William Blake's Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision Softcover - 2008

Biography / Sexuality"Schuchard places Blake at the heart of a secret London as high on spiritualized sexuality as San Francisco in the 'summer of love.'" --Miranda Seymour, The Sunday Times "This remarkable book opens the reader's eyes to what fired Blake's writings and art."--David V. Bennett, The Independent"Exposes a forgotten visionary/sexual underworld. Scholarship with the momentum of a detective story."--Iain Sinclair, The GuardianWilliam Blake (1757-1827) has long been treasured as an artist and poet whose work was born out of authentic spiritual vision. The acutely personal, almost otherworldly look of his artwork--combined with its archetypal casting and depth of emotion--transcends social convention and ordinary experience. In this book, Marsha Keith Schuchard breaks new ground with her investigation of the psychosexual practices that surrounded this famous artist. Her fastidious research includes new archival discoveries of Blake family documents and reveals how early Moravian and Swedenborgian erotic and visionary experimentation fueled much of Blake's creative and spiritual life and found expression in the explicit sexual imagery of his art. Much of this was lost to posterity, however, when religious conservatives pressured Blake's pious executor to suppress the more overtly sexual aspects of his work, which were subsequently altered or destroyed.Schuchard's latest findings, combined with advances in photographic techniques used in modern-day art research, reveal this previously censored imagery. The recovery of these elements supports the belief that Blake explored kabbalistic and tantric extramarital sexual practices that were designed to transcend the bonds of social convention and that he pressured his wife to join him in these explorations. author's exhaustive research provides a new context for understanding the mystical practices at the heart of Blake's most radical beliefs about sexualized spirituality and its relation to visionary art.MARSHA KEITH SCHUCHARD received a Ph.D. in British literature for her explorations into the esoteric-erotic underground traditions of seventeenth- to twentieth-century secret societies and their influence on British and Irish poets and artists. She is the author of Restoring the Temple of Vision and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.