War is Energy Enslav'd: William Blake on War

The difference between Mental Fight and Corporeal War

This piece explores Blake’s views on war, and examines the key distinction he made between ‘Mental Fight’ and what he calls ‘Corporeal War’.

Introduction: Mind-forg’d Manacles

‘War is Energy Enslaved,’ Blake once observed - an observation that powerfully captures one of war’s most characteristic and toxic aspects: its ability to harness and enslave the immense productive power and life of human society – our collective energy, intelligence, industry and labour – and put it to profoundly destructive and degrading ends, to set humanity against itself. Blake’s observation implicitly equates war with slavery, as equal forms of ‘enslaved’ energy, and with both mental and physical servitude to its militaristic ideology – or ‘service’ as it’s more frequently called today. ‘The mind-forged manacles’ that keep this system in place.

Blake himself witnessed first-hand the devastating impact of warfare: he lived for sixty-nine years (1757-1827) and for each one of those years, Britain was at war or in military conflict with one country or another – with India, with Portugal, with Hanover, Prussia, the Netherlands, Spain, the Dutch Republic, Austria, Germany, Ireland, America, France, Sweden, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma …

In the image of Nelson, above, Blake therefore includes and incloses all of the continents of the world within the terrifying coils and ‘wreathings’ not so much of a military machine but of a vast military dragon, Leviathan, representing the brutal and colonising nature of British naval warfare in particular. As he alluded to in his carefully encoded title for the work, the image reveals ‘the spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan, in whose wreathings are infolded the Nations of the Earth.’ The prostrate figure of Africa, one of Britain’s major slave trade territories, is shown manacled and half dead at the bottom, under the indifferent feet of Britain’s celebrated military hero Lord Nelson.

And it is Britain’s unconscious blindness and military delusion that forms the centre-piece of the image, the huge disjunct between perception and reality. Nelson is standing with a halo, almost like a young Apollo, amidst the catastrophic scene of organised murder and enchainment that he himself has initiated and brought forth. Something is very wrong, Blake is suggesting, in Britain’s image of itself, and this picture was intended in part to alter and correct that image - to reveal the true nature of who we are and what we are doing, and the underlying relationships and attitudes that generate war.

Blake first exhibited the painting in a small room above his brother’s shop in Soho, London - the city heart of Britain’s military empire. More and more ‘Nations of the Earth’ have sadly become ‘infolded’ within that wreath - absorbed, harnessed, colonised, and killed since then - vastly more. As Ben Griffin, the former British SAS soldier and founder of Veterans for Peace UK, observed in 2016, ‘military forces from these islands have invaded every single country in the world, bar 22’ during its thousand-year history - an extraordinary accomplishment and indictment, revealing the true depth of the dysfunctions and perverse forces driving war and conquest throughout its history, part of its pathological cultural DNA. This is the ‘spiritual form’, the underlying psychological structures and attitudes, that Blake is getting at in his work.

‘The UK is a prime driver of war in the world’, Griffin observes with an epigrammatic terseness that could be Blake’s. ‘In my view, the War System consists of every institution and every individual that thinks it's acceptable to prepare and go to war to further status, power, and wealth. All current mainstream parties are still underneath and subservient to the War System that controls this country.’

Blake would have concurred. He saw that Britain’s global and commercial dominance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was built on its vast military empire and financial capabilities, which in turn were built on the back of global slavery, exploitation, colonialism and violence. ‘Slavery on an industrial scale was a major source of the wealth of the British empire’, notes Sanchez Manning, and the extensiveness and brutalising character of war’s ‘enslavement’ marked the age of Britain emerging as the first modern superpower.

It also marked the faces of those Blake encountered while wandering through the militarised and impoverished streets of London, the city he lived in for all but three years of his life, and which he wrote about constantly:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every black’ning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

Blake is perhaps best known for his remarkable collection of short poems Songs of Innocence and of Experience (of which this poem, ‘London’, forms a part), but as even this short example shows, a profound social and political consciousness is evident throughout his writing, bursting and burning through such lines as ‘mind-forg’d manacles’, and the haunting image of the Soldier’s sigh running ‘in blood down Palace walls’ – a line that still drips into modern consciousness, with our awareness of the extensiveness of veteran PTSD, and the complicity of the establishment (‘Palace walls’) in maintaining this ongoing brutality.

