Solomon's Secret Arts (66 page)

E.P. Thompson associated “Ignoramus” with a conservative, denominational strain of Swedenborgianism that was rejected by William Blake.
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Yet in many respects Jonathan Pratt was not very far removed from Blake. Pratt was a founding member of the New Jerusalem Church at its inception in April 1792.
Blake had attended the meeting three years before at which the idea of a new denomination was suggested; he and his wife signed the proposal. As late as 1797, his friend John Flaxman thought that Blake could be brought into the fold of the New Jerusalem Church.
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Blake's alienation from Swedenborgianism, which was never total, seems to have originated in his beliefs that humans possessed an innate divinity and no soul was destined to damnation, views he may have derived from Boehme. Pratt also lauded Boehme; for him, damnation was not predestined, but was equivalent to the human choice of evil. Blake's views on gender, at least in this period, were similar to those of Pratt.
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Both men can be considered as free interpreters of Swedenborg.

By contrast, Mary Pratt really despised “the deluded Swedenborg,” as she called him in her letters. “My partner in life,” she wrote in 1792, “is an adherent to these wild doctrines who call themselves the New Jerusalem Church … poor hoodwinked mortals, blindfolded by the seducer, to their own destruction.”
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Blake never expressed himself so strongly against “the Assessor” or his followers. By the time she wrote these words, moreover, Mary Pratt was already a public figure, whose pamphlet on spiritual healing had gone through two editions. She was probably better known as a writer than Blake, whose poems had appeared in tiny editions, or her own husband, who wrote anonymously.

A sign of her independence from her husband's religious views may be found in a 1778 collection of religious poems, addressed to members of the Congregational Church in Redcross Street. Mary subscribed to the volume; her husband did not.
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Her marital status was not mentioned in the pamphlet on magnetic cures, which she printed at her own expense in 1789. Her name appeared as “M.P.” on the title page, where she was also identified as “a Lover of the Lamb of God” but she signed the dedication to the archbishop of Canterbury as “Mary Pratt [no Mrs], 41 Portland Street, Mary-le-Bone.”
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While the work is hardly a feminist tract, its point of view is distinctly female. Lucy de Loutherbourg is given credit for the cure of “a woman possessed with Evil Spirits” who happened to be a near-neighbour of Mary Pratt and whose condition (“she was like a Lunatic”) paralleled her own alleged madness.
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Mary Pratt may have seen aspects of herself in these female figures, both sufferers and healers.

She was totally disinterested in the scientific aspects of magnetic healing. For her, the cures were divine, and suggested parallels with the miracles of the Apostles. She called for public prayers to be offered up “for such an astonishing proof of God's love to this
favoured Land
.” The last comment was not a statement of national pride; in fact, Mary Pratt had little confidence in God's continuing favour to Britain. The public prayers, she wrote, were necessary now, as at the time of King George's recovery from madness, “that we as a People may avert and deprecate those judgments, which at this awful hour have fallen on other
Nations.”
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The pamphlet was dedicated on 21 July, one week after the fall of the Bastille. Thus, Pratt linked the miraculous cures of the Loutherbourgs with the political situation of the nation, just as her own recovery from supposed madness might be linked with the recovery of King George.

