The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

A Facsimile in Full Color

William Blake

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486132242
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

Once regarded as a brilliant eccentric whose works skirted the outer fringes of English art and literature, William Blake (1757–1827) is today recognized as a major poet, a profound thinker, and one of the most original and exciting English artists. Nowhere is his glorious poetic and pictorial legacy more evident than in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which many consider his most inspired and original work.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is both a humorous satire on religion and morality and a work that concisely expresses Blake's essential wisdom and philosophy, much of it revealed in the 70 aphorisms of his `Proverbs of Hell.` This beautiful edition, reproduced from a rare facsimile, invites readers to enjoy the rich character of Blake's own hand-printed text along with his deeply stirring illustrations, reproduced on 27 full-color plates. A typeset transcription of the text is included.

THE MARRIAGE of HEAVEN and HELL

[Plate 1]

THE ARGUMENT.

[Plate 2]

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden’d air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted:
And a river and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.

Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.

Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility,
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden’d air:
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

[Plate3]

As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedengorg 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, see Isaiah XXXIV & XXXV Chap:.

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passsive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.

Good is Heaven Evil is Hell.

THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL

[Plate4]

All Bibles or sacred codes, have benn the causes of the following Errors.

1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body, & Soul.

2.That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body,& that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. but the following Contraries to these are True.

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2.Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference or Energy.

3.Energy is Eternal Delight

[Plates 5–6]

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.

And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.

The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah.

And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is call’d the Devil or Satan and his children are call’d Sin & Death.

But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan.

For this history has been adopted by both parties.

It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devils account is that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.

This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire.

Know that after Christs death, he became Jehovah.

But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses, & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!

Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.

A MEMORABLE FANCY

[Plates 6–7]

As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which ...