Blake, Jung, and the Collective Unconscious: The Conflict Between Reason and Imagination

Preface

In childhood the individual psyche is given form and shape by parents, teachers, our peer groups, and church, synagogue or mosque. We are told at every turn how we are supposed to behave, what is expected of us, and what will bring us success in the world and in the world to come. What we learn from these external influences may have little to do with what we might have learned by paying closer attention to the voices and visions that arise out of our inmost selves. William Blake, poet, painter and printer (by his own unique method) had little regard for ordinary received knowledge. He took his pleasure in the fields of imagination, where angels danced in perfect freedom and the Guardians of the Law were often bound by their own chains.

C. G. Jung, as a child, found as many ways as he could to avoid the daily grind of school, and instead immersed himself in the myths and legends of antiquity, and in building cities in the sand. He would have been an archeologist or anthropologist when he grew up, but for the need to learn a profession that would enable him to marry and support a family. Medical school held little excitement for him until he discovered the field of psychiatry—where he could treat people who were called insane and try to draw some sense out of their nonsense. For both men, the imagination was the quality that made people human. Imagination was the sine qua non for living the creative life.

Jung asserted that while human beings live in the everyday world, we are not entirely of that world, but are connected by the slender filament of the symbol to a world beyond, which he calls the collective unconscious. Unlike Jung, Blake did not theorize—he shaped myths and symbols to express his worldview. Jung examined the statements of his patients and the symbol-rich literature of the world with an eye to finding out how the individual could become his or her most creative self. Blake had the temerity to gaze directly into the abyss and call forth its contents, which he then embellished with vivid images for all to see.

Blake had been my favorite poet ever since my mother read me his poem Infant Joy, when I couldn’t have been more than 3 years old. Later, in the course of my personal analysis, when I was breaking with the collective pressures that had limited me in the past, Blake’s words that had the greatest significance for me were:

I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another man’s

I will not reason and compare, my business is to create.¹

Create I did—the gods helping. The initial impetus for my study of Blake in relation to the psychology of Jung was the requirement to write a thesis for my analyst’s diploma at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Blake was on my mind for weeks. I read everything on him that I could find, though my sources were limited to what I could find among the somewhat dusty volumes at the English Library in Zurich. I found every book fascinating, as each revealed some hidden aspect of the man about whose personal life so little was known.

One night I woke up at about two o’clock and reached for the yellow lined pad I used to record my dreams. I wrote and wrote while the clock at Römerhof struck the quarter hours and then three. The outline of my thesis slowly took shape under my pen. Exhausted, I finally finished, put down my pen, and fell back to sleep. In the morning, when I awoke, I half expected to find the paper blank, as if I’d dreamed it all. But miracle of miracles, it was there in language so clear that all I had to do was type it just as it was! I presented it as a proposal for my thesis and it was accepted. I wrote on Blake’s long poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the problem of contraries, and the final resolution of the problem of opposites being the paper’s major focus: Without contraries there is no progression. This principle has also been a leitmotif throughout Jung’s works. All the time I was writing, it was as though Blake stood at my right shoulder and Jung at my left. I was not bound by the strictures of literary criticism, nor by adherence to historical fact. The guiding figure was Divine Imagination, and I allowed myself to be led by It through the Blakean labyrinth.

When I returned to the United States, I revised and expanded my Zurich thesis to include Blake’s later major prophetic works. The Jung Foundation published my book in a small edition, which quickly went out of print. Blake’s genius continued to inspire my writing, even as I turned to other subject matter. In my next book, Boundaries of the Soul, I attempted to give my reader a picture of some of Jung’s more difficult psychological and philosophical concepts, the works of the poet often articulating these more clearly than I, as psychologist, could have done. For example, in creating an impression of how archetypes hidden in the collective unconscious give rise to species-specific behaviors, I called upon this passage from Blake:

With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the rav’nous hawk?

With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse?

With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse and frog

Eyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitations

And their pursuits as different as their forms and as their joys?

Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens, and the meek camel

Why he loves man: is it because of eye, ear, mouth or skin,

Or breathing nostrils? No, for these the wolf and tyger have.

Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her spires

Love to curl round the bones of death; and ask the rav’nous snake

Where she gets poison, & the wing’d eagle why he loves the sun;

And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old.²

Blake’s last great work, Jerusalem, came to mind as I was pondering questions about how the masculine and feminine principles combined in each individual psyche—questions whose resolution led me to write my next two books, Androgyny and Energies of Love (soon to be reissued as Through the Eyes of Love). Blake used a mythic form, teeming with images and symbols dealing with the theme of the separation and alienation of the masculine and feminine principles in the psyche—masculine and feminine here referring not to specific sexual elements, but rather to archetypal characterizations common to all mythologies: for instance, the masculine rational thinking of Apollo versus the feminine emotional spontaneity associated with Dionysus. For Blake, Albion represents England in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, enslaved by the soulless machine, the looms of Locke. Jerusalem is Albion’s soul, its anima, the carrier of the feminine principle. Albion has cast Jersualem aside—this being the metaphor Blake uses for the triumph of Reason over Feeling, of the Rational Mind over Imagination.

Blake’s vivid descriptions of what happens in a world where for so long the masculine principle has been overdeveloped and the feminine principle has been suppressed provide a framework for my own work on gender and relationships. I have searched for evidence of feminine wisdom-figures who bring into being what can only be conceived when male and female energies engage co-equally in dynamic interplay. I found Shakti, and Sophia, Shekhinah, the Rose of Sharon, and the Queen of Sheba. Each character in her own way represents the Anima Mundi, that feminine principle which, when separated from its masculine counterpart, throws the external world and the worlds within out of balance. Such a figure is Blake’s Jerusalem:

England! awake! awake! awake!

Jerusalem thy Sister calls!

Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death

And close her from thy ancient wall?

Thy hills and valleys felt her feet

Gently upon their bosoms move:

Thy gates beheld sweet Zion’s ways:

Then was a time of joy and love.

And now the time returns again:

Our souls exult, and London’s towers

Receive the Lamb of God to dwell

In England’s green and pleasant bowers.³

When Blake, Jung and the Collective Unconscious was first published (as The Unholy Bible), neither Jung nor the basic concepts of his work were well known or generally understood. Today Jung’s work is widely known and respected. It has undergone a critical revival due to a social climate today which is far more hospitable than in the past to Jung’s validation of the non-rational aspects of the psyche, and to his use of active imagination as a means of exploring the mysteries within.

Blake remains difficult to understand because his words need to be seen in the context of the calligraphy and drawings on the actual pages of his works. To read and come to know Blake, one needs to have a gift for symbolic communication. For the past two centuries, one could only see facsimiles of Blake’s work in libraries and museums. We would have been fortunate to see one example of a manuscript, for example, but would miss the many other different examples of the same work, because he had colored each one individually. Most works could be accessed only in printed copies; the originals in all their variations were far too expensive and rare for most people to acquire. This promises to change. It has recently been announced that Blake’s works will soon be available on the Internet in full color facsimile! Blake would have been amused. I suspect he would have liked the Information Age better than he did the Industrial Age. Now there will surely be a demand for books— like this one—that will guide the reader or the surfer toward a deeper appreciation of Blake’s genius.

The time is ripe for a renewed interest in Blake and Jung. Their gifts to us were to teach us to honor the not yet known instead of trying to impress us with proofs and laws and assumptions and corollaries. Even in the field of physics, over recent years, many people have come to believe that one cannot understand the universe by tearing it apart and analyzing the pieces. A more wholistic view is becoming recognized in which the relationship among interacting forms is being perceived as more important than those between objects or events. We have come to know that reality is not exactly what it appears to be, for the range of our senses and our intellect is limited, and cannot give us access to the infinite. Only through dreams and meditation, through intuition and imagination, can we find evidence for an invisible Source behind all that we see. Blake, of course said it better and more succinctly: What is now prov’d was only once imagin’d.

Theoretical physicist, David Bohm, speaks of an implicate order and an explicate order. He sees the implicate order as the Source of the universe, in which is enfolded all the potentialities of existence. This higher order, so to speak, unfolds into the manifest order, the world in which we have our being, and which Bohm calls the explicate order. Seen subjectively, it is the unconscious that unfolds, beginning with our birth (or perhaps, as some believe, with conception), expanding as consciousness throughout our lives in this explicate order until, in old age, we begin the process of folding up again. At our death, our consciousness is again enfolded into the implicate order.

