e priest lays his curse on the fairest joys" ("Proverbs" 19; "Proverbs" 20). Rather than accepting a traditional religion from an organized church, Blake designed his own mythology (based primarily upon the Bible and Greek mythology) to accompany his personal, revealed religion. Blake's personal religion was an outgrowth of his search for the Everlasting Gospel, which he believed to be the original, pre-Jesus revelation which Jesus preached. As Blake said, "all had originally one language and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus" (Damon 344). Blake's religion was based upon the joy of man, which he believed glorified God (Damon 344). One of Blake's strongest objections to orthodox Christianity is that it encourages the suppression of natural desires and discourages earthly joy; in A Vision of the Last Judgement, Blake says that "Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern'd their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory" (Damon 344). Blake also believes that the religion of this world is actually the worship of the entity that St. Paul calls "the god of this world" in II Corinthians 4:4: Satan. It should be noted here that Blake does not conceive of Satan as an incarnate horned quasi-deity, but rather as Error and the "State of Death"; Blake also explicitly says that Satan is "not a Human existence" (Damon 355). Blake believes that orthodox Christians, in part because of their denial of earthly joy, are actually worshiping Satan, which is to say that they are in Error (Damon 344-345; Damon xi). Since the 1960s, more and more Westerners have joined faith movements which promote individuals deciding on their own ethics and beliefs, or to find their own wa...
