THIRTEEN
THE GOLDEN RIDDLE
Some time in or after 1804, William Blake wrote a mysterious verse. He appended it to a section addressed “To the Christians” of his 100-plate, illuminated epic poem Jerusalem—the Emanation of the Giant Albion. It goes like this:
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
It appears to be a riddle. What does it mean?
The late authority on Blake, Kathleen Raine, informed this author in 1986 that she believed the “golden string” referred to the “Excluded Tradition.” By this she meant the Gnostic-Neoplatonist-Hermetic-Alchemical-Rosicrucian-Behmenist-Paracelsian-Theosophical spiritual stream—a rattling train of word-freight that adds up to what scholars today call “Western Esotericism”: complex, overlapping traditions of spiritual knowledge at last receiving the serious attention they eminently deserve.
I am sure Kathleen would not mind at all if I here stated her interpretation of Blake’s golden string does not exhaust its possibilities, though it does set one a-thinking. To find the complete solution to Blake’s riddle we need first to do as William Blake asked: take the end of the string and wind it into a ball. Then we may find that the ball becomes something magical, as Blake undoubtedly conceived it.
When Blake urged winding the golden string into a ball, he was in fact employing an image from a famous poem by Andrew Marvell (1621–1678), a figure from the artistic and philosophical aspect of English revolutionary history of the 1640s and 1650s: a period best known for conflicts that set King and Parliament apart in armed camps. Blake empathized with poets and natural philosophers of the era, men such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Hall, Thomas Henshaw, Thomas and Henry Vaughan, Robert Vaughan, Dr. Robert Childe, Elias Ashmole, John Pordage, Samuel Hartlib, and a bevy of other bright sparks—some royalist some republican—who all inherited spiritual ideals from the Elizabethan Renaissance whose seeds lay partly in the Platonic-Hermetic revolution of the Italian Quattrocento, but the kernel of whose ideas take us back to late antiquity.
“Andy Marvell! What a marvel!” exclaimed David Niven (playing poet “Peter Carter”) in The Archers’ movie Stairway to Heaven (1946). In this justly famed cinematic jewel, the hero decides to spend his last minutes before death in the burning cockpit of his Lancaster bomber as it careers toward inevitable destruction, crying out lines of spiritual poetry, religion, and philosophy to a disembodied female voice in his earphones. The voice belongs to an American girl called June (Midsummer is approaching) stationed with an Air Force squadron in the south of England. The date: May 2, 1945. The setting is World War Two: the night Berlin fell, spelling an end to a crisis for the light of the world. On this night of magic, when one man’s mind flies briefly beyond the earthly sphere, June is privileged to hear Carter’s last visionary tirade:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity . . .
The words are Andrew Marvell’s. Taking his cue from the marvelous Marvell, Master Bomber Peter Carter declares his belief that a better world takes off “where this one leaves off, or where this one could leave off if we’d listened to Plato and Aristotle and Jesus. With all our little earthly problems solved but with greater ones worth the solving.” Having bid his love adieu, he jumps optimistically, even triumphantly, to what he thinks is certain death in sure hope of the continuity of personal identity in eternal life. Of course, this being a movie, he will find his better life on Earth, in an erotic tryst with June in a flower-powered garden of roses and rhododendrons. The lovers’ passion is only interrupted when time stops still for the arrival of a being from “another world” come to claim Peter whose “time is up.”
Fast-forward twenty years. It is 1965. We are in Paris: a short trip away from “Swinging London.” The movie is Charles K. Feldman’s production of Woody Allen’s script for What’s New, Pussycat? What’s new is that Paris is fast dissolving from black and white nouvelle vague existentialism into Technicolor, Art Nouveau-drenched, pleasure-seeking psychedelicism, to the tune of Burt Bacharach’s fabulous Satie and Ravel-inspired jazz-pop romances. The scene is Lothario Peter O’Toole’s attempted nighttime seduction of neurotic nymphomaniac Paula Prentiss. She wants to recite her versified agitprop “pleas for better housing” as a last ditch, left-wing resistance to letting her “warm lover,” played irresistibly by O’Toole, into her knickers. Countering Prentiss’s tiresome “free verse” with genuine lyric poetry, O’Toole invokes Marvell. “I know a poem too!” he declares:
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
There’s no time to dilly-dally: carpe diem—or at least the night! Passion is all. Marvell’s poem is addressed “To His Coy Mistress,” written in the early 1650s. It is the same poem quoted by “Peter Carter” in Stairway to Heaven to his disembodied lover-to-be. Quite a poem to leap from World War II to the Swinging Sixties in two utterly contrasting scenes, the first with a celestial subtext, the second sublunary and carnal, but both having one hot thing in common: passion.
June is as slayed by the voice of Niven/Carter as was Cerberus by Orpheus’s lyre. Paula Prentiss’s character attempts a comic suicide rather than admit she’s in love—or lust—with young and beautiful Peter O’Toole. “Andy Marvell, what a marvel!” indeed.
And Marvell got brother poet William Blake excited too, with these lines, also from “To His Coy Mistress”:
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Now we have something. Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” has inspired at least three scenarios of visionary art, all composed at critical moments of history. Can this simply be attributed to the literary quality of a poem apparently about sexual frustration? While such frustration is probably universal, it barely covers the ground.
THE GOLDEN BALL
Let’s hear Blake again:
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
Blake has added his “golden string” to Marvell’s gathering-into-a-ball metaphor, before transforming Marvell’s “iron gates of life” into “Heaven’s gate.”
What, we may ask, could break down the iron gates of life, or transform them from being a dark, forbidding, “no trespassers” barrier into the gates of very heaven?
The first clue lies in Blake’s golden string itself. What is a golden string? The answer lies in Pindar (518–438 BCE), known in Pythagoras’s time as Greece’s greatest lyric poet. A worshipper of Apollo, Pindar came to envision his god as civilization’s redeemer: the bringer of grace, harmony, wisdom, and the unity behind diverse created things, symbolized by the golden light of the sun.
Apollo’s virtues are concentrated in Pindar’s first Pythian Ode into the image of his “golden” lyre. Plucking Apollo’s seven stringed, golden instrument can even enchant and pacify the belligerent Zeus. The seven golden strings express the “music of the spheres.” We may note that when Blake’s golden string is wound, it forms itself into a light-giving ball or sphere, a personal sun, serving to banish darkness through the explication of love in sexual harmony.
The classical world believed the Earth to be encircled by seven “planets” (“wanderers”): Venus, Mercury, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and, of course, the Sun. Each planet corresponded to a metal. Mars, for example, corresponded to iron, so iron is linked to war, and the “iron gates of life” represents life as a locus of conflict: civil war. The Sun rules gold, the highest metal. Blake’s “golden string” resonates in tune with the Sun, and thus we may hear an echo of Marvell’s last lines “To His Coy Mistress”:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Blake’s golden string expresses Marvell’s “all our strength and all Our sweetness,” which gathered up, or “charged,” into a solar union of love can break through life’s iron gates; cf. “the gates of hell shall never prevail against it [the “stone”]” (Matthew 16:17–19).
Blake doubtless intuited what Marvell was getting at, or what he thought Marvell was getting at.
But what was Marvell’s original meaning?
