William Blake's Mysticism

[00:00:00]Thank you all so much for coming to my lecture. Um, thank you to the Blake Society for hosting this event, to Tamson and Jason for organizing and to Ian for helping the tech run smoothly.

[00:00:12]So, as specified in the event information, this talk kind of covers two different time periods, the romantic period and then the very early modernist period. So, the 1890s through to the 1900s. So that second period will explore Blake's postumous reception as a mystic. Um so the talk introduces material I explore in greater depth in my academic work and in my book. So I've got all the further reading on the uh final slide. So I'd like to dedicate this talk to Professor Katherine S.

[00:00:50]Freeman who was professor of romanticism at the University of Miami and she passed away in January 2025.

[00:00:58]So whilst I never met Katherine in person, she commissioned me to write a chapter for the upcoming Rootage Companion to William Blake.

[00:01:08]She took a chance on me very early on in my career when I had little to my name and she was a delight to work with. So her faith in me and my work on Blake and women profits before it was widely known before I was widely published helped me to see the value in my own work and my own research. Collaborating with her online by email in 2024 shaped my thinking on Blake and gender for the better. I wish she was still here to help see how her input influenced my book and my future work, but thank you Kathy wherever you may be. Okay, so we're going to start during Blake's lifetime.

[00:01:57]So this is when his mystic reputation spread amongst romantic authors like Cridge, like Charles Lamb as well. So his mystic reputation began during this lifetime and built steadily through the 19th century as authors such as Cridge Lamb Henry Crab Robinson, Alan Cunningham and then later postumously Alexander Gilpr and Alenolon and Charles Windbone each referred to Blake as a mystic. So of these only Robinson knew him personally and Robinson recorded several conversations and encounters with him in his diaries. So these entries include a discussion of the author Emanuel Swedenborg and the prophets Richard Brothers and Joanna Southk all of whom are relevant to understanding Blake's mysticism in context.

[00:02:54]So early Blake commentators, as Laura Quinny notes, took it quote for granted unquote that Blake was a mystic artist as they did not really specify what made Blake and his work mystical.

[00:03:09]analyzing Blake's work and his 19th century critics and you I realized that the 19th century understand 19th century's understanding of Blake as a mystic blends several modes as outlined in this diagram. So each of these terms, so mysticism, proper, uh, prophecy, the visionary, and esotericism, each of these terms are now considered separate strands in contemporary Blake studies. The word mystic, as used by Blake's 19th century critics, was a way to describe Blake's engagement with many traditions without fully committing him to one specific mode. So to understand Blake as a mystic is to reaffirm his fluid boundary blurring nature as an artist. So this is a reading which is deeply compatible with reading Blake through a queer lens as I will detail later in this talk. So the reputations of Blake and the other figures I'll discuss sit at the intersection of several key terms.

[00:04:15]So considered together these terms all contribute to each author's mystic reputation. To understand how the authors discussed in this talk engaged with each modality and to pass out the key differences between each of them, I must first define them. What I present here and elsewhere in this presentation is highly condensed and simplified for time. So I do recommend consulting my references slide or emailing me for further reading.

[00:04:45]So starting with mysticism, older theoretical definitions of mysticism like Elyn Underh Hills from 1911 describe mysticism as union with the absolute. Whilst this is clearcut and Underh Hill writes at length about Blake within her book Mysticism, Underh Hill's definition focuses more on the experience of mysticism rather than its dissemination and publication.

[00:05:12]More modern definitions consider mysticism's dynamic quality. So mysticism according to scholar Glenn Alexander Maji is the perception of the ultimate truth of what is. It is simply put to see the truth in all things.

[00:05:29]Mystic experiences teach that all experiences on earth are part of an infinite whole. Maji's definition of mysticism aligns so well with the work of Blake and romantic period prophets because for Maji mysticism helps to help others be receptive of the same realizations. The mysticism then is a twostep process perception and communication.

[00:05:55]So 20 years earlier the religious historian Bernard Machin wrote that mysticism could not be separated from religious practice that mystics believed in and practiced religions that contained mystical elements as part of a wider historical whole. Such a definition is both applicable to yet at odds with the lives of Blake and his dissenting contemporaries who whilst technically Christian were either outcasts from or actively rejected traditional Christian religious institutions. In practice then mysticism alone only presents part of the picture regarding Blake's spirituality and the spirituality of his era.

