In conventional history Romanticism was a reaction to the polite, ordered eighteenth century. In the secret history it was demonic forces, rather than merely subconscious forces, that caused this reaction.
The roots of this reaction were sexual.
IN JULY 1744 JOHN PAUL BROCKMER, a London watchmaker, worried what on earth was wrong with his lodger. Emmanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish engineer, had seemed a quiet, respectable character, attending the local Moravian chapel every Sunday.
Now his hair stood on end. He foamed at the mouth and chased Brockmer down the street, gibbering and apparently claiming to be the Messiah. Brockmer tried to persuade him to see a doctor but instead Swedenborg went to the Swedish embassy. When they wouldn’t let him in, he ran to a nearby drainage ditch, undressed himself and rolled around in the mud, throwing money at the crowd.
In a recent breakthrough book, the fruit of years of meticulous research, Marsha Keith Suchard reveals that Swedenborg had been experimenting with certain sexual techniques for achieving extreme altered states of consciousness that were taught at the outwardly respectable Moravian chapel. Marsha Keith Suchard also shows that William Blake was brought up in this church and that these sexual practices inspired his poetry.
We have touched on various techniques for inducing altered states, including breathing exercises, dancing and meditation. But these sexual techniques are the hard stuff, the most closely guarded secrets of the secret societies. It’s instructive, then, to follow with Marsha Keith Suchard the different stages of development of Swedenborg’s practice, as recorded in his journals and alluded to in his publications.
Even as a boy Swedenborg had experimented with breath control. He noticed that if he held his breath for long periods, he went into a sort of trance. He discovered, too, that by synchronizing his breath to his pulse he could deepen the trance. ‘Sometimes I was reduced into a state of insensibility as to the body senses, thus almost unto the state of dying persons, retaining however my interior life unimpaired, attended with the power of thinking and with sufficient breathing for life.’ Persistence in these techniques could bring practitioners great rewards… ‘there is a certain cheering light and joyful, confirmatory brightness that plays around the sphere of the mind, and a kind of mysterious radiation… that darts through some temple in the brain… the soul is called into a more inward communion, and has returned at that moment into the golden age of its intellectual perfections. The mind… in the kindling flame of its love despises all in comparison… all merely corporeal pleasures.’ Swedenborg seems to be describing different stages of altered states of the kind we have seen involved in the process of initiation. As Marsha Keith has pointed out, modern neurological research has confirmed that meditation increases the levels of DHEAS and melatonin, secretions produced by the pineal and pituitary glands which together are said by occultists to create the Third Eye.
At the age of fifteen Swedenborg was sent to live with his brother-in-law, who for the next seven years would be his mentor, and it was here at his new home that Swedenborg’s own researches turned markedly cabalistic.
We have seen how in the Cabala, as in all esoteric traditions, the creation is conceived of in terms of a series of emanations (sephiroth, or servants) from the cosmic mind. In the Cabala, as much as in the myths of the Greeks and Romans, these emanations are thought of as male and female. The En Sof, the unattainable cosmic mind, emanates male and female spirits, and these intertwine in a sexual way as the impulse of creation spirals downwards. In the same way that erotic images in the mind create sperm, the En Sof’s acts of loving imagination generate physical effects. The imagination — and particularly the sexually-fired imagination — is therefore seen to be the root principle of creativity.
On this cabalistic account, the Fall happened because of an imbalance which occurred between the male and female sephiroth. By imagining balanced and harmonious love-making between the sephiroth, the adept helps set right this primordial cosmic wrong.
In cabalistic lore the Cherubim arching their wings above the Ark of the Holy Covenant in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple were seen as an image of the harmonious love-making of the male and female sephiroth. Then when the second Temple was sacked by Antiochus in 168 BC, these erotic images were paraded through the streets to ridicule the Jews. When the Temple was destroyed in AD 70, a great need arose in the heart of the people to rebuild it. Sacred imagery of the love-making of the male and female sephira lay at the heart of a programme to right a historical wrong.
Swedenborg also wrote about rhythmic breathing methods relating to the pulse of the genitals. It is evident that, while living with his father’s brother-in-law, he began to practise such exercises in breath control in conjunction with the imagining of naked human bodies contorted erotically into the shapes of Hebrew letters already alluded to. These were believed to be powerful magical emblems or sigils. Similar techniques of taking sexual energies and using them as a force for spiritual good are used by some Hasidic groups today. Bob Dylan, who is in some way heir to the poetic tradition of Blake, has explored some of these practices.
The element of control is crucial to these practices and this was emphasized in another esoteric tradition of sexually charged spirituality. The expansion of European empires eastwards had caused rumours of Tantric practices to trickle back in the other direction. Swedenborg explored sexual tantra in detail. Psychological discipline was needed to achieve prolonged arousal. This in turn was needed to redirect sexual energies to the brain and thereby achieve a breakthrough into the spirit worlds, a visionary ecstasy rather than a narrowly sexual one. Swedenborg also mastered what is by all accounts an extremely difficult technique of muscle control known to Indian adepts, whereby at the moment of ejaculation the sperm is diverted to the bladder and therefore not expelled.
Clearly the techniques are dangerous — one of the reasons why they are kept so secret. They risk the sort of nervous breakdown witnessed by Swedenborg’s landlord, not to mention madness and death.
The peculiar admixture to his researches that Swedenborg discovered while attending the Moravian church in New Fetter Lane was a specifically Christian version of the arcana of love. At that time Moravians in London were under the sway of the charismatic Count Zizendorf. Members of the congregation were encouraged by him to visualize, smell and touch in imagination the side wound in the body of Christ. This wound was, in Zizendorf’s vision, a sweet, luscious vagina oozing a magical juice. The spear of Longinus was to be thrust repeatedly and ecstatically into it.
Zizendorf encouraged sex as a sacramental act and urged his followers to see the divine, spiritual emanations in each other at the moment of climax. A joint mental prayer at this moment has particular magical force. As Swedenborg put it, ‘partner sees partner in mind… each partner has the other in himself’ so they ‘cohabit in their innermost’. In a visionary trance partners were able to meet, communicate, even make love in their dismembered, spiritual forms.
Marsha Keith Suchard records that Blake’s parents were members of this congregation and that Blake absorbed these ideas from his wide reading of Swedenborg. She has shown how the prudish Victorians erased from Blake’s drawings much explicitly sexual imagery — including drawing pairs of underpants over genitals. Although there is a popular understanding that Blake was influenced by the esoteric philosophy of Swedenborg and others, we have until now overlooked these very specific techniques of sex magic that were at the root of his imaginative vision.