ABSTRACT
The New Magazine of Knowledge concerning Heaven and Hell had begun a serialization of ‘A New Dictionary of Correspondences, Representations, and the Spiritual Signification of Words’ in the edition for April 1790, which was continued over the following months. The spirits in Heaven were closest to the Spiritual Sun, and thereby dwelt ‘in the light of heaven, that is, in its wisdom’. To Emanuel Swedenborg, ‘punishment’ meant living a spiritual life in selfhood, unenlightened by Divine Wisdom. William Blake’s impulse for writing a satire on Swedenborg may have been a response to various developments within the New Jerusalem Church towards orthodox observances and loyalist politics, as John Howard was the first to suggest. Evidently, Blake meant his criticism to target practicing Swedenborgians, rather than their prophet, who had been dead since 1772. As Blake was becoming ever more alienated from Swedenborg, he came to view him as an enemy to antinomian liberty.
