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PARTISAN REVIEW
293
GINSBERG:
Yeah, that's the whole point.
If
you're interested in the line
of descent, I'll tell you - back from Blake through Paracelsus and
Plotinus and Jakob B6hme all the way back to Pythagoras, and back
from, back to in those days, the Eleusinian mysteries and the Bacchic
mysteries to the mystery cults, and back through the mystery cults
to the Near East, back to the source of it all, you come to the same
sources.
INT:
And he was aware of all this?
GINSBERG:
Yes, Blake had a great collection of those texts - in fact,
I understand he handled manuscripts.
INT:
Yeah. He was a bookseller.
GINSBERG:
A manuscript-seller. He handled some of the gnostic manu–
scripts. But one of the great people that influenced him was a guy
named Thomas Taylor, the Platonist. Taylor is a very interesting
figure, a very interesting psychedelic gnostic figure, in Europe and
in America. Taylor was a great Latin-Greek scholar who translated
all of the remaining gnostic fragments and made them available to
eighteenth-century cats, so that Shelley, as well as Blake, Coleridge,
other heads of that time, picked up on Thomas Taylor's translations.
INT:
Yeah. And were enabled to take what they read further into their
own thing.
GINSBERG:
Yeah. And at the same time, Bronson Alcott, from America,
of the Brook Farm commune, the early enlarged family experiments
so typical of nineteenth-century America, went to England to get
Thomas Taylor's books and translations - brought them back and
loaned them to Emerson. So that the same sources Blake was using,
tracing back to the Middle East, were also influential in the forma–
tion of the American individualistic transcendentalist tradition which
is so influential now in, say, the antiwar revolutionary movement.
INT:
The other thing
I
wanted to ask you about Blake was whether
you'd been able to get into the
Prophetic Books
at all.
GINSBERG:
No, I've been sort of hung-up in the simpler, earlier poems.
I read in and out of the
Prophetic Books.
INT:
Because
I
tried at one point.
It
was pretty difficult.
GINSBERG:
OK. The cosmic geography of the
Prophetic Books,
cos–
mology, that Blake outlines and changes around, year by year to
the end, is parallel to the cosmography and cosmogony that you find
outlined in the gnostic religions, pre-Christian, pre-Christ, including
the names that Blake uses, like Ruha is the Mandaean gnostic name
for the evil female first principle, otherwise known as Sophia, wisdom,
in other places, and in Blake's
Songs of Experience
known as Tirzah,
the chick who created the whole cosmic chaos because she was
reflecting the empty light of the abyss. She was a reflection of that
