Klüver Form-constants

Abstract

This chapter aims to restore the ‘visions’ to Blake’s ‘visionary’ art by introducing a novel method for assigning the incidence in his paintings and illuminated books of the presence of one specific type of visual hallucination, the four form-constants of hallucinatory patterns identified by experimental psychologist Heinrich Klüver (1897–1979). They are the most likely phenomenological candidates for the most easily traceable examples of Blake’s originating visual ‘visions.’ As Klüver summarized them in 1942, ‘The author’s analysis of the hallucinatory phenomena … yielded the following form-constants: (a) grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard; (b) cobweb; (c) tunnel, funnel, alley, cone, or vessel; (d) spiral. Many [hallucinatory] phenomena are, on close examination, nothing but modifications and transformations of these basic forms.’ As discussed in the Introduction, Klüver’s discoveries were eventually confirmed by tracing the origins of the four hallucinatory patterns back to the neural architecture of V1, demonstrated in two stages by Ermentrout and Cowan (1979) and Bressloff and Cowan, et al., (2001). Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations, with their distinctive geometric shapes, can be found located in the compositional choices Blake made in his visual art, and sometimes in his poetics, making them amenable to easy identification. These patterns were seen by Blake on his retina, signalled from V1, self-luminous within his visual field, eyes open or eyes closed and always in these same four configurations (although, as Klüver commented, sometimes in overlapping amalgamation). What remains in his visual art are the outline traces of these shapes or, as he put it in The Ghost of Abel (1822), ‘Nature has no Outline: but Imagination has’ (E 270). Not least, their repetition in Klüver’s stable configurations, what Blake described as ‘ever Existent Images,’ resulted in a long-term preference for symmetrical composition discussed in Chap. 8 (E 555).

This chapter aims to restore the ‘visions’ to Blake’s ‘visionary’ art by introducing a novel method for assigning the incidence in his paintings and illuminated books of the presence of one specific type of visual hallucination, the four form-constants of hallucinatory patterns identified by experimental psychologist Heinrich Klüver (1897–1979). They are the most likely candidates for the most easily traceable examples of Blake’s originating visual ‘visions.’ As Klüver summarized them in 1942, ‘The author’s analysis of the hallucinatory phenomena … yielded the following form-constants: (a) grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard; (b) cobweb; (c) tunnel, funnel, alley, cone, or vessel; (d) spiral. Many [hallucinatory] phenomena are, on close examination, nothing but modifications and transformations of these basic forms’.¹ As discussed in the Introduction, Klüver’s discoveries were eventually confirmed by tracing the origins of the four hallucinatory patterns back to the neural architecture of V1, demonstrated in two stages by Ermentrout and Cowan (1979) and Bressloff and Cowan, et al., (2001).² Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations, with their distinctive geometric shapes, can be found located in the compositional choices Blake made in his visual art, and sometimes in his poetics, making them amenable to easy identification. These patterns were seen by Blake on his retina, signalled from V1, self-luminous within his visual field, eyes open or eyes closed and always in these same four configurations (although, as Klüver commented, sometimes in overlapping amalgamation). What remains in his visual art are the outline traces of these shapes or, as he put it in The Ghost of Abel (1822), ‘Nature has no Outline: but Imagination has’ (E 270). Not least, their repetition in Klüver’s stable configurations, what Blake described as ‘ever Existent Images,’ resulted in his long-term preference for symmetrical composition discussed in Chap. 9 (E 555).

The principal requirement for identifying the phenomenology of Blake’s ‘visions’ is that the percepts should be comprised of ‘ever Existent Images’ outside of ‘Generative Nature’ (E 555). In A Descriptive Catalogue he was just as uncompromising, stressing that his ‘visions’ lay beyond what is normally understood as being encompassed by natural stimuli, ‘The Prophets describe what they saw in Vision as real and existing … A Spirit and a Vision … are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that mortal and perishing nature can produce’ (E 541). Blake’s lifetime of repeated assertions that he experienced ‘visions’ validates the search for their traces within his visual art. This is not to say that geometrical compositions, symmetries, flattened perspectives, eclectic symbolism and other features common to both eastern and western visual art are exclusive to Blake. However, Blake is unusual in repeatedly claiming that his visual art specifically originated in ‘visions,’ and that he had a lifetime susceptibility to ‘visions,’ so it is perhaps not unexpected to find that manifestations of these phenomena are located in compositional choices in his paintings and drawings. While Blake had other types of visual ‘visions,’ including the percepts triggered by synaesthesia discussed in Chaps. 6, 7, and 8, the Klüver form-constants evident in his visual art were replicated by him in his visual art and poetics on account of their incidence on his retina, signalled from his V1. These visual hallucinations are not particularly rare. The physiologies of their production are discussed in Chap. 5 and all have some degree of prevalence across the population. In December 1825, Crabb Robinson, talking directly to Blake at his home in Fountain Court, off the Strand, reported that, ‘Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early infancy—He thinks all men partake of it—but it is lost by not being cultiv^d.’³ Crucially, if Crabb Robinson’s records of his conversations with Blake are correct, he spoke of a ‘faculty of Vision,’ not a state of mind or a religious or philosophical turn. He also unmistakably insisted that ‘all men partake of it.’ Given the evidence presented below related to his visual art, the most plausible candidate for the source of ‘ever Existent Images,’ ‘that all men partake of,’ species-wide on account of their neural correlates, are the four sets of visual hallucination form-constant geometric patterns identified by Klüver.

There are good evolutionary reasons why we do not hallucinate yet also good evolutionary reasons why our neural architecture retains the capacity to do just that. In a 2012 paper on evolutionary constraints on the neural processing of optical vision, the authors describe ‘V1’s most striking long-range features—patchy excitatory connections and sparse inhibitory connections—are strongly constrained by two requirements: the need for the visual state to be robust and the developmental requirements of the orientational preference map.’⁴ That is, V1 is required to encompass the almost mutually exclusive demands of stability combined with flexibility. The requirement to rapidly process and rationalize visual information through V1 runs in parallel with the evolutionary progress of the species. At the very least, Blake’s visual hallucinations of the Klüver type are good indicators that he had a normal, healthy, V1 unimpaired by neurological disorder or dysfunction.

Blake’s paintings, including designs in the illuminated books, suggest that he experienced Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations beginning no later than 1793 and possibly as early as c. 1780. They have ‘ever Existent’ permanence because these ‘Images’ only appear in these four geometric patterns, the four form-constants of Klüver’s original taxonomy (although they often appear in amalgamation with each other). They are comprised of geometrically patterned phosphenes perceived as self-luminous entoptic hallucinations in the visual field.⁵ Crucially, Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations have neural correlates. They are not psychological entities. Although their correlation with V1 was not demonstrated until after his death (in the two papers by Ermentrout and Cowan and Bressloff and Cowan, et al.), Klüver was at pains to differentiate the cortical from the psychological.⁶ Their distinctive geometric shapes, visible in his normal visual field, enable the reliable identification of their presence in Blake’s visual art as evidence of his original ‘visions.’ He would, exactly as he claimed, have been looking ‘thro’ the eye and seen them because they were on his retina. They were not an exoptic ‘Sight’ of external stimuli as if located beyond a ‘Window’ but were entoptic images seen ‘thro’ the ‘visions’ located on his retina. (E 566). Their trace in the paintings, drawings and in the designs of the illuminated books allows an association to be made between their occurrence and the origins of his creative processes. Although they have no verbal auditory modality, Klüver form-constants were one of several phenomena he called ‘visions.’ The patterns of Klüver visual hallucinations, are amongst the most easily recognizable entoptic percepts in Blake’s art.

What follows are five ‘worked’ examples of individual pictures, from c. 1780 to c. 1820, together with a survey of some of the illuminated books up to 1795, indicating the traces of Klüver form-constants left on these works as compositional choices. In some of these examples, an association is also made between the presence of the Klüver percepts and their detailed historical social contexts. This is done by way of demonstrating that the methods of analyses employed here are not mutually exclusive. The identification of different kinds of hallucinatory phenomena in Blake’s works is not incompatible with general historicism, one of the more dominant critical methodologies of the last three decades.

Gallery-goers will be able to find their own examples of Klüver patterns in Blake’s art but the chapter will begin by examining An Allegory of the Bible (c. 1780–1785), one of the earliest of his watercolours and possibly the first to show traces of Blake’s original hallucinatory percepts. If the analysis of this drawing is correct, it would set the earliest date for the influence of Klüver-type hallucinations in his art, implying that all subsequent parts of Blake’s visual corpus need to be re-examined to locate traces of the ‘visions’ he thought central to his painting. The discussion will then move to one of Blake’s most iconographically powerful images, Jacob’s Dream (or Jacob’s Ladder), c. 1799–1807, now in the British Museum, London. The next picture to be discussed will be The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church (c. 1793) now in Tate Britain, London, a work displayed by him in the 1809 exhibition, the show where he maintained some of the pictures were based on things ‘seen in my visions.’ Although it may seem an unlikely candidate for inclusion in the 1809 exhibition, it also contains dissident cultural encodings which have not been recognized before but which made it consonant with the pictures from ‘visions’ he was showing to the public. The issue about whether Blake was aware of Klüver’s patterns over a hundred years before Klüver classified them will then be discussed with reference to Miltons Mysterious Dream (c. 1816–1820), an illustration forming part of a series relating to John Milton’s poem, Il Penseroso (1631). Even taken on its own, this is a remarkable milestone in the history of the classification of visual hallucinations. The chapter will then discuss similar form-constants in, Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations Among the Tombs,” c. 1820–1825, another Tate Britain painting, along with a brief account of how this picture might be set within a specific historical and cultural context. This is followed by a section indicating the extent of the incidence of Klüver patterns in the illuminated books of the early to mid-1790s. The significance of this particular date range is that, as can be seen in Viscomi’s tabulation of his output in Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), it marks a high point in Blake’s printing and production of new illuminated book titles, perhaps not least because they coincided with a period of political upheaval in Britain in the aftermath of the French Revolution and outbreak of war with France in 1793.⁷ In short, the illuminated books, particularly of the early 1790s, demonstrate a remarkable expansion in his incorporation of Klüver-type form-constants into his visual art.

