William Blake and the ark.
As Basire's apprentice, Blake found himself in an environment of antiquity. The 'ancient republics, monarchies, and patriarchates of Asia' of his visions owed much to his prenticework for Basire on such books as Bryant's New System of Mythology, as famous a work in its day as Frazer's Golden Bough. Ruthven Todd first discerned Blake's hand in several of the plates, some of which contain details later discoverable in Blake's own designs. In Plate 16 of his Jove series, When The Morning Stars Sang Together, the raised and crossed arms and parted feet are a reflection of the frieze-figures of a Persian Temple of Mithras illustrated in one of the Basire plates - possibly one Blake himself worked on. The archaelogical premisses of Bryant's Mythology and the several moon-arks of Blake's mythological works. It was to Bryant that Blake owed his realisation - a bold one at the time - that 'the antiquities of every Nation under Heaven, is no less sacred than that of the Jews. They are the same thing, as Jacob Bryant and all antiquaries have proved... All had originally one language, and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel of Jesus.' The Mythology was a gold-mine, upon which Blake drew in the compositions of his own pantheon of mythological lore; a universal language (as Bryant himself had understood) of the human imagination, with dialectical variations according to time, place and local tradition.
(from pp 13-15 of William Blake by Kathleen Rain,1970).
