March 28

The 110th anniversary of Parry's Jerusalem

(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)

On March 28, 1916, a choir of three hundred voices gathered at the Queen's Hall in London's Langham Place—the self-described musical center of the Empire—and sang a short poem for the first time. The poem was by William Blake, dead for nearly ninety years. The music was by Hubert Parry, who had written it eighteen days earlier and handed the manuscript to his former student Henry Walford Davies with the rather casual comment: “Here's a tune for you, old chap. Do what you like with it.”

What Davies did with it, what England did with it, and what continues to be done with it one hundred and ten years later—that is one of the stranger stories in the history of sacred music. Because the poem that became Jerusalem was not written as a patriotic hymn. It was not written for choirs or concert halls or rugby stadiums or royal weddings. It was written as the preface to a visionary Gnostic epic, as a war cry against institutional religion, as a prophet's demand for spiritual revolution. And the process by which it was transformed into England's unofficial national anthem is, for anyone paying attention, a masterclass in how sacred texts get appropriated, stripped of their teeth, and turned into the very thing they were written to oppose.

The Poem Blake Actually Wrote

William Blake completed the verses now known as Jerusalem (originally titled, "And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time") around 1804, engraving them as the preface to his prophetic epic Milton: A Poem. To understand what they meant to him, you have to understand what Milton meant to him—which is not what you might expect.

Blake's Milton is a visionary account in which the spirit of John Milton descends from Eternity to correct the errors of his earthly life—his acceptance of a harsh, judgmental God, his implicit endorsement of the very moral and spiritual tyranny that Blake spent his entire career fighting. The preface to this poem opens with an attack on the classical education system—Homer, Ovid, Plato, Cicero—which Blake saw as the intellectual machinery of oppression, the tools by which officialdom maintained its grip on the human imagination. And then, immediately following this attack, come the verses:

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On England's pleasant pastures seen! And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my Arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire! I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In England's green & pleasant Land.

Blake then appended a quotation from the Book of Numbers: “Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets.” This is not the epigraph of a man writing a cheerful patriotic song. It is the war cry of a visionary demanding that every human being claim their own prophetic authority rather than ceding it to priests, kings, and academics.

The “dark Satanic Mills” that everyone assumes refers to the factories of the Industrial Revolution meant something considerably more unsettling in Blake's original cosmology. In the larger poem Milton, Satan is described as the “Miller of Eternity”—and his mills are the grinding mechanisms of rationalist thought, institutional religion, and the educational systems that crush the human imagination into conformity. The Starry Mills of Satan in Blake's mythology are the rotating celestial mechanics of Newtonian physics, the dead clockwork universe of the Enlightenment, the very systems of thought that his entire life's work was dedicated to overthrowing. The factories of Manchester were a symptom. The real target was deeper.

The poem closes not with comfort but with an oath. “Mental Fight”—the phrase Blake insisted upon against all corporeal warfare—is his term for the only battle that matters: the battle against the forces that seek to diminish human consciousness, chain the imagination, and reduce the divine spark in every person to a cog in someone else's machinery.

The Reluctant Composer and the War Machine

When Poet Laureate Robert Bridges approached Parry in early 1916 to set Blake's verses to music, the occasion was a meeting of the Fight for Right campaign—an organization founded by General Sir Francis Younghusband to sustain British morale during the darkest years of the First World War. The idea was to create a rousing English anthem to counteract German propaganda and stiffen the national resolve.

The irony was almost cosmic. Blake had written his preface as an explicit attack on exactly this kind of institutional war-making. In the prose introduction to Milton that immediately precedes the poem, he had attacked “hirelings in the camp, the court, and universities” who promoted physical warfare over the mental fight he considered the only legitimate battle. And now, in 1916, his poem was being conscripted into precisely the kind of corporeal war he had set his forehead against.

Parry knew this, or at least sensed it. He was a man of deeply liberal political sympathies—a passionate supporter of women's suffrage, a musical world heavily indebted to German composers he adored (Schumann, Wagner, Brahms were central to his creative life), and a figure fundamentally uncomfortable with jingoism. He agreed to write the setting reluctantly, not wanting to disappoint Bridges or Davies. But within three months of the first performance, he had withdrawn his support from Fight for Right entirely.

He did not, however, withdraw the music. Instead, he did something considerably more interesting: he gave it away. When Millicent Garrett Fawcett of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies approached him in 1917 about using Jerusalem as an anthem for the suffrage movement, Parry transferred the copyright to her cause with a letter that captures the entire spirit of the thing: “I wish indeed it might become the Women Voters' hymn, as you suggest. People seem to enjoy singing it. And having the vote ought to diffuse a good deal of joy too. So they would combine happily.”

A poem written by a radical visionary mystic, set to music by a liberal composer who hated the occasion for which he wrote it, becoming a suffragette anthem within a year of its premiere as a war rally. Blake, who spent his life watching official institutions appropriate and distort the sacred, would have recognized the pattern immediately.

