An exploration of the vital importance of imagination and experience, as exemplified in the works of William Blake and Jacob Boehme. This paper is based on a lecture given at the Temenos Academy London, and published in the Temenos Academy Review 20 (2017).

Boehme wrote of his works that ‘a Man’s Reason, without the light of God, cannot come into the Ground [of them], it is impossible, let his wit be ever so high and subtle, it apprehends but as it were the Shadow of it in a Glass’.17 As Blake wrote in Jerusalem, when ‘the Reasoning Power in Man’ is ‘separated/From Imagination,’ it encloses ‘itself as in steel, in a Ratio/Of the Things of Memory’.