Sound and Above the entrance of the Rockefeller Center in New York one can see an Art Deco relief of a man with a beard and a compass, with a text of Isaiah: “Wisdom and Knowledge shall be the stability of thy times.” Wisdom and Knowledge are the solid foundation of your time. Flanked by two figures that symbolise sound and light. (p. 14)
B
ecause the RCA corporation used to be located here, it seemed as if the artwork had to do with television and radio. But it turned out to be an image from The Book of Urizen by William Blake (1757-1827), which belongs to a poem. At the end of the eighteenth century, there was an intelligent group of people in England who achieved spiritual depth, with their own symbolism and language. This English group held weekly meetings in the small room above Joseph John’s Bookshop in London. Here, at Joseph Johnson, Blake discussed politics, philosophy, religion and literature and met the writers who often came to the bookseller. Frederick Tatham, a friend of Blake in his later years, wrote about him: “His mental skills were incredible; he had read almost everything in every possible language, which he had always taught himself.”
Of the theosophists who influenced Blake, Jacob Boehme was the first and most important: Boehme, like Blake, used beauty as a window to the divine. Robert Fludd and Thomas Vaughan (Vohn) provided Blake with ideas about alchemical symbolism; Blake shared the opinion of the Hermeticists that man is the microcosm of the divine and he was familiar with the works of William Law who translated Jacob Boehme into English. According to Blake’s worldview, celestial man, the microcosm of the universe (Albion, in Blake’s wording), is separated from his deity by his fall, and has to reunite with the divine again in the course of centuries. In Blake’s view, the soul has fallen apart and every fragment of her being has to reconcile itself with her again on the path back to eternity. This is reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian myth of the tearing apart of Osiris at the beginning of time, and the duty of man to collect the torn parts to regain spiritual wholeness. To do this ‘man constantly needs a new selfnessed’, as Blake expresses it. ‘Self-conversion’ is what is necessary. Seven guards
The Book of Urizen begins with the story of the fall of the heavenly man into matter, in the vortex of experience, “the valleys, dark with selfishness.” And he is struggling with the task of converting the “naked (basic)” passions into the pure gold of the eternal. To assist in this cosmic process, Blake introduces the fiery Orc-the-consciousness-awakener, the spirit of
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Sound and light
