The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Based on Wikipedia: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Devil's Bible

In 1790, a London engraver named William Blake began etching one of the most provocative religious texts ever written. He called it The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The title alone was blasphemy. For nearly two millennia, Christian theology had insisted that heaven and hell were eternal enemies, separated by an unbridgeable chasm. Blake proposed they should be wed.

This wasn't mere shock value. Blake genuinely believed that the entire moral framework of Western religion had gotten things backwards.

He argued that what churches called "evil"—passion, desire, creative energy—was actually divine. And what they called "good"—obedience, restraint, submission to authority—was a kind of spiritual death. The demons in his cosmology weren't villains. They were artists, rebels, and truth-tellers. The angels? Bureaucrats of the soul.

How Blake Made His Books

Before diving into what Blake wrote, it's worth understanding how he wrote it. Blake didn't just compose poetry or prose. He invented an entirely new medium. Each page of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was carved in reverse into a copper plate. Blake then inked the plate and pressed it onto paper, creating pages where text and images intertwined inseparably. After printing, he and his wife Catherine hand-painted each copy with watercolors.

This meant no two copies were identical. Each was a unique object, part book and part painting.

The technique was painstaking. A single plate might take days to engrave. But it gave Blake total control over his work. He needed no publisher, no printer, no approval from anyone. In an era when radical ideas could land you in prison, this self-sufficiency was both artistic statement and survival strategy.

Only nine complete copies of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell survive today. Each one is worth millions.

The Revolution in the Background

Blake composed this work between 1790 and 1793. To understand why it reads like a manifesto, you need to know what was happening in those years.

The French Revolution had just exploded across the English Channel. The Bastille had fallen. The monarchy was collapsing. Across Europe, ordinary people were suddenly asking dangerous questions: Why should kings rule? Why should priests control what we think? Why should a tiny aristocracy own everything while millions starve?

London was alive with radical politics. Underground printing presses churned out revolutionary pamphlets. The workers who operated these presses were often ink-stained from head to foot, and they had a nickname: "printer's devils."

Blake was one of them, metaphorically and literally. He ran his own press. And when conservative preachers denounced revolutionary literature as "the work of the devil," Blake decided to embrace the insult. If speaking truth to power made you a devil, then hell must be the place where honest people gathered.

The Argument with Swedenborg

The full title is actually a joke—a very pointed one.

In 1758, a Swedish scientist and mystic named Emanuel Swedenborg had published a book called Heaven and Hell. Swedenborg claimed to have visited both realms during mystical visions and returned with detailed accounts of their geography, inhabitants, and rules. His writings attracted a devoted following, and by Blake's time, Swedenborgian churches were spreading across England.

Blake had initially been drawn to Swedenborg's grand cosmic vision. Here was someone who took the spiritual world seriously, who described it with the precision of a naturalist cataloging species. But as Blake read deeper, he grew disgusted.

Swedenborg's heaven turned out to be appallingly conventional. The blessed souls spent eternity in orderly communities, observing strict moral codes, married in proper heterosexual unions, organized into hierarchies that looked suspiciously like the class system of eighteenth-century Europe. His hell, meanwhile, was populated by anyone who enjoyed bodily pleasure too much or questioned authority.

In other words, Swedenborg had traveled to the infinite and returned with bourgeois morality dressed in mystical robes.

Blake was furious. He titled his own book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a direct rebuttal. Where Swedenborg insisted heaven and hell must remain forever separate, Blake declared they should merge. Where Swedenborg saw clear boundaries between good and evil, Blake saw a false dichotomy that crippled the human spirit.

Milton's Secret Devil

Blake makes an extraordinary claim early in the text. He argues that John Milton, the great Puritan poet who wrote Paradise Lost, was secretly on the devil's side.

This sounds absurd at first. Milton was a devout Christian who wrote the most famous retelling of the Genesis story in English literature. His stated purpose was to "justify the ways of God to men." How could he be a devil's partisan?

Blake's answer is subtle and brilliant. Look at Paradise Lost honestly, he says. Which character has all the best lines? Which one has depth, complexity, courage, and passion? Satan. Milton's God, by contrast, comes across as a remote tyrant issuing edicts from a celestial throne. His angels are obedient servants without personality.

