Mazeppism is a Blakean Apocalyptic Humanism

Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790's (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

The vicissitudes of scholarly fashion require Job-like patience, a felicitous genetic inheritance, and just enough luck to deliver a life adequately long to see intellectuals arrive at the obvious. When they do arrive, woefully tardy and rarely apologetic, they are often burdened with glorious gifts.

Blake scholarship is no exception.

One must wade through reams of fallen trees blotted with toxic ink stains, risking life, health, and sanity, until one bright, sunny morning, roaming the library stacks in heart-sick desperation, a title catches the eye. Sometimes, as with Makdisi's book on Blake, the title is too long and inadequately informative. But if the sunlight manages to penetrate the gloom of the aisle that holds the PR 4100's, and do so at just the right angle, the spine of the book for which one has waited decades (without knowing it) whispers urgently from the shelf: "Pick me!" At that moment, freedom of choice is exposed for the self-congratulatory conceit that it is. The book is plucked from the shelf and, after several moments of intense scrutiny, one is reconciled to all of the scribblers who have made the life of the mind ultimately so rewarding.

Makdisi gets it.

At that momentous historical turning point, toward the end of the eighteenth century, in which almost every attempt to represent otherness seemed to slip into the exoticizing political aesthetic that would enable and justify imperial conquest, it was a matter of some urgency to be able to think of the foreign without resorting to (or sliding into) the language and figures of exoticism...Blake drew on and reformulated for the exigencies of his own time a heterogeneous underground tradition that stressed the continuity of European and Afro-Asiatic cultures, rather than the sharp differentiation between Europe and its others which would prove essential to modern imperialism...Blake's interest in certain mystical currents which had plunged deep underground long before his own time offered him a way to articulate a logic of cultural heterogeneity that refused the discourse of exoticism. Indeed, his simultaneously political and aesthetic stance on otherness must be seen to enable a carefully articulated position on the cultural politics of imperialism, as well as a discourse of freedom contesting the internal imperialism of the state. Or, rather, Blake's elaboration of a form of religious and political freedom that would defy what he called 'state religion' was also an elaboration of a form of political and cultural freedom from the discourse and practice of imperialism...What I want to propose is that through this investigation of Blake's anti-imperialism we will discover how he found a way to produce a critique for his own time, rather than as a quasi-reactionary attempt to return to some lost original fullness, both of the ancien regime and of the bourgeois radicalism that attacked it--a way to refuse the logic of the state and of the discourse of sovereign power itself in the name of what he would call 'Immortal Joy.' Makdisi, pp. 204-205.

Mazeppism, as I practice it, is, and has always been, a variety of Blakean apocalyptic humanism.