Is There A There There? Testing Re-enchantment

The play of the medieval infinite scroll evoked divine presence. Might it do so again?

Mar 21, 2026

All images from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience

Human beings had lived with, and loved, the infinite scroll long before the electronic version was rolled out a couple of decades back. The earlier type took the form of illuminated manuscripts and Books of Hours.

These colourful parchments captivated the eyes of our forebears in a dance amongst seemingly disjointed images that ranged over the sacred and the profane, the fantastical and the mundane.

Gospel texts shared the space with griffins and hobgobbins. There: a giant rabbit attacks a group of hunters. Now: a snail takes on a knight. Or again, with a glance sideways, a fox preaches to chickens, as monkeys play their harps. Turning the page once more, foliage, fruit and flowers spring into view, rooting amongst starry constellations and planets. Turn again and elaborate knotwork morphs into herds of twisty beasts.

The effect was delightful, confusing, dazzling. “Turn the page slowly,” advised the 10th century scribe, Florentius of Valeranica.

A brilliantly provocative talk by Mary Harrington set me on this train of thought, she making the link, developed by Mary Carruthers and others, between the apparently incoherent designs of illuminated manuscripts and memory techniques. For there was method in the seeming medieval madness.

The design goals of illuminated texts were not dissimilar to the algorithmically assembled arrays of images presented by the infinite scroll of today: the provocation of an emotionally charged response. Only, the aim back then was not to gather and sell audiences by herding attention. Rather, the stimulus was to aid memory, a valuable faculty in a world short of books. Recollection is much enhanced when thoughts are coupled to scenes, the more elaborate the link the better, so the snails and goblins were hooks for thoughts. Palaces of memory were the result, Harrington explained.

The argument can be taken a step further. Recollection to the medieval mind was not just about recall. Rather, it was anemnesis, to cite the Greek word: memory as a mode of spiritual transportation that cuts across time and space to know in the present what is timeless; to expand the human mind by making it conscious of participation in the mind of God.

The ceaseless play of the medieval infinite scroll evoked divine presence, therefore. Behind the many things could be discerned the one source and wellspring of it all. The myriad was held together by an omnipresent, implicit centre.

William Blake recognised the value of an eternal orientation amidst the minute particulars of life when he recreated the older medium as a way of publishing his poems and designs. “Illuminated printing”, as he called it, enabled him to set texts alongside illustrations so as to recall awareness of what he called “the infinite”.

But there was a development in his work that is crucial now.

Blake realised that medieval arts of memory need to become modern experiments in imagination, since modern people no longer spontaneously experience their inner lives as connected to the inner life of God. Nihilism, a word coined in his lifetime, was becoming the norm.

But thoughts and images can reestablish the divine link via an imaginative play that actively bridges the gap felt to yawn between the individual and God; people can know, once more, that they enjoy the life of God via the imagination, as their ancestors had in the life of vivid memory, because the imagination is, simultaneously, theirs inwardly and, outwardly, is shared with the myriad phenomena of nature. The two, in turn, are manifestations of Life itself. “The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination, that is God himself, The Divine Body, Jesus; we are his Members,” Blake writes.

His works are a careful evocation of this field of immanent and transcendent vitality, which is why they are so entrancing and stimulating. In verse and pictures, what he calls an “active translation” is experienced: from divine source, through human hand, to a reader’s receptive sight: the power of memory restored.

His method is an act of resistance against the tabula rasa theory of the mind postulated by his philosophical enemy, John Locke. In line with the emerging notion that an individual’s interiority is isolated, and nature has no interiority at all, Locke had proposed that the human mind is a blank slate, stamped on by sensory impressions, like a seal deforming warm wax.

But, Blake realised, that model of cognition is not only demonstrably false to anyone who pays attention to their reflections: worlds are communed with in grains of sand, heavens in wild flowers, and trees are never green things that simply stand in the way; the model also turns people into passive participants in a game of manipulation played by the powerful: not liberated but corralled by communication.

All that changes when an inspired visionary, like Blake, knits together word and imagery. The reader is invited into a dialogue with the author that reveals a third: the agency and activity of both can join to elicit true recollection. “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite,” Blake summarised at the conclusion of a discussion of his “infernal method”, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (This quality of presence is also why AI-generated material will always need the human to rise above the derivative.)

Blake hoped that his illuminated printing would be accessible to the masses and make him some money. He wasn’t averse to that. Unfortunately for him, that turned out not to be the case. Craziness was the judgement commonly passed on his work, with only rare critics recognising a “man of Genius”, as did Samuel Taylor Coleridge - another person aware that the imaginations of human beings and nature are not random but echoes and participations in the divine imagination.

In Blake’s era, enjoyment of the eternal infinite was falling out of fashion. Instead came the consumption of an effectively infinite range of goods, brought to booming London from across Albion’s empire. “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul,” Blake protested, knowing that accumulation is no substitute for participation; entertainment can distract from anamnesis. But to no avail.

The ideological grounds were laid for the reinvention of the infinite scroll 2.0: the digital version. Out with orientation, in with exploitation. Blake would have associated the thumb-flicked scrolls of today with what he called “single vision and Newton’s sleep”: the enchanted world of the medieval cosmos eclipsed by flighty distractions sprung from an environment widely regarded as meaningless and mechanical. Though I bet Blake would have also been in the vanguard of figuring out how the internet might foster “fourfold vision” yet, and with that recollection of God.

Perhaps the separation was a necessary stage. After all, whilst vivid imagery adorned church walls and celestial patterns were made into bright stained glass, medieval illuminated manuscripts were elite goods. A Book of Hours might cost the same price as a house.

Democratisation came via the printing press, with the downward pressure of mass production. Pamphlets were to the sixteenth century Reformation what social media is to the political tumult of today. Protestant and Catholic authorities alike sought to command the minds of their followers via floods of improving sermons and rigorous catecheses, derogatory cartoons and polemic tracts. Pilgrimages, festivals and devotions were replaced by prescribed pathways that would secure your salvation.

Now, though, might things be turning full circle? This was part of Mary Harrington’s argument: that the scrolling now widely available online is implicitly offering a training in spotting unlikely associations, multidimensional patterns and hidden meanings. Enchantment is back.

What is missing, of course, is a renewal of centering, practices that foster a transcendent orientation, and a creativity that has, as its end, the presence of God in all creations. Hence McPolitics, conspiracy theories and WitchTok are more commonly the result.

But Blake draws attention to the perennial issue: is there a there there? Illuminated printing was a “divine art”, he said, “melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid”.

So: reject the worldview that empties images of depth by insisting that imagination is but private fantasy, words merely evolved grunts, and minds are lost in a dark cosmos. “He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God,” Blake encouraged - a deity “heard throughout the Universe whereever a grass grows Or a leaf buds.”

“Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell There God is dwelling too.” These are the tests to apply to the contemporary re-enchantment. And Blake, for one, shows why and how it might much matter.