Naturally I’ll post updates here as publication approaches (early 2012 a good estimate), but I’ve also kicked off a website for the project with a sign-up for a special mailing list dedicated to the book. The book’s title isn’t confirmed, but the site is named with rough aptness ‘Polar Cosmology‘.

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.

It’s an attractive, reassuring view, and I’m not really here now to debate its pros and cons. I’m just noting the fact that in my web reading today I’ve happened upon pages about two people who’ve influenced my thinking—Terence McKenna and Pierre Clastres—that made me realise that there’s a resonance between their models and this broad kind of Gnosticism, one I hadn’t really seen before. Again, I’ve not much to say past that; file this under “notes” rather than “opinions”.

Being currently interested to find out if anyone has followed up McKenna’s theories about mushrooms and human evolution since his death, I happened across this useful (though slightly dated) collection of links on the “stoned ape” theory. In a quote from an interview here we find McKenna summing up his model of psilocybin’s impact on human history:

The primate tendency to form dominance hierarchies was temporarily interrupted for about 100,000 years by the psilocybin in the paleolithic diet. This behavioral style of male dominance was chemically interrupted by psilocybin in the diet, so it allowed the style of social organization called partnership to emerge, and that that occurred during the period when language, altruism, planning, moral values, aesthetics, music and so forth—everything associated with humanness—emerged during that period. About 12,000 years ago, the mushrooms left the human diet because they were no longer available, due to climatological change and the previous tendency to form dominance hierarchies re-emerged.

It’s kind of contrary to the Reichian view, but equally simplistic and attractive. He’s basically saying that our genetic line naturally tends towards male dominance and aggression, and that only mushrooms can mellow us out significantly.

Compare Wikipedia’s entry on Clastres’ work:

[Clastres] criticizes both the evolutionist notion that the state would be the ultimate destiny of all societies, and the Rousseauian notion of man’s natural state of innocence (the myth of the noble savage). Knowledge of power is innate in any society, thus the natural state for humans wanting to preserve autonomy is a society structured by a complex set of customs which actively avert the rise of despotic power. The state is seen as but a specific constellation of hierarchical power peculiar only to societies who have failed to maintain these mechanisms which prevent separation from happening.

Both kind of suggest that the Genesis story should be rewritten to find the Garden of Eden as a rather brutish place that Adam and Eve managed to learn how to subdue, how to weed it effectively and actively encourage the right plants (notably, McKenna would say, magic mushrooms). They weren’t expelled; they had to leave when it became too overgrown after they’d lazily stopped tending to it.

Obviously neither theorist aligns with the simplistic conclusion that nature itself is wholly brutish and without harmonising tendencies. But both are often seen as subscribing to the “noble savage” myth, the idea that we just need to cast off civilisation and things will sort themselves out. Plainly this isn’t the case. The message is: we have to work at it, all the time. Or, as we know usually know the sentiment: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.