William Blake had a remarkable skill for succinctly condensing a whole way of seeing or subject into a single phrase or epithet. His descriptions of ‘dark Satanic mills’, to capture the deadening nature of the industrial revolution and the mechanical mindset that ran it, or England as once a ‘green and pleasant land’, or of seeing ‘a world in a grain of sand’, all suggest this ability both to immediately see into a reality and to convey it vividly, going to the very heart of a condition or state.

And as his gnomic observation about the fundamentally ‘enslaved’ nature of war – both the literal enslavement and recruitment of war, and the deeper mental and ideological recruitment that supports it – suggests, Blake was someone deeply involved in the social movements and debates of his time. And they were also global movements, signalling the terrifying new expansion of the capabilities of war and slavery that Britain was busy, blindly, spearheading in its pursuit of ‘Empire’.

'Empire is no more!' Blake's great rallying cry, which appears on the final plate of his revolutionary realignment of the human psyche and culture, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), before the final words - the counter mantra to Empire and War: ‘For every thing that lives is Holy’. The perception and sense that everything is sacred is the complete antithesis of the perception and sense of war and empire, which is why the Church’s support and sanctification of Britain’s endless wars was so obscene to Blake: ‘the black’ning Church’.

Slavery and War

When we think of 'Empire' today we tend to think of flags, and territories, and commerce - the economic and conceptual drivers that legitimised and justified its continuance, and indeed does so still today (an estimated fifty million people are currently living in modern slavery according to a 2022 report).

We don't tend to think of this - its psychology or its embodied reality - or what the process of enslavement actually involves.

War and slavery are synonymous in Blake’s work, as in these powerful engravings he made for John Stedman’s anti-slavery treatise, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition (1796) suggest. Stedman's account of the slave rebellion in Dutch Guiana (1772-1777) included 16 plates by Blake. As John Windle notes, ‘Stedman's narrative was an important resource for the abolitionist movement across Europe ... Blake's graphic illustrations of abused slaves, infused with human dignity, undoubtedly influenced the reading public and advanced the abolitionist's cause’.

The presence of transporting ships in Blake's plates (such as the one seen above, disappearing over the horizon with its precious cargo of human slaves in the print on the right) reminds us of the colossal amount of energy, time, labour, and money that was involved in such activities. Even involved in the more mundane work of building gallows, constructing war ships, manufacturing munitions and the constant effort of all the interventions, punishments, and suppressions that were required constantly to keep this insane and unnatural project going - all of which continue today and constitute what’s euphemistically termed 'the arms trade'. Blake reminds us of just how much human energy and life has been wasted and lost in this perverse organisation.

Essick writes that ‘Stedman's narrative of the brutalities of slavery very probably influenced Blake's own anti-slavery position’ - and indeed his imagery. Blake seems to have drawn from the illustrations for Stedman's book in his own depiction of The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan (1805-09). The implications of comparing the two figures is probably clear.

Nelson’s victory over Napoleon at Trafalgar (1805, just four years before Blake presented his painting to the public in London) ensured British naval supremacy and control of its colonies for the next 100 years. In Blake’s painting, the monster Leviathan ‘represents naval warfare’, as S. Foster Damon notes, the link with the monster of the deep relating to Nelson’s naval career, just as in Blake’s accompanying painting of British prime minster William Pitt leading ‘Behemoth’ signifies Pitt’s military operations on land.

Britain at War and in War

Blake wrote movingly and passionately about the crushing and dehumanising effects of industrialisation and decades of warfare on England’s supposedly ‘green and pleasant land’, and above all the distress, misery, and anger felt by ordinary people as a result of the militarisation, industrialisation, and urbanisation on a society profoundly at war, in every sense.

And all the Arts of Life. they changd into the Arts of Death in Albion …
And in their stead, intricate wheels invented, wheel without wheel
To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours in Albion
Of day & night the myriads of eternity that they may grind
And polish brass & iron hour after hour laborious task!
Kept ignorant of its use, that they may spend the days of wisdom
In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread …

For in the depths of Albions bosom in the eastern heaven,
They sound the clarions strong! they chain the howling Captives!
They cast the lots into the helmet; they give the oath of blood in Lambeth
They vote the death of Luvah …

Then left the Sons of Urizen the plow & harrow, the loom
The hammer & the chisel, & the rule & compasses; from London fleeing
They forg'd the sword on Cheviot, the chariot of war & the battle-ax,
The trumpet fitted to mortal battle

(Blake, Jerusalem)

Detail from Blake’s accompanying image of William Pitt, suggesting the devastation on civilian and indigenous populations as a result of Pitt’s military policies and actions. Pitt, like Nelson, remains blithely indifferent to all this, standing gloriously in the centre of the frame.

