BLAKE'S STARS

New York Public Library
Milton 
Plate 4

There are the sun, the moon, the stars and the planets; the sources of light in the mundane world. The sun is associated with reason or Urizen, one of the four aspects of the Eternal Man. The aspect we call emotion was the precinct of Luvah or the moon, a passive source of light which provided repose or rest from the severe contentions of reason. But the balance was broken and Urizen fell, splitting his light into factions, the stars, which provide dim light. As remnants of reason, the stars form a chain of rationality expressed as law which restrains the fall of man into the abyss. The planets are the wanderers among the constellations of the Zodiac.  

Four Zoas, Night II, Page 33, (E 321)
"For the Divine Lamb Even Jesus who is the Divine Vision
Permitted all lest Man should fall into Eternal Death

For when Luvah sunk down himself put on the robes of blood
Lest the state calld Luvah should cease. & the Divine Vision
Walked in robes of blood till he who slept should awake 
Thus were the stars of heaven created like a golden chain
To bind the Body of Man to heaven from failing into the Abyss 
Each took his station, & his course began with sorrow & care 
In sevens & tens & fifties, hundreds, thousands, numberd all 
According to their various powers. Subordinate to Urizen 
And to his sons in their degrees & to his beauteous daughters 
Travelling in silent majesty along their orderd ways 
In right lined paths outmeasurd by proportions of number weight
And measure. mathematic motion wondrous. along the deep"

William Blake's Circle of Destiny by Milton Percival, on Page 148, visualizes Blake's process of using astronomical symbols in the fall of Albion:

"When the starry mundane shell crashes into the darkness of the abyss, the planets moving irregularly eastward, made their appearance. To counteract their maleficent influence Los creates a temporal sun and a temporal moon, feeble but indispensable replicas of their eternal counterparts.

The first diminution of light is indicated as we have just said, by the star world. This world was created to keep the body of man from falling into the abyss, when both the sun and moon had failed. When knowledge ceased to be intuitive and love ceased to be spontaneous, when, in astrological imagery, the departure of Urizen, the sun, into the north (the realm sacred to Urthona), and of Luvah, the moon, into the south (the realm sacred to Urizen), the diminished reason became Albion's guiding light. Out of fear it built the world of law that Albion might not descend into chaos. The ordered world of constellations is Blake's beautiful and appropriate symbol for the order imposed by law upon a world from which unity had fled. The symbol draws an added value from the Stoics' association of the stars with reason's ethereal fires. The star world of the law is the great rational achievement."   

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