Beulah: intermundo, surrealidad. El territorio del subconsciente y los sueños en el mundo visionario de William Blake

Authors

  • Daniela Picón Universidad de Chile

Abstract

The english poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) places the events of his visionary work in a complex cosmography, which express an essential part of the symbolic content of his illuminated books. From this perspective, we explore part of this visionary universe, and, specifically Beulah, the ungovernable region of the night, subconscious and dreams. This territory plays a key role in blake’s reinterpretation of the Fall and the recuperation of the Lost Paradise: beulah is the zone that surrounds Eternity and it works like an interworld that comunicates reciprocally the superior and inferior spheres of the human existence, that is, the Spiritual and the Worldly. Some suggestive affinities with other visionary expressions, apparently remote, like sufí mysticism and the surrealist practice can help us understand in a wider way this intermediate world (beulah, mundus imaginalis, surreality) where the whithdrawal of the logical and rational laws makes the recuperation of the essential creative state of the conscience –that is, the imagination– possible and allows the trascendence of the soul to its true existence.

Keywords:

William Blake, Beulah, intermediate world, dream, vision