Fig. 4.1

William Blake, An Allegory of the Bible, c.1780–1785, graphite, ink and watercolour on paper, Tate Britain

Example One: An Allegory of the Bible (c. 1780–1785)

The earliest, if perhaps one of the most initially aesthetically disappointing, of Blake’s early graphite, ink and watercolour drawings referencing Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations is the one now titled (not chosen by Blake), An Allegory of the Bible (c. 1780–1785) (Fig. 4.1).⁸ It is regularly on display at Tate Britain but was not included in the 1978 or 2001 Blake exhibitions although it featured in the 2019 show. A problem with the current appearance of An Allegory of the Bible is that, as investigated by Noa Cahaner McManus and Joyce H. Townsend at the conservation science department at Tate Britain, parts of it have faded considerably. It has ‘lost red lake [pigment] from the background to the arched screen in the middle portion and its appearance is now dramatically changed, with the unaltered pattern of the foreground dominating.’⁹ A considerable measure of accommodation for sympathetic retro-reconstruction needs to be made when viewing the picture today.

Butlin makes the comment that, in comparison to similar early works, ‘it is considerably less accomplished than … works of the late 1780s and was presumably painted earlier.’¹⁰ It may have been produced in association with another pencil and wash drawing titled (again, not titled by Blake) A Soul at the Door of Paradise, with which it shares some stylistic similarities (c. 1780).¹¹ Neither of these images has received much critical attention. However, Christopher Rowland in Blake and the Bible (2010) registers An Allegory of the Bible’s importance by giving it a careful description. He places it broadly within an exegetical context concerning the holy written word, emphasizing the significance of the opened Bible in the picture’s background and examining the role of spirituality implicitly inherent in holy texts. According to Rowland, the picture reminds us that ‘the book is never an end in itself, never the object of devotion, for one must look through it, with it, and, indeed, beyond it, back to the reality in which one lives.’¹²

An Allegory of the Bible is based around a Klüver form-constant of a combined tunnel and lattice form type. It is revealing to compare it with a much-reproduced drawing by David Sheridan (1943–1982) made after a drug-induced hallucination and reproduced in R.K. Siegel and M.E. Jarvik’s 1975 journal article, a standard point of reference in the current scientific literature for sampling these hallucinations and their adherence to the classifications set out earlier by Klüver.¹³ Another helpful picture is one known as Untitled (1985), a balcony scene painted by an under 16-year-old woman in the East Midlands region of the United Kingdom as part of the Migraine Art competitions of the 1980s.¹⁴ In this painting, a chequer-patterned tiling is edged with a trellis railing (showing the lattice form-constant) with the scene having considerable depth (the tunnel form-constant) as it looks out onto a Mediterranean-type townscape. An Allegory of the Bible and the female under 16-year-old’s Untitled are consistent with migraine aura operating as a co-modality of Klüver form-constant hallucinations.¹⁵

The interpretation of An Allegory of the Bible proposed here is that the composition is a combination of two Klüver form-constants which repeat the shapes seen in Blake’s original hallucinations. Although Blake had no option but to fix his design as a static artefact (a painting), the current neuroscience finds it difficult to describe the differentials of depth, colour and motion in Klüver’s patterns whose stabilities of pattern formation originally made them so attractive for analysis.¹⁶ Blake’s Allegory of the Bible may have been the outcome of a ‘vision’ or hallucination which had considerable depth, colour and motion but which is only partially represented in the painting. Unfortunately, along with the colour of the Tate painting being depleted, one can see he also struggled to portray depth although his groups of static and physically moving human figures may suggest the dynamic contents of his original hallucination.

It may also be important that Blake depicts a double formation of a Klüver tunnel form-constant and a lattice form-constant. The double sets of tiled floors in the picture, traces of the original lattice form-constant, are represented horizontal to their axis, contrasting with two sets of four, treaded, rising steps on the picture’s (rather weak) vertical axis. These ensure that the background of the picture is, pictorially, a raised space. The rising steps, emphasized by the figure walking down them, as well as the other figures seated or standing on different levels of their treads, lead the eye into a Klüver tunnel form-constant, higher, and further away in the background than in the foreground. The pattern of the floor tiles and the (now faded) diamond patterned tracery are the markers of a Klüver lattice form-constant which dominated the original hallucination.¹⁷ Significantly, this visual hallucinatory pattern was repeated in The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church, c. 1793 (and its precursor sketch of c. 1779), discussed below, a work he went on to exhibit in his 1809 show. The opened book (which one assumes to be the Christian Bible) seems to lie beyond the tracery, radiating light, and is emphasized by the arching curve of the diamond-shaped tracery or windows. With its chequerboards and tunnel pattern, a Figure reproduced in Christopher W. Tyler’s important 1978 journal article on entoptic phenomena approximates quite noticeably to An Allegory of the Bible but particularly on account of Tyler’s (c. 1970s acculturated) description of ‘blank t.v. screens’ (superimposed patterns of phosphenes) which uncannily replicate the shapes of the opened Bible in Blake’s picture.¹⁸ These rectangular blank spaces in Tyler’s Figure, seem to provide an evidential basis, located in the known phenomenology of phosphene patterned visual hallucinations, for the source of the two opened pages of the book featured in the background which Blake saw in his original ‘vision.’

Like a revelatory event, both Blake’s meaning and the cognitive development he made from his original ‘vision’ becomes clear. If the Bible originated in divine revelation or ‘vision,’ the visual hallucinations Blake adapts in An Allegory of the Bible echo that original revelation, verifying the spiritual foundations of the holy text and implicating the artist’s sharing of that revelation (very much as Christopher Rowland has described). These twin Klüver visual hallucinations, would have been seen by him within his normal visual field, self-luminous, eyes open or eyes closed. They are Blake’s simulacra for the Bible’s original status as ‘Vision.’ In this picture, what he called ‘vision’ can now be identified as having originated in his cognitive development arising from a precise phenomenology of neural signals from V1 mapped onto his retina and adapted according to his aesthetic preferences, cognitively prioritizing its shapes to conform to the originary hallucinatory event. With the drawing bearing the trace of one of his earliest ‘visions,’ the Klüver patterns he saw verified the Bible’s ‘Genuine Preservd’ authority. In short, for the first time, it is now possible to identify in An Allegory of the Bible, what were probably Blake’s first representations of ‘ever Existent Images,’ stable and permanent because recurring only in the same form-constant geometric patterns, self-luminous, eyes open or eyes closed, and seen by him directly within his visual field (E 555).

If Butlin’s date range is correct, he would have been between 23 and 28 years old at this point. He had not yet attended the Swedenborg conference at which he may have met Dorothy Gott, the contemporary prophetic author who, by the spring of 1789, had already written about her own vision of the Bible perceived as a hallucinatory book (‘this light enlarged the Scriptures … things appeared as a scene, and a voice, as plain as if the book laid before me’).¹⁹ By circumstances of their social conjunction, even if not actualized in a face-to-face meeting (although the 1789 Swedenborg conference facilitated such contact), then based upon their occupation of this precise strata of London’s contemporary prophetic milieu, both of them had ‘visions’ of an opened Bible. It is certainly plausible he retained An Allegory of the Bible in his collection, tentative though its composition was, because it reminded him that his own ‘visions’ preceded those of Gott and recalled the heady atmosphere of the prophetic and apocalyptic days of late 1780s London shortly after he completed the painting.

The significance of establishing that An Allegory of the Bible is based on two Klüver form-constants lies in its very early date, possibly as early as c. 1780 on Butlin’s dating. This means that Blake’s use of hallucinations as a part of his creativity is present right at the beginning of his career as a visual artist. Apart from drawings made for his apprenticeship master, James Basire, or his Royal Academy student pieces, there are only 10 extant pictures that Butlin attributes with possible dates earlier than 1780 (but one of which is The Penance of Jane Shore drawing, discussed below). Although these neurologically generated patterns do not dominate Blake’s compositions at any point in his career, they derive from the phenomenology of visual hallucinations. If the earliest visual record of these form-constants in Blake’s art appears no later than, c. 1785, the greater part of the corpus of Blake’s visual output, including the illuminated books included (discussed separately, below), then they need to be re-scrutinized for the presence in the traces of the Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations which were origin of some of the ‘visions’ he declared as the sources of his art.

Example Two: Jacob’s Ladder (c. 1799–1807)

Those with even a cursory knowledge of the range of Blake’s images will probably know his pen and watercolour drawing, Jacob’s Dream, exhibited first at the Royal Academy in 1808 (c. 1805, British Museum) (Fig. 4.2).²⁰ A year after the Royal Academy exhibition (where it remained unsold), Blake retitled it Jacob’s Ladder, a ‘Drawing,’ and showed it at his exhibition off Oxford Street in 1809. At some point, probably during Blake’s lifetime, it was acquired by Blake’s long-term patron, Thomas Butts. Its status as one of Blake’s rare Royal Academy pictures, its place in the 1809 exhibition and the reliability of its provenance makes this a significant composition. It was for his 1809 exhibition that Blake’s wrote in the Descriptive Catalogue (1809) accompanying the show, that he painted from ‘wonderful originals seen in my visions’ (E 531). Far less tentative than An Allegory of the Bible, Jacob’s Ladder is ‘Exhibit A’ in the evidence for Blake’s incorporation of Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations. It offers perhaps the clearest example of the presence of two of Klüver’s form-constants in Blake’s work. It is also one of his most striking images.

Fig. 4.2

William Blake, Jacob’s Ladder, or Jacob’s Dream c.1799–1807, pen, grey ink and watercolour on paper, British Museum

Although a recent essay by Jonathan Roberts (see below) is an exception, the picture has attracted limited critical attention. It was not discussed in David Bindman’s, Blake as an Artist (1977) or Christopher Heppner’s Reading Blake’s Designs (1998), still the two most substantial monographs on Blake’s visual art. Perhaps the most pertinent comment is that of Anthony Blunt in 1959 who described the spiral stairs as ‘a complete novelty in the iconography of this subject.’²¹ In this case, the agent of the originating hallucination can be fairly confidently traced. For Jacob’s Ladder, Blake inscribed the exact Bible location of the Genesis text directly onto the border of the picture. For the Royal Academy exhibition catalogue, it was captioned ‘Vide Genesis, chap. Xxviii, ver.12.’²² The Bible text says that Jacob ‘lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed …,’ dreaming of ‘a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to heaven,’ from which dream ‘Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.’ However, this is not a case of Blake’s painting imitating the contents of the scriptural text but quite the reverse. Blake has recognized the historical Jacob’s experience as a hypnopompic (waking from sleep) visual hallucination of the type he had probably experienced himself many times, not least as announced at the beginning of Jerusalem, a work he had begun in 1804 (‘This theme calls me in sleep night after night, & ev’ry morn / Awakes me at sun-rise, then I see the Saviour over me …/ dictating the words of this mild song’ (E 146). Emerging from a hypnopompic hallucinatory state, which mirrored the example of ‘Jacob awaked out of his sleep,’ created this specific Klüver form-constant self-luminous shape in his visual field, here revealing the pattern of the original visual hallucination as a trace.