In search of it, I contacted Marvell specialist Paul Bembridge, fellow lecturer in Western Esotericism and the first man to reveal the depth of Marvell’s commitment to “British Rosicrucianism” whose radiant, utopian influence, Bembridge believes, Marvell and others attempted to shed on British republican government after the execution of King Charles I in 1649.1
Bembridge first considered the nature of the ball Marvell imagined consisting of “all our strength and all our sweetness”—a blended combination powerfully redolent of blissful sexual intercourse. An initial impression must then be that a ball that could tear through the “iron gates of life” must be a metaphoric cannonball: the idea being that, at least for a magic moment of supreme joy, the couple might momentarily shatter the constraints of devouring time, the sound of whose “wingèd chariot hurrying near” makes the poet’s plea so urgent as to suggest delay or “coyness” would constitute naught less than a “crime.”
Apart from the suggestion of iron’s being ruled by bellicose Mars, Marvell’s iron gates of life probably allude to the Neoplatonic belief that the soul enters the physical cosmos through the Gate of Cancer where it loses its memory of divine life, before proceeding to struggle under the weight of inexorable zodiacal Fate bearing down on life’s course, before exiting by the Gate of Capricorn, often little wiser for the experience. (One should also bear in mind that Cancer marked the northernmost “gate” of the Sun before its “return”; Cancer used to rule Midsummer, and Midsummer was traditionally held to be the perfect time for souls to enter the world, Apollo-blessed.)
It is, however, unclear whether Marvell’s ball is a metaphor, allegory or symbol, or indeed a synthesis of the three. Were we dependent on Marvell’s poem alone, we should only know that the ball is somehow love’s creation or consummation, a conglobing of loving, will-directed energies. The word ball could mean anything round; it did not have to be fully spherical or globular, or represent a plaything. The Earth—flat or spherical—could be described at the time as a “ball.” Accounts existed of the alchemical philosopher’s stone and of the elixir of life being contained as a ball. The idea of something turning—like a head (the etymological origin of “ball”)—is central to the idea of the “ball”: something, literally, revolutionary, or world-turning.
Marvell was familiar with kabbalistic images of the attributes of the Godhead descending through the emanated tree to the Earth and lower hells as spheres. Marvell was also mindful of images of ball-like planets on their courses, along with the stars’ unearthly counterpart on Earth: the globular dew, believed by alchemists to be impregnated with star power through stellar rays. Bembridge focuses on the link between alchemical processes and the pains of love unrequited.
He finds this link in Sir Philip Sydney’s last sonnet, “Astrophil and Stella,” which undoubtedly describes amorous frustration in terms of a failed alchemical operation. Sydney’s personal association with Elizabethan astrologer-magus John Dee would have furnished appropriate practical knowledge to stock the metaphor.
Boiling like lead in a darkened heart, the poet’s sorrow is relieved solely by the light afforded by thoughts of Stella (“Star”). But the light compounds frustration, for the “iron doors” of Astrophil’s sorrow obscure the poet-lover from “Phoebus’s gold” (possession of Stella’s radiant, solar love in love’s physical fulfillment). The Sun “turns back” from the northern Gate of Cancer. Taking Sydney’s idea into Marvell’s poem, we see that Marvell’s “iron gates of life” likewise evoke the base metal’s oppression of the aspirant lover, but the poet aspires yet to blast through to the physical (and by analogy, spiritual) gold (Sun) by virtue of the propitious strength of the magic moment, a consummation both spiritual and physical, devoutly wished: to run with the sun.
Such insight makes good sense of Marvell’s lines concerning the lovers tearing their “pleasures” through the iron gates of life to so striking an extent that “though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.”
What does Marvell mean by making the sun run?
Alchemists of the time believed that variant metals grew imperceptibly over great time periods like vegetables in the earth, the ores’ parent principles, sulphur and mercury, being affected by the sun: a photo-metamorphosis. The ultimate end of the process—transformation into perfected gold—could be speeded up like lightning if the alchemist by art created in the laboratory the philosophers’ stone through heat and chemical combination, taking into account solar and zodiacal influences from the macrocosm into the microcosm. Thus, Marvell seems to be saying that should the lovers attend on nature’s course alone for their fulfillment, time will surely run out on them, but by making a philosopher’s “ball” from their willed ardor, they might yet make the sun “run” in favor of love’s consummation: a great purpose fulfilled.
Put another way, if the iron gates of Cancer could be obliterated, then that which made the sun retreat could be inhibited and the sun’s natural course come under the influence of the lovers’ will.
While we can see here clearly how alchemical symbolism and practice can relate precisely to sexual magic, Bembridge takes the view that Marvell’s concern was not confined to the private world of amorous heroes and heroines “breaking through to the other side.” Rather, Bembridge believes that Marvell was using the lovers’ alchemical potential as an allegory for more universal aspirations in the sphere of national government, that is to say, to join earthly government to the active will of heaven, to set the British Isles under the direct guidance of supernal Wisdom. Was he suggesting the republican government instigate a stupendous act of love? Was he, like the Pole Samuel Hartlib advocating republican support for Sir Francis Bacon’s “Great Instauration,” the great reformation of knowledge Bacon (1561–1626) proposed as the work of “Six Days” in imitation of the divine Creation, culminating in Adam’s re-ascendancy over creation? Notably, the image for this process appeared as the frontispiece to Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (“The Wood of the Woods”; 1627), where we see the divine Name at the center of the Sun. The fiery orb shoots down powerful rays of divine wisdom to enlighten earth’s shadowy state. The rays seem to tear roughly through the cloudy vaults that cover the ball of the Earth, bringing Apollonine light to those in darkness.
Bembridge locates Marvell’s source of inspiration in the poem called “To his Tutor, Master Pawson. An Ode.” Written by John Hall (1626–1656), Marvell’s government associate, Hall published it in 1646. While Marvell was writing his poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (Marvell served from 1650 to 1653 as tutor to the daughter of Lord General Thomas Fairfax, lately commander of the parliamentarian army), fellow Cambridge graduate Hall was in the government employ as a brilliant propagandist in a world of “rough strife,” pitched in pamphlet and actual war with royalists supporting the late King’s son and heir, Prince Charles Stuart.
Hall, like Marvell, was something of a utopian with high hopes for the republic’s capacity to enact a golden age of purified science and religion. It is thus significant that in 1647, Hall followed up his “Ode” with a translation of German Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianae Societas imago, Hall’s translation appearing as A Modell of a Christian Society. Samuel Hartlib, Bacon’s chief advocate, commissioned the work.
Andreae (1586–1654) wrote at least two of the first so-called Rosicrucian Manifestos: startlingly provocative utopian works published in Germany between 1614 and 1616. The manifestos would stimulate a gnostic spiritual movement that persists to this day. We need to bear this background in mind as we read the signifying words of John Hall’s remarkable ode, addressed, when the poet was just twenty, to Cambridge tutor, Master Pawson. I have italicized those lines with the most direct bearing on Marvell’s imagery.
Come, let us run
And give the world a girdle with the sun;
For so we shall
Take a full view of this enamelled ball
Both where it may be seen
Clad in a constant green,
And where it lies
Crusted with ice;
Where’t swells with mountains, and shrinks down to vales;
Where it permits the usurping sea
To rove with liberty,
And where it pants with drought, and of all liquor fails.
