{"id":6309,"date":"2026-02-06T23:46:04","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T23:46:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=6309"},"modified":"2026-02-06T23:46:04","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T23:46:04","slug":"five-questions-jodie-marley-on-william-blakes-mysticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=6309","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Jodie Marley on William Blake’s Mysticism<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dr Jodie Marley is an independent scholar working on Romantic literature and art history. \u00a0Her recent publications include a chapter on gender and sexuality in Se\u00e1n O\u2019Casey in Context<\/em><\/a> (Cambridge University Press, ed. James Moran) and an article on W.B. Yeats and William Blake in the 1890s in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 She is a regular contributor to Global Blake\u2019s online lecture series and podcast.\u00a0 Her first monograph, William Blake\u2019s Mysticism: The Legacy of Prophetic Women<\/em><\/a>, which we discuss below, was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1) How did you first become interested in William Blake?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blake\u2019s Songs of Innocence and of Experience<\/em> was a set text for my first year of undergraduate studies. His illuminations\u2019 luminous use of colour arrested me and pulled me back to my teenage years at Catholic school in a former convent (my family were early C20th Irish Catholic immigrants, though I\u2019m no longer in the Church). My English teacher had Blake\u2019s painting \u2018The Circle of the Lustful\u2019 from Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em> as her desktop background, which often ended up projected across the wall: a strange choice given the crucifixes and Virgin statues in the corridors. I\u2019d taken art to GCSE, specialising in silk painting and watercolour. They\u2019re both temperamental mediums that glow softly when you get them right, particularly silk, translucent when backlit. I don\u2019t wear much colour, but all my visual art, and the artists I admire the most, uses colour in a very striking way. Blake\u2019s earliest use of watercolour wash in his prints in the 1790s \u2013 in the Songs<\/em>, the Book of Thel<\/em>, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell <\/em>\u2013 reminded me of my own background. He seemed to articulate a mood I\u2019d been trying to capture myself for years without knowing why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2) How does your research define mysticism, and how does seeing William Blake as a mystic help us better understand his reception?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was very intentional in defining mysticism at the start of the book, following the topic\u2019s reputation in Blake studies. Northrop Frye\u2019s (correct) observation that calling Blake a mystic creates confusion without further definition compelled me to come up with my own. My definition is probably closest to Glenn Alexander Magee\u2019s, which, to summarise, describes mysticism as having a spiritual or visionary experience and then, crucially<\/em>, sharing it with others, which connotes a kind of conversion process. This applies to most of Blake\u2019s output, as well as academics\u2019 definitions of millenarian prophecy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blake\u2019s reputation as a millenarian prophet really took off in the late twentieth century and has only grown since, yet studies of Blake\u2019s mysticism mostly petered out after Kathleen Raine. By my own definition, stated in my book\u2019s conclusion, both prophecy and mysticism are interwoven. To see and hear God, to be compelled by him to share his word through prophecy: that\u2019s a mystic experience. Not all mysticism is prophecy, but all prophecy is mysticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m so interested in the development of Blake\u2019s reputation as a mystic in the nineteenth century because the word casts such a wide net, which can, as Frye said above, create confusion, because then Blake becomes too much, too loose. As you\u2019ll find if you read my book, back then \u2018mystic\u2019 encompassed a range of artistic modes, influences, and assumptions that, today, have branched off and bloomed into many different, clearer subcategories of Blake studies. In the nineteenth century, \u2018mystic\u2019 was a way of explaining a range of traditions that Blake almost fit, without fully committing Blake to one mode. To re-vision Blake as a mystic today is to reaffirm his fluid, boundary-blurring nature as an artist, which, in my book, I find very compatible with reading Blake through a queer lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To summarise: my research\u2019s purpose isn\u2019t necessarily to see Blake as a mystic. Rather, it is to determine why Blake\u2019s works and influences merit that definition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3) In what ways did Blake’s works and their influences intersect with those of women prophets such as Dorothy Gott and Joanna Southcott?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key thing to understand about the relationship between Blake\u2019s, Gott\u2019s, and Southcott\u2019s works is that they all lived in overlapping spiritual communities, so naturally, they had many shared influences. Blake and Gott, for example, attended the same Swedenborg meeting, demonstrating a shared affinity for his works. Most crucially, the intersection of influences came from gathering with people with similar interests. It was a culture rooted in communal discussion and debate rather than solitary reading and reflection \u2013 which is what Yeats\u2019 work on Blake\u2019s occult influences never quite captures. Occult writers such as alchemical philosopher Jacob Boehme and, yes, Swedenborg (reclaimed for the occult by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn syllabi in the 1890s) were popular in Blake\u2019s time, as Robert Rix\u2019s book attests, but were encountered in a contemporary, politicised context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This chaotic Romantic conversational culture is best exemplified in Henry Crabb Robinson\u2019s diary records of Blake\u2019s conversations with his friend, engraver William Sharp. Blake and Robinson skewer Sharp\u2019s fickle prophetic allegiances, first to Richard Brothers, then to Joanna Southcott, critiquing both prophets. Southcott herself derided Brothers in A Dispute Between the Woman and the Powers of Darkness<\/em> (1802), citing his imprisonment as evidence of his prophetic weakness, rather than a logical consequence of prophesying against the political establishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regarding their published works, Blake explicitly references Southcott in his four-line Notebook <\/em>poem \u2018On the Virginity of Johanna [sic] Southcott\u2019 (c. 1801-3). Blake mimics Southcott\u2019s idiosyncratic use of rhyme to prophesise, alluding to her favourite theme of her own virtuous virginity. The fragment shows a distinct familiarity with her published work. Blake does not name Gott, yet there is an eerie overlap of imagery and metaphor between their works, which is particularly significant given they attended the same Swedenborg group and published at the same time (Southcott was a little later). Gott and Blake use the same worm and grave imagery for the same themes of gender, humility, and spiritual service. The Book of Thel<\/em> is the most evident demonstration of their works\u2019 intersection, and of Gott\u2019s influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4) What were the most important things that W.B. Yeats and his circle drew from Blake?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From a general perspective, Blake represented a predecessor for the Yeats circle. He was, for them, an artist-mystic, who shared their interests and their vocation. Yeats specifically promoted this view. It validated his circle\u2019 work, and positioned them as inheritors of Blake\u2019s cultural legacy, the next generation in a lineage passed down from Boehme, to Swedenborg, to Blake, to the Celtic Twilight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