For Blake there is an archway dividing this world from that mysterious one, and above the archway he has written:

There is a Void outside of existence, which if enter’d into

Englobes itself and becomes a Womb. . .⁴

And for Jung:

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true self is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away, an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the central flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.⁵

The beauty of Blake’s oeuvre derives from the fact that he not only wrote about the contents of the collective unconsciousness, he experienced them as well. He conveyed his eidetic images to paper, both in words and pictures. He printed in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutory and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

This then is the key to the mystery which Blake called his Bible of Hell. Blake’s testament avows its purpose: to penetrate the walls of ancient traditions, built with the stones of dogma. It acknowledges one Source behind the universe, giving rise to all the gods in this manifest world who, despite their grandeur and majesty, their angers and jealousies, are but fragments of the invisible Whole.

¹ William Blake, The Complete Writings of William Blake, with all the variant readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch Press, 1957), p. 629.

² William Blake, The Complete Writings of William Blake, eel. Geoffrey Keynes, p. 191.

³ William Blake, The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, p. 718.

⁴ William Blake, The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, p. 620.

⁵ C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 4.

Introduction

BY M. ESTHER HARDING

BLAKE’S WRITINGS HAVE NOT BEEN VERY WELL KNOWN UNTIL recently, with the exception of some of his shorter poems, namely those of the early years of his life. His style is not easily understood and the symbolic figures of his mythology are obscure in meaning. His early work appears deceptively simple, but already the major problem that was to occupy the thoughts of hi« mature years was expressed in the unforgettable poem:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

This poem expresses the god-like passion and ruthlessness of the king of the beasts but ends with a question, a question already asked in his poem, Little Lamb, who made thee? Here, however, the question takes on a new and deeper significance, foreshadowing the profound problem of good and evil, of submissiveness and aggression, or suppression of desire and its expression that was to occupy Blake all the rest of his life.

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water’d heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Evidently Blake was beginning to face the enigma of God in his dual nature—gentle and loving and prolific and devouring.

Blake was thirty-three when he expressed his conflict over this dichotomy in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the book that marks the turning point from simple or seemingly simple lyrics to the later profound prophetic works. In this short book, consisting of twenty-seven engraved plates with text and pictures and decorative marginal designs, Blake portrayed the problem of good and evil and announced his belief that the rule of order, convention and morality expressed in the then current codes of behavior as taught by law and the churches was static, restrictive and deadening, while the free exercise of desire and the energies of the psyche were life-giving. To him, just as to Milton in Paradise Lost, the Devil represented the life-giving and creative energy. He was the true hero, bringing redemption to a world grown old and stale.

In her commentary on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell June K. Singer brings this view and its implications concerning the creative process forcibly before us. Especially in the section on The Proverbs of Hell does her amplification of the material shed a beam of light on the problem Blake was facing, a problem that is no longer seen only by one or two creative minds, as it was in the eighteenth century. Today it has erupted into the open. For the lid of repression has slipped aside and energy, instinctive energy, is rampant. Excess is the order of the day, at least among the young. In these Proverbs the problems we are facing in the twentieth century were already set forth by a creative genius, and a solution or resolution of the problems involved was suggested. Instead of facing the either-or of the opposites, we are directed to consider the cyclic form of energy expressed in the seasons: In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. The creative process, we are told, follows a similar law: receptivity at seed time must be followed by productivity and harvest. Exuberance is beauty. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. It is the law of the enantiodromia as enunciated by Heraclitus and elaborated by Jung in his discussion of the functioning of the opposites.

These Proverbs also describe the fourfold nature of man as an expression of the divine nature within him. But if this divine image is to be recognized man, must really live according to his intrinsic individuality and give voice to his desire. This requires that he recognize the individual nature of his experience, of his perceptions of the object and, even more, of his subjective reaction to what he perceives. For this is individual and unique; it is indeed one evidence of his relation to the divine within him.

The fact that Blake calls his aphorisms Proverbs suggests that he considers them to be of ancient origin, the formulation of wisdom acquired by ages of experience. Indeed they are expressions of archetypes, the term Jung uses to express the fundamental energetic patterns underlying psychic functioning. Dr. Singer sums up her discussion of the Proverbs dealing with the fourfold nature of man by saying: "We may conclude, therefore, that the archetypal images produced by Blake in his symbolic visions have this in common with those produced by the dreams of modern man. Their meaning is that man is able to have the experience of the God within " But for Blake this necessarily includes the acceptance of a man’s desire, of energy, even of excess, an attitude which he says marks the man as of the Devil’s party.

