William Blake and The Bible of Hell

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.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

You may be puzzled about what Blake means by “the Bible of Hell” or what he means by reading the Bible “in its infernal or diabolical sense”. To understand Blake’s meaning, you must also understand something about the present Kaliyuga, or spiritual dark age, that aroused Blake’s antipathy to all institutional religion as being the work of his false and delusional deity Urizen and his Book of the Law. It’s a matter of mistaking the letter of the law for the spirit of the law, and the spirit of the law, being suppressed or eclipsed, becomes “the infernal”.

Advertisement

Everything You Thought You Knew….

For those of you who follow such matters, you may perhaps have realised that something akin to a second Copernican Revolution is occurring in the sciences — the overthrow of an old paradigm (or “master narrative”), as Thomas Kuhn described it in his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This is having a very profound and disturbing effect on the mind that has been conditioned over generations by that former worldview to perceive all reality according to that paradigm — what we call here after Jean Gebser a “consciousness structure”. Reality just ain’t what it used to be.

The Doctrine of “Creative Destruction”

George W. Bush and the neo-cons justified the Iraq War, operation “Shock and Awe”, and the reach for global empire on the basis of a doctine of “creative destruction”, arguing too that capitalism was also this very same process of creative destruction. This idea of creative destruction is also what informs Naomi Klein’s critique of “disaster capitalism” in her book The Shock Doctrine. But with “Shock and Awe” and it’s aftermath, we have witnessed plenty of destruction but very little, if any, creation, and most sensible people today recognise it was one of the biggest bungles, if not criminal actions, in modern history.