William Blake (1757—1827)

[KALKI]

William Blake (1757—1827) English poet, painter, and engraver, who created a unique form of illustrated verse; his poetry, inspired by mystical vision, is among the most original, lyric, and prophetic in the language.

According to author David Weir - William Blake’s poetry was due to the British discovery of Hindu literature. His mystic system springs from the rich historical context that produced the Oriental Renaissance.

Blake’s poetic career underwent a profound development as a result of his exposure to Hindu mythology. By combining mythographic insight with republican politics and Protestant dissent, Blake devised a poetic system that opposed the powers of Church and King

The reference to Brahma in The Song of Los shows that Blake was able to incorporate the latest mythographic material into his own evolving system.

Adam stood in the garden of Eden:
And Noah on the mountains of Ararat;
They saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations
By the hands of the children of Los.
Adam shuddered! Noah faded! Black grew the sunny African
When Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brahma in the East.

For many years now a fairly large contingent of critics has insisted on a relationship between Blake’s work and Hindu mythology. In 1924, S Foster Damon claimed that Blake was “in accord with Eastern mysticism".

Urthona is Dharma; Urizen, Karma, while both Tharmas and Luvah are included in Maya.”

In 1947 Northrop Frye observed in Fearful Symmetry that:

“Blake was among the first of European idealists to link his own traditions of thought” with the Indian classic, taking the account of the lost drawing of “Mr. Charles Wilkins translating the Geeta” (E 148) in Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue of 1809 as evidence of such a link. Frye also noted that Blake’s conception of three classes of human beings – Angels, Devils, and Elect – “may have come from the ‘Gunas” of the Bhagavad Gita. Wilkins translation of the Gita are called “three Goon or qualities arising from Prakreetee or nature, namely, “Sattwa truth, Rajas, passion, and tamas darkness.”

Blake refers to the "Geeta" in his Descriptive Catalogue of 1809, the same year that Moses Haughton engraved the plates for Edward Moor’s The Hindu Pantheon (1810), a copious account of Hindu deities with the Sanskrit names of the gods affixed in Devanagari script by Charles Wilkins.





Engraving of a spectre, plate 78, by William Blake. The most obvious similarity is the combination of bird and human which is usual in Indian iconography. Blake is said to have done a drawing of two-elephant headed figures that might have been modeled after Ganesha.




(image source: Drawings of Garuda from Edward Moor's The Hindu Pantheon).

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(source: Brahma in the West – By David Weir p. 8 - 97).