Sacred Visions: Blake and First Nations Peoples

Sacred Visions: Blake and First Nations Peoples

As part of St James’s Piccadilly’s Changing Our Minds initiative, Diane Pacitti explores the similarities between the visions of indigenous peoples and William Blake.

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, 1795, Metropolitan Museum of Art

In fact, the First Nations idea of divinity is 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. The indigenous universe-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.

(left) Microscopy image of moth sperm ,(right) Witchetty Grub Dreaming, Jennifer Napaliarri Lewis, Warlukurlangu Artists of Yuendumu

First Nations voices speak out powerfully in a series 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 online conversations engages with North American and Australian academics, activists and creatives. 

‘Without contraries is no progression.’

Blake’s assertion, developed so subversively in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is present in the stories and foundational beliefs of North American indigenous peoples, which recognise the dynamic interaction of opposites like earth and sky. It is a unitive vision, totally different from the dualistic opposition of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ preached by colonising missionaries. The experience of inter-relatedness lived so profoundly by First Nations people is echoed by Blake’s warning in Auguries of Innocence that the abuse of one living being threatens the whole cosmic order.

The presence of a living cosmos is felt powerfully by First Nations peoples and celebrated in ceremonies like the North American Sun Dance. 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. 

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.

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 created so passionately because he saw how the industrialising-colonising machine, driven by reductive materialism, was powering through the world and into the human mind. Two hundred years on, in a world still dominated by the mindset of the global north, we face ecological catastrophe. Indigenous peoples, labelled inferior by that mindset and violently subjugated, are speaking out with prophetic anger. The St. James’s series includes powerful First Nations conversationalists: Sandy Bigtree (Mohawk nation), based at the sacred site of Onondaga Lake; Dr Lyla June Johnston (Dine Nation) researcher into indigenous food systems; Professor Lily Mendoza, writer on the politics of indigeneity, whose roots are in the colonised Philippines. From Australia we encounter Professor Anne Poelina, a Nyikina Warrwa woman and earth rights advocate, Craig Molyneux, a custodian of the World Heritage site Budj Bim and theology professor Anne Pattel-Gray.

Earth’s Creation, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, 1994, National Museum of Australia

Newton (detail and complete image), William Blake, 1795, Tate Collection

Anne Pattel-Gray is one of a growing number of aboriginal activists and theologians who challenge the hypocrisy of the established Church and the version of the Bible enforced  by colonisers.  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-claiming Biblical narratives from the colonisers.  One thinks of Blake’s rebellious Jesus, and of the subversiveness of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 

Blake was uncannily perceptive about the psychological harm which the compulsion to control inflicts on both the subjugated and the subjugator, whether within relationships, or on the huge scale of empire. Our First Nations conversationalists speak of the loss, displacement and crisis of identity inflicted on their people. But 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 isolation and diminishment of self which characterises anyone who separates humankind from the more-than-human world, or separates out certain fellow-humans as inferior.

The First Book of Urizen, title page, William Blake, 1794, Yale Center for British Art

Of course, there are profound aspects of the indigenous world-view which find no echo in a London-dweller like Blake. But, even as he attacked the industrial-colonising machine that was a tool of empire, Blake was expressing a vision of reality which chimed with that of the very peoples that machine was displacing and suppressing.  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 (This stone mosaic, by Warlpiri artist Michael Nelson Jagamara, is 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.)

A fuller version of this Emanation is available at www.sjp.org.uk/sacred-visions-blake-and-first-nations-peoples