Shortly after England declared war on France in 1793, Blake wrote Europe a Prophecy, a long ‘prophetic’ work in which he depicts liberty as being repressed after England’s decision to embrace military action in pursuit of its morally self-righteous and apparently Church-backed ideals and abstractions. This action won both Pitt, and later Nelson and Wellington, enormous glory.

The results are not glorious for the citizens though, Blake suggests, but miserable: ‘Over the doors Thou shalt not; & over the chimneys Fear is written:/With bands of iron round their necks fasten’d into the walls/The citizens’ (Europe). Pointing out such cognitive dissonance was a risky task: many of his friends, including the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, were arrested and thrown into prison during this decade. Blake himself was put on trial for sedition in 1803.

Blake was living during the first ‘War on Terror’, the British establishment’s war with post-revolutionary France, which is where the modern word ‘terrorist’ was first coined to describe supporters of the revolutionary government in France, such as Thomas Paine. In the 1790s, booksellers were thrown into jail simply for selling the works of Paine. Britain’s war was simultaneously internal and external: in 1819, when Blake was in his sixties, the British government murdered unarmed demonstrators in the notorious ‘Peterloo’ massacre, an event that also sparked Shelley’s outrage and inspired him to write one of the most politically electrifying poems ever published, The Mask of Anarchy. These were signs of the times.

Blake had seen it coming in the early 1790s. He witnessed riots first-hand across London, such as the crowds setting fire to Newgate prison, and during his lifetime he saw revolutions breaking out in both France and America (Blake was just 18 when the American Revolution started, and 32 when the French Revolution began), as well as witnessing the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act at home, the Sedition Trials of 1793 and 1794, and the 1794 Treason Trials, intended by Prime Minister Pitt to cripple the British radical movement of the 1790s. He observed the military engagements abroad and the intense levels of violence used domestically against ordinary people, and noted that it was being justified or ‘rationalised’ in the name of ‘law and order.’

The cry of war-torn populations everywhere. Image: from Blake’s Europe a Prophecy.

The Disjunct

War – then as now – was often portrayed as a glorious and moralistic enterprise. But Blake paints a different picture – literally, in his two extraordinary canvases depicting the ‘Spiritual Forms’ (i.e. the psychological realities) of Pitt and Nelson (c. 1805–9).

In his remarkable and thought-provoking image of the great naval commander, Blake presents Nelson as standing serenely aloof over a scene of devastation and struggle that he himself has initiated. Blake’s description of the painting mentions Nelson ‘guiding’ Leviathan, the destructive monster of chaos and war; what we see is Nelson holding a cord in his left hand, which is loosely attached to the head of the devouring serpent. He seems to be neither guiding nor restraining it. Indeed he seems to be very much part of it: his left foot rests calmly on the back of the writhing folds of Leviathan, while his right hand, held aloft, seems to be more clearing a space for him to stand and look glorious than to be effectively countering the movements of the coiled monster.  Nelson—looking blithely undisturbed and convinced of his own rightness in going to war—is an unnervingly contemporary and familiar figure.

Indeed, Blake’s depictions of contemporary military and political leaders in Britain have a strikingly familiar aspect: Pitt (the subject of Blake’s other canvas) was Britain’s youngest Prime Minster, best remembered for his military engagement in foreign wars. 

Blake rarely painted what might be called historical or literal scenes directly: but here, in his vignettes of the bruising and mundane brutality of war—distant cities and churches on fire, hands held up in supplication to powers that are wholly indifferent to if not actually hostile to the fate of those they have torn down, human bodies doubled in agony, eyes appalled and uncomprehending—are some of his most trenchant and affecting sketches. In these paintings Blake draws attention to the contemporary forms of the political and social pathology of his day.

This cognitive, and also aesthetic and moral, separation of home and abroad, cause and effect, is one of the mechanisms that keeps war going, Blake suggests - the perceived distance between the Home Office and Foreign Office, between the smart suits and ‘civilised’ buildings of those conducting the wars, and the mangled heaps of bodies that are the effect.

