Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Naked History Displayed
- 1 ‘Merely a Superior Being’: Blake and the Creations of Eve
- 2 The Last Strumpet: Harlotry and Hermaphroditism in Blake's Rahab
- 3 Sex, Violence and the History of this World: Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Enoch
- 4 Bridal Mysticism and ‘Sifting Time’: The Lost Moravian History of Blake's Family
- 5 ‘A Secret Common to Our Blood’: The Visionary Erotic Heritage of Blake, Thomas Butts and Mary Butts
- 6 Changing the Sexual Garments: The Regeneration of Sexuality in Jerusalem
- 7 Philoprogenitive Blake
- 8 ‘Seeking Flowers to Comfort Her’: Queer Botany in Blake's Visions, Darwin's Loves and Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman
- 9 ‘Or Wilt Thou Go Ask the Mole?’: (Con)Figuring the Feminine in Blake's Thel
- 10 Gendering the Margins of Gray: Blake, Classical Visual Culture and the Alternative Bodies of Ann Flaxman's Book
- 11 The Virgil Woodcuts Out of Scale: Blake's Gigantic, Masculine Pastoral
- 12 Closet Drama: Gender and Performance in Blake and Joanna Baillie
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - ‘A Secret Common to Our Blood’: The Visionary Erotic Heritage of Blake, Thomas Butts and Mary Butts
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Naked History Displayed
- 1 ‘Merely a Superior Being’: Blake and the Creations of Eve
- 2 The Last Strumpet: Harlotry and Hermaphroditism in Blake's Rahab
- 3 Sex, Violence and the History of this World: Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Enoch
- 4 Bridal Mysticism and ‘Sifting Time’: The Lost Moravian History of Blake's Family
- 5 ‘A Secret Common to Our Blood’: The Visionary Erotic Heritage of Blake, Thomas Butts and Mary Butts
- 6 Changing the Sexual Garments: The Regeneration of Sexuality in Jerusalem
- 7 Philoprogenitive Blake
- 8 ‘Seeking Flowers to Comfort Her’: Queer Botany in Blake's Visions, Darwin's Loves and Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman
- 9 ‘Or Wilt Thou Go Ask the Mole?’: (Con)Figuring the Feminine in Blake's Thel
- 10 Gendering the Margins of Gray: Blake, Classical Visual Culture and the Alternative Bodies of Ann Flaxman's Book
- 11 The Virgil Woodcuts Out of Scale: Blake's Gigantic, Masculine Pastoral
- 12 Closet Drama: Gender and Performance in Blake and Joanna Baillie
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
I was seeing my mind as though it were a cabinet, furnished with all sorts of shelves and cupboards and drawers. Secret cupboards and secret drawers … the gifts of my father's spirit to me. Yet still on the whole an empty cabinet, a crystal cabinet like the one Blake wanted to live inside and outside at once … But to do what Blake said … Wasn't that what someone called the … ‘simultaneous possession of eternal life’?
– Mary Butts, The Crystal Cabinet (1937; rev. edn 1988)This essay is a sequel to one I published earlier on the suppressed Moravian heritage of Blake and the American author Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), for her good friend, the English writer Mary Butts, shared her belief that they inherited psychic gifts and mystical inclinations from their eighteenth-century ancestors. Though neither Butts nor H. D. was aware of Swedenborg's participation in Moravian affairs, they both drew upon the merged Moravian–Swedenborgian esoteric tradition that linked sexual arousal to visionary capacity. Mary Butts (1890–1937) frequently affirmed that her great-grandfather, Thomas Butts (1759–1844), the friend and generous patron of Blake, was ‘an early Swedenborgian’. She believed that he and Blake passed on to her father, Captain Frederick John Butts (1853–1905), a capacity for erotic spirituality and visionary art – a capacity suppressed and mocked by her conventional and frivolous mother.
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- Information
- Blake, Gender and Culture , pp. 71 - 82Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014