And as we go,
We’ll mind these atoms that crawl to and fro:
There may we see
One both be soldier and artillery;
Another whose defense
Is only innocence;
One swift as wind,
Or flying hind,
Another slow as is a mounting stone;
Some that love earth, some scorn to dwell
Upon’t, but seem to tell
Those that deny there is a heaven, they know of one.
Nor all this while
Shall there escape us e’er a braving pile,
Nor ruin, that
Wastes what it has, to tell its former state.
Yet shall we ne’er descry [discover]
Where bounds of kingdoms lie,
But see them gone
As flights new flown,
And lose themselves in their own breadth, just as
Circlings upon the water, one
Grows great to be undone;
Or as lines in the sand, which as they’re drawn do pass.
But objects here
Cloy in the very taste; O, let us tear
A passage through
That fleeting vault above; there may we know
Some rosy brethren stray
To a set battalia [distribution of battle forces],
And others scout
Still round about,
Fix’d in their courses, and uncertain too;
But clammy matter doth deny
A clear discovery,
Which those, that are inhabitants, may solely know.
Then let’s away,
And journey thither: what should cause our stay?
We’ll not be hurl’d
Asleep by drowsy potions of the world.
Let not Wealth tutor out
Our spirits with her gout,
Nor Anger pull
With cramps the soul;
But fairly disengag’d we’ll upward fly,
Till that occurring joy affright
Even with its very weight,
And point the haven where we may securely lie.
It is difficult to disagree with Bembridge’s view that herein are secreted keys to unlock further the riddle of Marvell’s ball. Hall’s youthful, poetic vision launches the reader out of the world altogether, without benefit of fiery rocket, pointing himself and us in the direction of Marvell’s “deserts of vast eternity,” which “yonder all before us lie.” He has flown to the starry heights, torn his way through the sky’s “fleeting vault” in his mind’s exalted vision, seeing all things from a cosmic perspective, imagining himself girdling the planet like the sun but faster, by will of vision, autonomous, revealing (almost) what is known by the “rosy brethren” (the invisible Rose Cross Fraternity) of the eternal life in the spheres of the heavens and their role in our little earthly lives. Hall wants to open free passage of spirit from the heavens to the Earth. To do so will require escaping from the dullness of “clammy matter” where all that is immediate seems most real, to embrace a supra-cosmic vision where the world appears in its relative place as an enameled ball, and life a window of spiritual opportunity—so long, that is, as one is not drugged by the “sleep” or unconsciousness of the world and the worldly (in Gnostic terms, the Demiurge).
Hall’s “drowsy potions of the world” precisely invokes the discourse of the second so-called Rosicrucian Manifesto, the Confessio Fraternitatis (first published in Latin in 1615 and in English by Thomas Vaughan in 1652) wherein: “what before times hath been seen, heard, and smelt, now finally shall be spoken and uttered forth, when the World shall awake out of her heavy and drowsy sleep, and with an open heart, bare-head, and bare-foot, shall merrily and joyfully meet the new arising Sun.”
Christopher McIntosh’s recent masterful re-translation of the Confessio’s predecessor manifesto (the Fama) encouraged me to ask him to re-examine the above passage from the Confessio. Christopher offered the following translation from the Confessio’s first German version (1615): “that which in earlier times has been seen, heard and smelt shall now finally be spoken [“uttered forth” is repetition], when the world shall awake out of its heavy [“drowsy” is also an English addition] sleep and, with an open heart, bare-headed and barefoot, go towards the newly rising sun.”2 The crucial redundancy of the word “drowsy” in the English translation suggests to me the likelihood that the translator deliberately included the English word with the analogous section of Hall’s visionary Ode to Master Pawson in mind.
The 1652 English translations of the Fama and Confessio are often attributed to Thomas Vaughan (1621–1666). Vaughan, however, as “Eugenius Philalethes,” was the publisher, and his introductory note tells us that the Confessio’s predecessor the Fama was translated by a man unknown, a copy of it being given him by one “more learned than myself,” a man who wished to remain anonymous. Vaughan respected his wish: a respect that extended to printing what Vaughan considered the translator’s error in confusing “Damcar in Arabia” with Damascus.
Significantly, in the translation of the Confessio, “Damcar” also occurs as the place where “Frater R.C.” obtains his secrets (in fact the proper place was Damar but that error belonged to the original German). This suggests whoever translated the Fama may have contributed to translating the Confessio, a translation inferior in style to that of the graceful Fama. A likelihood that Hall was the Fama’s translator emerges, and that it was Hartlib who conveyed the translation to Vaughan. If so, we can explain Hall’s preference for anonymity on account of his working for the government where association with an apocalyptic, utopian work with a secret magical agenda was potentially embarrassing. The word “drowsy” then may have entered the text as a “clue” from Vaughan to those “in the know.” Alternatively, Hall may already have undertaken a rough or part-translation of the Confessio (including his arguably “giveaway” preference for “drowsy” over the German’s “heavy” sleep) with or without Vaughan.
The foundation works of Rosicrucianism were printed from existing manuscripts for the first time in English in 1652 as a parergon, or “by-product,” of the attempts of Vaughan and friends Thomas Henshaw (1618–1700) and Dr. Robert Childe (ca. 1612–1654) to conform themselves to an ideal alchemical fraternity, inspired by Andreae’s Wisdom-focused Image of a Christian Society, whose translation by John Hall as A Modell of a Christian Society was commissioned and published by Hall’s (and Vaughan’s) friend, the Polish Baconian and “Rosicrucian” activist, Samuel Hartlib (1599–1652).
A Modell of a Christian Society first appeared in 1647 printed by Roger Daniel, printer to the University of Cambridge, with its rubric from Matthew 18:20: “When two or three be gathered together in my name I will be in the midst of them.” It takes only a handful of “centered” people to become a heavenly “mustard seed” (Matthew 13:31–2) or radix for God’s active will.
Hall, Vaughan, Henshaw, and Childe were not the first English-speakers to be inspired by the Rosicrucian promise. A generation before them, Hartlib himself, along with the Czech educationalist and Moravian church-member Comenius (1592–1650), journeyed to England to exert themselves between 1628 and 1642 enacting a spiritually oriented reformation of learning through cultivating social and political contacts in their host country, efforts largely thwarted by energy-sapping conflict between King and Parliament. Comenius is famous as the promoter of Pansophia, an integrated spiritual-artsscience-philosophy educational program. As the name indicates, Comenius found the divine Sophia in everything and wished to point the world’s children in the same direction.
Thus it is possible to see Marvell in “To His Coy Mistress,” following Hall, pondering a revival of the efforts of the earlier “rosy brethren” to stimulate a divine transformation of society.
The new republic of the early 1650s was, however, riven by infighting between parliament and its army, now dominated by Oliver Cromwell, once Fairfax’s subordinate. The dramatically uncertain times and anchorless fluidity generated not only profound frustration but, in the visionary gleam, high expectation or “wishful-thinking” that the new era might yet herald propitious signs for a holy, enlightened nation under Wisdom’s care. Apocalypticism of sundry degrees was abroad to stir the blood of many looking for God’s will out of the mess. I have used italic for emphasis:
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his [time’s] slow-chapt [slow-grinding] power.