There is a detail in the transmission of Jerusalem that deserves particular attention, because it reveals with crystalline precision how sacred texts get neutralized in the process of popularization. Blake's original poem reads: “And was Jerusalem builded here, / Among these dark Satanic Mills?” The word “these” is doing tremendous work. It places the Satanic Mills here, in England, now, among us. It is an accusation directed inward, at the society singing the song. The dark forces Blake is naming are not distant enemies or foreign oppressors—they are the grinding mechanisms of the culture in which the singer lives and breathes.

When Bridges and Parry adapted the poem, they changed one word. “These” became “those.” The dark Satanic Mills were suddenly somewhere else — over there, in the enemy's territory, among the Germans whose propaganda Fight for Right had been created to counter. With a single pronoun, Blake's inward-facing prophetic accusation was transformed into an outward-facing nationalist assertion. The poet who had spent his life demanding that England confront its own spiritual failures was pressed into service as a rallying cry against the nation's enemies.

Most performances still sing “those.” Occasionally, a choir or a soloist restores Blake's original word — and it is, as one scholar beautifully observed, “a thrilling moment, to hear Blake's vision restored.” That vision recognizes the evil lurking on our doorstep and wants to work fervently to remove it. The comfortable version looks outward. The real poem looks in the mirror.

The Afterlife of a Visionary Text

What happened next to Jerusalem is simultaneously a testament to the power of sacred music and a cautionary tale about the fate of prophetic vision in the hands of institutions.

Edward Elgar—who had deeply admired Parry—made his own orchestration of the accompaniment in 1922, and it is this version, richer and more ceremonial than Parry's original, that most people know today. The Women's Institute adopted Jerusalem as their anthem in 1924. It entered the hymn books. It became a fixture at the Last Night of the Proms. It was sung at the Conservative Party Conference and the Labour Party Conference. Clement Attlee invoked it in the 1945 election campaign, promising to build a New Jerusalem. King George V said he preferred it to “God Save the King.” It was sung at the royal wedding of 2011 and in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

Every political faction, every class, every ideological position has claimed Jerusalem as its own. The left hears in it a demand for social justice. The right hears national pride. The suffragettes heard liberation. The Women's Institute hears community. The rugby crowd hears tribal solidarity. Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson put the full text into a track on his 1998 solo album. The hymn has been performed by punk bands, gospel choirs, and the London Gay Men's Chorus, sometimes in the same decade.

Blake would have been horrified. He would also, perhaps, have been secretly delighted. Because the reason Jerusalem speaks to everyone is that Blake's poem is genuinely capacious—it contains within its sixteen lines a vision of human potential so compressed and so charged that almost any aspiration toward something better can find itself reflected there. The Mental Fight he calls for is real. The demand that we not cease until we have built Jerusalem—whatever that means to the singer in the moment of singing—is a genuine prophetic imperative.

The institutions that have appropriated it cannot quite extinguish that fire, no matter how many times they change “these” to “those.”

Blake the Occultist

For the readers of Modern Occultist, Jerusalem offers a final dimension that its mainstream admirers rarely acknowledge: William Blake was, by any serious reckoning, a practitioner of visionary mysticism operating in the Western esoteric tradition.

He built an entire private mythological cosmos—Urizen, Los, Albion, the Emanations, the Zoas — a system as internally consistent and as theologically sophisticated as any Kabbalistic or Gnostic framework. His Prophetic Books are not wild flights of fancy but a systematic attempt to map the structure of fallen and redeemed consciousness. His Satan is not the devil of popular theology but a cosmological principle: the force of rationalist reduction that grinds the infinite human imagination down to finite mechanical operations.

The "feet" in the poem's opening line—"And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green”—draw on the apocryphal tradition that the young Jesus visited Britain with Joseph of Arimathea, a tradition centered particularly on Glastonbury, one of the great nodes of British sacred geography. Blake is not asserting this as historical fact. He is asking whether the divine has ever been genuinely present in this landscape—and then immediately contrasting that possibility with the dark Satanic Mills that currently define it. The movement of the poem is from the question of sacred immanence to the demand for sacred action.

The weapons he calls for—the Bow of burning gold, the Arrows of desire, the Chariot of fire—are the weapons of Ephesians 6, the whole armor of God, transposed into his own visionary idiom. They are not instruments of physical warfare. They are the tools of what he insists on calling Mental Fight: the battle for the human soul against every force that seeks to diminish, mechanize, or bureaucratize it.

In that sense, Blake's Jerusalem is not a hymn at all; it’s a grimoire, a working. It is a declaration of magical intent, inscribed in sixteen lines and sealed with an oath, by a man who understood that the imagination is the primary faculty through which reality is shaped—and who demanded that it be used in the service of something genuinely sacred rather than surrendered to the mills that grind it into dust.

One hundred and ten years after three hundred voices first sang it at the Queen's Hall, the fire in those words has not gone out.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

Modern Occultist