By 1791, Mary Pratt had become “the most intimate friend” of an Anglican minister of mystical inclinations, the Reverend Richard Clarke. Like Blake, Clarke believed in universal salvation and continuing revelation, or “the Everlasting Gospel.” He also had faith in alchemy, but not in Swedenborg.
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It was Clarke who brought Mary Pratt into contact with his friend Henry Brooke, an Irish painter and nephew of the celebrated novelist of the same name. A disciple of Boehme, Brooke sought out like-minded mystics throughout the British Isles. In a correspondence that lasted from December 1791 to October 1792, Pratt instructed Brooke in a supremely confident tone that frequently verged on the ecstatic. “I (truly) live in Paradise,” she wrote, “having passed by the Angel that stands at the Gate to guard the Tree of Life … Jehovah has clothed me and I see and rejoice in my own beauty: not by my attainments; not by my sufferings—tho’ grievous and terrible … No—it was by the Lords free gift … He espoused vile me!” She did not mean this in a figurative sense: she really believed that she was living in heaven, as the bride of Jehovah. She made the amazing claim: “I am the first, who ever had the honor to have the seventh seal opened to them: the time was not
come
, till it
came
to me.”
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This was not simply madness. It was a mystical conviction based on experience as well as on extensive reading. Pratt eagerly shared with Brooke the list of her favourite authors, an eclectic and international bunch. She recommended Boehme, of course, but also the Spanish Catholic mystic Miguel de Molinos and the French Quietists, Madame Guyon and Madame Bourignon. Among English mystics, Pratt had been inspired by the puritan Peter Sterry and the Philadelphians Richard Roach and William Bromley, although she noted that none of them had entered paradise while alive, as she had. She mentioned her “delight” in the writings of the radical Civil War preacher William Erbery, but we should not readily assume, as E.P. Thompson did, that she identified with his politics, because she said nothing about them. She omitted Jane Lead, the spiritual leader of the Philadelphians, although Brooke noted in a letter to Clarke the similarities between Pratt's mystical assertions and those of the late seventeenth-century prophetess, who also had a vision of the breaking of the seventh seal. Mary Pratt further asserted that she had read “many (almost all) Hermetic books,” and had “sought Earth, Sea and Air, speaking in a figure,” meaning that she had studied alchemy and ritual magic.
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Mary Pratt was not a passive reader: she brought to these mystical and occult tracts a highly gendered sensibility that focused on the travails of the
female body as the starting point for spiritual exaltation. Like other mystics, she condemned “[t]his foul body” as “like a
beast
; its appetites, its passions, its gratifications are vile.” Yet at the same time, her body provided a way to the divine. Heaven had opened up to her through the pain of childbirth: “I felt, when the Man child was born in me,—you would hardly credit it—the pain was the pain of hell, intolerable; neither could the humanity have sustained it: but Love tried the crucible, in a sevenfold fire.” The “Man child” was both her “ungodly infamous son,” Jonathan, and Jesus Christ, whose divinity is nowhere acknowledged by her. This contrasts sharply with her husband's view of Christ's divine maleness, paired in him with a degraded human femaleness.
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Mary Pratt preferred Jehovah to Jonathan, and she often evoked images of marriage and union to describe her relationship with the Almighty. It may be impossible today to read her description of “the ecstatic rapture of a Union with him Jehovah, the Lord,” without thinking of sexual abandonment: “You feel dissolved, annihilated, melted, dignified, swallowed up in him.” Her vision of heaven, however, was rooted not in sexuality but in a chaste matrimonial harmony, centred on the sharing of food: “for in equality as between man and wife, the connubial endearments are in Union, they taste reciprocal delights, for my beloved is mine, and I am his, he feedeth among the lilies; or he feedeth with me in spotless purity.—Come walk in the garden of Love, and taste pure delight and ineffable pleasure … It is extatic! It is glorious! it is divine!”
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Pratt frequently used images of eating and drinking, of “mannah” and “celestial food,” to convey the pleasures of union with God. Medieval female mystics drew the same connection between the maternal body as a source of food and the nourishing power of Christ's body.
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Pratt had clearly absorbed this tradition, although it is not clear where she had encountered it.

It was only in her last communication with Brooke that she veered into national affairs. “The times wear a most favorable aspect viz. French Republic,” she predicted. “The time is approaching very fast, when every man shall feed under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall make them afraid.” Again, self-sufficiency in food, this time for men, was equated with spiritual bliss. She went on to make her predictions more subjective. “I have not time to print my letters,
Pharoah
will in this life be obeyed. He is the Prince of the power of the air, and we who are witnesses of the resurrection, he persecutes more than any others; but the man child is out of his reach, it dwells with God; and all his floods cannot drown it.”
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By “Pharoah,” did she mean her husband or George III? Whatever the case, in this passage she foreshadowed the two most popular millenarian prophets of the period: Richard Brothers, who called for peace with France, and Joanna Southcott, who claimed to be pregnant with the new Messiah, the “man-child” Shiloh.