Blake's consistent strategy was to collapse these various dimensions - the inner and the outer worlds, the psychological, political, physical, physiological, and spiritual - to allow us to see their interrelations, how they mutually co-arise. His poem ‘London’, for example, occurs simultaneously within the streets of London, within the human optic and nervous system of those within London, and within the vaster political and psychological or cultural domain of London as a city and centre for war. Invading another country is a psychological act, a ‘spiritual form’, in Blake’s terms, through its pursuit of ‘status, power, and wealth’, as Griffin notes - all psychological wants and drives. Sighs run in blood down palace walls.

Blake's images of Pitt and Nelson are unusual for including and bringing home the effects of their foreign wars and actions. Even today, portraits of prime ministers, politicians and military leaders are usually rendered in splendid isolation, allowing the cognitive dislocation to continue. American artist Martha Rosler is one of the few contemporary figures to continue this tradition, such as in her remarkable House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series, c. 1967–72.

‘Cleaning the Drapes’, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, Martha Rosler. Image CC0 Public Domain.

Mind-ford’g manacles

‘Over the doors Thou shalt not; & over the chimneys Fear is written:/With bands of iron round their necks fasten’d into the walls/The citizens’. Note the persistence of chains, manacles, bands of iron, in Blake's verse. Modern rationalised, industrialised Britain is a slave state, Blake is suggesting. The manacles are ideological (‘mind-forged’), as much as literal - the myriad mental leads, whips, and leashes that tie us to our desks, work, drudgery, to the system - the ‘War System’, as Griffin terms it.

It's a prison, and the key to the prison is the belief that it is not a prison - that we are free. We don't see the manacles - that’s their whole point. It was Blake's task to dissolve the narratives and images and lies that kept us enslaved, bound to Empire, bound to profit, bound to control, bound to Your Reason.

As Elie Clayton notes of Blake’s illustrations for Europe, ‘what Blake intends to describe can be symbolized by being imprisoned in a dungeon. The images of webs and spiders, insects flying and crawling everywhere, give the impression of a dark, damp dungeon. Doubly trapped is the woman enclosed in a net asking for help from above. Above the image is the word “Dungeon”.’

Blake’s choice of illustration for plate 15 of Europe: ‘Above the rest the howl was heard from Westminster louder & louder; The Guardian of the secret codes forsook his ancient mansion. Driven out by the flames of Orc’. The ‘Guardian’ here is a reference to Thurlow, Lord Chancellor to Pitt, whose formal title was ‘Lord High Chancellor and Keeper of the Seal and Guardian of the King’s Conscience’. Blake is laying bare the structural machinery and institutional psychogeography of war, its ‘secret codes’. In his poem Jerusalem Blake similarly spoke of figures weaving ‘webs of war’.

The heart of this global military system was Blake's London - specifically Whitehall and Westminster, the headquarters of the wars against France and America, and via the Royal Exchange and the East India Company (the world’s greatest commercial business at that time, with its own private army, and handily located nearby in Leadenhall Street in the City), the diseased centre of Britain's notorious slave trade and trading colonies.

In this setting, Whitehall and Westminster form the dark heart of British empire and militarism. Blake lived just opposite this area, writing his prophetic works on empire (America, Europe, and the French Revolution) on the other side of the river - Westminster Bridge leads directly into Lambeth. On the other side and heading in the opposite direction, in every way, the bridge leads to Westminster Hall (the Houses of Parliament), Whitehall, Scotland Yard, Downing Street, the Horse Guards Parade, and the Admiralty, all massed together in this essential nucleus of war. It was from these buildings, these centres - as Blake refers to them in his poem Europe, in almost journalistic description - that the business of war (and war is always a business) was generated and organised.

As David Erdman notes, ‘Blake has used historical data to provide the framework for his commentary on the human condition. A proclamation was issued by England's George III in cooperation with his prime minister William Pitt in 1792 against “divers wicked and seditious writings”.’ This was the notorious 'Royal Proclamation Against Seditious Writings and Publications', issued by George III in 1792 in response to the growth of radicalism in Britain, inspired in part by the French Revolution and the phenomenal popularity of Thomas Paine's levelling manifesto, Rights of Man (1791). This incendiary work was published by Joseph Johnson - also Blake's publisher.