[00:06:38]So we now move on to the definition of prophecy. So the romantic period prophetic scholar Ian Balfa describes the romantic prophet as God's mouthpiece presenting God's will on earth to humanity. Moreover, prophecy was a marginal phenomenon. Whilst the prophet may be close to God, they are marginalized from society. JFC Harrison distinguishes two strands of romantic prophecy. Millennialism which was more scholarly and orthodox whereas millinarianism was more popular and more closely aligned to and addressed to workingclass concerns though there was overlap and fluidity between the two modes. Most of the people I'm talking about today in Blake's time fall into that latter category of millinarianism.

[00:07:32]Blake also wrote his own definition of prophecy which I include here. So every honest man is a prophet. He utters his opinion both of private and public matters. Thus if you go on so the result is so.

[00:07:51]So according to Blake, prophecy is concerned with seeing and speaking the truth. That every man is a prophet demonstrates that there is no specific elite group who can see events. Everyone can. However, in this definition, note that Blake says every honest man. And this is a point of contention within romantic prophetic studies.

[00:08:16]So I address this content um this contentious aspect of prophetic studies with my own work because prior to the 2010s in like the romantic scholarship mainstream most women romantic prophets were far less studied than they are now. An exception to that is Joanna Southkot who I'll get to. So besides work on Joanna Southk by Morton Daley in the 60s and 70s, it took until 2010 said this for Blake scholars to properly integrate studies of women prophets into their work. So whilst this was happening perhaps in romantic studies, it was far less common in Blake studies. So this may have been the result of interventions from authors like Arian Smith, though Deborah Valenc had published similar work from 18 1985.

[00:09:11]So as Belfa argues, prophets were marginal. They existed at the margins of society and religion. So women prophets were marginalized seven time several times over. They had independent traveling lifestyles. They were statistically workingass specially from the service and domestic spheres where prophetic tracts spread amongst teams of workers in the same households. And finally, due to their alleged god-given authority, these women subverted traditional hierarchies of male religious power. This meant that they were often the target of abuse and/or discreditation, as for the was the case for Joanna Southk, who was dismissed at the end of her life and immediately after her death as mad. Her autopsy was published when she could not defend herself, and her autopsy included detailed description of her psalist's breasts, genitalia, and reproductive organs. Such sensationalistic treatment of self seeped into Blake's studies in the 20th century, and Blake scholars were until the 2010s very critical and dismissive of her influence on Blake, which can be found in Blake's notebook poem fragment on the virginity of Joanna Southk.

[00:10:23]So with regards to the visionary in Blake's studies, visionary does not strictly refer to Blake seeing visions.

[00:10:31]Whilst it can and does refer to this phenomenon, the visionary also refers to another process, the quality of Blake's work being like a vision and then the effect this has on Blake's audiences.

[00:10:44]The visionary closely relates to the mystic and the prophetic qualities of Blake's work. John Lee writes that Blake's use of images in his illuminated books can be seen as a development of 18th century conceptions of prophecy, the visual nature of which was widely accepted. He also notes that Blake's images seek to induce vision in the reader rather than merely presenting it for consumption.

[00:11:08]So Blake is not sharing his visions with the world alone. He is trying to pe to get people to share in them to create a community as it were. So Blake's own definition of pro prophecy emphasizes that the everyman prophet is a seer. Prophets and mystics from Dorothy got to Emanuel Swedenborg saw visions. Got saw the devil appear in her house in Midnight Cry. And Swedenborg's published works often had the subtitle as seen in my visions. Again, these individual qualities within Blake's work, the prophetic, the mystic, and the visionary influences merge together in the same kind of experience.

[00:11:56]So, moving on to esotericism. This relates closely to my work on Yates, but I'm not doing as much on Yates as usual today because enough people have talked about him. He's very well known. So Yates claimed in an edited edition of Blake in 1893 that Blake, like Yates himself, was a member of a secret occult society in London. There is no documentary evidence to support this specific claim, which is very similar to the fact that there is no documentary evidence to support Yates's claim that Blake was Irish, which I know is a favorite factoid of Jason's. Um, but Blake did move in communal spiritual circles who read esoteric authors alongside mystics and prophets. So for example, Blake attended the Swedenborg conference alongside Got which is likely where he encountered her and her work and Swedenborg's work offers um owes a debt to people like Jacob Burma, Pariselus and people going back as Robert Rick's notes of printer Robert Hindmar's Theosophical Society which is not to be confused with HP HP Platsky's Theosophical Society. um such a reading of occult and prophetic texts took place in communal discussion and in relation to the political conditions of their present day. Regarding specific occult influences, Blake read and enthused about the works of Jacob Burma, the 17th century mystic writer and Paraselus, the alchemist and practicing physician.