The Song of Liberty is not actually a part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell but is always published together with it. It is a universalized expression of the change wrought by revolution. The old king, like the sun, sets in the west. The new saviour is born as a child of fire; his coming is proclaimed by a prodigious cry, for his advent will spell destruction of old values and freedom for those formerly oppressed by the rule of the old order. This Song heralds the prophetic work that occupied Blake for the remainder of his life.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was followed by a series of six books which Blake called ‘‘Prophecies," in which the ideas first mentioned in The Marriage are elaborated. These minor prophecies are mostly written in the form of poetic dramas whose protagonists are mythological figures representing psychological functions and whose subject matter is a myth of creation. This myth is carried forward and culminates in The Four Zoas where Blake portrays the outcome of his inner conflict in the experience of an inner marriage, the coniunctio of the fourfold nature of man. The Four Zoas was never engraved and remained during his lifetime as a secret and sacred happening of the poet’s inmost heart.

Jerusalem was Blake’s final major work, bringing together the ideas enunciated in The Four Zoas. The fourfold city in Blake’s mythological scheme is the counterpart and opposite of Albion, symbol of fallen man. Jerusalem is concerned with the union of the four aspects of man, making this unity a numinous symbol corresponding to the inner image of the divine which has been in man’s unconscious since the beginning.

It is not possible in a short introduction to consider the whole range of Blake’s work that Dr. Singer unfolds before us. The work brings us a grandiose vision of man in his relation to the dual aspect of God and the struggle he is compelled to undertake with the many contradictory elements in his own experience. The later works of Blake, the Prophecies, are not an attempt to foretell the future in a historical sense but are rather warnings that we today would consider as referring to psychological events occurring in individual men and more especially, perhaps, in mankind. For example, Blake says, Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private and public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator.

Dr. Singer handles this often abstruse text with remarkable insight and has produced out of seemingly chaotic material a meaningful whole. When properly understood these prophetic books can at last take their place among the literary and psychological masterworks of English literature.

A final chapter on the psychological aspects of the vision brings this study to a close. The book is more than a critique or even an interpretation of Blake. It carries his ideas on into the psychological realm and makes his profound insight accessible to the modern reader, whether his interest is literary or psychological. Dr. Singer has steeped herself in Blake’s strange mythological world without losing her own standpoint in the twentieth century, so that she is able to relate, even to translate, his intuitive grasp of the unconscious background of life into terms that are appropriate to the present day and so make them accessible to contemporary man. The result is that we are introduced to a way of thinking about problems that are not only perplexing today but which have also concerned mankind down the ages. They have been couched in language appropriate to each generation, to each cultural stage of development. First, when entirely projected onto a metaphysical world, they appeared as mythology and the affairs of the gods; then, when seen in terms of the rational intellect, they appeared as philosophical speculation and rational enlightenment; now, in our day, they have been rediscovered and voiced in psychological language. If we are to carry forward the quest for consciousness versus the unconscious these problems must be experienced consciously. This is the task and the responsibility of each generation. Release from the compulsion of raw instinct can be found by man, not by repressing but by giving full expression to all his desires, not necessarily in overt behavior but rather in inner creative activity. In this way man may become whole. For when he is free to live what he is, man shows himself to be motivated by spiritual impulses as well as by blind instincts and when both are given freedom to live they do not cancel each other out but produce a condition moving toward the wholeness of the individual. This is the truth that Blake proclaimed in his Proverbs of Hell, and it is also the most fundamental insight that psychology has brought us. The process of individuation, as Jung has shown, is based on the antinomy and reunion of the opposites—of the carnal instincts and of spirit. Interestingly enough, while Blake discussed the problems involved in the difficult and fundamental reconciliation of body and spirit under the imagery of a marriage—a marriage of above and below, of Heaven and Hell—we find the same symbolism in Revelations where the culmination of man’s lifelong effort and devotion will be found in the marriage consummated in Heaven between the Lamb and Jerusalem. Jung, too, basing himself on his psychological researches into the dreams and fantasies of modern people, writes of this reconciliation under the symbol of a marriage, a strange marriage, the mysterium coniunctionis, in which consciousness and the unconscious are united.

