From Hell: Blake and Evil in Popular Culture

Abstract

Since his death in 1827, William Blake has often been associated with the devil’s party: Algernon Swinburne (1867) wrote of Blake that ‘he was born and baptised into the church of rebels’ (3), while Georges Bataille (1973) saw the poet as a satanic visionary in whose work ‘evil attains a form of purity’ (9). As one inspiration behind the occult art of Aleister Crowley, the self-styled ‘Great Beast’, and the transformation of Saladin Chamcha into a devil in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses , the association has been a curiously tenacious one considering Blake’s judgement of himself as a Christian prophet. The source of the connection was, of course, Blake’s early illuminated prophecy The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , in which he declared that energy, often called evil by the religious, is from the body and ‘Eternal Delight’, while Milton ‘was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it’ (pl. 5, E 35). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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