ON WILLIAM BLAKE

BY

FLEUR NELSON
PhD Clinical Psychology Program
Cultural Foundations of Depth Psychology
Winter 2008

Blake’s poetry has great value because it provides a kind of outline for the unconscious mind. With his engraving craft he used his hands and conscious mind in order to synchronize with the outer world. He was able to delve in the archetypal inner world of symbols and yet bring his experience in the conscious realm by reporting what he had seen. Many others, one could say, have descended in to the unconscious as far as Blake, but they have not returned (Witcutt, 1946, p.18).

The multitude of varied symbols that Blake employs throughout his work is, for him, the sources of his creative activity. They span the hiatus between the known and the unknown- the small center of consciousness presided over by the ego and the all embracing other. The transcendent function of the symbol has a deep significance not alone for Blake, but for all who permit themselves to follow in the directions where it leads (Singer, J., 2000, p.246).

His inner journey was an exploration of the mythological world, godlike figures and symbols that became the landscape of the human mind. The language of the unconscious is the symbol, the figure, or the image, which appear before the mind’s eye in daydream, or more vividly in sleep and are fundamentally the same for all men, regardless the period or race. Jung (1959) called these symbols, primordial images or the archetypes of the unconscious. The collectivity of these images he called, the “collective unconscious”. Mythology is the language of the unconscious, of the imagination.

In The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (1966), Jung describes the creative process as the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and the shaping of this image into a new symbol. He believed that these enacted new symbols have the potential to increase individual and collective consciousness and transform society by integrating them into the language of the current society.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense – he is “collective man,” a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind
(par. 157, p. 101).

Blake utilizes the symbols of the unconscious in his poetry. As an intuitive introvert, he is predestined to be a Romantic poet looking reality through the lenses of the imaginative realm and expressing the inner images through art.

I feel that Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World is a World of Imagination and Vision. I see every thing I paint in This World, but every body does not see alike (Selected &Edited by Peter Butter,1996, from Letters, p. 68).

During the years 1795 to 1804 Blake wrote the longest and most comprehensive of all of his books titled, The Four Zoas (2006). This work was never published while Blake was alive. Yet, it was the most significant, distilling his core values of his spirituality. In this epic he makes the attempt to synthesize a complete formula of man. He takes the reader into an alchemical journey of the psyche in order to reclaim its authenticity and balance with Nature.

Blake unlike his contemporary writers and artists is introducing the “dream technique” in order to access the unconscious. This technique is utilized today in Jungian Analysis, known as “active imagination”. Carl Jung in his in his Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1966) talks about "transcendent function" as a process of active imagination, an adjunct to dream work which is a process of consciously dialoguing with one’s unconscious, and as a result, has control over his or her own growth process.

The process of coming to terms with the unconscious is a true labor, a work that involves both action and suffering. It has been named the "transcendent function" because it represents a function based on real and "imaginary," or irrational and rational, data, thus bridging the yawning gulf between conscious and unconscious. It is a natural process, a manifestation of the energy that springs from the tension of opposites, and it consists in a series of fantasy-occurrences, which appear spontaneously in dreams and visions (p.100).

The ancients would retrieve in a semi-conscious state of mind, a somewhat trance, which would enable them to retrieve messages from within as coming from a god without. For Blake, unconscious often speaks like a god or daemon, which would reveal wisdom while one is in doubt and fear. In a similar way, Jung detected that initially the archetypal visionary messages would make him feel uncomfortable or doubt that he could trust what is being revealed from the unconscious. But, it is exactly that unfamiliar quality of the dream, fantasy, or active imagination content, which indicate that one indeed is tapping truly unconscious material.

In The Four Zoas Blake makes an attempt to recover the mythological universe of the human imagination. The Four Zoas is a dramatic epic of humanity, embodied in a mythic language. Blake is honest to his reader by claiming that his writing is not for the simple-minded.