Jacob’s Ladder is dominated by an image of a symmetrical spiral staircase, apparently made of stone, on which are seen ‘the angels of God ascending and descending on it,’ as referred to in the Bible’s Genesis xxviii.12. The stairs rise in at least two vertical revolutions. Near the top, the stairs enter and disappear into a circle of radiating, broad, spoke-like, bars of light, representing the entrance into heaven. The two compositional structures in the picture are a spiral and a funnel or tunnel, conforming to two of the four form-constants described by Klüver. That is, Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder is a compositional assembly or amalgamation of two Klüver form-constants, the spiral and the tunnel/funnel. As Blunt comments, in the history of representations of this subject, Blake’s spiral staircase is unique.

There are good neurophysiological reasons why spiral forms may have been adopted by Blake for this work, particularly if enhanced by experiences of visual hallucination. The perception of the orientation of optical objects, principally through their edges or contours, is a crucial function of V1. Spiral forms, lattices and cobwebs have distinct edges and contours facilitating fluent visual perception. The processes of decoding these signals by the cortex are only beginning to be understood, offering the theoretical prospect of being able ‘read-out the detailed contents of a person’s mental state.’²³ The discrimination of spiral and radial forms, two out of Klüver’s four form-constants, in Jacob’s Ladder are foundational to visual perception on account of their structural role in V1. Recent research has detected a radial orientation bias in early visual cortex, including V1. That is, radial edges (such as those represented by the spokes of light in Jacob’s Ladder) are processed by the cortex more fluently than other shapes. One paper claims that there is ‘evidence for an enhanced sensitivity to radial orientations in human perception,’ arguing that the evidence is so ‘robust’ that ‘a radial bias may be neurally fundamental.’²⁴ Again, such a neurophysiology appears to be consistent with ffytche’s observation that there is ‘co-localization of perceptual and non-perceptual activity within individual cortical areas.’²⁵ That is—although the inference is my own—the choice of dominant Klüver pattern spiral and radial structures in Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder, provides a good demonstration of V1’s cognitive role and implies Blake had insight into his visual hallucinations.

Evidence from the Migraine Art competitions of the 1980s may also be helpful. Jacob’s Ladder can be correlated with an Untitled (1981) picture by a 20-year-old female artist living in the South West of England which shows a migraine attack with a spiral staircase with people walking up the stairs along with (not evident in Blake’s painting) a characteristic lattice Klüver form-constant and migraine aura zigzag fortification spectra.²⁶ Although this anonymous artist may have seen Blake’s watercolour in a photograph or on exhibit, of course, her painting claimed to be an authentic response to her experience of migraine.

Spiral forms have an important status in Blake’s art and poetry.²⁷ As part of an explanation of ‘the hermeneutic of his Christological “fourfold vision,”’ Jonathan Roberts has offered an elegant discussion of Jacob’s Ladder by setting it in the context of poems Blake enclosed in letters sent to friends in London at their time of their departure from London and arrival in Felpham, Sussex, in early October 1800.²⁸ This was only about two weeks before he wrote the ‘Vision of Light’ poem discussed in Chap. 2. Although it is difficult to equate the picture with Roberts’ contention that this picture is an ‘inextricably textual’ response to the Bible, he makes an important connection between a poem Blake enclosed in one of these letters, ‘To my dear Friend M^rs Anna Flaxman,’ and an image which seems to allude to (what would later become), the spiral structure of the Jacob’s Ladder painting.²⁹ In this poem, written from Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, on 14 September 1800, about two weeks before they set out for Sussex, Blake refers to ‘Sweet Felpham’ where ‘The Ladder of the Angels descends thro the air / On the Turret its spiral does softly descend / Thro the village then winds at My Cot i[t] does end,’ (the Turret was a feature of Hayley’s house, E 708–09, my italics).³⁰ The emphasis on the descent of a kind of ‘spiral’ divine creativity in this poetic image provides an important correlate for the role of the Klüver form-constant patterns at what was a significant moment in Blake’s artistic life.

For the first time, Jacob’s Ladder and one of Blake’s literary poetic images (taken from the letter to Anna Flaxman), can be reliably associated with the cognitive outcome of a specific type of visual hallucination (in this case, Klüver spiral form-constants) or what he later called, in an attempt to describe the experience of V1’s cognitive capacity, a ‘Vision … seen by the [Imaginative Eye]’ (E 554).

Example Three: The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church—A Drawing

Given his ideas about the ‘permanence of … ever Existent Images,’ and the opportunity of the 1809 exhibition to demonstrate how these ideas had been put into artistic practice (all within the constraints of apparently having room for only 16 paintings), it would be unusual if there were any non-‘visionary’ paintings included in a show whose contents had been explicitly defined as including pictures inspired by ‘wonderful originals seen in my visions.’ With Blake claiming in A Descriptive Catalogue to ‘having been taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriarchates of Asia,’ painting a picture based on an episode in medieval English history was hardly outlandish (E 531). Exhibiting The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church, a watercolour of c. 1793, in 1809 allowed him to claim the longevity of his ‘visions,’ confirming their ‘permanence’ in his creativity (Fig. 4.3). Affirming that ‘the productions of our youth and our mature age are equal in all essential points,’ Blake claimed in A Descriptive Catalogue that the painting gave him ‘a reward … such as the world cannot give’ (E 550). Butlin notes his evident ‘pride’ in showing it.³¹ Although in this case the evidence of his ‘visions,’ one of the four Klüver form-constant patterns, is only a minor compositional feature, Jane looks directly at it.

Fig. 4.3

William Blake, The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church c.1793, ink, watercolour and gouache on paper, Tate Britain

The historical episode the drawing is based on is an incident in the life of Elizabeth Shore [née Lambert], known as Jane (d. 1526/27?), a controversial royal mistress forced in 1483 to do public penance in St. Paul’s church (the building pre-dating the Wren cathedral built on the same site). Penance ordeals required wearing a garment (typically a kyrtle or sheet) exposing underclothes, bare legs and feet and carrying a staff or candle.³² With the exception that the candle is a lighted taper, these are all present in Blake’s picture. Blake claimed in A Descriptive Catalogue that ‘This Drawing was done above Thirty Years ago,’ a dating which might plausibly relate it to a somewhat weaker (Butlin calls it ‘tentative’) version of the same subject forming part of a history series he was working on, c. 1779, that is, ‘Thirty Years ago’ (E 550).³³ However, as Butlin writes, ‘it seems probable, despite the difficulties’ (of dating) that the 1809 exhibited version of The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church was the one Blake listed in his Notebook as part of an abortive c. 1793 English history series where it appears as ‘15 The Penance of Jane Shore’ (E 672). That is, the 1809 exhibited Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church was not ‘above Thirty Years’ old but more like 16. Butlin, noting this discrepancy, indicates Blake’s ‘somewhat cavalier’ attitude to dates but fixes its date of conception nearer to the c. 1793 project.

Today, obscuring its place in an exhibition at least partially aimed at supporting his claims about ‘The Artist having been taken in vision’ to see their originals, is the unforgiving nature of its paint surface (E 531). The media surface of The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church shows a degree of translucence or deterioration. As well as flaking particles of paint, layers of indigo under Prussian blue on the central male figure with the red cloak only show up with infra-red false colour photography but, much more obviously to the eye, it also suffers from what the conservation scientists Piers Townshend and Joyce H. Townsend describe as ‘a pretinaceous coating like glue, which Blake probably applied as a protective varnish.’³⁴ The consequent loss of lustre, however carefully restored, may have deflected attention away from the luminosity of Jane Shore herself, barefooted, déshabillé, carrying a lighted taper surrounded by armed men in the middle of one of the foremost church buildings in Britain.

Analysing Blake’s Jane Shore in more detail brings to the surface an array of recondite meanings. Blake’s background included a childhood exposure to the influence of a mother who had adopted the Moravian faith, a likely meeting in 1789 with the ex-Quaker female prophetic visionary author, Dorothy Gott, and a contemporaneous flirtation with the Swedenborgianism later vehemently repudiated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789–1790). The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church, a painting depicting the public parading of a female penitent, allegedly the victim of her own sexuality, contains carefully coded cultural meanings. In this picture, these cultural encodings are presented in combination with traces of the original Klüver form-constant ‘vision’ which inspired it. In other words, it is fully consonant with dissident versions of history arising from the ‘visions’ he claimed characterized other pictures in the 1809 exhibition and which he had also explored in the early 1790s when he painted it.

Blake’s departure from the conventional iconography of Jane Shore is remarkable. If, as Butlin suggests, the c. 1793 ‘15 The Penance of Jane Shore’ version listed in the Notebook is the one exhibited in 1809, then he noticeably rejected most contemporary visual portrayals of the historical Jane Shore (although actress Sarah Siddons’ theatrical version in 1780s revivals of Nicholas Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) may be another matter).³⁵ Blake’s portrayal of Jane Shore almost fully covered in a kyrtle and chemise undergarment, is iconographically untypical. The public, if they were familiar with eighteenth-century prints, would mainly have seen her semi-naked. No authenticated likeness exists but most contemporary images, basing themselves on a University of Cambridge source, portrayed her bare breasted or with a transparent diaphanous chemise showing her breasts and nipples. The most elegantly produced of these is Francisco Bartolozzi’s stipple engraving, Jane Shore, 1 February 1790. In Blake’s picture, the kyrtle and chemise is an encoding of nakedness confirmed by her bare legs and feet but also by its distancing from prints such as Bartolozzi’s. Such encodings mean that it fits comfortably within the symbolism of seventeenth-century Quaker activist protests of ‘going naked for a sign.’³⁶ These were peaceful, prophetic, interventions, acted out in churches and in the streets, practised by both men and women, naked (or else constructively naked through partial or déshabillé dressing), warning the clergy that they would be overthrown, literally unclothed or defrocked.

