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WILLIAM BLAKE'S SEXUAL PATH TO SPIRITUAL VISION
Bibliophile price £9.00
Published price $19.95
Miranda Seymour in the Sunday Times said 'Schuchard places Blake at the heart of a secret London as high on spiritualized sexuality as San Francisco in the 'summer of love'.' William Blake (1757-1827) has long been treasured as an artist and poet whose work was born out of authentic spiritual vision. The acutely personal almost otherworldly look at his artwork, combined with its archetypal casting and depth of emotion, transcends social convention and ordinary experience. The book breaks new ground investigating the psycho-sexual practices that surrounded this famous artist. Schuchard's fastidious research includes new archival discoveries of Blake family documents, and reveals how early Moravian and Swedenborgian erotic and visionary experimentation fuelled much of Blake's creative and spiritual life, and found expression in the explicit sexual imagery of his art. Much of this was lost to posterity, when religious conservatives pressured Blake's pious executor to oppress all overtly sexual aspects of his work, and which was subsequently altered or destroyed. The latest findings combined with advances in photographic techniques used in modern-day art research reveal this previously censored imagery. The discoveries support the belief that Blake explored kabbalistic and tantric extramarital sexual practices that were designed to transcend the bonds of social convention, and that he pressured his wife to join him in these explorations. The book provides a new context for understanding the mystical practices at the heart of his most radical beliefs about sexualised spirituality and its relation to visionary art. In this way the book bravely explores the 'sexual-spiritual underworld' and is a fascinating history of both the erotic and the occult, a weird esoteric, erotic and apocalyptic counter-culture brewing in an otherwise 'enlightened' 18th century. 'The closing insights into the refusal of Blake's libido to synchronise with his fading physicality are deeply moving.' - The Telegraph. Well illustrated large softback with index, 398pp. Includes graphic woodcut illus. such as Lord George Riot suffering a clipping to become a Jew, James Gillray's Love In A Coffin (1784) and anatomical drawings of the penis and scrotum. 398pp, large softback.

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