Catherine Blackledge

Lily and Art

Abstract

William Lilly (1602-1681) was England's greatest astrologer and its first media celebrity. Via his hugely successful print career as an author of almanacs and the first comprehensive guide to astrology in English, Christian Astrology (1647), he raised popular awareness of astrology as an art form across seventeenth-century Europe. Under his public and professional leadership (heading up The Society of Astrologers), astrology enjoyed a mass acclaim it had never before experienced.

Lilly not only described and demonstrated astrology to be an art, but he and his work became the subject of artistic representation. The frontispiece of Christian Astrology depicts Lilly as the astrologer at work: complete with sidereal tools, a casebook displaying astral glyphs, and a chart revealing his philosophy of astrology. The cryptic backdrop speaks to deeper symbolism. His pamphlets were bestsellers not only for their print content but because of their striking front covers: the sundogs portending Charles I's beheading and Black Monday's solar eclipse that brought the country to a standstill. In later years, Lilly became infamous for his artwork - a series of hieroglyphics predicting the 'future condition of the English nation'. They include forecasts of the great plague and fire that struck London in 1665 and 1666.

Biography

Catherine Blackledge is the author of The Man Who Saw the Future: a biography of William Lilly (Watkins, February 2015) and the internationally-acclaimed The Story of V: a biography of the vagina (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2003) (published in 13 countries). She has a PhD in Chemistry from Birkbeck College, University of London.

Dr Blackledge is a scientist and award-winning journalist; she has studied astrology for over a decade and is working to complete John Frawley's Horary Apprenticeship. She has lectured at the Cheltenham and Manchester science festivals and Café Scientifique in Bristol, Newcastle and London. She has given talks, readings, done live radio and television, and appeared in debates in Amsterdam and Lisbon.