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).