William Blake's Concept of Deism and Druidism

An addendum to my treatment of Steiner's Lucifer and Ahriman

“Druids’ Trilithon” by William Blake, relief-etching, Jerusalem color plate 26, British Museum

They build a stupendous building on the plain of Salisbury, with chains
Of rocks round London Stone: of reasonings, of unhewn demonstrations
In labyrinthine arches (mighty Urizen the architect) through which
The heavens might revolve and Eternity be bound in their chain.
Labour unparalleled! a wondrous rocky world of cruel destiny,
Rocks piled on rocks reaching the stars, stretching from pole to pole.
The building is natural religion and its altars natural morality,
A building of eternal death, whose proportions are eternal despair.

With these words, William Blake describes the structure of Stonehenge in his magnum opus, the enigmatic and sprawling epic Jerusalem. And in the image above, you can find Blake’s depiction of one of Stonehenge’s great trilithons, towering above the small people below. If the text does not make altogether clear, Stonehenge is not a positive image in Blake’s cosmology. He’s not a fan of Stonehenge. He’s not Spinal Tap. If you aren’t familiar with Blake’s literary mythology, the most damning line here isn’t the last one but rather the one containing the claim that Urizen was the architect. Urizen is essentially the avatar of reason and logic taken to soul-draining extremes — a kind of supervillain of the Blakean universe, Blake’s moral nondualism notwithstanding — and Stonehenge, despite its ancientness, is a construction of his cold, inorganic provenance. Its firm right angles suggest calculation and measurement in the service of tracking the constellations, and in its monstrous size, it stands as a monument against the curvature and delicacy of the living form.

Why did Blake have such a problem with Stonehenge? The answer is found in his appraisal of the Druids, the pagan priests of Gaul from before it had been Romanized and also the people who were understood during Blake’s time to have built it. Most people now look back on the Druidic religion with an element of wistfulness and nostalgia, and it was very much the same way during Blake’s time, too. But Blake saw something in their brand of paganism that few others did then or do today, and it wasn’t good. It also elevated both their and all of Britain’s importance to extreme heights. As S. Foster Damon explains in his Blake Dictionary (1965),

The mythagogues speculated wildly where the British and their priests had come from. Of course they had to be descendants of Noah. William Stukeley considered them Phoenicians who had preserved the religion of Abraham uncorrupted. Edward Davies put them still earlier: they were descendants of Ashkenaz, eldest son of Gomer and great-grandson of Noah. Richard Brothers believed they were of the ten Lost Tribes. The climax came when the unfortunate Francis Wilford actually placed the Biblical patriarchs in Britain, and apparently was about to reveal that Britain itself was the original seat of Biblical history, when in 1805, he was obliged to reveal the forgeries of his Hindu assistants, who had provided for him what they thought he wanted. Blake seized upon Wilford’s theory with patriotic zeal, and gave it full expression. “All things begin & end in Albion’s ancient Druid rocky shore” (Milton 6:25; Jerusalem 32:15). Adam, Noah, and the others were Druids, and Britain was “the Primitive Seat of the Patriarchal Religion” as the Druid Temples and Oak Groves “over the whole Earth witness to this day” (Jerusalem 27; 70:16; 79:66; 89:23; 98:50).

[…]

To Blake, Druidism, far from being the pure faith of Abraham, symbolized Deism, the religion of the Natural Man, the savage, which was originally universal, and which (however modified) still exists. It is the Covering Cherub itself, the “Druid Spectre” which is the last enemy to be overcome. It is the whole system of Good and Evil, of the Accuser of Sin and human sacrifice for sin, the invention of “Albion’s Spectre, the Patriarch Druid” (Jerusalem 98:46–50). It was the religion of the patriarchs from Adam, until Abraham shrank from sacrificing his first born, substituting the ram. It overspread the earth “in patriarchal pomp & cruel pride.”

Essentially, Blake sees remnants of Druidism in everything he dislikes about later natural philosophy, particularly figures like John Locke, who provides the philosophical foundations for Deism. For Blake, there’s no contradiction between the brute violence of paganism and the methodical inquiries into nature that would characterize what’s now called the Age of Reason. He thus sees the Deism of the natural scientists as uniquely vulnerable, and indeed destined to revert to Druidism, the same corrupt outlook from which the worst aspects of civilization stem.

The problem with Druidic paganism is that it essentially worships nature, and in nature-worship man can only submit abjectly to her laws, sullen and unable to assume his rightful place above it. Remember, Blake is an extreme humanist. “Where man is not,” he says, “nature is barren.” And when man submits to nature and her laws, you get man-made laws that attempt a synchrony with nature’s, ultimately repressing and controlling everyone for no good reason. Thus, the Deist might consider himself a man of science but nonetheless find himself ambitiously applying reason and logic to justify only the worst superstitions imaginable. Northrop Frye, in his Fearful Symmetry (1947), is strong on this point:

We shall never understand why Blake so hated Deism unless we understand not only what it was to him, but what he saw that it would soon become. That is, we must accept in Blake a certain amount of prophecy in the literal sense of anticipating the probable future, and must see in his conception of Deism a mental attitude which is still with us, the monstrous hydra which is the perverted vision of human society as an atomic aggregate of egos instead of as a larger human body. The closer man comes to the state of nature, the more he clings to the “reason” which enables him to deal with nature on its own terms. The natural society, whether we see it in primitive tribes or in exhausted civilizations, is a complicated mechanism of prescribed acts which always have a rational explanation, but make no sense whatever in terms of passion, energy, insight or wisdom. The natural man is not the solitary majestic lion that he would like to be: he is a buzzing and spineless insect, a flying head cut off at the neck, like the cherubs in Reynolds, equipped with a venomous sting and a stupefied sense of duty. So at least he appears in Blake, both as the Deist of Blake’s time and as the “Druid” which Blake predicted he would soon become.

