The illustrations in a work of comparative mythology began as drawings and marks cut into metal. William Blake (1757–1827) encountered that practical work in the shop where he learned to engrave. His master’s shop produced plates for the New System of Jacob Bryant (1715–1804) during his apprenticeship, although the extent of Blake’s own work on them remains uncertain. The young engraver was close to the practical making of the images through which readers encountered ancient religion. His later prophetic books asked what human beings could perceive and become. Their authority did not depend on proving that a manuscript had survived from the first ages of the world.
The production of the books was itself bound to an account of revelation. Blake said a vision of his dead brother had shown him how to print words and pictures together. His method allowed text and image to be worked on the same copper plate, making the written argument inseparable from its visual form. A practical problem of printing became part of the history he told about his spiritual life.
This gave him unusual control over how a reader encountered the work. The movement from writing to drawing, engraving, and impression did not pass through the usual division between author and illustrator. Religious thought took shape through the making of the page. A figure borrowed from older mythology could be altered by its surroundings, and a passage read differently because of the image beside it.
The resulting works openly belonged to a living maker. Readers were not being asked to accept the age of a newly found manuscript, but to encounter claims about vision in pages Blake had made himself. The account of his brother’s instruction stayed close to that work, connecting the practical production of a book with the religious experiences its author believed continued around him.