English artist William Blake (1757–1827) stands as a courageous and singularly farsighted visionary, whimsical in touch and prophetic in scope. His affinity to the Judeo-Christian tradition, along with an inclination for developing his own philosophy of humanity and its place in the cosmos, inspired him to create unique narratives in dialogue with traditional biblical stories. Through writing, he penned many revelatory phrases celebrating the unity of the cosmos, humanity, and God. Ideas of the “Divine Imagination” and “Creative Genius” resound through his visionary heritage.
His “Angel of Revelation” depicts John, author of the Book of Revelations, gazing upward to the epic proportions of a “mighty angel” as described in the prophecy. The sensuous flow of thin drapery is a common element of Blake’s style, here serving to guide the visual movement of the figure in contrast to its firm and planted stability. The burning glow centers our attention on the angel with a radiance fit for the end times — both luminous and destructive in its divine capacity. The scene emerges as if from darkness, in the imaginal spaces behind our closed eyes. With Book in hand, we feel the angel reverberate with prophetic authority fulfilling what was written to warn and guide humanity.
Blake’s imaginative expression of angels uplifts us to a pinnacle of unity between creativity and divinity. The articulated and idealized forms of arms, legs, faces, and wings are rendered apparently effortlessly, and their ease and elegance are astounding. From heaven to hell and back, Blake’s paintings shepherd us along the artist’s personal voyages of the “divine imagination” into a hierarchy of vast spiritual worlds. Though biblical in scope and authoritative with prophecy, his paintings are buoyed with a light touch and heart. A compassionate and emotional quality pervades each work which addresses the inner child, as if during storytime, perhaps in each of us, and activates our sacred aspirations.
Blake was an illustrator of stories that invited whimsical freedom into the most exalted realms of theological exposition. He leads us by the hand as Virgil lead Dante through three arcs of the Divine Comedy, showing us divine imagination, psychedelic in its scope, and sober in its confrontation with darkness and the Light. In Dante, Blake seems to have found a kindred visionary from whose text he could launch his own correspondence with these realms. In “The Inscription over the Gate” we behold the next stage of the journey with flashes of fire and ice taking our breath away with their soaring poignancy.
Throughout his oeuvre Blake lands upon iconic simplicity which serves to condense a hint of divine power, if only a memory or distant thought, into the surface of a picture, as in Ancient of Days. (K) Here, we see the divine power reaching through a circular portal downward to create a world beneath his fiery empyrean. He reaches down with his divine Tool, both lightning bolt and compass, to measure the scope of creation, just as the artist himself could have done to draw the circle behind God in this very painting. The compass suggests thought, measurement, clarity of intention, and perfection in creation. As the ancient here dwells beyond a great circle, we are reminded of the axiom “as above, so below” — the resonance to be found between the human world and the divine within which it has been created.
We have methods of travel between these worlds. In “Jacobs Dream”*, Blake shows us joyful beings treading a spiral staircase. Here we can recognize a Christian resonance with the shamanic motif of travel between worlds through a central vertical route. The spiral further resonates with vines, snakes, and the DNA molecule, other motifs in shamanism and modern visionary art. Yet here we do not exactly see the magical flight or runged ladder as expressed in shamanism, but something more like a royal staircase tread up and down by humans and angels. Each figure exudes a royal innocence and blessedness, going to and coming from the Joy in the divine. Their contours are composed in resonance with the spiral stairs, evoking music and harmony.
For Blake, the imagination is divine. The “divine imagination” can be a primary source of Life and meaning. We can participate in it through exploring intimate and internal realms of visionary flight. We are one with the divine in the soaring heights of our inner imagination, which, infused with love and reverence for a unifying vision of the cosmos, our freedom resounds in creative expression.
Uniting divinity and the imagination and then expounding it throughout a vast body of work made Blake a titanic pillar of visionary art. His work shows a refined balance between biblical scripture and imaginative experience, breathing life into the Judeo-Christian cosmology through expounding it according to his unique visions and encounters. His paintings can serve as a bridge for audiences already familiar with Christian symbolism to more deeply consider the imagination as enrichment for the soul. Likewise audiences not invested in the Judeo-Christian tradition are invited into a vision of biblical dramas with fresh eyes. We are unbound by dogma and set free according to the imminent and transcendent worlds evoked in scripture.