The youthful Christian republic could boast good men who felt called to enact the divine will. Close to the circle of Hall, Milton and Marvell, Samuel Hartlib was familiar with the new generation of chemist-alchemists, “natural philosophers” and scientific reformers.3 Marvell himself, however, was wary that just as the Hartlib-Comenius dream of the 1630s and early 1640s had been dashed by the Civil Wars, continued conflict overshadowed the highest hopes: in 1650 Cromwell’s army savagely subdued Stuart supporters in Ireland and Scotland while parliament dithered. It would take a tremendous effort of will, and of concerted love, to revive the “Rosicrucian” golden-age promise of a union of pure knowledge and spirituality guiding a goodly, Godly nation in the face of prevailing conditions.
Marvell had ample opportunity to weigh up the odds at Nun Appleton House, near York, as tutor to Lord Thomas Fairfax’s daughter during the period 1650 to 1653. In the poem “Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax” Marvell reflected melancholically on the wars’ waste that had devastated a once paradisiac garden (the italic words are Marvell’s):
Unhappy! shall we never more
That sweet Militia restore,
When Gardens only had their Towrs,
And all the Garrisons were Flowrs,
When Roses only Arms might bear,
And Men did rosie Garlands wear?
Tulips, in several Colours barr’d,
Were then the Switzers of our Guard.4
The paradise (garden) becomes an image here for a lamented “Rosicrucian” vision when men with “rosie Garlands” populated a radix of true religion like the “Switzer” (Swiss) Guard about the Vatican. Brightly attired, like harlequin-tulips, the “Swiss Guard” consisted of Swiss professionals: mercenary soldiers paid both to protect the Pope and French (Catholic) royalty. Marvell’s Protestant “sweet Militia” directly echoes Hall’s “battalia” of the “rosy brethren” in Hall’s ode to his Cambridge master, Dr. Pawson. That is to say, the invisible Rosy Cross brothers had a secret, spiritually militant plan for the restoration of humankind: an apocatastasis, or “return to Adamic perfection,” before the fall of spiritually aware Man into matter. This, Marvell intones, was the Militia required; not mercenary (paid) guards defending the indefensible, nor even, perhaps, Cromwell’s controversial military suppression of Catholics in Ireland: on the one hand recognizing the danger of militant, politicized Catholicism (Cromwell’s fear) while possibly being disturbed by the army’s ruthless response to that danger.
In “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell looks, I think, to the wavering government to set in train a more inspired direction than constant war; the violence should at least have a peaceful, Godly goal. Spiritual-physical science could yet break the bonds of dark matter whose dense “psychology” makes for endless conflict, while opening men and women up to the light of the divine sun.
Marvell’s poetic analogy for this breakthrough was, apparently, that of “cosmic” orgasm, breaking the bounds and circumference of earthly bonds, shooting forth beyond the vault of an interior heaven to the very center of spiritual influx (a theme that would grace the Preface to Vaughan’s Fame and Confession edition). In sonic terms, the projection of the ball beyond the Earth is consistent with that triumphant E major heavenly chord that paradoxically slams the coffin shut (and the gates of heaven open) in John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s equally melancholic-optimist “A Day in the Life” (1967), composed at another turning-point of Western history when the paradise of flowers was again invoked as an image for the power of social and spiritual renewal in the wake and face of war’s devastation.
Who may we ask was intended by Marvell’s “coy mistress,” she to whom the poem’s plea was ostensibly addressed?
THE COY MISTRESS
In order to locate the “mistress” of the poem, we must first reexamine the notion of the “ball” that the poet hopes will be projected with “rough strife” from the strength and sweetness of union with that mistress. In doing so, we catch a luminous glimpse of the heroine of this book.
In order to locate the “mistress” of the poem, we must first reexamine the notion of the “ball” that the poet hopes will be projected with “rough strife” from the strength and sweetness of union with that mistress. In doing so, we may catch a luminous glimpse of the heroine of this book.
Vaughan’s publication of the Fame and Confession of the Fraternity RC (printed in 1652) opens its address “To the Wise and Understanding Reader” with a literary invocation of the personified divine Wisdom (Sophia):
Wisdom (saith Solomon) is to a man an infinite Treasure, for she is the Breath of the Power of God, and a pure Influence that floweth from the Glory of the Almighty; she is the Brightness of Eternal Light, and an undefiled Mirror of the Majesty of God, and an Image of his Goodness; she teacheth us Soberness and Prudence, Righteousness and Strength; she understands the Subtilty of words, and Solution of dark sentences; she foreknoweth Signs and Wonders, and what shall happen in time to come; with this Treasure was our first Father Adam fully endued [. . .]
No Gnostic would take issue with any of that. Although, asserts Vaughan, Wisdom has been lost due to the “sorrowful fall into sin,” the Lord God has sometimes bestowed Wisdom to “some of his Friends.” He then makes it clear that the Fraternity of RC may be so described. They may be counted as “true Disciples of Wisdom, and true Followers of the Spherical Art.”
The Spherical Art . . . . Could this art have something to do with Marvell’s “ball”?
Both the Fama and Confessio offer tantalizing clues as to the mysterious nature of the “Spherical Art.” The Fama declares that Wisdom enables one to see what ordinary logic cannot grasp, that Plato, Aristotle, Solomon, and the Bible are in fundamental agreement: “All that same concurreth together, and make a Sphere or Globe, whose total parts are equidistant from the Center, as hereof more at large and more plain shall be spoken of in Christianly Conference.” The Confessio sees this spherical gift of insight as being at the Rose Cross Brothers’ disposal. They can transcend circumferences or boundaries of space and time by standing at “the center,” thus being able to see everything as a totality, being equidistant from all manifestation influenced or projected to a superficial circumference from that divine, invisible central point:
Were it not a precious thing that you could always live so, as if you had lived from the beginning of the world, and, moreover, as you should still live to the end thereof? Were it not excellent you dwell in one place, that neither the people which dwell beyond the River Ganges in the Indies could hide anything, nor those which live in Peru might be able to keep secret their counsels from thee?
Indeed, Paul Bembridge would have this passage from the Confessio as being the inspiration behind the opening verse of Marvell’s poem:
Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness Lady were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long Loves Day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges side.
Should’st Rubies find: I by the Tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood:
And you should if you please refuse
Till the Conversion of the Jews.
Bembridge reckons Marvell retains the “Ganges” for the mistress, while substituting his native Humber for “Peru” and for himself, while extrapolating from the Confessio’s “from the beginning of the world . . . to the end thereof ” with biblical approximations: from “ten years before the Flood” until “the Conversion of the Jews” (an event believed to signify the final consummation of history). Such incredible universality of insight, the spherical art, could, Marvell suggests, be attained should the heart and will of the “coy mistress” be won. Bembridge is thus pleased to identify the “Coy Mistress” with a coy Sophia, the divine Wisdom of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood: Lady Wisdom Herself, who appears star-bespangled to the storyteller of the so-called third Rosicrucian Manifesto: The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz (first published in German in 1616) to invite the troubled Brother “CR” to a spiritual, alchemical wedding, that is, consummation by spiritual resurrection (a truly Valentinian theme).