Blake's Europe, with its ironic - indeed satiric - reference to king George as 'Albion's Angel' (to avoid, in part, accusations of sedition) appeared in 1794, although he'd been working on it for four years, as his Lambeth Notebooks reveal. Like several of his other works of the time, the poem was composed, printed, coloured and sold at his house itself - again, helping to circumvent the alarming infringements of free speech, free association, and free thought in the country. Blake’s development of self-printing has in part to be seen in this charged atmosphere - as a way round the king's Proclamation and the new censorious, controlling climate surrounding speech and media.

Title page for Europe. This version of the page was printed in 1795 (‘copy H’) and shows the address of the publisher: Blake himself, in Lambeth.

Blake is often thought of as a mythic, even cosmic, writer but in Europe he hones directly in on this particular area of London, describing in a striking passage the Lord Chancellor shamefully heading down Great George Street towards St James's Park. Pitt had just forced Chancellor Thurlow from his position because of his mild criticism of this proclamation against ‘seditious’ (ie libertarian) writings, and, as Allen Ginsberg notes in his account of this incident, ‘Thurlow was compelled to relinquish the Great Seal and doff his judicial gown and wig’. Blake’s poem captures the moment of Thurlow’s ‘last appearance as Chancellor … driving to St James’s Palace to surrender the Seal’.

Britain was in turmoil: in this decade Habeas Corpus was suspended (the legal process that allows a person to challenge unlawful imprisonment or detention) and Joseph Johnson, the publisher of works not only by Blake but also by Paine, Wollstonecraft, Erasmus Darwin, Stedman, and William Godwin, was formally indicted by Pitt’s government, the charge being that ‘Joseph Johnson … being a malicious seditious and ill disposed person and being greatly disaffected to our said sovereign Lord the King … wickedly and seditiously did publish and cause to be published a certain scandalous malicious and seditious libel’. Johnson was finally imprisoned in 1798 - the Dungeon of plate 15 of Europe. Blake himself later became entangled in the webs of this dark system, being tried for sedition in 1803, a reminder of the actual nature of the system to anyone who dares to reveal it.

Europe: A Prophecy, plate 15 with contemporary print of the angelic East India Company superimposed on top of its spidery web. If the web spread the wide world, London was where the spider laid its eggs. ‘Bleak, dark, abrupt, it stands & overshadows London city’.

Mental Fight

However much Blake despised what he called ‘Corporeal War’- the literal, brutal, material, organised murder (as Harry Patch aptly termed it) of human bodies, he made a key distinction between this activity and what he termed ‘Mental Fight’.

Indeed, Corporeal War was one of the things he fought passionately against through his life: his response to the culture of militarism of his day is energetic and oppositional.  In this, Blake seeks to reclaim and re-imagine the whole concept of activity, opposition, and ‘fighting’, reforging them to signify not gross literal battles - the dreadful endless wars promoted and portrayed so relentlessly by Greek writers such as Homer and Plato, he believed, and which were fought with equally literal and grotesque bayonets, swords, battle-axes and cavalry charges.

All this is what he means by ‘Corporeal’. Corporeal does not mean ‘bodily’ - Blake was always a champion of the body, the living form, and its desires, loves, and imaginings. He is instead drawing on a spiritual tradition which opposed what we could call ‘psychological’ or inner states with material activities and objective, literal ones. Lawyers use the word corporeal to describe the idea of things as ‘physical property’ (such as houses or cars) as opposed to something valuable but nonphysical like a good reputation, or a human right. ‘Corporeal ownership is the ownership of material things’. Perhaps this is a good way to understand Blake’s use of ‘corporeal’ - the constant war over physical property, fought by physical human beings reduced to the status of slaves or ‘servants’ of the War System.

Opposed to this is the true adventure of the human mind – what Blake famously called ‘Mental Fight’ – the engaged, dynamic, passionate activity of debate, dialogue, clarification, and intellectual resistance. Blake’s work suggests that we are constantly misled into downgrading these vital forces within us, turning this necessary and dynamic mental or imaginative struggle, through which liberty is forged, into a crude parody of struggle. The left hemisphere of the brain consistently sees everything literally (metaphor is a proper only of the right hemisphere), so it consequently views everything in terms of its own literalising, ‘corporealising’ program. And it finds it hard to comprehend ‘mental’ fighting, because this is a metaphor.

