William Blake and “The Bible of Hell”

William Blake concludes his masterpiece, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with a rather curious and enigmatic note:

Note.—This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend. We often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.
I have also The Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no.
One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression.

It’s a statement that is bound to shock your average, everyday Christian, and probably helped contribute much to the judgement that Blake was a lunatic. Actually, Blake wrote in a mythopoeic, symbolic and metaphorical language that was quite native to him (and to Hermeticism) that is also very characteristic of that mode of perception and attention that Iain McGilchrist calls “the Master”, in his impressive book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. This is exactly what Blake means when he states that he sees “thro’ the eye” and “not with the eye”. That’s just another way of describing the Master and Emissary modes of perception and attention we find in McGilchrist’s neurodynamics.

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Mass Dementia and The Return of the Repressed

Mr. Trump’s latest scandalous “lie” about his being among the first responders at 9/11 Ground Zero, (which just continues the pattern of his chronic scandalous lying), suggested to me that Trump may not be so much the “pathological liar” as suffering from dementia — from a complete inability to discern between his fantasies and reality.

That, of course, raises the next question if so: why do so many people support a president who displays evident symptoms of dementia as if it were quite normal…. unless they, too, were participants in the same dementia? That conclusion also seems to be the implication of the title of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland. And that reminded me of something I read years ago….

Fascism and Marxism

Well…. as I noted in an earlier comment, I actually never thought I’ld have to revisit my earlier studies and researches with the express purpose of gathering material to dispel the absurd revisionist nonsense that fascism was a movement of the radical left. It was a foregone conclusion in my time that fascism and Nazism were movements of the extreme right and of reactionary nationalism that could not possibly be confused with the movements of revolutionary socialism in the least.

Although what we call “fascism” and “Marxism” are, in many respects, the flotsam and jetsam of an age that is now fast receding, we are still required to deal with their spectres, which still to some extent continue to shape events. It is also quite relevant to our main interest here at The Chrysalis — Jean Gebser studies and the issue of “integral consciousness”, since Gebser wrote his great book The Ever-Present Origin parallel with all this turmoil in Europe. It evidently also conditioned some of his thinking, for he was himself a fugitive from fascism through much of his life, and even while writing his great book.