I should like to add that Marvell might have taken his Mistress’s discovery of “Rubies” by the Ganges from Vaughan’s Epistle to the Reader that introduces the English translation of the Fama and Confessio. Perhaps with a nod in the direction of Jacob Böhme’s work of this name, Vaughan writes of the coming “Aurora”: the Great Day when the Phoebus (Sun) of Divine Day-Light will reveal all mysteries from their occulted, obscure places, all the invisible “Treasures of godly Wisdom.” This light, Vaughan declares “will be the right kingly Ruby, and most excellent shining Carbuncle [an object that shines in the dark like a candle or burning coal, or rose-red ruby], of which it is said, That he doth shine and give light in darkness, and to be a perfect Medicine of all imperfect Bodies, and to change them into the best Gold, and to cure all Diseases of Men, easing them of all pains and miseries.” The rubies will not be offered to the suitor until the end of time (“wisdom is more precious than rubies” Proverbs 8:11). Therefore, the poet is enjoined to a projected acceleration into a “ball” (or Carbuncle?) that could chivy up the slow work of the natural sun or unaided worldly order.
THE SPHERICAL ART
There are other Sophianic clues to consider in Vaughan’s alchemical Preface to the Fama and Confessio. Thomas Vaughan is struck by the ability of the “Spherical Art” to demonstrate inner, central conformity of different schools of ancient Wisdom. He compares Philostratus’s account of the natural philosophy of magus Appolonius of Tyana (ca. 15–100 CE) with that of the RC Brothers, noting how Appolonius describes with respect the “Brachmans” (Brahmins) of the Ganges (India). But before detailing his observations of the “Brachmans” who by the Ganges have formed secret fraternities of wisdom, in tune with the exalted thoughts of the Jewish Kabbalah (Vaughan calls the Spheres of the kabbalistic Sephiroth a “Sphiristical Order,” also suggesting the “Spherical Art”), Vaughan tells a fascinating story.
He says that Alexander the Great never reached the holiest, secret places of the Brachmans, which stood on a hill between the Ganges and the River Hyphasis (the Beas River which rises in the Himalayas). He did not seize them, out of respect for their mysteries. However, it may have been respect engendered by fear for we are informed that the Brachmins had perfected, apparently by alchemy, the ability to rest secure within their gated refuge, while defeating the enemy without by means of “Thunder and Lightening” [sic]. Vaughan is quick to remind his readers that while the experience of gunpowder would have shocked Appolonius, nothing was now more familiar to his readers (on account of the Civil Wars), nor indeed would such fires and terrors of the sky have surprised the thirteenth-century adept Friar Roger Bacon.
In discoursing on “several wonderful Experiments,” Roger Bacon “tells us amongst the rest of a secret Composition, which being form’d into Pills, or little Balls, and then cast up into the Air, would break out into Thunders and Lighetnings, more violent and horrible then those of Nature.” Vaughan quotes Bacon to the effect that only a “thumbmeasure” of the substance could “cause a horrible report and show a brilliant flash, and this can be done in many ways, by which a city or an army may be destroyed.”
Here I think we have the seed of the fiery ball that only the ruby-wisdom of the Ganges could make: a ball to rock the body politic and break the iron doors of worldly blindness. Its composition was a secret wisdom of the east that held a key to blow such a storm in the heavens as could cow even the great Alexander—surely it could do so for Oliver Cromwell and the bickering parliament! But so long as the “Coy Mistress” remained by the “Ganges” and the English poet by the Humber, the magic could not be worked until the end of time. Then, all the secrets would be revealed—unless, that is, the signs of the day were right away seized and the transformative consummation—or “instauration”—hastened.
There is still hope for those who labor in the darkness, for Wisdom occasionally shines forth her fruits upon her disciples: one such fruit being the “Spherical Art” itself.
One must imagine, I think, a crystalline globe. If you “stood” at its center you would not be “standing” by any ordinary concept at all, for the center of a sphere must be a pure point, which by its nature must be invisible. One is reminded of the words attributed to Nicholas of Cusa but which first appeared in medieval commentaries on Hermetic wisdom: “God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” Particularize that concept and you have nothing less than an image of God: mundus imago dei (“the world is the image of God”), as the Hermetic Asclepius has it! Are you a bit lost? Of course you are lost in a sphere, unless you are the center, then you can see everything. That’s what the perfected adept can do.
Vaughan is at pains in his preface to speak of the difference between the knowledge of the worldly, superficial pedant and the knowledge of the adept. The center is the pure insubstantial substance. The adept must come to this center as he would his own soul’s spiritual kernel, the seed that enfolds into the divine being. The “enemy” is the circumference, the mere “skin” or flesh. That is where impurities accrete as on a surface (hence the peril of “superficiality”) where reflected essences are mixed.
Our ordinary rational faculties, unenlightened by the glowing light of Wisdom, know only how to deal with impure cards. Confused, the player is tempted to cheat. Only Wisdom can call Man to the Center. Thus the “true Disciples of Wisdom” are the “true Followers of the Spherical Art.” Such beings stand at peace, indifferent to affection of one thing over another, but subsist in solitary “darkness of God,” which though light to the enlightened is obscurity to the blind (cf. the Masonic axiom: “The light of the Master Mason is darkness visible”). She is black to the blind.
The one at the center is in perfect stasis, moving but unmoved, untrammeled by temptation, emotion, lustful attraction. At this one point, the adept finds all things are at his command, for with loving Wisdom he is the invisible center-point of the creation that forever extends from a center to a line, to a circle, to infinity (Elias Ashmole’s motto was: EX UNO OMNIA—“From the One, All”).
The perfected adept is with God and instrumental in His Will. He STANDS while others are forced to fall by imperfect position, gravity, pulls of the world, fancies, attractions, magnetism; taking each day and making each day, like a sun, but not subject to time’s corruption, which works on impure intimacies, magnetisms, but rather loving God through his Wisdom, which is Truth. He is in “yoga,” or union, with God (cf. John 10:30); he has found the Tao. As the German mystic-gnostic Jacob Böhme observed in his Aurora (1612): when Adam stood in his own center he was in Paradise, at one with his Sophia, but becoming enamored of his reflection in the lower sphere, his image was drawn down and bound by inferior powers. Love of Sophia can bring him to his return and the healing of the wound. The Center is essential; it is essence, being that is: the circumference is error. Or as the Master Mason degree still declares like an unheard voice in a desert of incomprehension, unheeded by the stone-less: “At the center of the circle, the Master Mason cannot err.”
The Center is with us, always.
THE CONVERSION OF THE JEWS
Marvell’s plea to his “Coy Mistress” posits the idea that she might withhold her favors “Till the conversion of the Jews.” No matter, the poet seems to say, that will give—or indeed has given—veritable ages (or aeons?) for him to reflect on and to appreciate every part of her beauty. Marvell describes her as a very special being, one worthy of the most intense intimacy. But it is the “last age” when she will finally “show her heart”:
I would Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
A hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
Marvell was not alone in seeing the Millennium or “last age” as imminent. This was a theme underlying the Rosicrucian Manifestos and was such a hope and expectation among certain figures in British government that it is widely thought to have functioned as an unstated component in Oliver Cromwell’s willingness to hear the case of Dutch Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel who, in 1655–56, persuaded Cromwell of the wisdom of granting government permission for Jews to come to Britain from Amsterdam after over 350 years of exile.