While all this suggests Blake’s encounter in 1789 with the ex-Quaker Dorothy Gott entailed a larger absorption of her prophetic tradition than previously thought, at the other end of the scale, Blake’s Moravian mother, Catherine, would have been aware of the intricate—if severe—dress codes, even for girls, followed by sections of her church.³⁷ That is, contemporary female clothing signified. Bare foot and with her undergarments showing, Blake’s Jane Shore is symbolically naked to do her penance yet simultaneously empowered because of the encodings of her clothing’s anticlerical meaning. Contemporary print images confirm nakedness as Jane’s status, hinting that the painting carries such encodings. Her lighted taper also fits into seventeenth-century Quaker prophetic activism. Carrying a candle in daylight to signify the darkness of others was exemplified in the much re-told example of Richard Sale, of Hoole, near Chester, who in 1655 carried to ‘those persecuting Priests and People a Lonthern and Candle, as a Figure of their Darkness.’³⁸ In Quaker symbolic dissidence, carrying a lighted candle at noon indicated surrounding spiritual darkness. Consonant with the currency of such encodings within contemporary prophetic idioms, two years after the 1809 exhibition, Dorothy Gott published The Noon Day Sun, a Revelation from Christ to Dispel the Night of Apostacy (1811). Demonstrating the continued currency of these meanings embedded in Blake’s painting, an 1821 stipple engraving of Jane Shore shows her bare breasted out of doors in broad daylight complete with her lighted taper (with the unmistakable twin towers of Westminster Abbey erroneously in the distance).³⁹

Although originating in seventeenth-century Quakerism, the prophetic symbolism of Jane’s iconography was coincident with Blake’s usage. Five years before he painted the c. 1793 version of The Penance of Jane Shore, Gott had published The Midnight Cry, “Behold, the Bridegroom comes!” Or, An Order from God To Get Your Lamps Lighted, Otherwise you must go into Darkness (1788), both Blake and Gott converging in their use of this precise prophetic idiom. It is plausible Blake even had the opportunity to discuss such iconography with Gott at the 1789 Swedenborg conference they both attended. This precise prophetic idiom is even alluded to in his Descriptive Catalogue remarks on the painting where he employs a parallel metaphor for his rejection by authorities ‘who pretend to encourage art.’ In his commentary, he enigmatically explains his fortitude in response to rejection, when ‘he has every night dropped into his shoe, as soon as he puts it off, and puts out the candle, and gets into bed, a reward for the labours of the day such as the world cannot give’ (E 550). The temporal ‘night’ and the discarded ‘shoe’ align him with Jane’s barefoot status, his snuffing ‘out the candle’ positioning him in a spiritual light ‘the world cannot give.’ While, of course, Blake’s principal message shows her quietly resistant to the coercive authorities crowding round her in the form of helmeted men armed with halberds and pikes, the painting is deeply embedded in the prophetic rhetoric of the late 1780s and 1790s and fully consonant with the ‘visions’ he insisted inspired other paintings in the 1809 exhibition.

If these encodings of Blake’s Jane Shore are correct, then it puts The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church within prophetic idioms much closer to the equally sexually dissident, Oothoon, of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), and coinciding with similar agencies of prophetic declaration embodied in America a Prophecy (1793) and Europe a Prophecy (1794). In the frontispiece to The Book of Los (1795), the fully clothed prophetic mother, Eno, sings her prophecy. If, to use Butlin’s term, Blake was proud of this picture, and it was conceived in his ‘visionary’ prophetic mode of the 1790s, the question may be asked, have his ‘Visions’ left phenomenological traces in this picture? Did it derive from things ‘seen in my visions’? Looking generically dated by 1809, if not jarring, why did Blake include this picture in an exhibition apparently intended to showcase paintings featuring his exclusively ‘visionary’ talents?

One of the most striking features of The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church is the curious emphasis on the alternating black and white floor paving of rectangular or square stones. This feature is also evident in the c. 1779 drawing although it is a much simpler sketch with fewer figures.⁴⁰ Across this pavement sweep a muddle of people, including Jane herself walking out her penance. In Blake’s picture they seem channelled down a double classical columned passageway (rather than through the Gothic, pre-Wren, church). Within this pictorial space the viewing perspective onto the rectangular paving stones at the front contributes a remarkable area of pictorial definition within a context of what David Bindman calls an otherwise ‘crowded group of heads.’⁴¹

As to what happens as far as the viewer’s perception is concerned, Christopher Heppner describes very well problems of this kind of use of pictorial space, noting that in The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church, Blake ‘places the viewpoint very high, so that the implied vanishing point is above the frame of the design.’⁴² Heppner also cites the relevance of Henry Fuseli’s warning about using a too high perspective which, ‘“from want of keeping, the horizontal line becomes a perpendicular, and drops the distance on the foreground; the more remote groups do not approach, but fall or stand upon the foremost actor.”’⁴³ The huddling of characters into the foreground in The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church, and the viewer’s uncertainty about the origin of the crowd behind, certainly appears to be a problem Fuseli understood, but which Blake disregarded and Heppner deftly describes. Despite Fuseli’s warnings, Blake ‘drops the distance on the foreground.’ This helps explains why the very well-defined paving stones at the front of the painting dominate and contrast with the uncertainty and muddle of the situation in the background.

The best phenomenological description of the visual hallucinatory percepts whose traces are visible in The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church, is tessellopsia (from the Greek-derived Latin word tessera, a small tile used in mosaics). This is a classification of a variant visual hallucination coined in 1999 by Dominic H. ffytche and colleagues within a clinical context. Theirs is a re-formulation of Klüver-type patterns to better suit the visual hallucinations of persons with degrees of sight loss. Other descriptors of their perceptual phenomenology include brickwork and tiles but their neural patterns of angular geometries are essentially modifications of the fortification spectra associated with migraine aura.⁴⁴ That is, the well-defined paving stones in this picture are variants of the Klüver chequerboard or lattice form-constant. Long before ffytche, using the simple method of moving his fingers in a grid pattern in front of a bright light source (sometimes the sun), Jan Purkinje in the late 1810s also induced chequerboard patterns in the first experimental observations of visual hallucination and produced an illustrative print to demonstrate what he saw.⁴⁵ A more recent paper by a neuroscientist with personal experience of tessellopsia visual hallucinations caused by macular degeneration, notes that such brickwork patterns may replicate the neuroanatomy of the boundaries between V1 and V2 as well as, not least, activities in the brain associated with dreaming.⁴⁶ It may be that the differences between non-hallucinating and hallucinating visual perception are slender, possibly affected by the impact of several pathologies or none.⁴⁷ Indeed, as the paper by Billock and Tsou referred to above suggests, a Turing reaction-diffusion model may be sufficient to explain some of the characteristics of several pattern-forming types of visual hallucination.⁴⁸

Chequerboard patterns (and stripes) are known triggers of migraine, a condition Blake may have had since c. 1766–1768.⁴⁹ They are also visible as the residual trace of Blake’s original visual hallucination in the precursor sketch known as The Penance of Jane Shore, drawn c. 1779.⁵⁰ Working from that original drawing of c. 1779, Blake produced The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church of c. 1793 and, as Butlin suggests, proudly exhibited it in 1809, no doubt to demonstrate the enduring capacity of ‘my visions.’ Consonant with Butlin’s dating of c. 1779, this would make The Penance of Jane Shore consistent with a ‘Drawing … done above Thirty Years ago,’ marking it as the original of the c. 1793 version exhibited in 1809. The implications are profound because, based on Butlin’s dating, this would move the c. 1779 drawing of The Penance of Jane Shore into the category of amongst the first evidences of ‘visions’ in Blake’s paintings, possibly even preceding An Allegory of the Bible of c. 1780–1785. This pavement feature noticeably echoes, along with its similarly strangely floating perspective viewpoint, An Allegory of the Bible. The identification of such shapes may be related to the ‘chequer worked filling in, in … rectangular patches’ reported by Sir John Herschel to Hubert Airy as early as 1870 to describe the modalities of (then still to be classified) migraine aura, or the ‘chequered’ or lattice Klüver form-constants defined in 46 of the 397 migraine paintings examined by Podoll and Robinson in 2008.⁵¹ That is, if Blake experienced migraine, the tessellopsia or the chequer/lattice patterns associated with its aura would account for his experience (as would the simple flicker-induced processes followed by Purkinje). These compositional features tell us a lot about the consistency and stability of Blake’s perceptual experiences of ‘visons’ and how they present in his pictures.

The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church is of considerable importance because Blake chose to include it in an exhibition whose context, as A Descriptive Catalogue reiterated, specifically emphasized pictures ‘seen in my visions.’ At that time, one assumes Blake was choosing his best, or most representative, work for exhibit. It is difficult to think The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church was an exception to this aim. Its inclusion in the 1809 show is his implicit personal corroboration of ‘visions’ beginning ‘Thirty Years ago.’ This may even place the c. 1779 version alongside An Allegory of the Bible, c. 1780–1785 as evidence of the earliest ‘ever Existent Images’ with hallucinatory origins in his painting and that he chose to exhibit in 1809 for that reason. Otherwise, as Butlin has commented, referring to the c. 1793 version, it is ‘in many ways amazingly conservative for a work that I place in the early 1790s.’⁵² Placing it in the 1809 exhibition was a considered, even daring, statement about the longevity of his ‘visions’ whose hallucinatory origins have not previously been understood. Not least, the picture also shows how popular prophetic movements, dateable back to the mid-seventeenth century, could be incorporated directly into the moments of ‘Prophecy’ Blake announced in the 1790s and re-exhibited again in 1809, proclaiming the timelessness of ‘my visions.’

Example Four: Milton’s Mysterious Dream c. 1816

No later than 1816 and his watercolour Milton’s Mysterious Dream, Blake had identified, named and discriminated three out of the four form-constant visual geometrical hallucinatory types later classified by Klüver in 1926 (c. 1816, Morgan Library, New York).⁵³ In a brief commentary written to accompany Milton’s Mysterious Dream, Blake refers to the presence in the picture of ‘Scrolls & Nets & Webs’ (E 685). These are the spiral, lattice and cobweb percepts defined by Klüver nearly a hundred years later. There is no conceivably relevant textual origin for ‘Scrolls,’ ‘Nets’ or ‘Webs’ in Milton’s poetic corpus.⁵⁴ Their naming by Blake, c. 1816, is a significant contribution towards understanding the cultural history of visual hallucinations, confirming he had cognitive insight into those events and was able to provide an accurate nomenclature and taxonomy.