[00:13:33]Scholars such as Ricks and Kevin Fisher have analyzed Blake's engagement with these occult authors in detail. Kathleen Rainine, following Yates's example, might be considered the prototype of such an academic analysis. Her legacy, especially today after Mark Burn's biography was published, Rain's legacy is far trickier and more difficult, as I will discuss in the second half of this talk.

[00:13:58]So Blake's citation of Burma and Paracelis, two male mystics alongside Swedenborg in his marriage of heaven and hell, is Yates's most likely source analyzing Blake's works exclusively through three male occult authors systems. Colin Trod writing on Yates's and Ellis's placement of Blake in a male esoteric tradition writes that this book allowed them to act as cannon formers.

[00:14:25]So they are presenting Blake as part of a cannon of mystic esoteric writers and then in doing so placing themselves in this lineage of mystic esoterics. So it goes say Swedenborg to Yates no Swedenborg to Blake to Yates and then to Yates's friends George Russell Ae and William Sharp Fion Mloud.

[00:14:56]So the consequence of such treatment of Blake's spirituality studies of which largely focus on male authors, male mystics and male prophets has been the exclusion of Blake's female influences.

[00:15:09]So for example, whilst Alexander Gilchrist noted Blake read Theresa Aia of Aia and she is referenced in Jerusalem, there is no single study of her influence on Blake's works that I know of. Please contradict me if you know of one. Um, and this is in comparison to the count of countless books referencing Blake and Swedenborg and the several single studies by people like Brian Aubry and Kevin Fischer on Lake and Burma.

[00:15:36]So, in my time spent defining these different facets of Blake's mystic reception, I attempt to both offer an homage towards and also subvert an old pro proverb of Blake studies coined by North Fry. that the word mystic never brought anything but confusion into the study of Blake. My aim in my study of Blake's mysticism is to clarify how and why he has been received as a mystic for so many centuries. My work attempts to dispel such alleged confusion by understanding mystic as one umbrella term which encompasses many. All of these terms mystic, prophet, visionary, esoteric, they all overlap. Yet all of them also represent specific granular valuable facets of Blake's work in its social and cultural context.

[00:16:28]Additionally, as a scholar with interests in gender, queerness, and neglected women's writing, I wanted to understand how Blake is known to have read so many women mystics and to have influenced so many queer authors after him. Yet, these facets of the spiritual reception are vastly underststudied and underrepresented to date.

[00:16:49]H. So to demonstrate the interplay of the terms just defined and to highlight the significance of gender therein, I will now move into two close readings from my own research. The first compares Blake's book of fell to Dorothy got midnight cry and the second from my work on Blake's reception by the Yates circle will analyze Blake's presence in an early work by William Sharp/ Fiona Mloud a trans author who in my opinion presents the most innovative adaptation of Blake's gender philosophy and spirituality of their time and who is well was until my thesis underststudied in William Blake scholarship specifically.

[00:17:32]So Dorothy got and thou Dorothy got grew up in the Quake community as a daughter of farms. She likely worked on that farm before moving to London to enter domestic service. She married one of her older colleagues, a footman called Abraham Got. She quote unquote married out. That is she married outside the faith she grew up in and then her community cut her off. Got worked in a habedasherie and a millinary. then owned a pub with her husband. Got became a public prophet after her husband's death in 1785 during a time of economic hardship. From all accounts, Scott's marriage was often unhappy and she suffered from her husband's temper and alleged financial mismanagement. I've compared this aspect of her life to Blake's visions of the daughter's Albian in my book, but I want to focus on Got's imagery and cell here today.

[00:18:26]According to God's writing, she only revealed her prophetic visions to her husband on his deathbed as God had told her in previous visions that Abraham was not ready before his death or before his time of death to receive her wisdom.

