ABSTRACT

Every civilization except perhaps our own has borne witness in its art to its knowledge and experience of a universal and unanimous tradition of spiritual wisdom. William Blake followed the Platonists and anticipated Jung in his belief that archetypal forms are innate; and the reawakening of our lost world of consciousness, submerged by 'the flood of the five senses', was the end for which he laboured. In terms of Blake's mythological language, the Golden Age of the Greeks, the Lost Paradise of the Hebrew myth, is a lost mode of consciousness. The restoration of this lost consciousness is the Last Judgment; which is nothing less than the confrontation of the temporal world of 'Error, or Creation' in which each of us has imprisoned himself, in which we are shut in like the dead in their graves, with 'Truth or Eternity'.