Milton’s Mysterious Dream was the eleventh in a set of 12 particularly magnificent pen and watercolours Blake produced, c. 1816–20, illustrative of John Milton’s poems, L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso (1645).⁵⁵ According to Blake’s commentary on them, the Milton passage he chose to illustrate were the lines from Il Penseroso, ‘Entice the dewy featherd Sleep / And let some strange mysterious dream / Wave on his Wings in airy stream’ (E 685). Consonant with Jacob’s Ladder, his selection of a ‘Strange Mysterious dream’ drawn from the text of the poem may suggest Blake’s Klüver-type percepts were the outcome of hypnagogic or hypnopompic induced hallucinations similar to those referred to in Jerusalem (written no earlier than 1804).

The L’Allegro and Il Penseroso series demonstrate Blake’s art at the height of his creativity. They are of special interest because they relate to Milton, the poet whose dominant poetic presence had already been the subject of the illuminated book in relief and white line etching, Milton a Poem in 2 Books (1804–1811). Their provenance is fully traceable, having been commissioned by Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts. Some of the drawings bear the watermark ‘M & J Lay 1816,’ indicating the earliest possible date for their execution (assuming, as looks stylistically likely, he painted them as a group). They were sold onto the art market in 1853 as one lot by Butts’ son, Thomas Butts Jr., and then passed through several hands before arriving at the Morgan Library in 1949. It is conceivable Butts requested the unusual set of descriptive commentaries (also held at the Morgan Library), written in Blake’s hand on separate pieces of paper, accompanying each picture in the series (E 682–86).

Critical opinion has not been particularly helpful in determining either the painting’s compositional contents or its meaning. Butlin’s catalogue raisonné entry for the L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso, lists and summarizes the already considerable body of critical literature as it stood in 1981, commenting that it comprised often ‘contradictory, interpretations.’⁵⁶ Of the details considered here, John E. Grant obliquely notices the netting; Bette Charlene Werner suggests the presence of a wider—if vaguer—symbolism (‘the waters and nets of materiality’) while Stephen C. Behrendt, offering one of the more nuanced perspectives on the series, simply characterizes Milton’s Mysterious Dream as ‘far more intense, far less conventional’ than the rest.⁵⁷

However, it is the short additional descriptive commentary text which is so remarkable: ‘Milton Sleeping on a Bank. Sleep descending, with a Strange Mysterious dream upon his Wings of Scrolls & Nets & Webs unfolded by Spirits in the Air & in the Brook around Milton are Six Spirits of fairies hovering on the air with Instruments of Music’ (E 685, my italics). In the picture, a winged personified ‘Sleep’ swoops around the supine and sleeping Milton, literally bearing on its ‘Wings … Scrolls & Nets & Webs.’ Of these three shapes, the ‘Nets,’ Klüver’s lattice percepts, are the hardest to discern but the ‘Nets’ meshes (highlighted in black ink) reach from two small soaring figures across to a single huddled figure in the lower horizontal section of the picture, all borne on the back of Sleep’s right-hand wing. On the same wing are the ‘Scrolls,’ that is, Klüver’s spiral percepts. They are represented as the spiralled ends of what seems to be a parchment associated with one long robed figure who touches it with both hands, its folds enclosing a soaring man and woman. Scrolled ends of garments also figure in the group circled in radiating spokes of light at the top of the picture.

Of the third and final Klüver pattern shown in this composition, it is this latter design, a lattice or cobweb form-constant, borne on the back of Sleep’s left-hand wing, which dominates the picture, filling the uppermost quadrant. Describing it simply as a ‘rainbow sphere,’ J.M.Q. Davies notes ‘It is a highly unusual motif.’⁵⁸ Its status as (what seems to be) a depiction of radiant light is, of course, consistent with the self-luminous qualities of Klüver percepts. However, instead of its being a conventional symbol of radiance, it forms a set of very distinct concentric circles, differentiated by colour but noticeably radially segmented. This fits Blake’s description of ‘Webs.’ It is also a reminder, as with the spokes of light in Jacob’s Ladder, that ‘a radial bias may be neurally fundamental’ to visual perception.⁵⁹

That the picture contains three out of the four Klüver form-constants brings Milton’s Mysterious Dream into phenomenological unity with the details described in Blake’s commentary. That is, in this case, the phenomenology of the hallucinatory origins of his ‘visions’ can be grouped around experiences of Klüver-type percepts. Their presence within the picture as a compositional choice Blake made also assigns these phenomena with a precise neurophysiology based on visual hallucinations. Indeed, Blake’s text could hardly be less ambiguous: ‘Sleep’ brings ‘a Strange Mysterious dream upon’ its ‘Wings,’ explicitly made up of ‘Scrolls & Nets & Webs,’ percepts the earlier Jacob’s Ladder picture suggests he had experienced no later than c. 1805 but now, apparently, associated with Milton. Not least, their deployment within an overtly secular illustration is a reminder that Blake’s ‘visions’ were not exclusively artistically dedicated to his religious beliefs.

Although it is not certain that the image of Milton depicted here refers to the period after he lost his sight (he was completely blind by the age of about 44), Blake may have surmised Klüver’s self-luminous patterns could be perceived by the blind (in the same way that Milton’s contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, knew they were visible in the dark).⁶⁰ One might speculate that self-luminous hallucinations held a special fascination for an artist who held the blind Milton in such high esteem. Whether this is the case or not, in what was clearly a complex response to Il Penseroso, ‘Scrolls & Nets & Webs’ make little other narrative sense except for their phenomenological unity within the range of the Klüver hallucinations inspiring Blake’s design.

It is even possible to speculate about the possible inducers of his hallucinatory state. Blake’s picture is of Milton’s … Dream, and this is probably the clue. Although one cannot be certain, the subject suggests the three Klüver form-constants arose during either a hypnagogic induced hallucination (percepts experienced in the transition from waking to sleeping) or a hypnopompic induced hallucination (percepts experienced in the transition from sleeping to waking). In a 2008 study of specifically hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations drawn from two cohorts of students at a British university, 85% of the sample claimed some experience of these double hallucinatory states.⁶¹ Either of these agencies would accord well with the phenomenology of visual hallucination, not least in Hobbes’ description of how ‘a man shall in the dark, (though awake) have the Images of Lines, and Angles before his eyes.’⁶² Whether Blake was somehow empathizing with Milton and mirroring his own fictive projection of his personal character is plausible but beyond the scope of this study.

Example Five: Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations Among the Tombs”

About 12 years after Jacob’s Ladder, as Martin Butlin noted in 1981, ‘The spiral composition was developed in the Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations Among the Tombs”’ (c. 1820–1825).⁶³ The subject of the pen and wash drawing refers to the much reprinted, Meditations among the Tombs. In a letter to a Lady (1746), by James Hervey (1714–1758), a Church of England minister in Weston-Favell, Northamptonshire.⁶⁴ Compositionally, it can be described as a latent companion-piece to Jacob’s Ladder but whose meaning it inverts. Once one grasps that Hervey had a reputation as an obdurate Calvinist, the meaning of the painting becomes much clearer.

It is easy enough to read the narrative of Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations Among the Tombs” because, unusually, Blake painted captions straight onto the picture. One at the top of the painting reads, ‘God out of Christ is a Consuming Fire’ (E 691). This was the key message he wanted to convey about Hervey, that an idea of God divorced from the healing ministry of Christ devastates the world. ‘Hervey,’ labelled as such, and standing with his back to the viewer at the bottom of the picture, is led into a ‘visionary’ world by two guardian angels who point him the way. The spiral staircase will be the means of his ascent to God. In other words, the picture demonstrates the extent to which Blake’s primary episode of a Klüver-type hallucination was processed and acculturated in ways specific to the complex religious ideologies of eighteenth-century Britain. Given the nature of Hervey’s severe Christian doctrine, Blake’s picture may also constitute the first satirical use of visual hallucinations of the Klüver type. By using the stable, species wide, presentation of Klüver visual hallucinations as the basis of the picture’s composition, Blake can make a profound point about the reality of the eternal world and the available visionary alternatives to Hervey’s theology.

Pictorially, a stone-like spiral staircase dominates the composition and becomes the principal visual structure ordering much of the design. Similarly, beams of light (and fire) mark the second, tunnel or funnel form-constant. Whether Blake experienced a specific episode of Klüver form-constant hallucination for Epitome is not especially relevant because, of course, their role in his cognitive processes of creativity was established with Jacob’s Dream. Although subsequent experiences of visual hallucination cannot be ruled out, he may have simply developed a design idea he had used before and which seemed to him to validate his ’visionary’ faculty. His ability to adapt or re-adapt the form-constant origins of his visual art makes this picture particularly valuable because the Epitome facilitates the observation of the broader historical contextualization of his experience of neural cognitive processes and their creative and cultural deployment.

Here, the spiral staircase is Gothicized perhaps because Blake is exploring its vertical bilateral symmetries, something akin to what David Bindman (following the Victorian biographer, Alexander Gilchrist) calls Blake’s ‘Gothicized Imagination,’ marking a distinctive, creative, attempt to aesthetically modulate the Klüver form-constants inherent in its structure.⁶⁵ However, what cannot be in doubt is that this painting also explores liminal states between life, death and eternity, all major themes throughout Blake’s work. Unusually, whether prompted by Thomas Butts (its first owner) or at his own initiative, Blake painted caption texts onto several parts of the painting. Hervey stands at bottom centre, dressed in black, his back to us (helpfully captioned by Blake, ‘Hervey,’ above his left shoulder). In the approximate centre of the picture Christ radiates shafts of light (the second form-constant), with Noah above. Above Noah, is God. Above them both are the captions, ‘God out of Christ is a Consuming Fire,’ ‘MERCY’ and ‘WRATH,’ the Calvinist creeds Blake thought appropriate to Hervey (E 691). As Butlin comments, ‘fire … fills much of the upper part of the picture,’ presumably parodying Hervey’s severe modulation of Christ’s radiant light. In this example, Blake’s elaboration of the Klüver form-constant pattern which structures the composition is annotated with extremely precise references to Enlightenment concerns about Christian belief and faith.