[00:18:42]In God's published works, she claimed she had experienced visions of God and biblical scenes from the age of 17 or 18 onwards. Like her contemporary Southk, she embarked on a prophetic career later in life as an unmarried forgot a widowed woman. Abraham got death and forced God to return to service whilst living with her sister with whom she had a strained relationship. So forgot as an isolated workingclass woman. The choice to follow her prophetic calling may have been necessary for her survival. Prophecy according to the lens was a viable alternative to married life in that period. a lifestyle wherein one could live relatively independently as a single woman. Speaking from her lived experience with God-given authority, Got's prophecies emphasize the struggle of workingclass young women in service and criticize the alleged charity and misogyny of the Freemasons.

[00:19:34]So got main two works that I have studied closely are Midnight Cry of 1788 and Christ the standard of truth which I believe is about 1800 but that's off the top of my head that date might not be quite right. So Blake's first acquaintance with Dorothy got dates to 1789 whereas Cho and Warl note both got and Blake attended the same Swedenb conference. Cho and Warl stressed the likelihood of Blake and Got talking to each other as such community meetings encouraged discussion and debate. Got likely brought her first published prophecy midnight prior to the meeting.

[00:20:14]Got was Blake's closest spiritual contemporary. So Blake then had several opportunities from his encounter with Got to discover and engage with her work.

[00:20:26]So, as detailed in my book, which is the same name as his lecture, Blake's poem Thel is, according to my research and my reading poem, the closest of Blake's writing to God's prophecies.

[00:20:40]Thematically, contentwise, it also demonstrates the merging of the mystic, prophetic, and visionary as outlined in my earlier definition slide.

[00:20:51]So fell is defined from the outset of the poem as a young shepherdess a young agricultural worker like the female prophet Scott and South [ __ ] in Blake's time and then after working you know agriculturally um Fel is then um transitions into the domestic labor of child care. So throughout the poem, Fel encounters characters within her immediate sphere who each convey to her their own spiritual truth who each prophesize to her from different slightly different perspectives. The lily, the cloud, and the cloud of clay.

[00:21:29]Both the lily and the clay are maternal figures. The lily has a numerous charge and the clay nurses the worm.

[00:21:37]Historically, Blake scholars like Helen Bruder have read the worm as the clay's biological child. However, in a reading which considers the prophetic context of domestic service, the worm can be considered the child that the work of prophet here the clay must look after as part of their work.

[00:21:56]The clay after all is called a matron rather than a mother. The lily has charges not children. Collectively, the female characters, the lily, the clay, and thou, represent a household of servants caring for the worm. In the workingclass context of service work, all the characters in thou, including the male cloud, can be interpreted as servants with differing spiritual experiences to share, but a commonality between all of them. The poem represents the conversion process whilst at work in a household of wouldbe prophets. The Lily's prophecy promising she will be faith and light evokes the woman clothed with the sun of Revelation 12 which is a key reference point for many female prophets of God's generation including most famously South K.

[00:22:45]So besides the contextual reference point of Got's experience in service, Fel evokes God's specific language and imagery, especially in the image of the worm. For God, the worm represents the lowliest creature before God, emphasizing her experience of humbleness in the face of the divine. The worm also combines with biblical imagery from Ezekiel, emphasizing regeneration in the desert. So forgot to be a worm is to be at the lowest point of debasement and humbleness before being transformed and revived from the dead as it were by God's word.

[00:23:24]Zel encounters the worm at her lowest and resonates with the clay because her prophecy directly addresses Zel with pronouns um with pronouns. So the clay akin to God and her followers, the clay akin to God with her followers represents both a spiritual mother and a spiritual initiatrix as it is the clay who leads the into her vision in the poem's final section.

[00:23:52]So the experiences a visual and auditory vision of her own dead body, a prophecy of a potential future. Th's corpse prophesizes her own bodily destruction and is the only part of the poem to sexualize Th. The animation of Thal's corpse by spirit evokes God's use of Quaker physical signs where in the possession of the body and its movements within this process were taken as a sign from God. So in God's midnight cry, God sometimes descends into her body and has her walk across rooms, sit on balconies.

[00:24:28]There's more on that in Midnight Cryan in my book. Um, so God's own prophecies describe such involuntary movement and appear in Blake as a kind of merging of God and of the biblical Ezekiel vision of the regeneration of the desert bones.

[00:24:44]The focus on Thel's body and its sexualization represents the kind of detraction female prophets like South experienced.

[00:24:53]evokes Cho's later interpretation of allegations of Got's own personal history as the basis for her marriage out and subsequent suffering.

[00:25:02]So in this theory, Got had sex before marriage, which is why she married. Um this is a theory of chose in her 2013 article, I believe, but it'll be in my references.