Blake associates many of the common pagan characteristics with this Druidic natural religion, like tree worship and serpent worship, and he presents them all in similarly negative terms. In Europe, here he is describing the “ancient temple serpent-formed” at Avebury, i.e. the big circle of stones, whom his contemporaries also believed to have been constructed by Druids:

Thought changed the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth
To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid
In forests of night. Then all the eternal forests were divided
Into earths rolling in circles of space, that like an ocean rushed
And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh.
Then was the serpent temple formed, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crowned.

Above all, one can see that his problem is with how self-limiting this Druidic mentality really is. In chess, you’ve got your bishops and your rooks. The bishops all go in straight lines that stay neatly within their own color. The priests and scientists are the bishops. The rooks, on the other hand, also go in a straight line but repeatedly transgress the barriers of black and white. I believe Blake thinks like a rook.

Now, the worst aspect of Druidism, the thing Blake treats as the clearest indication of its backwardness, is human sacrifice. As stated above in the Blake Dictionary quotation, Blake sees Abraham’s refusal to sacrifice Isaac as the first step away from Druidism in man’s postlapsarian state. Here he is in Jerusalem describing the culture of war that the Druids sponsor in order to appease their dark Goddess:

The wicker man of Scandinavia, in which cruelly consumed
The captives reared to heaven howl in flames among the stars;
Loud the cries of war on the Rhine and Danube with Albion’s sons.
Away from Beulah’s hills and vales break forth the souls of the dead
With cymbal, trumpet, clarion, and the scythed chariots of Britain.

And indeed, if you’re wondering, Blake is referring to the same “wicker man” that Julius Caesar describes in his Commentary on the Gallic War from the first century BC.

18th century engraving of Caesar’s wicker man, from Thomas Pennant’s A Tour In Wales (1778)

A while back, I talked to my pal Yeerk P about my recent essay on the film The Wicker Man (1973) and how it seemed like a demonstration of the way Rudolf Steiner describes the interplay between Lucifer and Ahriman, which I’ve since more fully discussed last week. After explaining the mechanism to him, he said it sounds like how Blake describes the relationship between the Druids and Deism. I’m glad I followed the trail he put me on, because what occurs in that film and what Blake says of the Druids (and, perhaps more pointedly, the manner in which Northrop Frye interprets Blake) form a compelling correspondence. So much so, in fact, that I’m led to believe that Blake or at least Frye may have directly influenced the film’s storyline — that is, in addition to J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890), which the filmmakers have expressly identified as an inspiration. If Blake was not an influence, then it does at least make for an incredible coincidence that the film is about a family of scientist-patriarchs intergenerationally regressing into nature-worshippers, until one (Christopher Lee) finally practices human sacrifice and deploys an incredibly technical scheme to do so.

Whether or not The Wicker Man was inspired by Blake, though, the film still wound up suffering from the same treatment that Blake did at the hands of the hippies. That is, the hippies (and post-hippies) wound up falling in love with The Wicker Man and treating it as an inspiration to try and realize a new kind of quasi-pagan free-love flower-power sensibility, just as they had done with Blake during the 1960s and beyond. All this despite the overt message in both items. The hippies were probably catalyzed by the ideal of free love and the cessation of sexual repression that you can find in Blake and The Wicker Man, though they had different approaches to the subject. Blake, strangely enough, believed that sexual repression came initially from the Druids, who implemented anti-sex laws to appease their pagan Goddess. But he was no pagan, and in fact he sought a kind of sexual guiltlessness that could be perfectly compatible with Christianity. In The Wicker Man, by contrast, free love is paganism’s whole selling point — something so self-evidently pleasant that it seems worth the occasional human sacrifice here and there. But these are trifling details.

There definitely is some connection between William Blake and Rudolf Steiner’s views, though, however divergent their intellectual backgrounds were — Steiner has actually discussed Blake in some lectures on poetic form, though I don’t think he was a huge fan (his major inspiration was Goethe, not Blake). Steiner’s concept of Lucifer and Ahriman is basically an extended meditation on how the sensibilities of monism and atomism (and by extension, mysticism and scientism) often work with each other in unexpected ways despite their professed opposition, producing warped outcomes. Blake’s understanding of the Druids and Deism emphasizes how an excessive fixation on nature will inevitably place one in submission to it — the desire to control it by knowing its laws can lead the scientist to “go native” and fall in love with his subject matter. The basic point is different, but it nonetheless observes a place in which mysticism and scientism both meet.

One thing in particular that heightens the connection between Lucifer/Ahriman and Druids/Deists is that Steiner associates Lucifer (the lord of nondualist metaphysics), with the traditionally “masculine” elements, fire and air, while Ahriman (the lord of natural science) is associated with the “feminine” elements, earth and water. It is hard to know what Blake would make of the concept of Lucifer as presented here, but he would seem to agree that the scientism of the enlightenment, the time he was coming from, ultimately leads men back toward feminine elements and chthonic deities despite its seemingly lofty ambitions. In this way, both men are completely opposed to Johann J. Bachofen, who argued that civilization began as essentially matriarchal and chthonic but then evolved into an essentially scientific, Apollonian, solar modernity. Although Bachofen expressly stated that he believed in the superiority of this masculine modernity, quite a few people (both admirers and critics) have observed that in his writings about the essentially feminine Hetaeric, Demetrian, and Dionysian periods of history, he is filled with an apparent nostalgia and longing that he does not show in his treatment of the modern world. But that’s a topic for another time.