The Work
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was composed and etched by William Blake between approximately 1790 and 1793, printed in his distinctive illuminated relief-etching technique in which text and images are engraved together on copper plates and hand-colored. It is a prose-poem manifesto in the form of a visionary journey, organized loosely around a series of sections: an introduction invoking a prophetic tradition, a 'Argument,' the encounter with devils who speak more truly than angels, the famous 'Proverbs of Hell,' 'Memorable Fancies' (parodies of Swedenborg's 'Memorable Relations'), and a final 'Song of Liberty.' It runs to roughly twenty-seven plates.
The work is simultaneously a response to Emanuel Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell (1758), which Blake had annotated with increasingly hostile marginalia; a parody of orthodox Christian dualism between good and evil; a manifesto for the creative energy Blake identified with the prophetic imagination; and the most sustained act of biblical irony in Romantic literature.
Biblical Engagement
Isaiah 14:12 - 'How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!' - is the text Blake most audaciously subverts. In orthodox theology, Lucifer's fall is the paradigmatic act of prideful rebellion; in Blake, it is the paradigmatic act of creative energy against passive obedience. Satan/Lucifer becomes a figure for the poetic genius that refuses to submit to the dead letter of religious authority. Blake's devil declares that 'The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.' This is the foundational statement of all Romantic Satanism.
Revelation 20:14 - 'And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire' - names the conventional destination for Blake's 'Hell,' which he inverts: in the work, Hell is the realm of energy, passion, desire, and creativity; Heaven is the realm of passive obedience, restraint, and the dead letter. Blake is not denying the biblical text so much as arguing that the categories of Heaven and Hell have been systematically misassigned by the 'Angels' - the priests and moralists who have used religion to enforce passive conformity and suppress the energies of life.
Proverbs 9:10 - 'The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom' - is the kind of biblical wisdom saying Blake parodies in his 'Proverbs of Hell.' His Proverbs - 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom'; 'No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings'; 'The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction' - systematically invert the values of biblical wisdom literature, replacing prudence with excess, humility with self-assertion, and fear of God with trust in creative energy. The parody works because Blake knows the original texts intimately enough to invert them precisely.
Author and Context
William Blake (1757-1827) was a London engraver and poet who worked outside the literary mainstream of his day, selling his illuminated books in tiny editions to a small audience. He was formed by the dissenting Protestant tradition - his family may have been Swedenborgians - but broke violently with it in the late 1780s. The French Revolution (1789) and the American Revolution (1776) provided the political context for his anti-authoritarian theology: the tyrannies of kings and priests were, for Blake, expressions of the same principle of repression that he identified with 'Heaven' as conventionally understood.
Blake's reading of the Bible was intensive and lifelong, but it was a reading that distinguished sharply between the 'Poetic Genius' that he believed had originally inspired the biblical prophets and the dead letter of doctrinal orthodoxy that he believed had subsequently institutionalized and killed that inspiration. His prophetic books - America, Europe, The Book of Urizen, Jerusalem - develop a complex personal mythology that reworks biblical material, but The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is his most direct and accessible engagement with the Bible as a target of ironic subversion.
Themes
The work's central argument is that conventional religion has divided what Blake sees as the unified energies of human existence into false opposites. 'Good' has been associated with passivity, restraint, and submission; 'evil' with energy, desire, and creation. Blake argues that this division has served the interests of priests and tyrants who profit from keeping the human energies in check. True religion - the religion of the prophets before they were institutionalized - is the religion of energy and imagination.
The work also contains one of the earliest systematic statements of what would later be called antinomianism: the view that moral law is a form of oppression rather than liberation. Blake's 'Proverbs of Hell' do not argue that murder or theft is permissible; they argue that the suppression of desire, passion, and creative excess - enforced in the name of moral law - is itself a form of spiritual murder.
Reception
The work circulated in tiny numbers in Blake's lifetime and was not widely known until the late nineteenth century, when Swinburne's study of Blake (1868) brought it to attention. Yeats and Ellis's edition of Blake's works (1893) gave it wider circulation. In the twentieth century it became one of the most quoted texts in the Romantic counter-tradition: the Beats, the 1960s counterculture, and the New Age movement all drew on its language.
Legacy
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is the fountainhead of literary Satanism and the Romantic rehabilitation of creative rebellion. Its influence runs from Shelley and Byron through Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire to Allen Ginsberg and the rock and roll tradition. Its specific contribution to the history of biblical reception is the demonstration that scripture can be irony's most powerful target when wielded by a reader who knows it too well for reverence to survive unexamined.