WILLIAM BLAKE: The Man Who Painted the Occult...

WILLIAM BLAKE: The Man Who Painted the Occult

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

William Blake is considered a key figure  in esotericism. A visionary artist,  

he transformed his experiences and perceptions  into poetry and images, creating his own  

symbolic universe in which imagination  becomes the key to unlocking the hidden.

In this video, we will explore his life and work,  

seeking to understand the complex  mystical and esoteric system he developed.

William Blake, born in London  in 1757, was a poet, engraver,  

Biography, Historical Context, and Education

and painter. His life and work were deeply  marked by visionary experiences that sparked  

in him a lasting fascination with  esoteric symbolism and mysticism.

From childhood, he claimed to  have extraordinary encounters:  

at the age of eight, he said he  saw a tree filled with angels,  

and later he reported witnessing the apparition of  his deceased brother’s spirit. These experiences  

cemented his conviction that a spiritual  reality existed beyond the material world.

Blake lived during a period of transition between  the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution,  

yet he firmly rejected both  currents. He criticized the  

cold rationalism of the Enlightenment  and denounced the Industrial Revolution,  

which he saw as the beginning of a dehumanizing  era. Against the mechanical and materialistic  

vision of thinkers like Locke or Newton, he  chose a mystical and highly symbolic outlook.

At the age of fourteen, he began training as  an engraver under James Basire, a renowned  

craftsman connected to the Society of Antiquaries  of London. During seven years of apprenticeship,  

he mastered engraving, drawing, and painting  techniques, gaining great technical precision  

and exposure to a world of symbols and  archetypes that would permeate all his work.

As an adult, he developed his own technique that  combined engraving and painting, merging image and  

poetry into a single piece. He also cultivated  the habit of spending long hours in bookshops,  

which in eighteenth-century London served as  meeting places for intellectuals, artists,  

occultists, revolutionaries,  and mystics—spaces where,  

in addition to buying books, people engaged in  intense debates on hidden realities and ideas.

He especially frequented the shop of  Joseph Johnson, publisher of authors  

such as Emanuel Swedenborg and Thomas Paine.  Johnson quickly recognized Blake’s talent,  

hiring him to produce engravings for  his publications and inviting him to  

the gatherings of writers and artists he hosted.

The bookshop offered a wide range of literature  but was particularly notable for its extensive  

collection of esoteric texts. It was there that  Blake encountered the works of Paracelsus, Hermes  

Trismegistus, Thomas Vaughan, Plato, Robert Fludd,  Agrippa, and Pico della Mirandola, among others.

However, the most decisive influence was  Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish mystic who  

claimed to have conversed directly  with angels and maintained that true  

reality was spiritual, while matter was  nothing more than a fleeting illusion.

These ideas profoundly shaped Blake,  

who attended meetings of the New Jerusalem  Church—founded by Swedenborg’s followers  

after his death—and was even a member of  the Swedenborg Society of London for a time.

Esoteric Influences

For a time, Blake actively promoted  Swedenborg’s ideas. However, as the  

years passed, he began to distance himself.  While he acknowledged Swedenborg’s value as  

a visionary and explorer of spiritual  realities, he believed he remained  

constrained by a traditional moralism  that divided good and evil too rigidly.

Blake aspired to something deeper: he saw  human imagination as an extension of the  

universal creative act—a divine spark or flame.  

Thus, although he was inspired by Swedenborg’s  mysticism and his conception of the afterlife,  

he ultimately regarded it as a starting  point that needed to be surpassed.

This stance was no small matter, as Swedenborg  enjoyed great prestige in esoteric circles and  

discreet societies of his time. He was a key  figure for seventeenth-century Rosicrucian  

thought and exerted a strong influence  on Swedish Freemasonry. The Swedish Rite,  

consolidated at the end of that century, adopted  several aspects of his Christian–esoteric vision,  

especially his concepts of the  soul, heaven, and the afterlife.