Milton poured his creative fire into Satan because Milton was himself a rebel. He had served in Oliver Cromwell's revolutionary government. He had written pamphlets defending the execution of King Charles I. He knew what it meant to defy established authority.

Blake's conclusion: Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it." His unconscious sympathies overrode his conscious theology. The proof is in the poetry itself.

The Proverbs of Hell

The most famous section of the book is a collection of aphorisms that Blake attributes to the inhabitants of hell. These are the opposite of conventional wisdom. Where the Biblical Book of Proverbs counsels moderation, prudence, and respect for authority, the Proverbs of Hell celebrate excess, energy, and holy transgression.

Some have become famous far beyond their original context:

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

This isn't an endorsement of reckless hedonism. Blake means that you cannot know your limits without testing them. The person who always holds back, who never pushes beyond comfortable boundaries, will never discover what they're truly capable of. Wisdom comes through experience, including the experience of going too far.

"The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

Here Blake contrasts two kinds of knowledge. The "horses of instruction" are domesticated, trained to follow commands, useful but ultimately servants. The "tygers of wrath" are wild, dangerous, and free. They embody a wisdom that cannot be taught because it comes from authentic feeling rather than imposed rules.

Blake is suspicious of formal education, which he sees as a system for breaking spirits and producing compliant workers. True wisdom, he suggests, is more likely to emerge from passionate engagement with life than from sitting in classrooms.

Other proverbs are more cryptic:

"The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship."

Each creature builds according to its nature. Birds make nests. Spiders spin webs. Humans create relationships. This is what we're designed to do. A human who lives without deep connection is as unnatural as a bird that refuses to build a nest.

The filmmaker Kelly Reichardt used this proverb as the epigraph to her 2019 film First Cow, a quiet story about an unlikely friendship on the American frontier.

The Doctrine of Contraries

Blake's central philosophical argument appears in a famous passage:

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence."

This is not the same as saying opposites exist. Blake is making a stronger claim: opposites require each other. You cannot have progress without tension. You cannot have creation without destruction. You cannot have meaning without the possibility of meaninglessness.

Good and evil, Blake continues, are names we give to these fundamental contraries. Religious institutions have taught us that good should triumph over evil, that we should suppress our "dark" impulses and cultivate only the "light." But this is like trying to have a magnet with only one pole. It's not just impossible—it's a category error.

Blake divides humanity into two types: "energetic creators" and "rational organizers." The creators bring new things into existence. They are driven by passion, vision, and desire. The organizers systematize and preserve what already exists. They are driven by logic, tradition, and fear of chaos.

Both are necessary. Without creators, there would be nothing new under the sun. Without organizers, nothing would last. But Blake clearly identifies with the creators—the "devils" in his cosmology. He sees his era as one in which the organizers have gained too much power, where institutional religion has become a machine for crushing creative energy in the name of moral order.

How Religion Goes Wrong

One of Blake's most devastating passages traces the origins of organized religion:

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive."

In the beginning, Blake says, there was poetry. Early humans looked at the world and saw it as alive with divine presences. Every river had a spirit. Every mountain was sacred. This wasn't primitive superstition but a genuine perception of the numinous quality of existence.

Then came the priests. They "took advantage" of these poetic visions, Blake says, by abstracting the deities from their objects. The river-god became a disembodied God. The sacred mountain became a distant Heaven. The divine was removed from the material world and placed in a separate realm accessible only through official intermediaries.

"Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast."

For Blake, this is the original sin—not Adam's apple, but the priesthood's theft. They stole divinity from the world and from humanity, then sold it back to us in the form of institutional religion. The cure is not atheism but a return to the original vision: recognizing that the sacred is not elsewhere but here, not in churches but in bodies, not in scripture but in imagination.

A Surprising Afterlife

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was almost unknown during Blake's lifetime. He sold perhaps a few dozen copies, mostly to friends and a small circle of admirers. When he died in 1827, he was remembered primarily as an eccentric engraver who had produced some unusual illustrated books.

Then, in the twentieth century, everything changed.

Aldous Huxley discovered Blake while researching the psychology of mystical experience. One line in particular seized him:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite."

