The body and the senses.
Luvah: Emotion and passion.
Urthona (also known as Los): The imagination, the divine smith who labours to rebuild the fallen world.
Blake’s prophetic books, like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Jerusalem, and Milton, are the story of the conflict and eventual reunification of these four Zoas, the story of the fall and redemption of the human soul, and of the city of London itself.
The Builder of the New Jerusalem
Despite his dark vision of London as a fallen Babylon, Blake was not a pessimist. He believed that the city could be redeemed, that a “New Jerusalem” could be built in England’s green & pleasant Land.” But this New Jerusalem was not a physical city; it was a city of the spirit, a city built by the liberated power of the human imagination.
Blake’s famous lines from the preface to Milton are not just a patriotic anthem; they are a magical manifesto, a call to arms in a spiritual war:
I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green & pleasant Land.
Blake was a solitary and often misunderstood figure in his own time. But his vision of London as a complex, multi-layered spiritual entity, his critique of materialism, and his championing of the divine imagination would make him a prophet for future generations of occultists, artists, and radicals. He was a man who walked the streets of the black magic temple and saw it for what it was, in all its horror and all its potential glory.
In our next post, we will enter the 19th century, a period of immense industrial expansion and imperial confidence, and explore the strange revival of spiritualism and ceremonial magic that took place in the very heart of this new, modern London.
Join us as we continue to uncover the secrets of the Secret City.
Solomon Jones (Author/Researcher)
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