Blake & Boehme: Imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Reason
Imagination’.48 The Spectre is ‘a false Body: an Incrustation over my
Immortal/Spirit; a Selfhood’.49 It declares in Jerusalem:
I am your Rational Power . . . & that Human Form You call Divine, is but a Worm seventy inches long
That creeps forth in a night & is dried in the morning sun.50
Worldly religion can also shut the individual off from the inner life: ‘There is a Grain of Sand . . . that Satan cannot find/Nor can his Watch Fiends find it . . .’; it ‘has many Angles’ and
every angle is a lovely heaven
But should the Watch Fiends find it, they would call it Sin
And lay its Heavens & their inhabitants in blood of punishment.51
Boehme complained that ‘Our divines set themselves Hand and Foot with Might and Main, with their utmost Endeavour, by Persecution and Reproach . . . [and say] that man must not [dare to] search into the deep Grounds what God is; Men must not search nor curiously pry into the Deity’.52 And so, as Boehme adds, ‘the Temple of Christ was turned into Temples made of Stones, and out of the Testimony of the Holy Ghost a Worldly Law was made. Then the Holy Ghost spoke no more freely, but he must speak according to their Laws . . . and so the Temple of Christ in Man’s Knowledge became very obscure’.53
As a result, Boehme believed that all too often the Antichrist had been mistaken for God, that there are, in his words, ‘two . . . Churches upon the earth; one which seeketh only . . . the outward God . . .
therein . . . lodgeth the Serpent’s child. The other, which seeketh the Virgin-child and God’s kingdom . . . must suffer itself to be persecuted.’ If ‘the virgin’s child . . . be not manifest . . . the devil is’.54 Blake made essentially the same argument in Jerusalem:
Man must & will have Some Religion; if he has not the Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan . . . calling the Prince of this World, God; and destroying all who do not worship Satan under the Name God.55