Blake confounds the orthodox European temperament by seeing evil as a positive creative factor, for it is only because of a limitation of the moral intelligence that energy flowing contrary to reason is seen as evil.

Blake completely rejects the Cartesian assumption in the following lines:

Man has no Body distinct from his Soul,

for that called Body is a portion of the
Soul discern'd by the five Senses,
the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

Furthermore, Energy is the only Life and is from the Body;

Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

In Blake's vision we may distinguish two concepts of hell:
1. The hell of holy energy, which is the fire of inspiration and even salvation.
2. The hell that directly results from the belief in the separateness of body and soul.

It is the latter hell that we experience as the continuum of contemporary historical events, in which energy is forcibly bound by its outer circumference, reason.

History is the hell of the fall from the unitive vision of eternal imagination.

Though Blake may not have known specifically of the Hindu concept of the Yugas, he would certainly have agreed with the notion that man is now in the final Yuga, the Kali Yuga or Iron Age, the age of blackness where purity of spirit is obscured - in Blake's brilliant prose - by the choking smoke of "the Mills of Satan" Thus, Blake wrote from what he called the Hell of Eternal Delight:

The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire
     at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is commanded hereby to leave his guard
     at the tree of life, and when he does the whole of creation will be consumed,
      and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite and corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his souls is to be expunged:
      this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives,
      which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away,
      and displaying the infinite which was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed,
      everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up,
      till he sees all things thro narrow chinks of his cavern.

History is the result of an over elaboration and separation of the senses. Thus, man's redemption requires a re-velation, a lifting again of the veil of the law through the purification of the sense organs.

Blake's vision of man's natural condition and the condition man shall return to following the apocalyptic disclosure of the present era-is that of a psychosensory unity in which each sense is not a "narrow chink" walled off from the other senses but in a state of free communication with them.

This state of sensory interfusion, often referred to as synesthesia, is presupposed by a consciousness in which body and soul are realized to be one, and in turn presupposes a social order so totally different from the present one that its closest approximation is to be found in the remnant of so-called primitive societies. As Mircea Eliade has perceived, "From primitive ideology present-day mystical experience is inferior to the sensory experience of primordial man."

Modern technological civilization is a state of hell, a province of ignorance from which man must be redeemed: this is the grand theme of Blake's vision and prophecies.

As if by some miracle, Blake was exempted from the fallacies of his time; his vision of hell as a contemporary state has its counterparts only in the defunct and decaying traditions of non-European civilizations.

We have mentioned the Hindu tradition, and even more notably the Mexican. In both the destruction and purgation of the present world system is prophesied, not necessarily by fire, but by some sort of tremendous earth-shaking cataclysm. The coincidence of the cyclical hell periods in the Mexican calendar with the rise of modern European civilization has already been pointed out; the place of Blake's vision within the larger scheme cannot be overlooked any longer.

It is of more than passing interest that at the bottom of Plate 15 of "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," after describing the process by which knowledge is transmitted - from dragons, to serpents, to eagles, to unnamed forms, and finally to men in a "Printing house in Hell" - Blake has painted an eagle with a serpent in its talons.

This is the mystical tribal symbol of the last of the Mexican empires, the Aztec; it is also the symbol the Mexicans adopted for their flag upon winning independence from Spain in 1821.

Every space that a Man views around his dwelling place,
standing on his own roof or in his garden . . .
such space is his universe:

on its verge the Sun rises & sets,
the clouds bow to meet the flat Earth & Sea in such an order'd Space:

the Starry heavens reach no further, but here bend and set on all sides,
& the two Poles turn on their valves of Gold;
and if he but moves his dwelling place, his heavens also move wherever he goes.

... Man's body is a garden of delight & a building of magnificence.

The universe is not only of man's making, it is contained within man...

Chapter 8. Transformative Vision. page 1..2..3..4..5

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