But what is so exciting and unusual about Blake’s position is that he reclaims for pacifism (anti-Corporeal War) the exhilarating sense of adventure and dynamism that military institutions have so successfully drawn upon and perverted, and he shows how pitiful and dehumanising their limited, ‘corporeal’, literal, version of it truly is. Not to mention the vast acres of corporeal blood shed by it.

Blake often appeals to young people for precisely this reason: his poetry is a living embodiment of his belief that instead of waging wars, we should be winning arguments, reimagining futures.

As Ernst Friedrich similarly observed a century later, ‘true heroism lies not in murder, but in the refusal to commit murder’: one can be engaged, and at war, with the assumptions and platitudes of war itself.

It is interesting in this respect that Blake’s most famous lyric, ’And did those feet in ancient time’ (popularly known as ‘Jerusalem’), is actually a fierce criticism of the whole ideology of war – and of any Church or State that dares to wage literal ‘corporeal’ wars on other human beings.

Britain’s ‘unofficial national anthem’ (as it has been called) is therefore all about this struggle: it is a profound attack on any system that seeks to brutalise us through its pursuit of warfare, however ‘gloriously’ or solemnly it is dressed up. Instead, the lyric advocates active resistance to all such states or religions. It is therefore something of an irony that the words are often sung at events and in churches which the poem itself criticises.

Blake asks what is it that drives the ideology of killing and legitimatises it: what is it that downgrades our imaginations, our way of seeing other human beings, in this way, and turns our energies into destructive, embattled literalisms? Blake suggests that it’s based in part on a restricting, hardening mode of seeing that we’re encouraged to have of other people (for example, seeing them in terms of narrow self-interest and utility) and often, he notes, a way of seeing bolstered by and inculcated through a toxic sense of moral self-righteousness and rationalised superiority.

The process of educated and cultural identification with this rationalised self-interest (which Blake called the ‘Selfhood’ and the ‘Spectre’’) - with flags, countries, religions, ideologies, themselves the products of the self-interests of those governing them - is the thing which really imbues this hardened, polarised, and restrictive way of seeing with its parasitic, serpentine, energy.

The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man; & when separated
From Imagination, and closing itself as in steel, in a Ratio
Of the Things of Memory. It thence frames Laws & Moralities
To destroy Imagination! the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars

(Blake, Jerusalem)

The Moral Wars

Blake's critique of war, therefore is not a 'moral' one - it is not based on moral precepts (which are themselves rooted in warring and conflictual assumptions, such as 'I am right and you are wrong', 'I am better than you, because I am moral' etc). What promotes and promulgates wars of all sorts, for Blake, are systems of religion and morality based on this schizophrenia of Right or Wrong, the ‘Tree of Good & Evil’ as Blake refers t it., aka the ‘Tree of Death’:

It is not because Angels are Holier than Men or Devils that makes them Angels but because they do not Expect Holiness from one another but from God only

Satan thinks that Sin is displeasing to God he ought to know that Nothing is displeasing to God but Unbelief & Eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil

The Last Judgment when all those are Cast away who trouble Religion with Questions concerning Good & Evil or Eating of the Tree of those Knowledges or Reasonings which hinder the Vision of God turning all into a Consuming fire

The Temple stands on the Mount of God from it flows on each side the River of Life on whose banks Grows the tree of Life … Here they are no longer talking of what is Good & Evil or of what is Right or Wrong & puzzling themselves in Satans Labyrinth But are Conversing with Eternal Realities as they Exist in the Human Imagination

I do not consider either the Just or the Wicked to be in a Supreme State but to be every one of them States of the Sleep which the Soul may fall into in its Deadly Dreams of Good & Evil when it leaves Paradise [with] <following> the Serpent

The Combats of Good & Evil <is Eating of the Tree of Knowledge The Combats of Truth & Error is Eating of the Tree of Life> [& of Truth & Error which are the same thing]

The Tree of Good & Evil splits everything in two. It divides the world into good and bad, splits them apart and identifies with only one contrary, judges reality rather than relating and participating in it, and above all it divides the judger. It’s a sort of manic schizoid position, which drives wars - the material manifestations of this inner divided world necessarily generating an equally divided world ‘outside’. Image: Blake’s Illustration to Milton's Paradise Lost

For all his dislike of orthodox religion and organised dogmas, Blake therefore targets one of the chief drivers of war in the key cultural texts of Western civilisation themselves - in the work of Homer, Virgil, and Plato.  Our cultural classics celebrate war - corporeal war - and we have made them the sick bibles of our civilisation. As S. Foster Damon observes:

The epics of Homer and Virgil glorified war; therefore, Blake believed, we follow their ideal. ‘The Classics! it is the Classics, & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars.’ (On Homer’s Poetry; On Virgil, K 778).