The Epitome offers a particularly rich example of Blake at work, creating meaning from entoptic spiral geometric patterns but with the picture also filled with separate visual information and allusions, some of it captioned by the artist and presenting a rare example of his literally labelling what he means. In the lower right quadrant is a picture of a soaring mother and child, captioned by Blake, ‘Sophronia died in Childbed’ (E 691). The reference to Sophronia comes from a passage in Hervey’s successful two volume collection printed after Meditations among the Tombs. In a letter to a Lady and titled, Meditations and Contemplations (1746), in whose first volume was located the section called, ‘Meditations among the Tombs,’ Hervey refers to liminal states between life, death and eternity as if they are real, existing and actual, perhaps making it difficult today for us to truly comprehend his meaning, or even be sympathetic towards it. In the ‘Meditations,’ in an episode redolent of the what would later be termed the Burkean sublime, a visitor is taken to the tomb of ‘Sophronia; who died in Child-bed.—How often does this Calamity happen! The Branch shoots; but the Stem withers. The Babe springs to Light; but She that bare Him, breathes her last. She gives Life, but (O pitiable Consideration!) gives it at the Expence of her own; and becomes, at once, a Mother, and a Corpse.—Or else, perhaps, She expires in severe Pangs, and is Herself a Tomb for her Infant.’⁶⁶ In Blake’s painting, both Sophronia and her baby are pictured flying upwards, surrounded by the lettering of their caption.

Even more surprising, is tantalizing evidence of a potential link back to the ‘marriage hearse’ phrase of ‘London’ in Songs of Experience (1794) (E 27). On the right of Epitome, Blake vertically captions above Sophronia, another young woman, soaring upside down, grasping at a young man who looks up at her and labelled, ‘She died on her Wedding Day.’ In the Meditations Hervey tells the story, not of a wife but a husband. In his lugubrious style, ‘the Bride-maids, girded with Gladness, had prepared the Marriage-Bed,’ but on the wedding day the bridegroom dies and lies ‘stretched in the gloomy Hearse … followed by a Train of Mourners.’⁶⁷ Such a switching of genders may simply mark an opportunity afforded by Blake’s neat visual incorporation of another female figure co-opted to join the other women in the picture who include, female angels, a ‘Virgin,’ ‘Widow,’ ‘Mother’ and, of course, Sophronia. In Epitome, Blake’s decision to emphasise Sophronia’s fate stresses the risks of maternal death in child-birth but also the more positive visual declaration of Hervey’s text that, ‘The Babe [still] springs to Light.’ In this way the ‘visionary’ developmental nature of Blake’s original hallucinatory experiences are made manifest, based on the stable geometric Klüver form-constants and then evolving into powerful cultural messages about the rigidity of religious zealotry. If Blake’s first Klüver-type visual hallucinations started c. 1780–1785, by the time he came to work on, Epitome (c. 1820), he would have realized these ‘visions’ were persistent and manifested in a limited number of patterns. By c. 1816 Blake had already defined three out of the four Klüver form-constants in Miltons Mysterious Dream, by the time he came to Epitome, as with Jacob’s Dream, he had found an appropriate compositional form in which to embed the ‘ever Existent Images’ of these visual hallucinations.

This embedded message about eternity is a function not only of Klüver spiral form-constant but also of the picture’s contrasting Gothic features (a Gothic tracery ornamented altar stands in bottom foreground) where vertical bilateral symmetry once again stands out as a major organizational feature of the composition. Klüver commented on how symmetry in hallucinatory types were particularly stood out in the responses of his survey groups: ‘As regards the distribution of the colors, forms or configurations in the field of vision, most observers emphasize the symmetry of the phenomena.’⁶⁸

In short, one is struck by the sheer economy of Blake’s incorporation of this (easily identifiable) visual hallucinatory type incorporated within an axis of simple vertical bilateral symmetry. Although not painted until c. 1820, these continuities of a visual theme of a ‘spiral composition,’ together with bilateral vertical symmetry, makes it cognate with the pictures which can be dated at least as early his group of 1808 Royal Academy exhibits (see Chap. 9). Such repetitions emphasise how those hallucinatory experiences, deriving from Blake’s V1, were endowed with insight and were both cognitive and developmental.

Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations Among the Tombs” has features which make it particularly valuable for analysis. Whether at the request of Butts or of his own volition, Blake captioned many of the figures within the painting, attributing them not only with names but also with ethical qualities. These elements leave less room for ambiguity. Secondly, the position of the historical Hervey can be recovered and assigned with a very precise location within the often-unpredictable nuances of eighteenth-century Christian religious culture. Although hardly a household name even during his own lifetime, his background can be traced with some precision. The figure who is the subject of Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations Among the Tombs” can be located within precise social communities potentially revealing how Blake’s creativity related to his entoptic visions and his theological perspective on Hervey. On this occasion Blake’s responses can even be traced across the timeline of his own intellectual development. He made a fleeting allusion to another text by Hervey, citing his Theron and Aspasio; Or, A Series of Dialogues And Letters (1755), in his incomplete manuscript dramatic satire, An Island in the Moon (c. 1784). This is one of his earliest pieces of writing and certainly his earliest autograph manuscript (E 456).

Nearly 40 years after An Island in the Moon, Blake had obviously continued to read or remember Hervey’s Meditations and Contemplations. He knew it well enough to be able to extract the Sophronia episode as something he wanted to comment on in his painting. Indeed, the picture is unusual for Blake in that it encapsulates, in one visual image, his entire attitude towards the very specific type of religion Hervey represented. His contemporary biographer called him ‘Calvinistic,’ adding that he was one of the ‘Marrow Theologians,’ a reference to a now recondite doctrinal controversy about Calvinism’s priority of faith over repentance.⁶⁹ Another biographer commented, more straightforwardly, that when some men were condemned to death in nearby Northampton in 1755, he addressed them in a pamphlet but ‘not so much as once mentioned Repentance to them.’⁷⁰ The first owner of the Epitome, was Thomas Butts, an important commissioner of Blake’s Bible illustrations. It is possible it was specially commissioned by him.⁷¹ There is even a possibility that Blake associated Hervey with the English Midlands movement of Moravianism which swept the region in the 1740s, gathering up his mother, Catherine Wright, into its faith, perhaps even reaching her place of birth, Walkeringham, Nottinghamshire.⁷² Despite their Calvinist rigour, Hervey’s doctrines were so inimical to the conventional bounds of the church that he was considered at various times, as well as a Calvinist, an Antinomian, an Arminian and someone ‘in the habits of intimacy with … all Dissenting Ministers.’⁷³ It is, therefore, not surprising that one of the early histories of the Moravians in England, reports that, Thomas Cartwright of Culworth, Northamptonshire, a convert to Moravianism, was allowed by Hervey to attend worship at his church in Weston-Favell in 1744.⁷⁴

The purpose of mentioning these potential connections to the Epitome is to convey, albeit at a minimal level, something of the historical complexity of the social context into which Blake’s painting can be situated. The unpredictable nuances of less conventional areas of early eighteenth-century English Midlands Christian ministry can now be set against the relative simplicity of the Klüver spiral form-constant which structures its composition. As far as the Epitome’s meaning is concerned, it is now much easier to see that Blake is diminishing the status of the extreme Calvinist, James Hervey, and building up the positive cognitive opportunities offered by entoptic religious ‘vision.’ With his back to us in the picture, Hervey is led into a defamiliarized world, a new state of entoptic visionary realities into which he is ushered by two angels directing him towards the cognitive prospects of (for him) a new and enlightened vision of Christianity. Sophronia’s death, a story Hervey himself chose to narrate, is no longer a tale of terrifying predicaments, but an image literally floated amongst Blake’s entoptic ‘visions.’

Indeed, with all their complexities, The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’s Church and his Epitome of Hervey all provide a rich body of evidence about how an artist’s perception of Klüver entoptic form-constants, verified as being connected to V1 by Ermentrout and Cowan, et al., and Bressloff and Cowan, et al., can be placed within precise historical contexts of European Enlightenment. While Blake’s Moravian link to Hervey is speculative (not to say, esoteric), a virtue of this type of methodology is that it exemplifies how social communities can become correlates for considering the role of entoptic visions in art. Of course, the real message of Blake’s Epitome was directed at the brand of religious doctrine Hervey expounded. Through its compositional structure the picture shows that Hervey’s spiritual journey is towards a new personal state of vision or altered consciousness. With Hervey unmistakably labelled by Blake as ‘Hervey,’ he is shown an entoptic reality, a spiritual dimension of religious narrative (from wrath to mercy, for example), all shaped by the Klüver form-constants at the origin of Blake’s own cognitive processes of debating and challenging Hervey’s views. In its pictorial narrative, implicitly accompanied by a touching act of forgiveness, Hervey is directed towards the rejuvenating ‘visions’ Blake saw, teaching him to re-use the ‘visionary’ faculty ‘He thinks all men partake of it—but it is lost by not being cultiv^d.’⁷⁵ Or, as he put it in Jerusalem, ‘The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions, / Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix’d into furrows of death’ (E 198).

Example Six: The Illuminated Books (up to 1794)

Perhaps because the illuminated books were privately produced enterprises exploiting his printmaking skills for the admiration of affluent, socially and politically progressive bibliophiles, it may not be surprising Klüver form-constant patterns occur frequently in these works.⁷⁶ They form a more exclusive, less public, mode of artistic output than his paintings aimed at the Royal Academy. Given his experience with the 1785 show, he may have felt more secure exhibiting his ‘visions’ through prints presented as books. At any rate, traces of the geometric patterns of his Klüver ‘visions’ proliferate in them to such a degree that the discussion here is limited to just four titles issued up to 1795. That Blake used recurrent patterns in the illuminated books is not a new idea. In 1978 W.J.T. Mitchell observed that ‘Abstract linear forms such as the vortex or the circle … are repeated so systematically that they suggest a kind of pantomimic body-language, a repertoire of motifs.’⁷⁷ The vortex and circle approximate to two of the four Klüver form-constants (although they are not assigned by Mitchell to neurological causes). Of course, these neural patterns sometimes appear decoratively although, in such cases, they may still be aesthetically selected echoes of entoptic percepts first seen in the ‘visions’ he claimed as integral to his art.⁷⁸

It is possible to collect an editorially consistent and prior endorsed range of results for Klüver-type shapes in the illuminated books by using the visual motif search engine within The William Blake Archive. The facility is now (since c. 2020) slightly less easy to use because, arguably, it does not gather so readily cumulatively tagged ‘hits’ in explicit totals. However, its principal virtue for the present study was that the Archive’s editors had independently deliberated and agreed descriptors to match the images they decided Blake’s works presented. By using an online ‘tick-box,’ it was possible to find out how often, for example, ‘spiral’ shapes had been tagged in Blake’s visual art and then to collate them using the ‘Search Images’ facility of BlakeArchive.org. The results are both surprising and complicated.

