William Blake’s corrections.
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors:
1. That man has two real existing principles—viz., a body and a soul.
2. That energy, called evil, is alone from the body; and that reason, called good, is alone from the soul.
3. That God will torment man in eternity for following his energies.
But the following contraries to these are true:
1. Man has no body distinct from his soul; for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the body; and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy.
3. Energy is eternal delight.
In 1758 Emanuel Swedenborg, a Christian mystic, published Heaven and Hell, an account of the afterlife. Though Swedenborg’s work initially intrigued Blake, he later scrawled “cursed folly” in the margins of the Swede’s Divine Providence and accused him of “lies and priestcraft.” Around 1790 Blake began work on a pamphlet satirizing Swedenborgian mysticism that likely became part of this book.
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