Despite often employing religious motifs, flesh abounds in the work of poet and artist William Blake. His fascination with both the sexual and the spiritual was the product of a unique milieu of influences that included yogis, Kabbalists and Christian mystics, writes Rachael Kohn.

Poet and artist William Blake confided to a barrister in 1825 that according to the Bible, he should have access to ‘a community of women’ because concubines were part of God’s plan.

This left the barrister confused and flustered: ‘Shall I call him Artist or Genius—or Mystic—or Madman? Probably all.'

The sheer volume of naked flesh in Blake’s art and poetry ought to make anyone wonder what drove the artist’s imagination.

Blake, whose paintings and etchings are on display at the National Gallery of Victoria from April 4, was not just musing to a friend in a late-age reverie. He was, in fact, confessing a core belief that had been nurtured in a unique spiritual milieu, at the centre of which were radical ideas about God and sex.

Indeed, the sheer volume of naked flesh in Blake’s art and poetry ought to make anyone wonder what drove the artist’s imagination. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, for example, writhing bodies in rampant postures and adoring gestures show couples and groups in uninhibited displays of sex. Yet even these may be considerably milder than the drawings and manuscripts (‘up to a hundred volumes’) that his executor, Frederick Tatham, appointed by Blake’s widow Catherine, consigned to the flames after Blake’s death in 1827.

It seems Tatham was pressed by members of various esoteric groups who knew Blake and feared exposure and ridicule if his images of male and female genitalia juxtaposed with religious symbols were shown to the public. Graphic depictions of vaginas as gothic chapels and the worship of erect phalluses were not the norm then, any more than they are now. Even the poet WB Yeats, a deep admirer of the artist and no prude himself, published (with EJ Ellis) Blake’s erotic Vala or The Four Zoas, the Torments of Love and Jealousy in the Death and Judgement of the Ancient Man with the illustrations of phallic and vulvic images omitted.

How sex fused with religion came to inhabit Blake’s life and art is a story that Marsha Keith Schuchard, an independent American historian of esoteric spirituality, has told in a remarkable book called Why Mrs Blake Cried. In fact, it was Blake’s desire for concubines, following the example of Biblical Patriarch Abraham, which reportedly made his wife cry, prompting Blake to give up the plan.

Sanctified sexuality, however, never left his imagination and it went far beyond Biblical concubines and included the Jewish esoteric beliefs of the Kabbalah, ‘celestial marriage’ practised by the Moravians and Swedenborgians, as well as Indian Yogic and Tantric traditions of sacred sex. And it all began at home, when his parents became members of the Moravian Congregation of the Lamb in Fetter Lane, London.

‘At the time that Blake’s mother and her first husband and his paternal uncle were all involved in the Moravians they were going through something called "the sifting time," which was a sort of wild period of experimentation and radical behaviour,’ says Schuchard.

‘Based on Count Zinzindorf—the leader of the Moravians—his studies in Kabbala in which he became quite interested in the whole idea of sacramental sexuality. And a way of bringing sexuality back into religion in a very positive way.’

The Moravians, who originated in Czechoslovakia and migrated to Saxony, were a sectarian fellowship under eccentric German nobleman Nicolaus von Zinzendorf. Among the practices instituted by von Zinzendorf was the intense visualisation of the physical body of Christ, the ‘God Man’. Encouraged to paint mental pictures of Christ’s wounds, beginning with his circumcision and ending with his side wound, penitents fell into an ecstatic union with his body.

Another union would take on an equally mystical significance in Count Zinzendorf’s theology: the conjugal act between husband and wife, which was thought of as nothing less than the re-enactment of the divine creation.

The marriage bed as sacred altar would owe its origin to the Kabbalah, esoteric Jewish mystical teachings, of which Zinzendorf was a keen student. The Kabbalistic belief that God united with his female emanation, the Shekinah, was represented by the male and female cherubim who were entwined in a sexual embrace over the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies in the Temple at Jerusalem. Visualising this celestial embrace was not only a prayerful practice and the subject of Moravian hymns, but it was also a domestic command. The married couple’s bedroom became such an important part of the Moravian faith that a marriage theology was developed for new couples.

Blake’s parents were among those who showed no reserve and also engaged in the Moravian ‘Love Feasts,’ which often lasted all night and ended in sensual and religious ecstasy.

The carnal nature of Zinzendorf’s theology, which encouraged couples to report their conjugal relations to other members of the fraternity, was attractive not only to the Blakes, but also to another religious reformer who attended the Fetter Lane chapel at that time, Swedish engineer and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.

‘As Swedenborg wrote, nakedness is innocence,’ says Schuchard. ‘And he said that when he travelled to heaven and was up there with departed spirits and angels, they were all going naked, including their servants, because this is the way that God intended us to be.’

According to Schuchard, Swedenborg was also a proponent of the psycho-erotic mysticism that employed sexual techniques to achieve a spiritual vision. Indeed, he claimed to be able to travel to heaven and back at will.

Swedenborg, who prophesied that a new era had dawned in 1757 in which a New Jerusalem was born, would be an abiding presence in Blake’s imagination and art, for instead of formal schooling Blake’s father allowed him to stay home and study his writings.

The cast of characters who inhabited the milieu of Blake, including Kabbalists, Moravian missionaries back from India bringing Tantric and Yogic practices, antiquarians from Italy and Greece bearing priapic imagery, Swedenborgians and revolutionary Freemasons, invested Blake with a sexual world view far different to that of the Puritanism that had shaped English Protestantism.

William Blake's Erotic Spirituality Sunday 30 March 2014 Listen to The Spirit of Things to hear Blake's biographer and the curator of the NGV's Blake collection talk about about the artist's erotic spiritual vision. More This [series episode segment] has image,

It is a history that Schuchard argues has been largely whitewashed, even by secularists who prefer to remember the 18th century as the era of enlightened rationalism and the birth of science. On the contrary, it was also a time when a mystical underground counter-culture teemed with spiritual innovation, occult rites and universalist visions of the brotherhood of humanity. It was this unfettered world of the imagination that Blake expressed in both in his private life with his wife Catherine and through his voluminous art and poetry.

It is perhaps most memorably recounted in an anecdote from Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake: ‘At the end of the little garden in Hercules buildings there was a summer house. Mr Butts calling one day found Mr and Mrs Blake sitting in this summer house freed from “those troublesome disguises” which have prevailed since the Fall. “Come in!” cried Blake. “It’s only Adam and Eve, you know!”’

Find out more at The Spirit of Things.