While there were sound mercantilist reasons for depriving the Dutch of some of their economic strength in Britain’s favor, the tacit (but not legislated) acceptance of Jews settling once more in Britain in 1656 encouraged many who believed that conversion of the Jews constituted a sign of Christ’s “thousand-year” reign on Earth, before or after the Last Judgment. Thus, while return was not conditional on accepting conversion (in fact Jews were instructed not to make proselytes), the simple reappearance of Jewry in Britain could be taken to signify imminent apocalypse, a conception that gave Britain’s growing influence in the world the dimension of a divine commission: a Godly nation would serve God’s historical plan. Such a plan was based chiefly on St. Paul’s fervent hope (Romans 11) that the severed “branches” of the Jews who denied that Jesus was the Messiah would one day see the light and be regrafted by God onto what Paul believed had become the Christian olive tree wherein all the sons of Adam would find salvation.5 Thus for visionary enthusiasts of the conception, Britain had become a millennial locus with a serious role in God’s Book of Life. This conception would play a part in William Blake’s philosophy of Britain, as we shall see, where “Jerusalem” will be identified as Albion’s bride—and having addressed Valentinian eschatology, we ahall understand what was intended by the bride-bridegroom idea of Albion and Jerusalem, rising into each other’s arms for the New Age at the spiritual revolution.
Paul Bembridge has observed how Marvell’s millennial enthusiasms emerged as government propaganda in his 1655 poem, The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C. (Oliver Cromwell). Marvell here gives Cromwell a role in the (alchemical) “Great Work” that would “precipitate the latest day,” referring to the Last Days:
Sure, the mysterious Work, where none withstand,
Would forthwith finish under such a hand:
Foreshortened time its useless course would stay,
And soon precipitate the latest day.
Again we have the theme of foreshortening time (I have added the italics), of precipitating changes through superior knowledge, of trumping merely natural processes. Time is hurrying near and requires decisive responses. However, like John Hall’s reservation that “clammy matter doth deny/ A clear discovery,” Marvell and his associates did not possess the full benefit of the “Spherical Art,” not themselves being perfected adepti. There was room for doubt, as these lines from First Anniversary immediately following those above demonstrate:
But a thick cloud about that morning lies,
And intercepts the beams of mortal eyes,
That ’tis the most which we determine can,
If these the times, then this must be the man
Bembridge is I am sure quite right to make a plea for the existence of something called “British Rosicrucianism” in this period, supported by Marvell, Hall, Henshaw, Vaughan, Childe, and Ashmole, building on the work of Andreae, Comenius, and Hartlib. According to Bembridge, British Rosicrucianism was “a heady mix of Neoplatonist and alchemical ideas which converged with millennialism to produce the ‘new dawn’ politics of the ‘Left’ at a crucial period in English history. This is the background against which Marvell’s ‘Coy Mistress’ is best read. Superficially a biographical courtship poem, at a deeper level, it is a call for adept action to conjure forth a golden age whose reality was there for those with esoteric eyes to see.”6
Indeed, perceiving a suspect Rosicrucian strain within 1650s government, those who despised the Cromwellian Protectorate seized upon the “Rosicrucians’” political dreams as accounting for the religious anarchy and uprooting of tradition that characterized the tumults of the eleven-year alien republic. Cromwellian government’s ultimate failure to secure broad support from the country became a matter for mockery, and what better way to mock than to accuse it of having toyed with dubious alchemical arts and chaos-inducing “Rosicrucian” magic (like blaming the “Sixties” or the “hippies” for numerous contemporary social ills).
In his Restoration comedy Characters, Royalist poet Samuel Butler (1613–1680) placed his “Rosicrucians” in literary stocks and cast rotten vegetable matter at the invisible brethren, though he suggests they were now dwelling in “spheres” above, for having bungled a reformation of government below. They were now:
carrying on a thorough Reformation in the celestial World—They have repaired the old Spheres, that were worn as thin as Cobweb, and fastened the Stars in them with a Screw, by which means they may be taken off, and put on again at Pleasure. . . . But their Intelligence in the upper World is nothing to what they have in the infernal; for they hold exact Correspondence with the Devils. . . . By their Advice the Fiends lately attempted a Reformation of their Government, that is, to bring all Things into Confusion, which among them is the greatest Order.7
Butler’s conception of the “new dawn” politics of British visionary politics was that it precisely lacked that very divine Wisdom to whom Marvell had apparently addressed his plea.
Does it transpire then that Marvell’s error, if such it was, was in confusing spiritual and material planes? Was his and his country’s “coy mistress” really the government of Britannia? Etymology rather reinforces this view, for while modern readers think of a “mistress” as a woman who engages the erotic interest of a married man—and therefore a “coy” mistress (as we understand the word “coy”) must seem a contradiction in terms—Dr. Johnson’s English Dictionary (Volume 2, 1766) gives mistress’s primary meaning as “a female master” and quotes John Milton’s expression “sov’reign mistress” to back this up, followed by Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson’s “Rome now is mistress of the whole world”; while Sir Richard Blackmore has the “lunar orb” as mistress. A mistress, says Dr. Johnson, is a woman who governs “correlative to a subject or servant”: a female master. We may think then of Britannia enthroned.
Dr. Johnson’s second meaning for “mistress” is a “woman who has some thing in possession”; he cites Edmund Waller: “mistress of the Indies.” Thirdly, “mistress” may mean a woman skilled in any thing. Not until the fifth meaning do we come to “mistress” as a “woman beloved and courted,” while the sixth and final meaning offers “mistress” as a “term of contemptuous address; a whore, a concubine.”
For the word “coy,” Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (Volume 1, 1785) offers us: “1. Modest, decent; 2. Reserved, not accessible, not easily condescending to familiarity.” Johnson notes the verb “To Coy,” meaning: “1. to behave with reserve; to reject familiarity. 2. not to condescend willingly; to make difficulty.” On this basis, we may indeed impute a mixed metaphor or conflation of planes to Marvell’s mistress. She appears to be both the British State, his mistress or master, unsure of the next step to take, and Sophia, Lady Wisdom, virgin spirit, who might yet shower Herself upon the country’s governance, while gathering in her own, should the “ball” of desire shatter the iron gates that block her solar passage. Certainly, even as Johnson’s dictionary definition of “mistress,” Sophia has some interesting contrasts in her makeup. She is a female governor who compels service, a woman beloved and courted, and, last, a whore or concubine. By now, astute readers will see just how close the Divine Wisdom is to being “Mistress of the world,” and even a sometimes “Coy Mistress,” and therefore we shall see just how close Marvell seems truly to have come to his beloved heart’s core.
HEAVEN’S GATE
We can now return to Blake’s riddle from his epic poem Jerusalem. Unlike Marvell, Blake gives us a concrete image for the “ball” created from winding the golden string. The frontispiece to Jerusalem (1804–ca. 1820) depicts a young traveler. His left hand touches an opening perpendicular arched door. The thumb and fingers of his right appear to be embedded within a radiating three-dimensional disc (it is unclear if it is a true sphere; it could be, though it more resembles a kind of lens, suggesting vision).
When we carefully examine the golden ball, it appears joined to the traveler’s hand by a black line (possibly the “end” of the golden string) that is joined to his body and/or garment; Blake considered the body to be but the spirit’s fleshly garment.