These things are not easily understood; they belong to the mystery of man’s psychic nature, and Dr. Singer has expressed them in psychological terms without explaining them away. One reads her book with a sense that it is indeed dealing with profound problems of the human psyche and is grateful that the author succeeds in keeping her feet on the ground while at the same time she is able to penetrate the mystery of Blake’s vision through her own poetic feeling.

M. Esther Harding

New York, May 1970

"Every man carries heaven and

  hell with him in this world ..."

Jacob Boehme

1

Approaching Blake

READ WILLIAM BLAKE’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell with your uninhibited feelings as well as with your intellect, and you will know why the author tells us that at the end of life Heaven and Hell are joined. Flames of desire lick at man’s heels as he hurries through his days. At the moment of death they merge with the fragile visions of the sublime which inspired him, coloring his ideas and shaping them into graceful images. In one evanescent moment the Devil, boldly with eyes afire, or subtly disguised, clasps a shining Angel in his embrace. Opposites which struggled within the spirit of man while he walked the earth are united now in one vast paroxysm. Contraries are no longer set one against the other. Differences are resolved into a cloud that dissipates upward. A small mound of dust remains upon the ground.

We have few documented facts concerning those days in Blake’s troubled life when Heaven and Hell vied for dominance. His record is his strange unearthly work as poet, painter and self-styled prophet. Only the ground bears witness to the day in which he vanished into the anonymity of a pauper’s grave where within two days of his remains being lowered into the earth those of another were placed above him and on the following day yet another body was placed above that. ¹

Most of what we know about Blake is discovered in the reading of his poetic and prophetic works, at times so obscure as to baffle the patient literary scholar, at times so brilliant as to have stirred the creative spirits of such men as Swinburne, Shelley, D. G. Rossetti and Yeats. A small band of Blake cultists was quietly gathering adherents from the time of Blake’s maturity until a century later when one of their number, Herbert Jenkins, devoted several years to searching out the place where the body of Blake was buried. Jenkins located the unmarked plot in Bunham Fields which had been used on eight occasions, three times before and four times after Blake’s interment, without even a headstone to mark the place.

Contemporary knowledge of Blake’s personal history was scant: his name was missing from the encyclopedias of his day. Rare mentions occurred in biographical dictionaries, and those were sketchy and inaccurate. Yet between his death in 1827 and the appearance of the first biography in 1863, a body of memorabilia about Blake emerged which was to create for him a reputation as a unique genius. The material for The Life of William Blake was collected by Alexander Gilchrist out of conversations with many of the people still living who had known Blake personally.

Gilchrist had begun to cast about, in 1855, for information for his biography of Blake. An industrious researcher, he was moved (sometimes in conflicting directions) by a passion for accuracy and a love for his subject. He contacted many close friends of Blake: Linnell, Tatham, Palmer, Richmond, and Crabb Robinson. Reflecting the uncritical opinions of this tiny group of Blakean enthusiasts, he wrote of the poet’s style:

One must almost be born with a sympathy for it. He neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for workaday men at all, rather for children and angels; himself a ‘divine child,’ whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth.²

Gilchrist’s book abounds with anecdotes ascribing to Blake a personality that first awes people by its ingenuous reference to a world beyond the reach of the senses, then warms them with evidence of his very real contact with that world and his ability to draw from it tremendous sustenance in the form of psychic energy. Gilchrist tells of young students and artists who approached Blake for counsel and advice on how to come into contact with that other world in which new concepts arise and visions have their birth. Although Blake labored at his art and his handicraft every day of his adult life, he managed to find time for gentle discourse with those who would carry on his legend, to speak with them concerning the richness of immediate experience that they might enjoy if the doors of perception were cleansed. ³

Recollections of Blake’s conversations, notes and letters, annotations scrawled on the pages of books in his library, and selections from his major works made up the nucleus of material from which Gilchrist worked. He pieced this material together with such admiration and fascination that his writing often took on the quality of the stylistically elaborate Victorian eulogy. Were this not enough to burden the text, Gilchrist died before his work was complete. His