AND DID THOSE FEET...

De: Guillermo Santamaria

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The opening chapters sketch Blake as a rare hybrid: poet, artist, printer-inventor, and lifelong visionary, saturated with biblical language but hostile to what he saw as dead moralism and soul-crushing systems. You’re introduced to his big themes—innocence vs. experience as spiritual conditions, “Imagination” as a truth-seeing faculty (not mere daydreaming), and the symbolic cast of his prophetic books (figures like Urizen, Los, and Albion). That context matters because it frames “Jerusalem” not as a quaint patriotic song, but as a serious spiritual and social critique.

The core “decode” section reads the poem as a three-part engine. The first stanza’s questions about “those feet” in England are treated as deliberate provocation: Blake doesn’t need the tale to be factual; he uses it as a lever—if this land is so blessed, why does it feel so spiritually wrong? The famous “dark Satanic Mills” are read as more than factories: they are the outward machinery of dehumanizing modern life and the inward machinery of conformity, propaganda, and dead religion. The “Bring me…” stanza becomes a kind of prayer for prophetic weapons—bow, arrows, spear, Elijah’s chariot of fire—aimed at spiritual warfare in the realm Blake calls “Mental Fight.” The closing vow is interpreted as a refusal to outsource hope to the afterlife: “Jerusalem” is a symbol for a transformed people and a renewed society, built in the soot and noise of the present.

Then the book pivots into historical triage. Its answer to “Was Jesus really in England?” is blunt: there’s no reliable evidence. What exists instead is a medieval “sacred geography” centered on Glastonbury—Joseph of Arimathea, an early church foundation story, and later embellishments that eventually upgrade the claim into “maybe Christ came too.” A key theme here is how legends grow: early hints about “very early Christianity” harden into specific dates and founders, then get turbocharged by institutional incentive (monasteries benefiting from ancient origins, pilgrim interest, prestige, and donations). The book traces that escalation through medieval storytelling and into early modern promotional literature.

When it “steel-mans” the pro side, the strongest argument offered is basically plausibility-with-a-sheen: Britain wasn’t isolated, Cornwall’s tin trade connected into long-distance networks, and therefore it’s “not impossible” that travel could have happened during the Gospel “silent years.” But the book refuses to let “possible” masquerade as “probable,” and it underlines the main problem: the sources that gesture toward Jesus-in-Britain are late, devotional, and transparently legendary. Early Christian remarks about Britain (for example, lines sometimes recruited from writers like Tertullian or Eusebius) at best point to early Christianity reaching Britain—not to Jesus personally taking a trip there.

Finally, it maps who believed the story and why. The historical “engine” is medieval and early modern Glastonbury promotion and the pilgrims who trusted it; the explicit “Jesus personally visited” clause is treated as a later add-on. In the modern period the book tracks recognizable waves of belief and popularization, naming figures such as Abbot Richard Beere (linked to early 1500s promotion), the Victorian folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould (who records Cornish versions of the tale), Rev. C. C. Dobson (a twentieth-century defender in print), and later advocates like Gordon Strachan and Dennis Price. Blake himself is treated as the story’s great amplifier—but with a crucial caveat: his lines are questions, not a historical claim.