Sacred Visions: Blake and First Nations Peoples

Changing Our Minds, the recent series of Conversations with North American and Australian speakers, proved a rich and challenging experience. Diane Pacitti was struck by the similarities between the vision of indigenous peoples and that of William Blake, our own artist-poet and prophet, baptised in St James’s in 1757.

Diane has written a reflection on this for the website of the William Blake Society, and offers a fuller version here.

Background Shape
Church Window Mask

He is such a familiar figure. That ancient, white-bearded male stretching out his controlling rod. That joyless but prurient despot who in the guise of the Angel of the Divine Presence seems to fondle Adam and Eve with his huge hands even as he clothes their bodies. A North American or Australian First Nations person might look at Blake’s coercive patriarch and say that this is exactly the white god that colonisers have imposed on indigenous cultures.

God Judging Adam, William Blake

 

The Angel of the Divine Presence clothing Adam and Eve, William Blake

In fact, the First Nations idea of divinity is later echoed by Blake’s evocation of Energy flowing through the earth and cosmos, into and beyond time. The North American Great Spirit, or Creator (a term also used by Aboriginal Australians) pervades an animate universe full of sacred presences. This animacy is even expressed grammatically in the Potawatomi language, in which mountains, rivers and other earth-presences are verbs, not nouns. This  indigenous cosmos-conception is of course diametrically opposed to the world-view of industrialised nations, which reduces the earth to a collection of things, or exploitable resources. As this colonising mindset drives the planet towards ecological catastrophe, there is a groundswell of feeling that all of us born into this mindset must learn from indigenous wisdoms if we are to achieve the necessary metanoia, or change of mind.

Microscopy image of moth sperm and Witchetty Grub Dreaming: Jennifer Napaliarri Lewis: Warlukurlangu Artists of Yuendumu

First Nations voices speak out powerfully in a season of online Conversations emanating from the Blakean church St James’s Piccadilly. Planned by artist Sara Mark, scientist Deborah Colvin and myself as part of our project Food for the Ecozoic, this series of Conversations engages with North American and Australian academics, activists and creatives.

 

Writing about this presents someone like myself, raised in the global north, with problems of language. For example, the word Country, as used by Australian Aboriginal peoples, speaks of an interacting dynamic which includes place, custom and language, spiritual practice and identity. It is emphatically not the divisive, human-constructed term ‘nature’, which is why in this article I will speak not of nature but of the more-than-human world.

Aboriginal rock paintings in Quinkan Country, Queensland, features dingoes, eels and humans. Image credit: Steven David Miller/Auscape

First Nations peoples in Turtle Island (or North America) also live by a unitive vision. As one of our Conversationalists, Sandy Bigtree (Mohawk Nation) explained to me, their concept of reality which includes the dynamic interaction of opposites is totally different from the dualistic opposition of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ preached by colonising missionaries. We had just participated in an Eco Contemplative liturgy in St. James’s garden, in which Sandy was deeply moved by Blake’s poem Eternity and later explained how it chimes with the Haudenosaunee concept of reality.

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

Wampum Belt: Onandaga Nation

The wampum belt is a living record of the Haudenosaunee peoples, carrying the story of the Peacemaker, who reconciled the warring nations at Onondaga Lake. This story was suppressed by the Jesuit mission which was part of the French colonial project.

Blake offers his own celebration of progression though opposites in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which ends with the assertion ‘everything that lives is Holy.’ The experience of inter-relatedness lived so profoundly by First Nations peoples is echoed by his warning in Auguries of Innocence that the abuse of one live being threatens the whole cosmic order.

This inter-relatedness extends through the universe. The ceremonies of Indigenous peoples affirm a cosmology that we have lost, whether at the communal level, as in the Sun Dance ritual, or at a personal level, as in the presentation of a newborn baby to the dawn sun. Freya Mathews, a professor of environmental philosophy who is deeply attuned both to aboriginal wisdoms and to the more-than-human world, presents in her St James’s Conversation a philosophical grounding for the ecological self based on a living cosmos, a psycho-physical system that possesses a will to self-existence and self-increase.

When we look at Blake’s art, we realise he presents the cosmos in a totally different way from his contemporaries. The sun and moon are not depicted from the human perspective, as small shapes peeping above a landscape, but are sometimes personalised, as if to emphasise their sentience and agency, sometimes evoked as great pulsing presences who might indeed, in Blake’s words, contain ‘an innumerable company of the heavenly host’ crying praise.

The Sun at his Eastern Gate: William Blake

Both world-views transcend space and time. Australian Aboriginal culture reveres ancestors as still-active participants, which is why the spiritual peace of the community demands that bones stolen by colonisers should be restored to Country. Blake, whose moments open into eternity, can call on Milton to energise his writing hand and include living and historical figures, inherited and self-made mythologies in the four-fold vision of Jerusalem. Such sacred visions must necessarily reject the confinement of literal fact, whether through Blakean mythology or through indigenous myths, stories and dream-states, including powerful creation stories.