Blake is a Romantic poet-thinker. Historically, this period of about 1780-1830 A.D. can be viewed as a project of pioneering introspection, which allowed many thinkers and artists to discover sources of visionary power and thus create their own mythological characters in the attempt to express their experience of the human psyche. Blake was exposed to a nexus of emergent occultism, heterodox teachings and mythological traditions, which were the underground force of the intent of the Romantic evolution. That era is described by Martin Bidney (1988) in his book, Blake and Goethe. Psychology, Ontology, Imagination:

Romanticism is intensified introspective individualism, with mythopoetic intent, and Romantic enthusiasms tend to contribute to this project of making one’s own interiorized myth, with the help of unexpected, unusual Traditional sources (p. xiii).

Blake seemed to have borrowed motifs and models from the occult tradition. Gnosticism, cabbalism, neo-Platonism, alchemy, Paracelsus, Boehme, and Swedenborg influenced his worked. (1988). His poetry is a diversified search for the roots of his imaginative being, an inward journey seeking individuation and trying to understand the collective unconscious.

The Romantic research for Blake is divided into psychological, ontological, and imaginative. The psychological research represents the ethical life of the psyche, which strives for authenticity. But, authenticity holds the psychological tension of two opposing energies, that of self-assertion and self-renunciation, of self-affirmation and self-transcendence, the evilness and goodness. Our moral life is in constant alternating motion of polarities, which is the alchemical tempo of Becoming.

The ontological research is concerned with learning how to live in a temporal world and yet transcend our fear for death through creative Becoming. For example, Urizen is the “negator” because he is inflicting suffering by rejecting the challenge to have a creative life in time.

The imaginative research is about the process of transforming the spirit of negation and mediating the energy of the imagination in order to find balance between order and creativity.

In the Four Zoas Blake is trying to give the message of the potential for integration and unity when the duality, stagnation and in authenticity appear to be the dominant experience of life. The myth he created is a cathartic testament both for the individual and collective. His approach to poetry is similar to Jung’s approach to psychotherapy where the archetypes of the unconscious and the intuition are the vehicles for expression of the psyche.

Blake depicts in the interior universe, the archetypal psychological world four chief gods or daemons that he named Zoas. The word “Zoa”, which Blake used as an English singular, is a Greek plural for animals. Zoa and animals are derivatives of Zoe and Anima, both representations of life incarnated and not fully transcended. He named the four Zoas, Los or Urthona, Urizen, Luvah or Orc, and Tharnas, which inhabit our psychological states and represent fragments of the personality. (1946). For example, he tells us that Urizen is thought, Luvah or Orc are love, Los is “prophesy” or intuition and Tharnas is sensation.

Jungian psychology talks about the four functions of the psyche: thought, feeling, sensation, and intuition. In the Blakean mythology, the dominant function is intuition or imagination, which is symbolized by the demon or god Los. All gods are the product of imagination or intuition, springing from the unconscious mind. “All the Gods of the Kingdoms of Earth labor in Los’s Halls; every one is a fallen Son of the spirit of Prophecy.” (1946, p.33).

Blake seems to have named Los by spelling Sol backwards which is another name for the sun, the most dominant thing in nature, which sustains life and creativity, and thus closely associated with the power of the imagination.

“Then Los apear’d in all his power;
In the Sun he apear’d, descending before
My face in fierce flames; in my double sight
‘Twas outward a Sun, inward Los in his might” (Letter to Butts).
(1946, p. 34).

God Urizen who is “the Eternal Mind,” “the Prince of Light”, represents the thought function. His name Urizen has a different spelling for “reason”. If reasoning is applied, taking into consideration all other psychological functions it can promote order and justice and allow creativity to connect the heart with the material world. The contemporary Blake’s world seemed to have repressed certain functions of the psyche, such as feelings and imagination, into the unconscious. This repression caused internal and external aggression and through people out of balance with nature and the true purpose of life.