And Blake points to the celebrated statue of the Laocoön as an example of this process, a ‘Roman version of a lost Greek original’, as the Royal Academy of Arts puts it on their website, but the ‘lost Greek original’ was itself the remembrance and feint echo and misremembered copy, suggests Blake, of a much more profound and ‘mental’ battle, which it automatically converted into yet another corporeal war, through the usual literalising. rationalising modes and models of the Greek mind.

Blake’s remarkable graffitied version of the Laocoön, restoring the original associations. Under the engraving he writes; “יה  [Jehovah] & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim of Solomons Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact. or History of Ilium Art Degraded Imagination Denied War Governed the Nations

Originally, Blake suggests, the scene referred not to the various mundane and manipulative figures the Trojan war (a metaphorical narrative that symbolised the defeat of the Asiatic cultures by the new war-obsessed, Greek states), but to no less a figure that Jehovah and his two 'sons', Adam and Satan. How this became degraded into a tale about a gang of hired murderers, adulterers, and assassins (Achilles, Paris., Priam & co), and how that tale became idolised and glorified by the subsequent centres of ‘civilisation’, is one of the remarkable pervasions of history, according to Blake, but one that reveals much about why we celebrate modern wars so triumphantly and blindly.

This literalising fall from the celebration of mental to corporeal war says it all. The deep sources of conflict and aggression, of fragmentation and division, are contained within the very 'holy' programs of Reason, Logos, and Thinking themselves, he suggests: ‘This is the Spectre of Man, the Holy Reasoning Power’. ‘It is thought which divides everything up’, agrees the brilliant twentieth-century theoretical physicist David Bohm, through its process of what he terms ‘fragmentation, which originates in thought’ - whereas ‘in actuality, the whole world is shades merging into one’ (Bohm, On Dialogue). The Logos-loving Greeks of course ended up in a state of almost perpetual war: that was the nature of the fragmenting god they subliminally worshipped, their Reason.

Blake’s vision of the integrated human brain, a place of enormous activity, both electrical (look at those lightnings!) and imaginative, a world of dynamism and infinite adventure - but no war, because an integrated consciousness contains and integrates the contraries, Blake believed, it didn't polarise and divide them. Hence we see both of the Edenic trees in the middle, the marriage of heaven and hell: ‘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 and Evil …’

For Blake, anything that gets in the way of our humanity, and the recognition of the humanity in all of us, needs to be revealed and challenged and jettisoned as quickly as possible, including the practice and rhetoric of ‘pseudospeciation’ (imagining one’s enemy to be less than human), which is rooted in the denial of our imaginative capacity of sympathetic insight (a property of the right, not left, hemisphere, it has to be said). In Blake’s work, how we view war is ultimately a question of perception and vision, and he urges us to recalibrate and elevate our view of humanity in order to challenge and effectively undermine the basis of the pathology that lies behind all appeals to war.

This inevitably entails a change in how the human imagination, which Blake terms ‘Urthona’ (and which is for him the basic operating system of man) functions and is perceived. No longer enslaved to and perverted by the War System, the intellectual and imaginative capacities of humanity are now free to pursue their true liberation and creative potential:

Urthona rises from the ruinous walls
In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science
For intellectual War. The war of swords departed now

(Blake, The Four Zoas).

‘Intellectual War’, and ‘Mental Fight’: this is the true activity of the human mind, Blake suggests, and the literal ‘war of swords’ is simply a crude and grotesque perversion of it.  As the modern media pervasively demonstrates, war is conducted and presented precisely to stop people thinking, to prevent ‘mental fight’, and to try and co-opt us into accepting the validity of ‘corporeal war’ instead. Blake’s work powerfully allows us to deconstruct and undermine this dehumanising rhetoric. 

NEVER AGAIN