Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I decided when going for a poo last night that I'd flip open my collected Blake on random pages and read whatever was there. In this divine manner I discovered "The Divine Image" where Blake has Christ crucified and consum'd by God Himself. Then I read the whole of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Absolutely fascinating, especially since lately I've been arduously working my way through some of Dante's Inferno (and Paradise Lost having made such an impression on me, and of course Y*ats... oh, and Ulysses which I listened to a few chapters of on Bloomsday).

This section in particular is a sort of anti-Catholic (/anti any organised religion) spin on Inferno.

A MEMORABLE FANCY​

An Angel came to me and said: “O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible, O dreadful state! Consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all Eternity, to which thou art going in such career.”

I said: “Perhaps you will be willing to show me my eternal lot, and we will contemplate together upon it, and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable.”

So he took me through a stable, and through a church, and down into the church vault, at the end of which was a mill; through the mill we went, and came to a cave; down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as a nether sky appeared beneath us, and we held by[32] the roots of trees, and hung over this immensity; but I said: “If you please, we will commit ourselves to this void, and see whether Providence is here also; if you will not, I will.” But he answered: “Do not presume, O young man; but as we here remain, behold thy lot, which will soon appear when the darkness passes away.”

So I remained with him sitting in the twisted root of an oak; he was suspended in a fungus, which hung with the head downward into the deep.

By degrees we beheld the infinite abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolved vast spiders, crawling after their prey, which flew, or rather swum, in the infinite deep, in the most[33] terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption; and the air was full of them, and seemed composed of them. These are Devils, and are called powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot. He said: “Between the black and white spiders.”

But now, from between the black and white spiders, a cloud and fire burst and rolled through the deep, blackening all beneath so that the nether deep grew black as a sea, and rolled with a terrible noise. Beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till looking East between the clouds and the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones’ throw from us appeared and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent. At last to the East, distant about three degrees, appeared a fiery crest above the waves;[34] slowly it reared like a ridge of golden rocks, till we discovered two globes of crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke; and now we saw it was the head of Leviathan. His forehead was divided into streaks of green and purple, like those on a tiger’s forehead; soon we saw his mouth and red gills hang just above the raging foam, tinging the black deeps with beams of blood, advancing toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence.

My friend the Angel climbed up from his station into the mill. I remained alone, and then this appearance was no more; but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight, hearing a harper who sung to the harp; and his theme was: “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

[35]

But I arose, and sought for the mill, and there I found my Angel, who, surprised, asked me how I escaped.

I answered: “All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics; for when you ran away, I found myself on a bank by moonlight, hearing a harper. But now we have seen my eternal lot, shall I show you yours?” He laughed at my proposal; but I by force suddenly caught him in my arms, and flew Westerly through the night, till we were elevated above the earth’s shadow; then I flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun; here I clothed myself in white, and taking in my hand Swedenborg’s volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all the planets till we came to Saturn. Here I stayed to rest, and then leaped into the void between Saturn and the fixed stars.

[36]

“Here,” said I, “is your lot; in this space, if space it may be called.” Soon we saw the stable and the church, and I took him to the altar and opened the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended, driving the Angel before me. Soon we saw seven houses of brick. One we entered. In it were a number of monkeys, baboons, and all of that species, chained by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but withheld by the shortness of their chains. However, I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with and then devoured by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk; this, after grinning and kissing it with seeming fondness, they devoured too. And here and there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off[37] his own tail. As the stench terribly annoyed us both, we went into the mill; and I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotle’s Analytics.

So the Angel said: “Thy phantasy has imposed upon me, and thou oughtest to be ashamed.”

I answered: “We impose on one another, and it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics.”
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
So many have borrowed the black sun motif, but few have the potency of Blake

A good audio example are Coil, see Last Rites of Spring
 

version

Well-known member
It's one of the most memorable images from A Field in England too.

3.jpg
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's a kind of a spin on Milton's vision of hell's flames as "darkness visible" (perhaps because light symbolises divinity and so of course Satan et al would be denied it) and for all I know Dante might have made a similar juxtaposition.
 

jenks

thread death
Anyone read the Higgs William Blake v The World book - heard Andy Miller raving about it on Backlisted.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Collected Poems. It's a Wordsworth Editions and only cost three quid.
I was wrong, it's SELECTED poems.

"THE Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all Men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible: but when the New Age is at leisure to Pronounce, all will be set right & those Grand Works of the more ancient & consciously & professedly Inspired Men will hold their proper rank & the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakspeare & Milton were both curb'd by the general malady & infedlion from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword.

Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against
lo the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever, in Jesus Our Lord."
 

catalog

Well-known member
i just read the marriage of heaven and hell tonight, it's really good. I've got the penguin selected poems from the library. love how he flips from a very general and cryptic proverbs section into "i was just chatting with ezekial the other night..." like this casual slip between pronouncements and thick description of meeting otherworldly spirits, but describing it like he's just met his mate for a few beers.

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them, and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, and so be the cause of imposition.

Also thought this was interesting, straight off the bat, given what we've been talking about in the "Attraction" thread:

THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL​

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors:—

1. That man has two real existing principles, viz., a Body and a Soul.
But the following contraries to these are true:—

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul. For that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
And he comes back to it later on:
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

So was thinking about what was said last night / this morning:

I think you need to find a way to get out of your head and into your body.
Yeah, whereas much of this can be seen as trying to think my way out of my head.

Like, we take this dualism between head/body as a given.

And also back to what luke was talking about ages ago, in the DMT/aphantasia talk, how you can sometimes access this group consciousness, we all get to feel it, it's not unique to anyone, it's more like a place. i'm quoting what he said in the talk:

i like that idea of a commons that you enter when you think
'get rid of the idea that you are making something up, you are going somehwere and perceiving something that is there'

And then what I recently read about forest bathing

exposure to nature slows down your front brain activity (=marker of stress) a bit and massively boosts your "parasympathetic" brain activity (=drift, flow, governs body organs rather than head).

So forest bathing takes you out of your head.

I was thinking, if you took away our individual heads, how different really are our bodies? Like my guts, are they very different to someone else's? the head gets imprinted with so much data, you can see/hear so many different things, but aside from our diets, which can obviously be very different, once you get to the body, how different are we?

Just a thought.
 

sus

Well-known member
"everything possible of being believed is an image of truth" what do ya reckon he meant by that
 

sus

Well-known member
Guts are very different, bacteria depend on what you eat your genes etc. Your gut is basically a fingerprint
 

catalog

Well-known member
"everything possible of being believed is an image of truth" what do ya reckon he meant by that
that you create it all from your imagination / inner mind.

i think this is the same thinking, expressed in a different way, if that helps.

The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the Genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects. Thus began Priesthood. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.

It all comes from within, so everything you think can be the truth, in fact is a truth.
 
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