Inner Revolution: The Luminous Mind of Enlightenment

Abstract

In the “Ancient Poets” section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—which follows the “readerly” negotiations of the kōan-esque sequence of “The Proverbs of Hell” and precedes the “Memorable” exchange between the I-persona and Isaiah and Ezekiel (where Ezekiel proposed that his elevation of the “Poetic Genius” reflected the philosophical wisdom “of the east, [which] taught the first principles of human perception”)—Blake proposes that the emergence of myth occurs through projective efforts of the imagination, resulting in the animation of “all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses” (E 38) then projected onto “the Vegetable Glass of Nature” (E 555). However, after the visionary act, the “vulgar” (i.e., priests) use these very projections to “enslave” humanity by crafting “forms of worship from poetic tales” and thereby shaping these into an ideological apparatus of control predicated on the denial “that All deities [originally] reside in the human breast” (E 38). In Blake’s later account of the operation of “Science [as] the Tree of Death” (E 274) in Milton, Western enlightenment forms of knowledge follow this same movement from interiority to exteriority, where the “Newtonian phantasm” (E 141) establishes a mechanical universe by an extension of “Mathematical Proportion” (E 99) that reduces the free-flowing operations of the imagination through the deadening projections of “the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man” (E 142) as the prime attribute for the recognition of truth.