Higgs and RAW on William Blake

Musician Prince performing in 2008 (Creative Commons photo). 

The big news of course is John Higgs' new book, William Blake Versus the World, and John has been publishing pieces to promote the book. "Visionaries Across Time: The Shared Magic Of Prince & William Blake" discusses the surprising commonalities between Blake and the late American musician: "Prince and Blake were the products of very different worlds and they created very different art, of course, but they both saw beyond their contemporary circumstances and came to remarkably similar conclusions. The most prominent themes in their work are spiritual liberation and sexual freedom. They portrayed these not as opposites or contradictions, but as essential and related concepts - interlinked pathways that we need to follow, if we are find our way to paradise."

In Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits (which I've just finished) Robert Anton Wilson makes a similar point about Blake.

RAW writes, "If a man writes a poem to his beloved in a Christian nation, and it too frank about expressing that love, he is in danger of being called 'obscene,' throughout most of Christian history, he could be jailed, tortured or even killed. As William Blake wrote in horror:

Children of a future age
Reading this indignant page
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was called a crime."

A search of my ebook copy of RAW's book shows six references to Blake.