William Blake's Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision

William Blake's Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision PDF Author: Marsha Keith Schuchard
Publisher: Inner Traditions
ISBN: 9781594772115
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
The secret and mystical sexual practices at the heart of William Blake’s creative and spiritual life • Reveals newly discovered family documents connecting Blake’s mother and Blake himself to Moravian and Swedenborgian erotic and visionary experimentation • Shows Blake had access to kabbalistic and tantric techniques of psychoerotic meditation, which used sexual arousal to achieve spiritual vision William Blake (1757-1827) has long been treasured as an artist and poet whose work was born out of authentic spiritual vision. The acutely personal, almost otherworldly look of his artwork, combined with its archetypal casting and depth of emotion, transcend societal conventions and ordinary experience. But much of the overtly sexual work has been destroyed or altered, deemed too heretical by conservative elements among the mystic Moravians and Swedenborgians, whose influence on Blake has been uncovered only recently. The author’s investigation into the radical psychosexual spiritual practices surrounding William Blake, which includes new archival discoveries of Blake family documents, reveals that Moravian and Swedenborgian erotic and visionary experimentation fueled much of Blake’s creative and spiritual life. Drawing also upon modern art restoration techniques, Marsha Keith Schuchard shows that Blake and his wife, Catherine, were influenced by secret kabbalistic and tantric rituals designed to transcend the bonds of social convention. Her exhaustive research provides a new context for understanding the mystical practices at the heart of Blake’s most radical beliefs about sexualized spirituality and its relation to visionary art.

William Blake's Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision

William Blake's Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision PDF Author: Marsha Keith Schuchard
Publisher: Inner Traditions
ISBN: 9781594772115
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Get Book

Book Description
The secret and mystical sexual practices at the heart of William Blake’s creative and spiritual life • Reveals newly discovered family documents connecting Blake’s mother and Blake himself to Moravian and Swedenborgian erotic and visionary experimentation • Shows Blake had access to kabbalistic and tantric techniques of psychoerotic meditation, which used sexual arousal to achieve spiritual vision William Blake (1757-1827) has long been treasured as an artist and poet whose work was born out of authentic spiritual vision. The acutely personal, almost otherworldly look of his artwork, combined with its archetypal casting and depth of emotion, transcend societal conventions and ordinary experience. But much of the overtly sexual work has been destroyed or altered, deemed too heretical by conservative elements among the mystic Moravians and Swedenborgians, whose influence on Blake has been uncovered only recently. The author’s investigation into the radical psychosexual spiritual practices surrounding William Blake, which includes new archival discoveries of Blake family documents, reveals that Moravian and Swedenborgian erotic and visionary experimentation fueled much of Blake’s creative and spiritual life. Drawing also upon modern art restoration techniques, Marsha Keith Schuchard shows that Blake and his wife, Catherine, were influenced by secret kabbalistic and tantric rituals designed to transcend the bonds of social convention. Her exhaustive research provides a new context for understanding the mystical practices at the heart of Blake’s most radical beliefs about sexualized spirituality and its relation to visionary art.

Why Mrs Blake Cried

Why Mrs Blake Cried PDF Author: Marsha Keith Schuchard
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
This work offers a new insight into the work of William Blake. The discovery of Blake family documents led to a radical cast of characters including Cagliostro, Zinzendorf and Swedenborg, and to a world of waking visions, magical practices, sexual-spiritual experimentation, tantric sex and free love.

The Life of William Blake

The Life of William Blake PDF Author: Alexander Gilchrist
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Artists
Languages : en
Pages : 676

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Visions of the Daughters of Albion

Visions of the Daughters of Albion PDF Author: William Blake
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 27

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Songs of Innocence

Songs of Innocence PDF Author: William Blake
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Illumination of books and manuscripts
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Wild Romanticism

Wild Romanticism PDF Author: Markus Poetzsch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000380416
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Wild Romanticism consolidates contemporary thinking about conceptions of the wild in British and European Romanticism, clarifying the emergence of wilderness as a cultural, symbolic, and ecological idea. This volume brings together the work of twelve scholars, who examine representations of wildness in canonical texts such as Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey, "Kubla Khan," "Expostulation and Reply," and Childe Harold ́s Pilgrimage, as well as lesser-known works by Radcliffe, Clare, Hölderlin, P.B. Shelley, and Hogg. Celebrating the wild provided Romantic-period authors with a way of thinking about nature that resists instrumentalization and anthropocentricism, but writing about wilderness also engaged them in debates about the sublime and picturesque as aesthetic categories, about gender and the cultivation of independence as natural, and about the ability of natural forces to resist categorical or literal enclosure. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Romanticism, environmental literature, environmental history, and the environmental humanities more broadly.

Milton ...

Milton ... PDF Author: William Blake
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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The Unlimited Dream Company: A Novel

The Unlimited Dream Company: A Novel PDF Author: J. G. Ballard
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 087140687X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
"A remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire." —New York Times Book Review When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is transformed. Vultures invade rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man’s urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations toward an apocalyptic climax. In this characteristically inventive novel Ballard displays to devastating effect the extraordinary imagination that has established him as one of the twentieth century’s most visionary writers.

William Blake

William Blake PDF Author: Algernon Charles Swinburne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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The Siblys of London

The Siblys of London PDF Author: Susan Sommers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190687339
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Ebenezer Sibly was a quack doctor, plagiarist, and masonic ritualist in late eighteenth-century London; his brother Manoah was a respectable accountant and a pastor who ministered to his congregation without pay for fifty years. The inventor of Dr. Sibly's Reanimating Solar Tincture, which claimed to restore the newly dead to life, Ebenezer himself died before he turned fifty and stayed that way despite being surrounded by bottles of the stuff. Asked to execute his will, which urged the continued manufacture of Solar Tincture, and left legacies for multiple and concurrent wives as well as an illegitimate son whose name the deceased could not recall, Manoah found his brother's record of financial and moral indiscretions so upsetting that he immediately resigned his executorship. Ebenezer's death brought a premature conclusion to a colorfully chaotic life, lived on the fringes of various interwoven esoteric subcultures. Drawing on such sources as ratebooks and pollbooks, personal letters and published sermons, burial registers and horoscopes, Susan Mitchell Sommers has woven together an engaging microhistory that offers useful revisions to scholarly accounts of Ebenezer and Manoah, while placing the entire Sibly family firmly in the esoteric byways of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Siblys of London provides fascinating insight into the lives of a family who lived just outside our usual historical range of vision.