The number of distinct ‘spiral’ picture features logged by the editors (Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi), when restricted just to the illuminated books in relief and intaglio etching produced between c. 1788 and 1795, amounted to 67.⁷⁹ The definition of these features as spirals, as well as the location in Blake’s illuminated books of the patterns known to be characteristic of the three other form-constants, of course, is not a property of the present writer but that of the editorial decisions of The William Blake Archive.

Of those to be discussed here, the findings are as follows. In America a Prophecy (1793) there are at least 8 different spirals, each of them potentially capable of being designated as Klüver form-constants. Perhaps the most striking is on plate 7 which has a cone-shaped spiralling serpent, standing on its tail, dominating the composition (which also includes an apparent revolutionary tribunal judging and condemning a hunched up human figure to be forced through the tunnel of a serpent’s spiral folds). The judicial ensemble and serpent spiral is obscure. Such a judgement and punishment scene may possibly refer to the political fractures in British society and national identity which occurred as a result of the American War of Independence in the late 1770s and early 1780s (whose events are alluded to several times in the poem). Equally, it may refer to the Terror of the French Revolution of the early 1790s. Reprising critical debate about its meaning up to 1995, and providing the plate’s most extensive commentary, America’s latest editor, Detlef Dörrbecker, rightly remarks on its ‘reduction of the conventional pictorial pattern which has given rise to the contradictory interpretations in modern Blake criticism.’ As he describes this particular detail, a ‘tormented figure is plunging headlong into a funnel or vortex, that is formed by the seven coils … of a hissing serpent that rises from the flames.’⁸⁰

The America plate 7 feature, a spiral of ‘coils’ in a ‘funnel or vortex’ shape according to Dörrbecker, invokes two of Klüver’s form-constants. Klüver wrote, quoting verbatim from reports in his survey sample, that ‘A third important form-constant is the spiral … there appears a brown spiral, a wide band, revolving madly around its vertical axis.’⁸¹ Although not illustrated in his book, the description of a ‘brown spiral, a wide band, revolving madly around its vertical axis,’ would certainly be consistent with Blake’s unusual image in America plate 7. The human figure, described by Dörrbecker as ‘plunging headlong into a funnel or vortex,’ is consistent with what Klüver later (incorporating feedback from his volunteers) described at length as, ‘A second form-constant … designated by terms [such] as tunnel, funnel, alley, cone or vessel. To illustrate: “Sometimes I seemed to be gazing into a vast hollow revolving vessel” … “the field of vision is similar to the interior of a cone the vertex of which is lying in the center of the field directly before the eyes (or vice versa)” … [a] “vision of a tunnel in copper-brown color … lines seem to converge in the infinite” … “deep beautiful perspectives … growing into the infinite …” “I was standing in a very long and wide tunnel.”’⁸² By contrast, given the complexities of plate 7, America plate 4 has merely a spiral-shaped piece of foliage (with its vegetable roots visible) edging the left-hand side of the page. Of course, it may be argued that while one is meaningful, the other is merely decorative but, whatever the intention, the basic shape is dominant. That is, a limited range of visual motifs (here spiral and funnel forms) are visually modulated or repeated within the work. Whatever their intended meaning, the proliferation of form-constants is noticeable in these books.

Europe a Prophecy (1794) presents another series of Klüver form-constants. Their presence is so clear that it is best to identify them briefly sequentially, before moving to a discussion. Although pre-dating Klüver’s work, Munro Smith’s 1909 BMJ article drew attention to the phenomenological similarities of migraine aura fortification spectra (which are known to include Klüver form-constants) and Europe’s more famous frontispiece print, The Ancient of Days (plate 1). While it is not claimed here that Klüver form-constants necessarily influenced The Ancient of Days, it will be argued that the Europe title page (plate ii), and Europe plate 10 are based upon spiral Klüver form-constants and Europe plate 13, based on cobweb Klüver form-constants. Consonant with Munro Smith’s claims about The Ancient of Days, the known phenomenological variants of migraine aura would certainly provide a plausible neurophysiological basis for the Klüver form-constants located in Europe.

The William Blake Archive tagged nine Europe plates for ‘spiral’ and ‘web’ features and their synonyms.⁸³ Of these, some are functionally decorative although, of course, this is because their decorative role imitates the originating visual hallucinations Blake experienced. In Europe, spirals which appear to be functionally decorative include the calligraphic flourish at the end of the ‘Y’ of ‘Prophecy’ (E 61) but other examples seem intended to convey meaning.

The first Klüver form-constant is the title page (plate ii, E 60), which is dominated by a single motif of a coiled serpent. Only a piece of foliage in the foreground and the suggestion of low-rising hills in the background provide other visual elements in a starkness of composition best seen in Copy H, the uncoloured Houghton Library copy. In most copies, this plate is preceded by The Ancient of Days print which acts, as in book making convention, as a frontispiece. As to the iconographic tradition in which this plate might be said to stand, Dörrbecker, summarizing scholarship up to 1995, concludes that ‘not just in Blake, but in British late eighteenth-century culture in general the meaning of all serpent imagery was nothing if not ambiguous.’⁸⁴ The explanation of its meaning comes in the next spiral Klüver form-constant in Europe, plate 10 (in some copies numbered by Blake as plate ‘9,’ but occurring as plates 11 and 13 in others), which shows a vertical, spiral-shaped serpent, standing on its tail, taking up the entire left-hand margin of the page and ending with a crested head radiating fire. Again, Dörrbecker is the plate’s most extensive commentator.⁸⁵ The poetry on plate 10 is concerned with a loss of revelation replaced through the intermedial presence of an ‘ancient temple serpent-form’d’ (E 63). The spiral form-constant, accessed by Blake through one of his ‘visions,’ may be aimed at indicating the potential distortion or corruption of a founding hallucinatory revelation. However, as Dörrbecker hints, much of the serpent symbolism in Blake is a communicative dead-end. Its connection to the Biblical story of Satan and its pervasiveness amongst the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, as Jacob Bryant discovered, made it a cumbersome symbol.

The final form-constant in Europe is not only much clearer, it was taken up by Blake with some vigour, and rather more successfully, as a continuum of images and symbols referring to concepts at the heart of his cultural and ideological positions about contemporary society. This cognitive usage of visual hallucinations provides another fascinating example for how a poet and artist responded to the experience of Klüver’s entoptic percepts. Pictured across much of Europe plate 12[15] is a large cobweb, fairly naturalistically rendered, accompanied by at least five spiders and several other insects. This is the ‘cobweb figure’ hallucinatory percept identified by Klüver and, as discussed above, also a prominent feature of Milton’s Mysterious Dream.⁸⁶ As with the editorial team of The William Blake Archive, Podoll and Robinson were independent assessors of the images presented to them. Cobwebs are percepts identified in some forms of epileptic hallucination as a neural disturbance of the cortex (although, as noted above, there is no evidence Blake had this disorder).⁸⁷ In the late twentieth century, Klüver’s lattice and cobweb form-constants proved particularly difficult to correlate mathematically with V1. Cowan, writing in 2014, stated that it took him and his colleagues from 1979 to 1993 to work out the mathematics of their geometry.⁸⁸ Extrapolation of these percepts from evidences in illustrations, partially based on the hand-drawn cobweb percepts of the hallucinating subjects interviewed by Klüver, can also be seen in a Figure reproduced in a journal article by Jean Petitot.⁸⁹ Of course, Blake would return to this cobweb form-constant no later than 1816 for Milton’s Mysterious Dream. One of the more striking things about this design is that Europe plate 12[15] demonstrates Blake’s willingness to give dramatic articulation to this percept. In addition to the cobweb with spiders, clearly pictured at bottom right of the Europe plate is a reclining, huddled human figure, hands together in prayer or entreaty and tightly bound or wrapped in a net, the characteristic indicator of the lattice Klüver form-constant included in his original ‘vision.’

The uncoloured (save for touches of grey wash) Copy H of Europe demonstrates very clearly that these shapes were made as relief-etched outlines on the plates and were not added later (although in most copies of Europe Blake strengthened with ink the lines binding the netted human). As a decorative echo, the lattices of a fragmentary cobweb with spider are also shown as an interlinear figure in Europe plate 13. This detail is probably meant simply to enrich the depiction of the gaoled and manacled human figure in the prison scene which dominates the design for that plate, with the scene itself perhaps alluding to the suspension of Habeas Corpus between May 1794 and July 1795.

The presence in Europe plate 12[15] of both the cobweb picture and the netted human provides a significant example of Blake’s creative use of hallucinatory percepts. Moreover, these designs have a bearing on the development of a specific strand of Blake’s poetics. Their presence marks a distinction between the neural correlates of visual hallucination and the role of their cognitive environment in V1. ‘The Net of Religion’ develops as a particularly effective metaphor in Blake’s work, with nets easily comprehensible as symbols of repression or captivity yet also directly linked to the characteristic phenomenology of a particular visual percept experienced in his ‘visions.’ From cobweb to net, the allusive symbolism is easily capable of extension and adaptation. Indeed, as one traces Blake’s development of these images, it is easy to see how adapting the ‘net’ of his lattice form-constant percept solved the expressive problem of following-up the spiral images America had initially explored. The serpent-like meaning of the spiral form-constants Blake laboured with had become, as Dörrbecker argues, confusingly embedded in eighteenth-century mythological lore and not readily capable of picturing anything in everyday life. ‘Nets of Religion,’ on the other hand, are much more strikingly memorable on account of their association with snares and traps. For the first time, it is now possible to trace how some of Blake’s ‘visions,’ in their original visual hallucinatory modes, promoted the development of a particular poetics, in this example, strikingly linked to his perspectives on contemporary religion.

