William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 15, 1827)

I wasn’t going to go here again, after deciding that John Varley was a better fit for me. And then I spotted the Peter Ackroyd book, Blake, in my office library. Looking through the first and last chapters, I found not only Blake’s birth time but also his death time!

So how can I resist the opportunity to compare his birth and death charts with mine?

That Yod pointing at Mars gives a hint of his ability to upset people, which he was prone to do. His brush with the law came when he was 45 years old.

Blake’s trouble with authority came to a head in August 1803, when he was involved in a physical altercation with a soldier, John Schofield. Blake was charged not only with assault, but with uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the king. Schofield claimed that Blake had exclaimed “Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves.” Blake was cleared in the Chichester assizes of the charges. According to a report in the Sussex county paper, “[T]he invented character of [the evidence] was … so obvious that an acquittal resulted”. Schofield was later depicted wearing “mind forged manacles” in an illustration to Jerusalem

Wikipedia

Saturn in Blake’s chart may, in fact, represent the timing of this event, but perhaps a bit earlier than it transpired. (That implies that the birth time of 7:45 pm may be a little bit later than it truly was. People didn’t note quarter and three-quarter hours on birth certificates in those days.) At any rate the opposition between Mars and Saturn is there.

Combining Blake’s birth chart with my own demonstrates the strong connections between us. My Sun/Jupiter conjunction is linked to his Saturn, my Mercury to his Venus, my Pluto to his Mars/Neptune conjunction, and most importantly, my Ascendant is conjunct his Pluto.

But if we are to believe Rudolf Steiner’s words, Blake’s death chart should be clear:

And it is. My Pluto is conjunct Blake’s ‘fatal’ Sun/Mercury/Mars in Leo, my North Node is conjunct his ‘fatal’ Pluto, his ‘fatal’ Jupiter is conjunct my Mars/South Node/Midheaven in Libra, his ‘fatal’ North Node is conjunct my Moon, and again, most importantly, my Mercury is conjunct his ‘fatal’ Uranus/Ascendant in Capricorn. OK. Take a deep breath.

*Exhale*

Now it seems that I am more likely to have been Blake than Varley. That may account for the preponderance of similarity between our poetry. And my ‘outlandish’ thinking about spirituality is also supported. Let’s face facts, we are both Gnostic. I know, I know.