Art and performance collective Guerilla Zoo are mounting a season celebrating the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky during November in London.

Events include The Gorilla, a new Jodorowsky play starring his son Brontis, an exhibition of work from the Panic Movement, an exhibition of works by Jodorowsky and Pascale Montandon, and of course, screenings of Jodorowsky’s incomparable surrealist alchemical films.

Patrick Harpur, the essential guide to Hermeticism and alchemy, author of Daimonic Reality, Mercurius and The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, is breaking his customary seclusion with a series of courses next year to be held in the heart of West Dorset.

Together with Jules Cashford (co-author of the excellent The Myth of the Goddess) and others, Patrick will host talks, discussions, films and field trips exploring soul, magic, Forteana, folklore, mythology, dreams, and other byways of the imagination. Full details can be found at The Mythic Imagination website.

You can call this healing, you can call it transformation—there are all sorts of names. But let’s stay with the word “love” because it is so amazing to realize that love is working toward clarification, becoming clarified like a broth, like a butter, because what happens is transparency. And when we try to “clear things up,” go over the past to see it better, or put ourselves through confessions—all that is part of love becoming clarified. We are working at transparency. Impossible dark spots of the interior person get lit up, the shadow, the ugliest man, all the shames and embarrassments regarding the concealed personal tied-up self—well, there they are. “Good morning! How are you! Nice to see you!” They’re aren’t gone away or healed or integrated. [...] There they are, but they have become transparent, for a moment at least, like rubies and emeralds. The leopard can’t change his spots, but the spots can be gems. I am trying to say that your shadow is your virtue, and that is what love is mostly about. And that’s what remains—if anything has to remain—after a person’s dead. His faults, his unbearable qualities, or hers, become clarified, and you remember them as virtues. They stand out sharp and clear, like essences. It’s amazing how the very thing you couldn’t bear in your mother or father, in your wife or husband—they die, and then the rubies show right in the shadow…

I’m no Blake scholar. And I know precious little about neo-Platonism and alchemy, relatively speaking, when you consider how steeped in these traditions many of the writers and thinkers who have influenced me are. So I don’t feel qualified to properly review this excellent little book by Kathleen Raine, which I randomly picked up in a second-hand shop in Bristol last year. However, it deserves a mention.

The book comprises part of a series of lectures Raine gave in the early sixties, and its premise is that, contrary to the popular image of Blake as a lone eccentric in a traditional society, forging his own idiosyncratic mythology in his poems and art, he was in fact a studious follower of traditional ancient knowledge. These cosmic, mythical and proto-psychological currents of tradition, filtered through Gnosticism, the Cabala, Orphism and the Hermetic tradition, had, by Blake’s time, become almost wholly occulted by the nascent rationality of science.

That Blake held alchemist Paracelsus to be an equal to Shakespeare had apparently escaped the general notice of the modern literary community until Raine and a handful of others pointed out Blake’s true inheritance. Such, it seems, is the level of repression that this stream of knowledge became subjected to. Blake’s popular image as an eccentric self-made man says much about the amnesia implicit in the arrogance of Western rationalism. As Raine observes:

Mr. Eliot has accused him [Blake] of “a certain meanness of culture” and a lack of that “Mediterranean gift of form which knows how to borrow, as Dante borrowed his theory of the soul; he must needs create a philosophy as well as a poetry.” A culture which embraced Plato and Plotinus, the Bible and the Hermetica, English science and philosophy, the tradition of Alchemy, Gibbon and Herodotus, besides the body of English poetry—not to mention his equally wide knowledge of painting—can scarcely be called mean. [...] Blake, like Dante, derived his knowledge of the soul from the ancients. He was a traditionalist in a society that had wholly lapsed from tradition. To the modern reader he appears most original when he is least so, most cranky when he is communicating traditional doctrine, and most personal when his theme is metaphysical reality, expressed in canonical symbols.

I found this book to be a huge boost to my patchy knowledge of both Blake and the traditions he drew on. Raine skillfully weaves the two together, or rather exposes their interwovenness. Blake’s evocative but seemingly oblique themes and images are illuminated without being “explained”, their inner coherence brought to light by judicious examples from the ancient sources he evidently drew on. And these frequently slippery doctrines—relating the the descent of the soul into matter, the cycle of world ages, and other esoteric staples—are likewise made more vivid and comprehensible by their exposition in Blake’s stunning works.

What makes things more interesting is that Blake was, of course, not wholly traditional. As Raine remarks, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Blake protested against an error found in ‘All Bibles and sacred codes’—and he must have included Platonism”. While cleaving strongly to the symbolic codes of the traditions that inspired him, Blake wrestled with the implications, too. In revealing the evolution of Blake’s thinking on the soul’s involvement in the material world, Raine creates a gripping and challenging as well as educational narrative.