intellectual fire

When i was a school boy I loved the poetry of Blake, Thel and of course the Songs of Innocence and Experience. I was that school boy caged in class and longing to escape into the countryside.

Reading Raine's book on Blake I was very interested to hear that his poems  Little Girl Lost and Little Girl Found are a retelling of the Greater and Lesser Mysteries of Eleusis. They were inspired, apparently, by Blake's reading of Thomas Taylor's The Eleusian and Bacchic Mysteries. Of course!

I used that very wonderful book as one of my main sources for my chapter on the Mystery Schools of the ancient world, but had entirely failed to make the connection with Blake and so failed to appreciate that layer of meaning in Blake's poems!

Making the connection now sparks the brain, sets off one or two currents.

That's something i want to teach my children - the value of intellectual curiosity. Even if your life is going very badly, if the material world is against you and the spirit worlds seem closed to you, if all seems dark, you can still create a spark.

Taylor's book is quite hard to find, but I recommend it as packed with esoteric lore. He is interesting, for example, on the evidence that those about to be initiated were attacked by material demons, the idea that Hades is on one level the human body, and the related idea that Hell begins in this life. These latter two are examples of material I couldn't weave into my own book without weighing down the narrative so much that it slumped to the floor like soggy cardboard. (There was such a richness of material readily available, it could have been written in some many different ways.)

He also quotes Clemens: whatever we see when awake is death. What a succinct commentary on that most esoteric of fairy tales Sleeping Beauty.

Comments

[Michael Allen]

I've just had a trawl on the internet for the Thomas Taylor book and found several s/h copies at a price, and also a new book which incorporates this book among others called 'Oracles and Mysteries' by Thomas Taylor
However I found eventually on www.innerbookshop.com a new edition of 'The Eleusian and Bacchic Mysteries' for £11.35 if anyone is interested . I couldn't find any trace of this on other sites such as Amazon or bookfinder so it must have just been re-issued.