Even so, while this perspective had  a distinctly esoteric character,  

it did not entirely break with the Christian  tradition. In the context of the Swedish Rite,  

Swedenborg functioned as a bridge  between religion and occult philosophy.

Freemasonry and Discreet Societies

Blake moved in circles of radical intellectuals  where he crossed paths with revolutionaries  

and Enlightenment thinkers—an environment that  reinforced his criticism of organized religion  

and traditional morality. His stance did not stem  from atheism, but from a heterodox spirituality.  

He considered himself a Christian, yet interpreted  that tradition in his own way. He believed that  

early Christianity had been a mystical religion  that encouraged imagination and inner freedom,  

but that over time it had been distorted under  the weight of dogma, politics, and materialism.

To most of his contemporaries, Blake was an  eccentric, and London society marginalized  

him for his ideas. Still, that never stopped  him. He continued to develop his mythology and  

mystical system, always leading a modest life.  In his later years, he managed to gather a small  

circle of disciples and patrons who recognized  his visionary genius, though true recognition  

only came after his death, when occultists and  scholars of symbolism rediscovered his legacy.

This trajectory has led many to wonder whether  Blake actually belonged to any esoteric order or  

was formally initiated into the occult. There  is no evidence or testimony to confirm this,  

yet his work and worldview reveal a deep  knowledge of occult philosophy and symbolism.  

Some historians of esotericism have suggested  that he may have had connections with Freemasonry,  

based on his environment and the evident presence  of Masonic symbols in his work—symbols that,  

in the eighteenth century, could  only be known through initiation.

There are no certainties, but there are striking  coincidences: from the physical proximity of his  

training grounds to London’s most important  Masonic institutions, to his friendships and  

collaborations with known Freemasons, and  his participation in the Swedenborg Society,  

which was linked to Enlightenment  currents with strong Masonic influence.

In any case, even if he was not an  institutional occultist, the nature  

of his work is profoundly esoteric. He did not  write manuals of magic or treatises on alchemy,  

but he created something more unique: a cosmology  of his own—a vision of the world as a stage for  

the struggle between forces seeking to subdue the  imagination and those striving to set it free.

But before we continue with the analysis,  I’d like to remind you that many of the  

paintings you’ll see throughout this  video are available for you to collect.

In the description, you’ll find a link to  the William Blake collection, where you  

can explore his works in detail and purchase  the one you like most to have in your home.

Shipping is completely free, and  by making a purchase, you’ll also  

be supporting me in continuing  to create videos like this one.

Now, let’s continue.

Blake’s Philosophy and Spiritual Vision

For Blake, imagination was not merely an act  of fantasy or a tool for inventing stories,  

but a spiritual faculty capable of connecting  human beings with the infinite. He believed  

that ideas were made of the same mysterious  substance as visions and dreams, and that if  

ultimate reality was spiritual in nature,  only the imaginative gaze could access it.

Hence his famous statement: “If the  doors of perception were cleansed,  

everything would appear to man  as it is: infinite.” By this,  

he meant that the physical senses offer  us only a limited version of reality.

His thought clashed with the Enlightenment  of his time, which reduced knowledge to  

what could be measured, touched, or seen. While  Enlightenment philosophers saw imagination as a  

secondary product of perception, for Blake it was  the very foundation of existence. He envisioned  

the cosmos as an interconnected whole, where  the human mind—the microcosm—mirrored the divine  

universe—the macrocosm. He summed it up in the  phrase: “God is in the lowest effects as well as  

in the highest causes,” a way of recognizing  the divine spark within humanity itself.

He even identified Jesus Christ  with the divine imagination,  

calling him “the Divine Imagination” and linking  him to the creative or mercurial principle in  

humankind. For this reason, his theology  was often considered Gnostic or Hermetic.