God Luvah who is “the prince of Love”, represents the feeling function. The word Luvah seems to derive from the word “love”. He is the eternal young Eros boy who brings innocence and helps Los to restore his dream for freedom. “The Spririts Luvah and Vala went down the human heart, where paradise and its joys abounded” (1946, from Vala, p.58).

God Tharmas who is “the Lord of the Waters” represents the body and the function of sensation. This is the most repressed function connected wit the unconscious. “The eternal weary work to strive against the monstrous forms that breed among my silent waves” (1946, from Vala, p.40). The four functions are finally transformed and the human soul awakes from her innocent sleep in harmony with imagination where there is no separation from body and mind, external and internal reality.

In conclusion, I find Blake’s poetry very contemporary. His work is not to be taken lightly or to be considered as a mere artistic expression of antiquity. Reading his literature will lead to a journey of introspection; where the old values are still running through our ancestral blue print and the contemporary quest for inner freedom and transformation runs through universal archetypes.

It may be that our technological innovations, and are rapid evolution is making us become more involved with abstract worlds resulting in the temporarily alleviating “pain” with the use of computers, movies, cell phones, etc. Yet, our soul continues to manifest problems in different levels. We could only assume that the way we used to deal with our problems in the past is not applicable in the present time. But that is not necessarily true. For example, we can still use the myths, and characters in history as archetypal devices to access our feelings and understand our situation better. Christine Downing (2000) in her work on Psychology at the Threshold appropriately reminds us of Sigmund Freud’s words:

As Freud said, “Humankind never lives entirely in the present. The past lives on in us and yields only slowly to the influences of the present and to new change” (p. 109).

Blake in The Four Zoas talks about the inner struggle, the hidden hope and the fantasy that longs to manifest but conflicts with the conventional. It is the dance between the imaginative and logic. It is the palpable force of the Kosmos that creates order as well as manifesting aesthetics. From the psychological point of view this inner struggle describes the unfolding of the human drama, where as creativity describes the beauty of the soul where the human drama becomes the painful inspiration for synthesizing a great piece of art, where pain transforms into an opportunity for personal growth. Oenning-Hodgson (2006) describes this process as “anxiety”. She concludes in her article with the following words:

“…if I can be with the anxiety and be in this third space, it will yield gold, it will yield me, and churning and churning in its own interpersonal intimacy, it will yield more than me. It morphs in to a creative space open for discovery “ (p. 120).

Finally, Blake’s work of The Four Zoas is modeling alchemical psychology where the dark side of the personality is considered to be one of the first stages that need to be passed. Yet, at the other end of the spectrum of light individuation and transformation is developed. In this Jung and Blake were in accord with the theories of the alchemists, for whom the ‘Great Work” originated from ‘blackness’. The worlds of psychology, art and alchemy are embracing the ‘black’ which marks the initial stage of evolutionary progress of the soul or, inversely, the final stage of a regression. Hillman talks about the alchemical Nigreto as the initial stage of the entire alchemical opus:

“All the while, the worker enters a Nigreto state: depressed, confused, constricted, anguished, and subject to pessimistic, even paranoid, thoughts of sickness, failure, and death “ (p.46).

Blake is suggesting restoration of the human psyche through the alchemical process of finding the Philosophers’ Stone, and with that discovering the formula of the elixir of life and the transmutation of degenerated qualities. Here, in essence, the alchemist is concerned with things spiritual rather than with things temporal or materialistic.

Rather were these men inspired by a vision, a vision of man made perfect, of man freed from disease and the limitations of warring faculties both mental and physical, standing as a god in realization of a power that even at this very moment of time is lying hidden in the deeper strata of his unconsciousness, a vision of man made truly in the image and likeliness of the one Divine Life in all its Perfection, Beauty, and Harmony (Archibald Cockren, 2007, p.20).


REFERENCES

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Damon, S. F. William Blake: His philosophy and symbols. Kessinger Publishing.

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Selected & Edited by Peter Butter. (1996). William Blake. London: Everyman’s Poetry.

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