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WILLIAM BLAKE’S VISION, Goose Green

At the age of nine in 1766 William Blake, who went on to become England’s greatest religiously inspired painter, claimed that he saw a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye, then in the countryside at the south-eastern fringe of London. He went home and told his father, who thrashed him until his mother intervened. Blake also once described seeing the face of God pressed against the window of his parents’ Soho shop. Blake later discovered, to his great pleasure, that his birth year – 1757 – had already been marked down by his mentor, the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, as a special one when the last judgment would come to pass in the spiritual world.

Although many of Blake’s paintings and poems were inspired by biblical imagery, confusion has long surrounded the identity of the Nonconformist sect he was born into. That his parents were Nonconformists was certain, for they were buried in Bunhill Fields, Moorgate, like Blake himself. Peter Ackroyd, Blake’s most extensive biographer, has debated whether William’s father, James, was a Baptist on Grafton Street, a Moravian on Fetter Lane, a Muggletonian, Sandemanian, Hutchinsonian, Thraskite or Salmonist, such were the bewildering number of non-establishment Protestant groups present in London in the mid-eighteenth century.

Blake’s own views were idiosyncratic. He designed a mythology based upon the Bible and the Greek classics, and rejected what he called ‘arid atheism and tepid deism’. He was wary of conventional religion, and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) wrote: ‘Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion . . . as the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys,’ a line borrowed from the Book of Proverbs.

In his epic poem Jerusalem (1804–20) Blake posed the ancient queries of the Christian Kabbalists that James I had revived when he moved to London from Scotland in 1603 to take the throne: was Britain the primitive seat of the patriarchal religion? Was Britain home of a purer Christianity than Rome? Was London the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, the centre of a world of one God, one religion, one nation?

If it is true, my title-page is also True, that Jerusalem was & is the Emanation of the Giant Albion. It is True, and cannot be controverted. Ye are united O ye Inhabitants of Earth in One Religion. The Religion of Jesus: the most Ancient, the Eternal: & the Everlasting Gospel – The Wicked will turn it to Wickedness, the Righteous to Righteousness. Amen! Huzza! Selah! All things Begin & End in Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.