We should, I think, compare the two cursive fingers within the sunlike ball to the two linear fingers of Blake’s famous Ancient of Days image, where Blake shows a crouching, bearded, Godlike figure bounding the circumference of the measurable universe with his fingers stretched into the form of a compass. I suspect Blake is here making a direct contrast between the fingers of the hopeful traveler who has allowed himself to be led by the apparently autonomous ball through an obscure gate (or indeed the obscure gate) in Jerusalem’s wall, to the insistent, metallic fingers of his figure “Urizen” or Reason. Thinking himself the highest God, the figure of Urizen the “Ancient of Days” (measurable by time) bounds the universe, setting a circumference to the infinite, rendering its appearance outside of Man: separating Man from spiritual reality. The golden ball, on the other hand (literally) represents the infinite spiritual imagination: the true center, the antithesis of Urizen’s realm, the hell of the false god: the circumference. The traveler is led within, where Jesus said the kingdom of heaven could be found.
The ball is the image’s sole source of light, and by its sunlight, the traveler’s attention is caught by something we cannot see that he, having been led through the door, can see, in the darkness illuminated by the beams that emanate from the golden ball. We note also that this door has a precise stone threshold. While one of the traveler’s feet is still outside it, the other has made the definitive step and thereby become invisible to the worldly perspective of the viewer outside of the wall (us).
And the golden string of which the ball is made? We naturally consider the famous thread of Ariadne that leads Theseus out of the dark labyrinth inhabited by the savage Minotaur in the Greek myth: the dark labyrinth being taken as an analogy for the material world. We may also ponder the idea that the God of the Bible “writes” with his finger. The magus-doctor Paracelsus (1484–1541) whom Blake admired so much, believed the good doctor’s essential task was to search for “divine signatures” or signs of divine mind in Nature. These signatures point to the Wisdom of its ultimate source: vestiges of the Logos (the “Word”), scattered like seams or seeds of glittering gold in a dark mine. If one caught hold of a natural observation—the hidden curative power of certain plants for example—and, through empathetic understanding, followed where the discovery led (the essence of experiment being experience), the seeker would find the gold of health and a divine blessing. To use Blake’s image, if we should follow the spiritual gold, obscured in Nature by our lack of vision, we should activate what Blake called the “Poetic Genius” within. Then we should remember of what we are truly made and where our true home is: we should embrace the lady he calls “Jerusalem” once more, for she is the bride. The Gnostic, after all, is one who has found his or her way home.
More simply, the traveler’s fingers have plucked the golden string of Apollo’s lyre and entered in the key of the Sun: the outer image of the God within.
Heaven’s Gate, Blake tells us, is “built in Jerusalem’s wall.” Must we travel to the East to find heaven? No indeed, for Blake tells us that “Jerusalem” is the “sister” of Albion which doped-up, “drowsy” England must be awoken to. In Blake, it is not the Mistress who is coy, but “Albion,” the spirit of England, who in Blake’s time will not embrace his “emanation,” his divine syzygy, his Bride, Jerusalem. As an unbalanced, disintegrating arch-patriarch, Albion considers himself separate from Jerusalem, who in truth he is joined to. Failure to see this has led to Albion’s rupture with America whose spirit has embraced liberty. Albion’s anguish of desire cannot be satisfied with earthly attachments, for She is beauty beyond flesh and heart of his heart. But he does not see this for his psyche has been shattered by the usurper, Urizen: the false God: Reason abstracted, the ruler of the circumference and the superficial.
Like Marvell, Blake envisions the salvation of the country, and indeed the world, in terms of the necessary embrace of Albion and Jerusalem (or Christ and Sophia in classical Gnostic terms, and on Earth: the spiritually reborn man and woman). And, like Marvell and the millennialists, Blake sees a final consummation with the Last Judgment (meaning a reunion with God) and its signs—such as the conversion of the Jews (that is, the return of the Jews to “Jerusalem” or spiritual liberty)—in terms of an erotic, orgasmic surrender of pride and separateness.
In the apocalyptic “Night the Ninth” in Blake’s unpublished spiritual epic The Four Zoas, justice is a sign of the return to the Center:
The thrones of Kings are shaken, they have lost their robes & crowns
The poor smite their oppressors, they awake up to the harvest.
Echoing the biblical prophecy of John the Baptist, Blake’s great day occurs when Man comes back to “himself,” which is to come back to God: to realize that he is one with the infinite, free of the false god. Then, only then, inadequate or oppressive religions will lose their grip on the reintegrated spiritual mind of Man, integrated in its faculties, united to its source where Male and Female are one dynamic life of God, where spiritual reality reveals the error of materiality as a hopeless imitation, where spirit is alive and not a dream, where mere pleasures are transformed into infinite joy, whole once more:
Thus shall the male & female live the life of Eternity,
Because the Lamb of God Creates himself a bride & wife
That we his Children evermore may live in Jerusalem
Which now descendeth out of heaven, a City, yet a Woman
Mother of myriads redeem’d & born in her spiritual palaces,
By a New Spiritual birth Regenerated from Death.
A City, yet a Woman. . . . Note that: It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, built in Jerusalem’s wall.
A City, for many may live in Her; a woman, for some may know her, really know Her: She, the Wisdom of God, is in woman, to be loved and embraced as She loves and gives Herself freely, utterly, ever pure to the pure in heart.
Yes, you have probably got there before me. This is to do with sex, is it not? Not perhaps a sex we have known, but something very great, something that could lift sex itself from the gutter of modern life, and raise us to the heavens and a New Jerusalem.
THY HEAVEN DOORS ARE MY HELL GATES
Like Marvell, Blake sees the “Last Times” as being both somehow signally present (immanent) and temporally imminent (coming). Blake had taken Emmanuel Swedenborg’s doctrine that the Last Times had actually been initiated in heaven in the year 1757, the year of Blake’s birth. Crises on Earth reflected the spiritual revolution above and within. But whereas Marvell’s poem of the previous century employed sexual imagery to chivy up the divine Millennium—even envisioning a sexual union with Lady Wisdom to explode the “iron gates of life”—Blake undoubtedly saw a divine sexual liberty as a key central characteristic of the New Age, a principle that rather horrified his contemporary, the Platonist Thomas Taylor (1758–1835) for whom love expressed in fleshly passion constituted an anti-Platonic abomination.
In 1790, as reports circulated of Fletcher Christian having taken the King’s Bounty by mutiny in the South Seas, while, closer to home, the French Revolution and its victims were in full swing, Blake declared in his cannonball of fiery, etched writing The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise.”
The new dawn brings new insight. Contraries, such as Reason and Energy, called by the churches “Good” and “Evil,” or Heaven and Hell, are, Blake announces, necessary to human existence. The contraries promote progress; they should properly embrace one another in fructifying intercourse. Enthusiastic passion is necessary for things to change. With a possible eye on the shocking news of mutiny on the South Seas, Blake famously declares: “the lust of the goat is the bounty [free gift] of God.” The spiritual and physical worlds, falsely set at odds with one another, are really the “working out” of one dynamic world: that which appears “without” is really within this unus mundus (one world).
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell demands we consult Isaiah chapters 34 and 35, for an understanding of what is really happening in—or rather through—the world: “For it is the day of the Lord’s vengeance, and the year of recompenses for the controversy of Zion [Jerusalem]” (Isaiah 34:8).
