William Blake’s Doors of Perception and Visionary Poetry
- David Lapadat
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
William Blake Biography and Mystical Influences
In the year when the mystic Swedenborg[1] prophesied the beginning of a new era, a poet-painter-prophet was born in London who would assert that to perceive transcendental reality, one must “cleanse the Doors of Perception”:
“If The Doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite”[2].
William Blake was born in London’s Soho district in 1757.
Inspired by the mysticism of Jakob Böhme and the visions of Swedenborg, Blake embarked on his own prophetic path, surrounded by angels and demons, guided by gods and spirits, while being rejected by society and (unjustly) labeled as mad.
Mentioning Blake in this study* could be justified solely by the fact that these “Doors of Perception” would, two hundred years later, through Huxley, inspire the name of the band The Doors.
As we shall see, this name is not arbitrary, not chosen randomly by the band members, but represents the metaphor under which the entire creation of The Doors unfolds.
The influence of the pre-Romantic poet is deeply rooted in Jim Morrison’s poetic work, where Blakean transcendentalism intertwines with a shamanic vocation.
Public domain reproduction of illuminated manuscript page,
In Blake’s vision, mystical inspiration manifests in the interdependence of poetry and painting, his books becoming works of art in themselves.
In Morrison’s perspective, music replaces graphic representation, deepening the ambiguity of the vision.
Transcendence in Blake and Morrison’s Shared Vision
The exploration of the transcendent is the common goal of both artists.
Blake frames his vision within a Biblical context (the ultimate goal being salvation), while Jim Morrison operates in an archaic framework, where the purpose of his revelation is not salvation but understanding the things that lie beyond the doors.
Borges[3] noted that Swedenborg proposed a new path to salvation, namely salvation through intellect.
Blake shows a third path to salvation, salvation through art.
Considering Jesus an artist because He conveyed His teachings through parables, Blake offers, alongside salvation through morality and intellect, salvation through aesthetics[4].
For Blake, the Bible is “the great code of art”[5], launching a powerful statement in verse:
“A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man / Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian”[6].
To reinforce the belief in salvation through art, Blake creates in his complex mythological system the city of Golgonooza, which is “the city of Art, of Poetry, the Citadel of Los” (i.e., of the artist)[7].
The similarity between Golgonooza and Golgotha is evident.
From this, we can conclude that Blake places art at the Center of the World (Golgotha being at the Center according to Christian belief).
By correlating this Center with its significance in archaic (i.e., shamanic) cultures, the suggestion of salvation through art becomes clear.
Through the Center of the World passes the Axis Mundi, the pillar that connects Heaven, Earth, and Hell, the quintessential place of transcendence.
If the ultimate goal of transcendence for Blake is union with Christ, and the city of Art is at the Center, then art becomes the path to salvation.
This is not the only instance where Blake’s system appears in the light of traditional or archaic cultures.
The technique of shamanic ecstasy is present in the poet’s repertoire, but for Blake, it is an aesthetic ecstasy.
He is inspired by spirits, supernatural beings.
Whether the creative self is subjugated by these spirits (or demons) or subjugates them, from this fusion, the work of art is born[8].
Experiences closely tied to interactions with gods, spirits of the dead, demons, or angels are, as we will see in the following blog posts of this series, part of the technique of shamanic ecstasy.
Such connections between shamanism and Blake’s work are evident both at the level of his oeuvre as a whole and in specific episodes.
Shamanic Elements and Creative Process in Blake’s Mythology
At the level of Blake’s proposed system, the creative process is “tormenting, like the terrifying Tibetan initiation (…)”[9] or like “the initiatory dismemberment of the future shaman by demons and ancestral spirits”[10].
We also find motifs such as the descent into hell, initiatory trials, or the antinomy of chaos-order.
The cross formed by the cardinal points, the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), or the Four Zoas in Blake’s vision resembles the sacred representation of the Axis Mundi[11]
“There are Two Gates through which Souls descend, One to the South / (…) the other to the North”[12].
We encounter archaic mythology in the text of the Prophetic Books, as in Milton:
“And the Hammers beat thundering and the Bellows mightily blow / (…) / And the Bellows are the Animated Lungs: the Hammers are the Animated Heart / The Furnaces the Stomach for digestion: their terrible fury / (…) / The double drum drowns howls and groans, and the sharp whistle hisses and shrieks”[13].