[00:25:19]So Cell's vision of her body is a prophecy of her prophetic career, of the sensationalist sexualization of her body against her will. Thel's shriek and retreat at the end of the poem is her fear of encountering this prophetic truth later down the line. And counsel's rejection of her prophetic calling and of the vision of her calling. Thel, however, is young. She may yet have a poetic career in later life as Got and South did. And of course, this is not in the poem.

[00:25:54]So, transitioning now into the 1889, so 1890s to early 1900s.

[00:26:06]So, we'll now turn to Blake's Mystic Reception by the Yates Circle, specifically by William Sharp and Fiona Mloud. So when I'm referring to William Sharp, I will use he him pronouns. When I am referring to Fion Mloud, I will use she her pronouns. When I'm referring to them both, I will use they them both in the plural sense and also in the non-binary sense. In this I follow Mole um Mole Heaton Callaway Callaway Heaton um her work. So to briefly summarize Yates's reading of Blake and his contributions to Blake's studies, Yates along with his father's friend Edwin Ellis wrote and published a three volume book on Blake in 1893 called the works of William Blake, poetic, symbolic, and critical.

[00:27:03]The book reads Blake through a series of complex occult frameworks, insisting that Blake's work can only be fully understood through prior reading and knowledge of such intricate philosophical systems, which is something he has in common with Rain.

[00:27:18]Later on, Yates names the three male oultists, Swedenborg, Burma, and Paraselus, as Blake's predecessors in an esoteric tradition of which allegedly, according to Yates, Blake was a part. So Yates had been interested inisism from his teens onwards. He deepened his study of Burma to complete Blake book and this is in his correspondence.

[00:27:42]So during Yates's work on the book he was also a member of the occult secret society the hermatic order of the golden dawn which he joined in 1890. Prior to this he was briefly involved with theosophy but he fell out with HP Batzky although George Russell became an adherent of that tradition instead.

[00:28:00]So Yates formed deep relationships in his youth with like-minded people interested in the intersection of the arts and the mystical. One of these of course is George William Russell AE but also many of these figures were women like Maud Gone Florence Far and Annie Horniman Mary Kay Gri's Women of the Golden Dawn which is a 1995 Greek biography is a really good example of work on this topic. Later in life, Yates attached himself to several more talented women occultists. For example, the painter and tarot deck creator Pamela Coleman Smith, the occult scholar and astrologer Georgie Hyde, and the translator and poet and World War I nurse is all gone. He of course eventually married Georgie Hidley's who became George Yates and Yates remained on off infatuated with Isult gone at the same time. So Isult gone was Maud Gon's daughter.

[00:28:57]There was a 30y year age difference or 30ish year age difference between Yates and Isult. And there was a 20 something age difference between him and Georgie.

[00:29:08]So uh make of that what you will.

[00:29:11]Within this social whirlwind, Fiona Mloud cuts a unique figure. Mloud is a complicated figure in literary history as she has until the early 2020s been considered only as the pen name the Scottish author and editor William Sharp 1855 to 1905.

[00:29:31]Sharp began writing and publishing under Mloud's name with the novel Farray in 1894.

[00:29:37]As I'll detail today, Mloud's distinct style and themes evident in writing published under Sharp's name. My research in sharpen mloud is influenced by work by romanticists K singer and s ybur on transromanticism which is for informed by trans and queer theory.

[00:29:57]Singer argues that people who did not conform to the gender binary have always existed and indeed often shaped their cultural moment. Essy's contribution adapt adapts trans theory to urism a key text Sharp engaged with. Coincidentally, um, singer and her colleague, uh, Elizabeth Fay are currently working on editing an addition called Transmanticism, and I'm contributing a chapter to that on Mloud and Sharp. So, uh, yeah, I'll let you all know when that comes out. Um, Yates and Mloud first met by a correspondence in the mid 1890s.

[00:30:38]Yates knew Sharp earlier from the 1880s through Sharp's editorial work at the publisher Walter Scott. Yates kept up separate correspondence with both authors. So both Sharp and Mloud and treated them as separate people and as separate authors with visionary abilities. Yates's support evidently meant a great deal to Sharp and Mloud because both authors trusted Yates with their secret only publicly confirmed after Sharp's death that Sharp wrote and published as Mloud.

[00:31:08]Recent research on Mloud and Sharp by myself and by Maul Heaton Callaway considers Mloud and Sharp through queer and trans scholarship for the first time.