W. B. Yeats, with Edwin J. Ellis, were the first Blake scholars to systematise Blake\u2019s esoteric influences. Yeats gave specific and detailed examples of where these appeared in Blake\u2019s work. Yet his criticism is highly influenced by the Golden Dawn\u2019s secret society ethos. It often obscures rather than clarifies, as if only a coterie of Blake initiates were truly worthy of understanding Blake in full. Often, it reflects Yeats\u2019 own desire for a philosophical system of spiritual belief, imposing a structure onto Blake that was not necessarily there. Yeats drew from Blake the conviction to create his own mythopoetic system of contraries and guiding entities. This achieved its final form in A Vision<\/em>, which his wife George Yeats channelled, shouldering the actual prophetic workload.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

George Russell \u2018\u00c6\u2019 is a curious figure as, like Blake, Yeats imposed a mystical reputation on him that never quite rubbed off. Russell was involved in several intersecting spiritual communities and wrote poetry, prose, drama, and political journalism, whilst painting and illustrating. His letters have a Blakean bluntness at odds with his sage-like image in Yeats\u2019 memoirs. He was familiar with Blake\u2019s works but leaned less self-consciously on them than Yeats. Blake was, for Russell, one of many influences, including some overlap with Blake\u2019s own (Boehme) and some unique to his late nineteenth-century milieu (H. P. Blavatsky). Because of the increased interest in and respect for Blake\u2019s work in the late nineteenth century, Russell profited from his Blakean associations, and perhaps for this reason, his work was seen as a little less strange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

William Sharp\/Fiona Macleod, like Russell, took elements of Blake\u2019s style and themes and transmuted them into their own work. Sharp was a significant figure in late nineteenth-century literary criticism, quietly respected, productive, and well-connected to several Blake collectors, including the Rossettis and William Bell Scott. He was part of the Golden Dawn and learned in esoterica. Sharp wrote and identified as the female author Macleod, and it is in their creative writing the Blake influence is most apparent. Sharp and Macleod particularly draw on Blake\u2019s lamenting, female prophetic figures as models for their heroines, and his multi-bodied concepts of gender in both creative and personal capacities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5) What new projects are you currently developing?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m currently working on two new projects. Both emerged from my monograph\u2019s Fiona Macleod research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first studies the careers of several artists who were apprenticed to the Edinburgh engraver Robert Scott and who trained at his workshop, which was one of the largest and most influential in Edinburgh at the time. Part of this project was funded by my Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Glasgow\u2019s Special Collections last year, plus a BARS Stephen Copley Award in December 2024. Sharp\/Macleod was friends with Scott\u2019s youngest son, William Bell Scott, which is how I first discovered the family\u2019s fascinating history. I\u2019m presenting a paper at the BARS Birmingham conference this year drawing on my archival research on Scottish Romantic astronomical engravings and Glasgow\u2019s intellectual culture in the early nineteenth century, so hopefully I\u2019ll see some of you there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My second project again originates in my Sharp\/Macleod research. It tracks their influence as a Romanticist literary critic in the nineteenth century, detailing their contributions to our reception of several Romantic poets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Jodie Marley is an independent scholar working on Romantic literature and art history. \u00a0Her recent publications include a chapter on gender and sexuality in Se\u00e1n O\u2019Casey in Context (Cambridge… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6311,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309\/revisions\/6311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}