Huxley made this the title of his 1954 book The Doors of Perception, which described his experiments with the psychedelic drug mescaline. He argued that drugs could temporarily "cleanse the doors" and allow ordinary people to glimpse what mystics and poets like Blake had always seen.

A decade later, a young musician named Jim Morrison read Huxley's book and named his band after it. The Doors became one of the defining groups of the 1960s counterculture, and through them, Blake's phrase entered mainstream consciousness. Millions of people who had never read a line of Blake knew about the doors of perception.

C.S. Lewis, the Christian apologist, took a very different lesson from Blake. In 1945, he published The Great Divorce, a fantasy in which souls from hell are given a chance to visit heaven. The title is an explicit rebuttal to Blake: Lewis insists that heaven and hell cannot be married, that you must choose one or the other, that there is no middle ground in the cosmic struggle between good and evil.

Both responses—Huxley's embrace and Lewis's rejection—testify to Blake's enduring power. He wrote something that demands a response.

The Funeral of Colette Peignot

One of the strangest episodes in the book's afterlife occurred in 1938, in Paris.

Colette Peignot was a French writer who had devoted her short life to transgression. She wrote violent, erotic texts that scandalized even the avant-garde circles she moved in. Her lover was Georges Bataille, a philosopher fascinated by excess, sacrifice, and the sacred dimensions of extreme experience.

Peignot died at thirty-five, from tuberculosis. At her funeral, according to Bataille's biographer Michel Surya, Bataille threw pages torn from Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell into her casket.

It was the perfect tribute. Peignot had lived the book. She had refused to separate her spiritual yearnings from her bodily desires. She had courted excess, pushed past every boundary, sought wisdom through experiences that respectable society condemned. In the end, Bataille honored her with the only scripture adequate to her life: the devil's bible.

A Living Influence

Blake's book continues to resonate through contemporary culture in ways both obvious and subtle.

The Norwegian experimental band Ulver—their name is Norwegian for "wolves"—released a double album in 1998 that set Blake's entire text to music. It shifts between electronic ambience, industrial noise, and something approaching black metal, a sonic marriage of heaven and hell in its own right.

The Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk titled her 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead after a line from Blake's proverbs. The book is a murder mystery set in a remote Polish village, but it's also a meditation on animal rights, astrology, and the fine line between prophecy and madness—themes Blake would have recognized.

David Foster Wallace, in his massive 1996 novel Infinite Jest, invents an avant-garde film called "The Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell." The joke is characteristically Wallace: intellectual, layered, simultaneously mocking and honoring its source.

Even the 1988 baseball comedy Bull Durham gets in on the act. Susan Sarandon's character, Annie Savoy, quotes the road-of-excess proverb while explaining her philosophy of minor-league romance. It's not the context Blake imagined, but he might have appreciated it. He believed that the sacred showed up in unexpected places, that wisdom could emerge from desire, that the body's knowledge was as valid as the mind's.

What Blake Was Really Saying

Strip away the eighteenth-century language and the mystical imagery, and Blake's argument is surprisingly modern.

He's saying that moral systems designed to control behavior often end up crushing the very qualities that make life worth living. He's saying that institutions claiming to speak for God usually speak for their own power. He's saying that the division between sacred and profane, spirit and matter, heaven and hell, is a lie we've been told so often that we've forgotten it's a lie.

He's also saying something more radical: that the divine is not a distant judge but an energy flowing through all living things. When you create, when you love, when you rage against injustice, when you refuse to submit to deadening authority—in those moments, you participate in the divine. The devils in Blake's hell are not damned souls suffering for their sins. They are artists at work, prophets speaking truth, lovers embracing, revolutionaries dreaming of a better world.

Heaven, in Blake's telling, is where you go to follow rules. Hell is where you go to break them.

The marriage he proposes is not a compromise between these opposites but a recognition that they need each other. A world of pure order would be a prison. A world of pure chaos would be uninhabitable. The goal is dynamic tension, the creative friction that makes genuine life possible.

Two centuries after Blake etched his copper plates, we're still arguing about where to draw the line between freedom and restraint, passion and reason, individual vision and social order. He didn't settle the argument. He gave us better language for having it.