[00:31:18]By Heat and Callaway considers Sharp and Mloud through their late Victorian queer literary networks, my research considers Sharp and Mloud's use of spiritual writing as a means by which Sharp and Mloud could safely express and explore their gender beyond binary conventions.

[00:31:35]Of course, I identify Blake as a key influence on Sharpton Mloud's conception or version of genderedic writing, but a little context is needed first to situate these authors and to consider why we might read them beyond the gender binary.

[00:31:51]So, from a young age, Sharp experienced another feminine self within him, a spirit who must speak out. Sharp and his wife Elizabeth describes this feminine sharp as one deeply connected to spirituality and dream visions. The relationship between Sharp and this feminine spiritual self expression was more complicated than considering the feminine as merely a half part or aspect of Sharp. The needs the feminine aspect often dominated Sharp's life. The needs of Sharp and Mloud were considered disharmonious by Elizabeth Sharp. Mloud existed in physical form in correspondence in manuscripts and in published books. The creative realm was a safe space for Sharp's feminine gender expression. It is especially significant as Heat and Callaway points out Mloud's correspondence was largely with women and queer men offering a community of support which Sharp struggled to find elsewhere. Most critics working on Sharp and Mloud consider this split life and the stress Sharp experienced keeping Mloud secret as a significant factor contribute to Sharp's death aged just 50. Sharp was already disabled by a chronic heart condition and poor mental health which the stress of the double life likely exacerbated hastening his decline.

[00:33:10]Sharp and Mloud's early writings indicate that they'd read widely from Blake and Blake scholarship of the 19th century. Shot's first documented engagement with Blake appears in his 1882 biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in which he compares Rosetti's work to Blake's and to the Scottish painter David Scott who is currently the subject or a subject of my Scottish romantic project which was funded by the Glasgow fellowship and will be by the Durham fellowship. So Sharp was friends with David Scott's younger brother William Bell Scott who provided the Blake derived frontest piece to Sharp's 1894 collection beasters which you are seeing on the screen now. This engraved illustration is repurposed to illustrate the themes Sharp's short drama the passing of Lilith was in Beasters which draws directly on Blake's representations of gender and spirituality.

[00:34:06]So, Lilith, like Blake Cathun, is punished for her sexual transgression and sees a vision of her own destruction and disintegration. At the start of the play, she gives life to shadowy spirits by handing them fruit. They grow into fleshly creatures in a bloody gory process almost identical to the creation of gendered beings in Blake. Like the Lilith herself is watery and transient and very malleable. Lilith and Satan in a scene which blurs their bodily boundaries and even the sense of them as two separate bodies produce child abominations.

[00:34:43]So terrible because these children split along the gender binary akit to Blake akin to Blake's description of binary and urism which is produced by sexual assault. as in Blake, male sexual harm enables the further reinforcement of a fall and strict division of binary gender, but it also produces the events which the female prophet mystic must speak out against to enact change, as Smith notes, by speaking it into being.

[00:35:11]In this case, Lilith is speaking her future into being.

[00:35:17]This is only a brief section of my deeper readings on Sharp and Mloud in my book because I didn't want to spoil the entire book and I'm ongoing doing ongoing research on Mloud. So my work as I said is informed by the work of Esbury, Kate Singer and I haven't gone into it in a lot of detail but by Susan Striker as well. It's also someone I reference in the book and whose work I draw on, particularly her um essay on Frankenstein.

[00:35:48]So, I highly recommend seeking out their writing and again it's in my references at the end.

[00:35:56]So, as I detailed in the first section of this talk, my definition of mysticism differs from previous definitions proposed in Blake's studies in that it gathers many facets of Blake spirituality together and considers their boundaries as porous. Mysticism itself is a word that could be imply applied to many experiences including visions, prophecies, and a sense of deep connectedness to God and to the world and to nature. For example, unlike millinarian prophecy, mysticism cannot be linked to a specific movement or period in time. I must state clearly here that my work on Blake's mysticism does not preclude the continuation of specific sections of Blake criticism like prophetic stage studies and the nature of Blake's visions and so on. I believe that we vitally need to further work on Blake spirituality because our field is so limited to studies of male authors and to post 18th century western Christian sex and Christian esoterica.

[00:36:59]We need more work as well which queers prophecy which looks at prophecy and bodies and which highlights how romantic spiritual communities disrupted expectations of gender and class. We also need more studies on the intersection of spirituality and political movements beyond British romanticism.