Earth’s Creation: Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1994)

 

Newton: William Blake (detail of the rocks)

 

Newton: William Blake

Unsurprisingly, in a world still dominated by the global north, First Nations peoples write and speak with prophetic anger. One of the Conversationalists, Professor Anne Poelina, a Nyikina Warrwa woman from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, is an earth rights advocate, whose enduring work is focussed on the right of her sacred ancestral being the Martuwarra/ Fitzroy River to live and flow. Like Blake, Aboriginal activists challenge the hypocrisy of the established Church and the version of the Bible enforced  by colonisers.  Another Conversationalist, Professor Anne Pattel-Gray, an aboriginal Australian theologian, has called the invasion and theft of the land the ‘original sin’  that Australian churches have to confront. In Decolonising the Biblical Narrative: vol 3 [1],  Pattel-Gray and Norman Habel provide an excoriating demolition of YHWH as colonial god, arguing that the term “Lord’ is not a name for God in the Bible.

With a subversiveness reminiscent of Blake, who sees clearly that any reading of the Bible is subjective (‘thou read’st black where I read white’) First Nations and settler theologians are re-writing Biblical narratives in books like Unsettling the Word [2]. One of its contributors, Jim Perkinson, settler theologian and activist in Three Fires Land, inner city Detroit (a Blakean layering of two realities) is another participant in our Conversations. He re-wilds the Bible from Genesis to Revelations, seeing Jesus as a Palestinian resister emanating from a nomadic wilderness tradition to challenge coercive agriculture and the rule of empire. One thinks of Blake’s rebellious Jesus, and of the subversiveness of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

[1] Decolonising the Biblical Narrative: Vol. 3. Anne Pattel- Gray, Norman Habel, ATF Press, 2023.

[2] Unsettling the Word. Ed. Steve Heinrichs, Orbis Books, 2021.

Milton and his Dream: William Blake

 

When my Grandfather Stopped Understanding the Bear’s Language Jason Elliot Clark, Alonquin nation (2003)

Blake was uncannily perceptive about the psychological harm which the compulsion to control inflicts on the subjugated and the subjugator alike, whether within relationships, or on the huge scale of empire. Some of our First Nations Conversationalists speak of this cost. Craig Molyneux, a custodian of the World Heritage site Budj Bim, tells his own family story of the appropriation of children in Mission orphanages, a separated family and poisonous secrecy, whilst Professor Lily Mendoza speaks of her own crisis of identity. And there is a counter-truth. We have only to look at Blake’s myopic authority-figures, or his Urizenic system-imposers, each trapped in their own circumscribed, joyless world, to see the cost to the perpetrator of separating humankind from the more-than-human world, and separating out certain fellow-humans as inferior.

The Book of Urizen: title page. William Blake

If we listen to the account by Philip Arnold and Sandy Bigtree of the violent suppressing of a matriarchal society and an indigenous history of world significance at Onondaga Lake; if we attend to Shawn Sanford Beck, priest and druid, as he talks about his more-than-human parishioners such as trees; if we learn from Lyla June Johnston’s doctoral research into the careful interventions through which First Nations people sustained the land of Turtle Island (North America) over millenia, and glimpse the sheer joy and celebration of their rituals, we realise how much we have lost.

Of course, there are profound aspects of the indigenous world-view which find no echo in a London-dweller like Blake, who so often embodies his spiritual vision in city streets and localities. A lone creator of his own mythology, Blake has no access to the communal experience of indigenous life, its rituals of acknowledgement and gratitude, its active custodianship of the earth, or its ethic of attentive respect and responsiveness to Country which to Australian Aboriginal peoples is part of Deep Law. But, even as he attacked the industrialised materialistic machine that was colonising the human brain and much of the world, Blake was expressing a concept of reality which chimed with that of the peoples who were being displaced and suppressed.  And now, as that machine drives us towards extinction, we need to listen to contemporary Indigenous voices, and to the artist-poet who spoke with passionate urgency two hundred years ago.

Possum and Wallaby Dreaming: Michael Nelson Jagamara 1985. Estate of the artist licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd.

Possum and Wallaby Dreaming by Warlpiri artist Michael Nelson Jagamara: stone mosaic on the forecourt of Australia’s Parliament House. It depicts the tracks of people from the red kangaroo, rock wallaby, bush-tail possum and goanna ancestors, flowing in concentric circles to represent the gathering of these ancestors. The mosaic is a vision of Parliament House as a place where all aboriginal people meet, talk and work together.