Like the ancient Gnostics, he distinguished  between a lesser god, the lawgiver bound to  

the material world (Jehovah–Elohim), and a  higher God, associated with spirit (Jesus,  

the archetype of forgiveness and imagination).  He interpreted the Creation and the Fall in  

Genesis as an allegory of a cosmic accident:  humanity, originally united with the divine,  

fell into matter and became confined  by the perception of the senses.

In his system, Christ represented the imagination  and creative love that could free humanity from  

the prison of law, matter, and the senses.  His visions of angels, demons, and biblical  

figures were understood as manifestations  of eternal truths—what we would now call  

archetypes—that appeared to him in familiar  images, in his case rooted in Christianity.

This form of spirituality brought  him into conflict with official  

religion and Victorian morality. He  criticized the repressive ethics that,  

in his view, stifled natural desires  and undermined the life of the spirit.

From this arose his dualistic vision, in which  heaven and hell were not physical places or  

postmortem destinies, but states of the soul and  ways of perceiving reality. Heaven symbolized law,  

reason, and order, but also dogma, repression, and  rigidity. Hell, by contrast, represented energy,  

creative desire, and passion, as well  as subversion and chaos. For Blake,  

desire and energy were expressions  of the divine vitality within humans,  

while reason was the force that could either  organize them or, when misused, repress them.

In his mythology, this opposition  took shape in two figures: Urizen,  

the old god of reason and law, and Orc, the  rebellious spirit of passion and revolution.  

The tension—and eventual reconciliation—between  reason and imagination, order and chaos,  

heaven and hell was the core of his entire  body of work. He embraced the “union of  

opposites” central to Hermetic and alchemical  thought, using it to construct a personal  

mythology that became a complex mystical  and prophetic system. He summed it up in  

a now-famous declaration: “I must create a  system, or be enslaved by another man’s.”

Mythical System and Archetypes

Blake did not set out his system in a  single volume; instead, he developed  

it over more than three decades, between  1789 and 1820, through poems, engravings,  

and illustrations. Along this journey,  standout works include The Book of Urizen,  

The Book of Los, America, a Prophecy,  Europe, a Prophecy, Milton: A Poem,  

and above all, Jerusalem, considered one  of the great esoteric works in history.

To understand his work, it’s important  to remember that Blake never separated  

poetry from image—he “spoke in images and  painted with words.” His artistic goal  

was to achieve a total unity in which word and  form were integrated as a single living entity.

Jerusalem is a prophetic work engraved on copper  plates using his own technique—illuminated  

relief printing—in which he combined text and  illustration, later hand-coloring the pages. In  

this book, he brought together and gave final  structure to all the elements of his system.

Within this symbolic universe, several  characters and archetypes stand out.  

Urizen embodies abstract reason, law, intellect,  and authority—both religious and scientific. He  

represents the force that separates the  mind from the imagination and the body,  

resembling the Gnostic demiurge associated with  repression and rigid order. Orc, by contrast,  

is his opposite: he symbolizes vital  rebellion, passion, creative desire,  

and the transformative impulse. Where Urizen sets  limits, Orc breaks them. He is a Promethean or  

Luciferian figure who brings the fire of change,  though without balance he can fall into chaos.

Los is the archetype of creative and artistic  imagination. A redemptive yet tragic figure,  

he suffers as he contemplates a broken world  and seeks to restore it through his art. In his  

eternal forge, he shapes forms with spiritual  fire. His companion Enitharmon represents the  

feminine principle of emotion. She can inspire  visions but also embody repressive sexual morality  

and mystery. She is also the mother of Orc,  linking her to the birth of desire and rebellion.

Albion is the primordial man before the fall,  equivalent to the Adam Kadmon of Kabbalah or  

the Gnostic Anthropos. He represents both  universal humanity and the individual soul  

in its integrated state. His fall fragments  him into the Four Zoas—Urizen, Los, Tharmas,  

and Luvah (or Urthona)—each reflecting an aspect  of the human psyche. Tharmas embodies the body,  

the senses, and instinct; Urthona is the  spiritual facet of imagination, linked to Los.

