Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

The Work

William Blake's Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, completed and printed around 1820 in an edition of only five copies, is the longest, most ambitious, and most densely biblical of all his illuminated books. The 100 copper plates of text and image constitute a complete mythological-theological epic in which the fallen giant Albion (England and universal humanity) must awaken from the sleep of materialism and self-righteousness to be redeemed by the divine forgiveness incarnate in Los and Jerusalem. The book incorporates imagery and theology drawn from nearly every book of the Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, reorganizing the entire scriptural canon into a sustained argument about the nature of spiritual freedom and the imagination as the divine in humanity.

Biblical Source

The title and central female figure draw on Revelation 21:2, the New Jerusalem descending as a bride adorned for her husband. The frontispiece figure of Los with his globe of fire draws on Revelation 14:14–19, the angel with the sickle who reaps the earth's harvest. Ezekiel's wheel vision (Ezekiel 1:15–21) provides the imagery of the Zoas and their wheels. Genesis 1:2 ('the earth was formless and empty') underlies the fallen world of Albion's sleep. The Gospels, particularly John, provide the theology of the Incarnation as the divine forgiveness that can redeem Albion's fallen condition.

The Artist

Blake etched, printed, and hand-colored each copy of Jerusalem individually between about 1804 and 1820. The surviving copies differ significantly in their coloring and finishing, and each represents a unique artistic object. Blake sold few copies in his lifetime and received little recognition for the work. The book's full significance was not appreciated until the 20th century, when scholars including Northrop Frye (in Fearful Symmetry, 1947) demonstrated its systematic mythological architecture. Blake's Jerusalem is now considered one of the supreme achievements of English Romanticism.

Iconography

The visual programme of Jerusalem deploys a complex iconography of Los (the poetic imagination), Urizen (reason and law), Vala (natural religion), Luvah (passion), and Tharmas (body) - Blake's fourfold mythology - against a landscape that is simultaneously England, biblical Israel, and the eternal human psyche. The plates range from full-page compositions of extraordinary visual complexity to pages where text and marginal decoration interact in continuous visual argument. The final plate, showing the liberated Albion with arms spread wide in a Christlike posture before the sun of eternity, is one of the most visually powerful images in Blake's entire output.

Significance

Jerusalem is Blake's most ambitious attempt to give the Bible - and particularly the prophetic tradition from Isaiah and Ezekiel through Revelation - a new visual and philosophical form applicable to the spiritually and politically desperate conditions of Regency England. Its insistence that the biblical story is an 'Eternal Gospel' enacted within each human consciousness rather than a historical deposit has made it a foundational text for liberation theology, for psychoanalytic approaches to religion, and for the Romantic tradition in English poetry and art.

Blake's technical method for Jerusalem involved etching the entire text and images on copper plates in relief, printing them in black ink, and in some copies applying watercolor by hand. The process of composition -- writing and designing simultaneously, the text and image inseparable -- meant that Jerusalem is neither a poem illustrated with images nor images accompanied by a poem but a single integrated visual-poetic object. The hundred plates were printed in five copies during Blake's lifetime, of which the most completely colored is now in the Yale Center for British Art. Only one copy was fully finished in Blake's own time.

The theological argument of Jerusalem unfolds through its four chapters, each addressed to a different audience (to the Public, to the Jews, to the Deists, to the Christians), and its resolution comes when Albion, recognizing Christ's self-sacrifice in the Divine Vision, throws himself 'into the furnaces of affliction' and is reborn. The final pages show Los and Enitharmon (creative imagination and its emanation) reunited with Albion and Jerusalem in the New Creation, a vision of universal reconciliation drawn from the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21 and the restoration promises of Isaiah 65-66. Blake's insistence that this redemption is achievable 'now' -- in this life, through the liberation of the imagination -- makes Jerusalem a practical as well as an eschatological vision.## Visiting Info

The most accessible copy of Jerusalem for viewing is Copy E, in the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Copy C is in the British Museum, London, and can be viewed by appointment. The British Museum's Prints and Drawings collection also holds other Blake illuminated books and can be visited by appointment. The Library of Congress and Harvard's Houghton Library hold additional copies. Full digital facsimiles of all copies are available through the William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org).