And behold! The abolition of nobility in the French Revolution is predicted: “They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing” (Isaiah 34:12). And with the fall of nobility and monarchy, Britain (“the island”) will be the place where the “wild beasts” meet: “And thorns shall come up in her [France’s?] palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls. The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest” (Isaiah 34:13–14). Island Britain is where the New Jerusalem will be built: “And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isaiah 35:10).
What did Blake mean by: “Now is the dominion of Edom”?
Isaiah 34 announces a judgment of slaughter that is to fall on Idumea, another name for the biblical Edom (meaning “Red”). Edom was linked to Isaac’s son Esau, who, born red all over, surrendered his inheritance for a mess of “red pottage” and went to live in Edom (where King Herod came from): “For my sword shall be bathed in heaven: behold, it shall come down upon Idumea, and upon the people of my curse, to judgment” (Isaiah 34:5).
Jewish commentators came to identify Edom with Babylon (which held Jews captive), with Rome (which imposed Idumean monarchy over Israel), and, subsequently, with Christianity. Edom, then, is the Gentile world. But Edom is also an “Adam” (whose name means “red earth”) returning to Paradise; and Edom is a desert where, after execution of justice, “waters break out.” Where once were dragons, Edom will be “grass with reeds and rushes.”
A green and pleasant land . . .
The “dominion of Edom” had even more specific connotations in Blake’s time. Suddenly, we shall see how Jewish conversion is tied in to sexual revolution and the culmination of history.
Jacob Frank (1726–1791) proclaimed himself successor to Jewish pseudo-messiah Sabbatai Zvi (1626–ca.1676), astonishing Polish Catholic leaders in the 1750s by his devotion to the kabbalistic text, the Zohar (or “Book of Splendour”), which in Frank’s view allowed for a Trinity, over the Talmud’s authority, and encouraged a reconciliation of Frank’s many Jewish followers with the church.
In the apocalyptic year 1757 (Blake’s birthdate), a debate between Talmudists and anti-Talmudists or “Zoharists” was presided over by the bishop of Kamenetz-Podolsk. Heeding the bishop’s judgment that the anti-Talmudists had won the debate, Jacob Frank appeared in Iwana, Poland, claiming, as Zvi’s successor, to be a man in receipt of heavenly messages. There followed a rush of interest among Catholic and Protestant leaders to accept the reconciled Jews into their communion. In London, the Moravian Church (whose members had included Blake’s mother until her second marriage to Blake’s father) was alerted to the dramatic, apocalyptically suggestive events in Poland.
By the time Blake finished The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), some 26,000 Jews had been baptized in Poland. Frank enjoined his followers to adopt the “religion of Edom” (Christianity), as a step toward a religion he called “das,” meaning “knowledge”: that is to say, gnosis. Seeing themselves as free of the Law of Rabbinic Judaism, embracing a spiritual journey on the “highway” established in the redeemed Edom of Isaiah chapter 35: “the way of holiness” (Isaiah 35:8–9), they adopted a “way” distinguished by love, song, “joy and gladness,” and, notably, a nonrepressive attitude to the human body, when, that is, its energies were directed to a heavenly ascent. The suggestion of a sexual religion in the service of the Holy Spirit was strong.
It is the transformed “Edom” bathed pure by the sword of heaven (“nor shall my sword sleep in my hand” as the famous hymn “Jerusalem” has it) that Blake celebrates in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a marriage made possible by marrying the contraries, attributable to divine will, for God’s ultimate being is limitless. Blake writes in The Marriage [consummation] of Heaven and Hell:
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at [the] tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
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.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
This will come to pass by an improvement in sensual enjoyment.
The New Age requires two definite signs for its enactment: Jewish acceptance of Jesus, and a sexual revolution in the melting into union of the fundamental sex-negative religious doctrine of body-soul dualism. The new heaven and new Earth result from an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
There was, and is, need of it.
Wherever in the world men appear most ready to react violently to circumstances, we find repression of women and sex-negative taboo-inflicting culture. Misogyny is at the root of much murderous psychosis, the perennial, absolutist division of woman into the “pure” and the “whore”: the fruitful one, the wild one, is of course, both.
The full recovery of humanity (apocatastasis) requires the relationship between body and soul to be properly understood. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell offers guidance: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses. the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” What we call body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses.
Remarkable.
Are the senses physical or psychological?
It is, according to Blake and the “golden string” of tradition he followed, the mind that creates the sensation of material existence. Sensual existence can be heightened until the senses are found rooted in a higher plane, when “we shall see things as they are: infinite.”
Blake called on the Jews of his time to recognize their own esoteric tradition: the kabbalistic doctrine of the Adam Kadmon, the original image of Man (the Gnostic Anthrōpos or Phōs = “Light”), the image of God, the Man who contains the universe in himself. Blake identified this figure with Albion, and he identified him with “Jesus the Imagination,” for the imagination links us to the Pleroma through music, poetry, and painting: together they constitute the “golden string” vibrating with the sexual energy of Wisdom. And Blake addresses his call to Christians too, for he is of the view that the church worships the false god and ignores the true, insofar as it has condemned the joy of sex.
In the scattered verses of a probably unfinished poem called “The Everlasting Gospel,” composed in the second decade of the nineteenth century, Blake makes his call to the Christians who, unbeknown to themselves, had abandoned Jesus:
The Vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my Visions Greatest Enemy
Thine has a great hook nose like thine
Mine has a snub nose like mine
Thine is the Friend of All Mankind
Mine speaks in parables to the Blind
Thine loves the same world that mine hates
Thy Heaven doors are my Hell Gates.
The reference to the “hook nose” might be a jibe at the expense of the Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo (1815), famous for his great hooked nose (“Old Hookey” he was called) who once said: “Educate people without religion and you make them but clever devils”—a comment Blake would have objected to, insofar as what children learned of religion from the national church at that time was often less likely to open their hearts than to frighten them. And note that last line: Thy Heaven doors are my Hell Gates. Do we not hear an echo here of the breaking down of Marvell’s “iron gates of life” (the Gate of Cancer where souls enter the material cosmos and forget their spiritual origin)? For by a neat inversion we may also have: “Thy Hell Gates are my Heaven’s doors,” for Heaven and Hell have been united in Blake’s vision: married. Everything that lives is holy, declares Blake the prophet. If the Gates to Heaven are righteous obedience to the Mosaic Law, subjection to Reason, condemnation of the body, then they are Hell’s Gates and so invite that contrary “Energy,” which is “Eternal Delight.” And if the vagina and penis are declared sinful and dirty, then they are in truth symbols of divine, eternal delight and should be respected as such.
And so the golden string, wound into a ball, leads us in at Heaven’s Gate built in Jerusalem’s wall. For “Jerusalem is a City, yet a woman,” and in her wall or circumference is a gateway. She has the keys to the kingdom, and her womb is the Gate of Heaven to the spiritually free. To ignore Her is to sleep the sleep of death; to embrace Her is to find God.
The Golden Ball will, if we will, lead us. It is the substance of a true Spiritual Revolution that, by its fundamental nature, involves each and every living one of us. For the ball is still spinning, casting its beams into the darkness.