It was all too much for Henry Brooke, who broke off the correspondence after this letter. He chided Pratt for being so resentful towards those who had wronged her, and urged that, “instead of being inflamed at opposition,” she should “pray for, a mistaken friend, a persecuting Pharoah, or an infamous relation.” Brooke later told Richard Clarke that, although he admired her piety, he feared that tapping into her “rich vein of enthusiasm” might “aggravate her malady.”
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He did not mention her political views or attitude towards her family. If Brooke was condescending towards Mary Pratt's feminine mysticism, he was not lacking in sympathy for her. For nine months he had encouraged her to open up her inner world to him, and it was only when she threatened his own equanimity that he broke off from her.

Mary Pratt may not have been a female Blake, but she has to be placed in the same intellectual milieu of heterodoxy, religious subjectivity and occult philosophy. Like him, she was a self-taught visionary, who drew on radical religious traditions as well as quasi-magical knowledge to shape her own approach to God. In her temperament and language, she looks forward to the Romantic age, and beyond it to the Spiritualists and Theosophers of the Victorian era.
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As a woman mystic, however, she incorporated (the term is apt) a point of view that Blake did not share, based on concepts of physical union with the deity and of the maternal body as the source of life. By laying claim to a physical superiority over men, rather than a moral equality to them, Mary Pratt was reformulating an old argument about female spirituality. To be sure, it was more effective in establishing the exalted character of women than in winning rights for them. She never argued in terms of earthly equality. On the other hand, neither did she subscribe to a belief in essential or natural gender differences. Her Swedenborgian husband may have been an essentialist in gender matters, but she simply ignored any discussion of the self that was premised on natural hierarchies. All that counted was her own supernatural yet physical link to God. Ultimately, that may have been all that mattered to Blake too. In that respect at least, we might call him a male Mary Pratt.

Urizen Wept: William Blake

Yet Blake differed in many essential respects from Mary Pratt, as he did from every other occult thinker of the late eighteenth century. For one thing, the God that mattered to him was part of himself. Did this qualify him as a mystic? Perhaps not; but then, categorizing Blake in any way is difficult. His relationship to the occult remains murky, in spite of the painstaking research carried out by Kathleen Raine and others into the Neoplatonic and Hermetic references that run through his poetry.
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Some scholars, eschewing Raine's approach, have
chosen to read Blake's visionary writings in strictly political terms, emphasizing his radical opposition to monarchy and organized religion.
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They have drawn out the contemporary relevance of his works, but fail to explain why he chose to compose mythic fantasies rather than political allegories. His imagination was bounded neither by current events, which he bent to his own purposes, nor by occult traditions. This might lead us to disregard him as a madman or self-absorbed loner with almost no audience. In an occult as well as a poetic context, however, Blake was a pivotal figure. A relentless opponent of rationalism, he foreshadowed the modern occult mentality, in which reason is not the instrument but the enemy of vision. Like William Law, Blake resented the constrictions imposed by modern philosophies. He went much further than Law in condemning them. Scorning respectability, Blake regarded occult thinking itself as utterly corrupted by an insidious collaboration with science and materialism.

Blake's religious roots and artisanal background figured in the formation of his ideas, although their significance is hard to decipher. His mother was apparently a Moravian, at least for part of her life. The joyful impulse in Blake's early poetry, as well as his exaltation of Jesus as a full-fledged God, may owe something to her beliefs.
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By the late 1780s, Blake and his wife, Catherine, were involved with the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, of which his friend John Flaxman was a strong supporter. Soon, however, Blake became critical of Swedenborgianism, and he never joined any other religious group. Despite E.P. Thompson's suggestion, no evidence exists to link him with the Muggletonians, the descendants of a radical Civil War sect.
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As for Blake's politics, they were highly personal. Working as a printer and engraver, Blake rubbed shoulders with radicals like William Sharp, and he was employed by the Unitarian bookseller Joseph Johnson, who published radical pamphlets. Yet Blake was never a member of any political organization, and he was not involved with any seditious publications. Expression of his strong anti-monarchical and anticlerical views was confined to self-published writings that circulated among a tiny number of friends.
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