We see references to the shamanic drum or elements borrowed from the archaic cult of blacksmiths[14].
Although the texts have a strong prophetic impact, and Blake’s mythical characters are in constant motion, there is a subtle sensation suggesting that the events took place in Primordial Time, similar to the homage paid by archaic tribes to the moments of Creation, which occurred in illo tempore.
Based on Blake’s own classification of vision levels, C. Ghiță identifies in the text of the poems the manifestation of the four types of vision.
Simple vision (the social level) is represented in America, Europe, and The Song of Los, double vision (metaphysical) is illustrated in The Four Zoas, triple vision (the aesthetic level) appears in Milton, while in Jerusalem, the highest level of vision, quadruple vision, is presented, where all three visions intertwine at the religious level[15].
Imagination, Inspiration, and Blake’s Enduring Legacy
Blake’s visions are induced by two main factors: imagination and inspiration[16].
Imagination is the link between the immanent and the transcendent in the equation of vision, considered superior to the material world, which Blake places in opposition to memory[17]:
“To cast off through Inspiration the rotten rags of Memory / (…) / To cast out from Poetry all that is not Imagination / (…) / And which aspire to the mastery of Poetry to destroy Imagination / By imitating Forms from Nature drawn from Memory”[18].
Inspiration, on the other hand, is an agent of transcendence, so the vision is caused by external mystical factors.
The vision is transposed by the recipient of inspiration into aesthetic terms (in Blake’s case, poetry and painting), and the artistic process becomes an ecstatic experience[19].
Blake’s system is far too complex to be discussed in detail, so we will limit ourselves to highlighting the aesthetic and mystical aspects that converge in Jim Morrison’s creation, which follows a mysterious thread starting from the symbols of archaic shamanism, passing through their religious revaluation in Blake’s work, and culminating in the nihilist-humanist influences of Nietzsche and the illuminated poetry of Rimbaud.
Morrison adopts from Blake, at an ideological level, the idea of transcendence.
At a formal level, the visionary poems of The Doors’ frontman intersect with the prophetic texts of the British poet.
The Doors’ creation contains enough elements from Blake’s poetics to conclude that the poet-prophet was a constant source of inspiration for Morrison, from the band’s name to the similarity between titles such as Blake’s poem “Little Girl Lost” and the song “Lost Little Girl” from The Doors’ second album.
The song “End of the Night,” inspired by the controversial French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, nonetheless directly incorporates lines from Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:
“Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to Endless Night”[20].
Moreover, it seems that Morrison was guided throughout his life by the maxim written by Blake in Proverbs of Hell:
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”[21].
Painter, poet, mystic, prophet, pre-Romantic, William Blake died in 1827, the same year as another great herald of Romanticism, Ludwig van Beethoven.
*The study will continue within a blog series
[1] Cf. Cătălin Ghiță, Demiurgul din Londra. Introducere în poetica lui William Blake, Iași, Institutul European, 2014, p. 145.
[2] William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Oxford, Bodleian Library, 2011, p. 73.[3] Jorge Luis Borges, Eseuri, Iași, Editura Polirom, 2015, p. 406.
[4] Borges, p. 502.
[5] Ghiță, p. 146.
[6] Ghiță, p. 146.
[7] William Blake, Cărțile profetice iluminate. Milton, Iași, Institutul European, 2006, p. 17.[8] Ghiță, pp. 104-106.
[9] Blake, p. 18.
[10] Blake, p. 18.
[11] Cf. Blake, nota 19, p. 171.
[12] Blake, p. 121.
[13] Blake, pp. 115-117.
[14] Cf. Mircea Eliade, Șamanismul și tehnicile arhaice ale extazului, București, Editura Humanitas, 2017, pp. 429-432.
[15] Ghiță, p. 232.
[16] Ghiță, p. 61.
[17] Ghiță, pp. 75-78.
[18] Blake, p. 163.
[19] Blake, pp. 79-82.
[20] Cf. Poetry Foundation, Auguries of Innocence by William Blake, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43650/auguries-of-innocence, accessed on 5.10.2020.
[21] William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Oxford, Bodleian Library, 2011, p. 66.
Comments