"I give you the end of a golden string" - Blake, the Gita and God

Mark Vernon - Talks and Thoughts

I've notice a tendency to downplay the divine element in accounts of William Blake, and to reduce his understanding of the imagination to a human artefact, from its true status as a supernatural capacity that he knew.
In this talk I consider 5 ways in which this can be resisted:
- Blake's insistence that "there is no natural religion".
- Blake's affirmation that “God becomes as we are that we may become as he is”.
- His understanding that, “The desire of man is infinite”, and without it, we consume the natural world.
- His realisation that even Eternal Death is transformed by Eternal Life.
- And his engagement with The Bhagavad Gita, which arguably not only inspired some of his own mythology but his clear absolute idealism and philosophy.