This strand of imagery appears to have received a heightened stage of development in the poetic narrative of the illuminated book in colour printed relief-etching, The Book of Urizen (1794). Enitharmon’s strategy in Europe (and European history) to ‘Spread nets in every secret path,’ has already been alluded to but in The Book of Urizen Blake provides a much more challenging direction in projecting an alternative to the Genesis story of creation (E 62). The incorporation of Klüver form-constants into its poetics makes The Book of Urizen not only an alternative narrative to Genesis but also one which alludes to an alternative basis for revelation, one ultimately validated by his own experience of the visual hallucinations he called ‘my visions.’

By following the development of Klüver images over a single phase of Blake’s productivity, one can follow the intricacies of how The Book of Urizen was part of an informal mini-cycle of illuminated books, the so-called Urizen books, produced during the mid-1790s and including The Book of Los (1795) and The Book of Ahania (1795).⁹⁰ Collectively they form a re-examination of different types of ‘visionary’ or revelatory experience linked to an immediate political context. As far its historical moment is concerned, The Book of Urizen can be placed as one of many contemporary responses and reactions to Tom Paine’s book, The Age of Reason (1794), a title which hints at a source for Blake’s punning ‘Urizen,’ with the poem’s reiterated couplet, ‘And a first Age passed over, / And a state of dismal woe,’ repeated across seven ages in a parody of the Genesis creation myth (E 75). Paine’s Age of Reason, published the year after the start of the war with France in 1793, reflected—or even created—a fractured political ideology amongst radically minded British intellectuals. Although more accurately deistical, The Age of Reason was widely perceived as atheistic. Paine had been held in high esteem by British radicals for his much reprinted and excerpted, The Rights of Man (1792). He had been fortunate to escape arrest for sedition for his Rights of Man: Part Two (1792) and Letter Addressed to the Addressers, on the Late Proclamation (1792). However, The Age of Reason, which Paine wrote in Paris, seems to have arrived as an unexpected incursion into the beliefs of his political sympathizers in London.

Paine’s rational deism was difficult to accept for those holding deep Christian beliefs about the veracity of divine revelation and the resurrection. For Blake, what must have seemed an ideological volte-face by Paine (although Paine had simply not much pronounced on religion before), led to a personal ideological crisis which was typical of many in his socially aspirant, manually skilled but politically disenfranchised, class. In a brilliant essay Jerome J. McGann has argued that Paine’s Age of Reason prompted Blake to rethink what contemporary Biblical commentators, in particular Alexander Geddes (1737–1802), had written about the Bible’s textual authority as consecutive texts derived from divine revelation.⁹¹ His occasional titling of the work as The [First] Book of Urizen may indicate that Blake projected further books as a series (although none survive or are known to have been printed), but it more probably alludes to canonical books of the Bible with The Book of Urizen competing with their authority by setting up a counter-canon. Whatever he planned, The Book of Urizen ends with a created material world held captive, self-enslaved by ‘narrowing perceptions,’ memorably pictured in plate 28 (E 83). Developmentally, the cobweb and netted figure of Europe plate 12[15], foreshadow the ‘spiders web’ and ‘Net of Religion’ in The Book of Urizen. These provide fascinating examples of Blake’s cognitive processing of Klüver’s hallucinatory percepts and their transformation into poetry.

It is worth tracing how Blake attaches verbal poetic meanings to these entoptic visual images:

Verse

Verse 6. … A cold shadow follow’d behind him [Urizen] Like a spiders web, moist, cold, & dim Drawing out from his sorrowing soul The dungeon-like heaven dividing. Where ever the footsteps of Urizen Walk’d over the cities in sorrow. 7. Till a Web dark & cold, throughout all The tormented element stretch’d From the sorrows of Urizens soul And the Web is a Female in embrio None could break the Web, no wings of fire. 8. So twisted the cords, & so knotted The meshes: twisted like to the human brain 9. And calld it. The Net of Religion. (25: 8–21, E 82)

In a perhaps unexpected twist, Blake’s utilization of Klüver form-constant in his poetics does not celebrate visual hallucinations but, on the contrary, describes their debasement, perhaps prompted by the ‘dark & cold’ environment of wartime Britain in the 1790s. In a remarkable development of the entoptic images he had experienced, the ‘spiders Web,’ a ‘Web dark & cold,’ becomes a ‘Net’ of ‘narrowing perceptions.’ Suggesting their close alliance within V1’s architecture, Podoll and Robinson treat ‘nets’ as a subgroup of web forms.⁹² Still retaining their symmetrical stability, one percept changes into a ‘Web,’ or ‘a Female in embrio,’ and another into a ‘Net of Religion.’ Although the Klüver visual hallucinations (what Blake calls in The Book of Urizen, ‘the dark visions of Los’) have become acculturated, gendered and assigned with a religion, they noticeably still retain the integrity of their form-constant patterns (E 78). In the case of The Book of Urizen, the Klüver cobweb and lattice form-constants of Blake’s original ‘visions’ are modified into their abstractions, a ‘Web dark & cold’ and a ‘Net of Religion,’ both indicative of ‘narrowing perceptions.’

What makes The Book of Urizen remarkable is the sophistication with which, by 1794, Blake has made the corruption (‘the dark visions’) of Klüver form-constants consonant with the ‘narrowing perceptions’ he was sensing in the repressive political atmosphere of contemporary Britain. The degree of Blake’s cognitive insight into his visual hallucinations demonstrates how non-pathological hallucinations can be incorporated into highly creative and philosophically analytical forms. The Urizen books offer a rare opportunity to trace the development and cognitive assimilation of hallucinatory percepts into a discourse of social commentary and poetics set against a backdrop of revolution and war.

The Book of Urizen, Ahania and The Book of Los, are all to some degree responses to the ideological trauma Paine’s book precipitated amongst radical writers and intellectuals. Viewed with the hindsight of the Urizen books, Blake’s An Allegory of the Bible drawing, for example, shows how early he was querying the Bible’s textual authority and supplementing it with his own experience of ‘visions’ originating in those entoptic images which appeared within his visual field in forms, much as Samuel Palmer claimed, as self-evidently tangible. The last one to be examined here, The Book of Los, which exists as a single copy, is another of the works from this cycle which incorporated his perception of Klüver patterns. The book’s precise provenance is confirmed by its publication location and date inscribed in intaglio etching ‘LAMBETH / Printed by W Blake 1795.’ In a remarkable design, The Book of Los plate 3 exhibits all four Klüver form-constants (viz. (a) tunnels/funnels (b) spirals (c) lattices and (d) cobwebs/concentric circles), all of them almost certainly linked to the phenomenology of migraine aura.

The broad aim of The Book of Los, as with The Book of Urizen, is to question or satirize the authority of Genesis by offering an alternative narrative of creation. It is plausible that the incorporation of traces of his revelatory ‘visions’ were a direct response to the deism of Paine, Blake’s own affirmation of a spiritual world Paine’s Age of Reason had repudiated. At the least, The Book of Los plate 3 offers an opportunity to observe how these worked in his creative imagination. The four Klüver form-constants in The Book of Los plate 3 are all elaborations of the intaglio etched word, ‘LOS.’ Its elliptically shaped ‘O’ contains a picture of a bearded male who holds an open book (or two inscribed tablets) resembling traditional renditions of the decalogue. From this ‘O’ flows a lattice or net (colour printed in green), which also extends behind the bearded figure, looking like the beginnings of a concave/convex covering or roof (under the upperside of the ‘O’), but also reaching forward to support to two supine figures, one male, one female, who lie directly on the lattice work. The flow of the lattice suggests a funnel or vortex reaching to these reclining figures yet is itself also shaped into the partially radiant shape of a cobweb. The intaglio etched letter ‘S’ of the word ‘LOS’ ends in a spiral. The decorative aspects of augmenting the word, ‘LOS,’ seem to be virtually sui generis with its extraordinary design showing clearly the presence of the four Klüver form-constants which were present at its inception.

It is even possible to assign a probable physiology at the origins of Blake’s visual hallucination. One paper produces a fascinating visualization of a scotoma with hallucinations of the Klüver lattice form-constant type which is helpful in defining the compositional contents of The Book of Los plate 3 and how they might relate to migraine aura.⁹³ The migraine feature illustrated is an elliptically shaped, double hemifield scotoma. The authors note that it is visible with eyes open or closed and may decrease in size or appear up to four times larger than shown. The lattice form manifests within the scotoma. Their illustration is consistent with Sacks (1992) and Podoll and Robinson (2008), suggesting that some migraine with aura episodes exhibit Klüver form-constant features.⁹⁴ These designs contained within the intaglio etched word ‘LOS’ of plate 3, also direct us back towards An Allegory of the Bible (c. 1780–1785). The opened book or twin tablets held by the bearded human crouched within the ‘O’ of ‘LOS,’ mirrors the opened book in An Allegory of the Bible. The contexts of both works suggest that their meanings are connected to debates about Biblical authority, perhaps specifically the authority of the Bible in its written form distinct from its possible spiritual meaning. Both pictures provide evidence of the two Klüver form-constants of lattice and tunnel shapes. The steps and tiled floor which dominated An Allegory of the Bible foreshadow the lattice or chequered floor on which the two male and female reclining human figures rest in The Book of Los vignette.

Once one makes the connections between these designs as actualizations of the visual hallucinations Blake called his ‘visions,’ it becomes easier to see that they are both not just simply validations or interrogations of the Bible but also, as with the figure of Hervey captioned in Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations Among the Tombs,” supplements recording the insights afforded by his ‘visions’ and marking his distance from contemporary religious and political doctrine. Not least, Blake’s ability, visible in the traces of Klüver form-constants left in the illuminated books of the early 1790s, to experience hallucinations yet retain an exceptionally high degree of social functionality was a facility repeated in his late life in his conversations with Crabb Robinson (discussed in Chap. 8), when he spoke to him about Voltaire, Socrates and blasphemy while apparently experiencing episodes of synaesthesia. As with all the examples discussed in this chapter, Blake’s hallucinatory types, in their several variations, occurred across his life and across his artistic output. The presence of ‘visions’ in his paintings and poetics, and even his general discourse, now needs to be reassessed from the beginning.