[00:37:22]So, for example, I only had room in my book to reference the French mystic um Gian Guang, and I wish I'd had more space to work on her influence on Blake.

[00:37:32]Having attended John Mi's keynote in um the networks networks of antiquities conference in Copenhagen this year, I'm especially excited that he's picking up this thread of discolorship again and applying it to British Nordic networks of Christian radicals.

[00:37:49]So mysticism within Blake has a poor reputation for several reasons.

[00:37:57]Firstly, I do agree with Fry. That's why I cite him. Mysticism can and does create confusion in Blake studies. The least of which because every single Blake writer working today has their own definition of what mysticism is which suits their specific works.

[00:38:13]Secondly, to quote myself, there is a paradox in working on mysticism because you are working on things that are intangible and ineffable and not necessarily quantifiable by science or logic.

[00:38:31]So in all honesty, I think Blake scholars are a bit spooked by mysticism.

[00:38:35]In part because it cannot be explained, but also because it holds a poor and gendered reputation, especially from the mid- 20th century onwards.

[00:38:45]So in 20th century academic studies, Blake's mysticism was the purview of women scholars, Kathleen Rain, Desiree Hurst, Elyn Underh Hill to name a few.

[00:38:56]By contrast, scholarship on prophecy and millinarianism was largely written by male authors, David Erdman, EP Thompson, and John Me. Studies of Blake's millinarian prophetic connections by men located Blake within a specific historical movement movement and served to legitimize him and legitimize the study of his work, which is an ironic reversal of Yates and Ellis's attempts to tie Blake to an oult tradition and legitimize him in that way. So this peculiar quote by EP Thompson exemplifies the kind of straight bias, strange bias women led mystic studies faced in the 20th century. So criticizing Kathleen Rain, Thompson writes, Miss Rain always gives us the transcendental cheek and neglects to mention the Antonyomian and Millinarian Jowl. So I couldn't put it better than I put myself in my book, so I just quoted myself. I apologize. Um, and I write that Thompson's metaphor evokes the image of inconvenient critical truth physically pressing against the female critic and masculineized corrective checking her lofty speculations.

[00:40:06]So you see here the kind of strange bodily imagery that male critics ironically previously used in work on say Joanna Southk and here they're applying it to a female Blake critic which I thought was very unusual specifically the very physical imagery here. I will also say that Kathleen Rain's work is worthy of criticism just you know perhaps in a less strange way.

[00:40:36]Um Rain's view of Blake's mysticism is distinctly narrow and Yatesian and she isolates Blake from many key political and spiritual movements of his era.

[00:40:48]Yet her criti her criticism by Thompson perhaps represents Blake's study's reluctant reluctance to face Blake's mystic reputation. the fear of not being taken seriously.

[00:41:00]So, strangely, and I find it strange because Rain's work is so old and has such a eclectic uh reputation in Blake studies, RE's work is experiencing a resurgence in trade Blake biographies.

[00:41:15]So, whilst academia struggles to contend with Blake's reputation as a mystic, nonacademic Blake books embrace it. So Rain's work pretty much underlies and structures a lot of Mark Vernon's recent book Awake William Blake in the power of the imagination and Philip Hall also gives Rain a shout out in his William Blake and the sea monsters of love though that is slightly critical. Um, perhaps my favorite use of Blake's mysticism in non-academic writing of the present day though, which is not exactly a biography, it's an autobiography, is by K Tempest in Balor. So K Tempest is a trans uh poet and performer and he writes here, "People dismissed me as a mad person and a drunk just like they dismissed him." like his example in his work gave me the fortitude and the diabolical conviction I must continue to work at all costs. So here Tempest feels a sense of spiritual community with Blake and in is kind of like inspired in an almost like visionary sense. So I'm using this space on this slide here to highlight some scholars and artists. So in the in the spirit of Blake being you know a multi-hyphenate artist and in the spirit of this talk being publicly available I wanted to highlight both scholars and artists working today who inspire me and whose work I particularly admire. So I've listed their key works and I do hope you'll go away and look them up and request their work from your local library.

[00:42:57]So yeah um thanks for listening to my talk. I've got some references here.

[00:43:03]Now, there's loads of them. So, uh you may want to look at the recording later and pause it or just email me and I can copy paste the link in. But, um yeah, thank you very much.