Other key archetypes include Vala, who represents  the world of appearances and the veil of  

illusion—divine wisdom in its fallen form; and  Rintrah, the symbol of righteous indignation and  

prophetic wrath, a voice denouncing injustice  without being driven by desire, unlike Orc.

Together, these characters form the central  cast of Blake’s cosmic drama, which tells the  

tragic creation of the universe, the emergence of  good and evil, and the hope of final redemption.

The Ancient of Days

In one of his most recognized works, The  Ancient of Days, Blake depicts Urizen,  

the demiurge. The figure, leaning forward with  an ambiguous expression, appears at once to be  

creating duality—the material world—and measuring  the darkness of the abyss with a compass.

With this image, Blake delivers a double  critique: on one hand, of the authoritarian  

God of the Old Testament, and on the other, of  the rationalist mindset dominant in his time. In  

traditional esoteric iconography, the compass  represents the architect of the universe and  

the divine reason that orders creation. Blake,  however, gives it a Gnostic and darker nuance:  

the demiurge who limits infinite reality,  enclosing it within the geometry of the material.

Urizen’s hunched posture conveys the  sense that his creative act is also an  

act of descent. There is no grandeur  or triumph, but weight and gravity,  

as though the spirit were falling into  matter—an inversion of celestial values.

From this perspective, The Ancient of Days is not  the representation of a benevolent creator god,  

but of a principle which, in  its effort to impose order,  

ends up repressing and confining what is  alive, spontaneous, and creative. Even  

the golden halo surrounding him is not the  full divine light, but the light of reason  

that only appears to be truth—yet remains  incomplete, for the circle is left open.

For Blake, order and reason were necessary,  

but they had to serve spiritual vision and  creative imagination. This is why the work  

embodies the tension between reason that  illuminates and reason that imprisons.

Conclusion

In summary, William Blake was a complete  creator—poet, painter, mystic, and  

esoteric thinker—whose entire body of work can be  understood as a symbolic system of his own making.  

Influenced by Hermetic tradition, Kabbalah, and  Gnosticism, he reinterpreted these currents within  

a Christian aesthetic to deliver a transformative  message: imagination as the divine spark,  

the world as the great work of art of the spirit,  and salvation as a new way of seeing reality.

His most important works function as true  treatises of occult philosophy, filled with  

archetypes and universal myths: the fall of the  soul, the struggle against oppressive forces,  

and redemption through inner light. Although  his imagery was close to Christian mysticism,  

his thought was deeply linked to Western  esotericism. At the height of rationalism,  

Blake emerged as a solitary, self-taught initiate,  

capable of reimagining ancient  symbols to give them new meaning.

His greatest gift was to take that esoteric  legacy and recreate it not as an academic,  

but as a mythmaker, shaping his own  symbolic narratives in images that act  

as living symbols and bearers of prophetic  messages. His esoteric Christianity placed  

creative imagination at the center and  opposed the dominant rationalism of his  

era. While rejecting the cold, mechanistic thought  of his time, he did not fall into irrationality:  

he sought a higher synthesis—a “poetic reason”  capable of recognizing and reconciling opposites.

For him, awakening from material illusion  meant cleansing the doors of perception  

to behold the infinite. He saw imagination  not as a passive pastime, but as a sacred  

faculty through which the soul could create,  redeem, and access the divine within itself.

Too heterodox for religion and too independent for  organized esotericism, Blake is now considered one  

of the most influential figures in modern esoteric  art. He was the heir of the enlightened occultism  

of the seventeenth century—seeking to unite  magic, alchemy, Kabbalah, and religion—and  

at the same time a forerunner of many themes  later developed in contemporary esotericism.

It is no coincidence that the  Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists,  

and Victorian occultists revived his work,  seeing in him a natural initiate—someone who,  

in solitude, managed to lift  part of the veil of Isis.