All Religions are One: A Note on Sources

Abstract

William Blake’s early tract All Religions are One was etched on ten copperplates c. 1788. In seven “principles,” Blake sets out to prove that a spiritual dimension of man, which he names the “Poetic Genius,” exists, and that this has been the origin of all religions. The gnomic principles have remained somewhat impenetrable because scholarly criticism has lost sight of the intellectual context in which the tract was produced. This short note is an attempt to recover the most important discourses to which Blake provides a response.