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Jodie Marley on astrology in William Blake’s art.

William Blake, The Vision of the Deity from Whom Proceeded the Nine Spheres, 1824-7, (The William Blake Archive).

The poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) has a reputation for mysticism and the esoteric, which began during his lifetime and never abated. His spiritual influences range from seventeenth-century alchemy to the prophecies of working-class, eighteenth-century Christian mystics like Richard Brothers and Dorothy Gott.

Historically, Blake’s engagement with astrology has been neglected by scholars. This may originate in the fewer references in his art and writing to astrology in comparison with other esoteric practices, and Blake’s own negative comments on astrology. My focus for part one of this essay will be Blake’s use of astrological symbolism its origins. Part two will focus on Blake’s personal views on astrology.

One of Blake’s final projects was his illustrations to the fourteenth-century Italian Renaissance poet Dante’s Divine Comedy (comprising Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), which Blake painted 1824-7. Many of Blake’s illustrations for the poem, especially from the Paradiso section, remain incomplete, as Blake died before he could finish the series.

The illustration ‘The Vision of the Deity from Whom Proceed the Nine Spheres’, demonstrates Blake’s familiarity with the Chaldean order of the traditional astrological planets, which is geocentric rather than heliocentric1. Christopher Warnock notes this arrangement of the planets ‘follows the speed of the orbits of the planets’, with Saturn first as the slowest to orbit Earth, and the moon last as the fastest.2 Blake’s illustration maps out Dante’s journey through the spheres in Paradiso, which begins with the moon, and ends in eternity. Accordingly, the personification of the moon appears lowest on the diagram, with bearded Saturn the highest before the entry to heaven.

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As mentioned above, one of Blake’s influences was spiritual alchemist Jacob Boehme. Blake enthused about the esoteric diagrams by Dionysius A. Freher in the English William Law version to friends.3 There is a marked similarity between one Freher diagram in particular, depicting God’s influence filtering down through the spheres, and Blake’s Paradiso illustration.4 Blake’s map of hell for Dante’s Inferno, though never completed beyond a sketch, also shares similarities with Freher’s cosmological diagrams for Boehme; as does Blake’s earlier depiction of the Four Zoas’ intersecting spheres in Milton a Poem (1811).5

Dionysius A. Freher, Plate XI to Jakob Boehme, *The works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic theosopher*, Volume 2, William Law Edition (published 1764)

Blake, Illustrations to Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, The Circles of Hell, 1824-7, (The William Blake Archive).

Blake, Milton a Poem (1811), plate 32, (The William Blake Archive).

Blake’s references to astrology in his diagrams to Paradiso and Inferno draw on his familiarity with Boehme’s work. Freher’s diagrams accompanying Boehme do not only depict the planets’ order, but rather, God’s spirit uniting them as a frame for the universe’s divinity. Blake’s work thus contextualises astrology as just one element within wider esotericism, even if Blake himself disagreed with astrology as a practice.
— Jodie Marley

1

Blake, ‘The Vision of the Deity from Whom Proceed the Nine Spheres’, see https://blakearchive.org/copy/but812.1?descId=but812.1.wc.100

2

Christopher Warnock, Secrets of Planetary Magic, 3rd edition (2012), p. 8.

3

Henry Crabb Robinson, diary entry for 10th December 1825, in Blake Records, ed. G. E. Bentley Jr. (1969), p. 313.

4

Dionysius A. Freher, Plate XI to Jakob Boehme, The works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic theosopher, Volume 2, William Law Edition (1764).

5

Blake, Milton a Poem (1811), plate 32, https://blakearchive.org/copy/milton.c?descId=milton.c.illbk.34.

Good Horoscope

William Blake on Astrology: Part 1