Free A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult by Gary Lachman

was one of Blake's teachers at Par's Drawing School in the Strand. He was also a practising magician, blending mesmerism, Kabbalah, ceremonial magic, drugs and ritual nudity in his devotions. (Oddly, Cosway, unknown today, was very successful in his time, and famous as much for his extravagant dress and enormous self-regard, as for his nicknames the Macaroni Painter, `Dicky' and Billy Dimple.) Swedenborg we know spoke openly about sex, and Blake's work, both his poetry and art, is suffused with a robust mystical eroticism as well as a Michaelangeloesque glory in the human body. But it is possible that he, and his devoted wife Catherine, professed a more than symbolic belief in the power of the naked body. His patron Thomas Butts was fond of telling the story of coming upon William and Catherine in their summer house in Lambeth and finding them in the nude. Blake is supposed to have said "Come in! It's only Adam and Eve." They had been reciting passage from Paradise Lost in their own Garden of Eden. Blake was also known to busy himself with erotic drawings depicting a variety of combinations and practices.
    With the painter Henry Fuseli, a close friend and supporter, Blake shared a love for the erotic, the Gothic and the sublime, as well as an openness and interest in the Semitic races, something he had in common with his contemporary esotericists. Another occult artist who met Blake late in his life was John Varley, a practising astrologer and `zodiacal physiognomist'. With Varley Blake conducted a series of seances during which he saw and drew the visionary heads of the famous dead: Socrates, Mahomet, Voltaire and Richard Coeur de Lion were among Blake's astral sitters. (It was also then that he saw his eerie "Ghost of a Flea.") This was not Blake's first encounter with astrology and heads: in 1791 he had executed a series of engravings of heads based on Lavater's philosophy of physiognomy, selections from which were published in issues of The Conjuror and The Astrologer's Magazine.

    Blake's other occult influences were literary. There was Swedenborg of course. But, as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell suggests, Blake came to reject central elements in Swedenborg's teachings. These were replaced by his deep study of Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme. (It will be remembered that Saint-Martin was also a profound reader of Boehme.) A wandering scholar and physician, like Blake, the 15th century alchemist Paracelsus rejected orthodox beliefs and accepted doctrines, disregarding the experts and trusting in his own instincts and natural insights. In many ways, Paracelsus is the patron saint of the Romantic`s; his central belief is that the truth of the universe lies in the human imagination, an insight that inspired Blake's life long "mental fight" against materialism and repression. From Boehme Blake absorbed the vision of the Universal Man - something Swedenborg professed as well - and the belief that the whole of existence is engaged in a perpetual creative conflict between will and desire or, as later philosophers would put it, being and nothingness. Blake declared that "Without Contraries there is no Progression" and his work is full of immense striving, a sense of cosmic struggle and labour.
    Blake was also attracted to the neoplatonic thought of Thomas Taylor. A bank clerk and mathematician, Taylor was obsessed with Plato, and taught himself Greek in order to read him and the other classical authors. Like Blake Taylor opposed Newton and materialist science, and it interesting to remark that neither Blake nor Taylor could have known of Newton's own obsessive pursuit of occult knowledge. Newton's volumes of Biblical exegesis and alchemical study did not come to light until the twentieth century. In lectures given at the house of Blake's fellow painter John Flaxman, Taylor introduced Blake to the notion of the prisca sapientia, the `primal wisdom' first brought to man through Orpheus, Hermes, Zoroaster, then later continued via Plato,