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Illustration 5 to Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity": The Flight of Moloch

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Type
Drawings(Opens in new tab)
Date
ca. 1814-1816
Accession number
000.18
Maker
William Blake(Opens in new tab) (British, 1757–1827)
Dimensions
6 3/16 x 4 7/8 in. (15.7 x 12.4 cm.) mount: 14 x 9 7/16 in. (35.5 x 24 cm.)
Medium
pen and watercolor
Description
The center of the composition is dominated by the "burning Idol all of Blackest hue" of "sullen Moloch" (205, 210). The devil-god himself flies away in dark smoke above the crowned and sceptered idol, much as the Genius departs the statue of Apollo in the previous design. The bat wings and posture of this figure are similar to Satan's on plate 19 of Blake's For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (ca. 1818) and recall the visual and verbal images of the Spectre in Milton (ca. 1804-1808) and Jerusalem (ca. 1804-20). On each side of the design are worshipers who "dance about the furnace blue" (210). Bearded men are on the left, youthful females on the right. These dancers and the timbrels (see 219) in their raised hands are fallen parodies of the chorus of angels and their instruments in the second design. Below the idol is his "Ark" (220) in the form of a furnace raised slightly on a circular plinth. Its arched mouth is just under the giant's foot. Two similarly arched mouths or vents also belch flames from the ends of the transverse extensions. This cruciform structure mimics its spiritual opposite-the stable as pictured in the second, third and sixth designs. The fires of the furnace reach upward toward the idol and would seem to be about to consume it. In Paradise Lost, Milton describes the child sacrifices practiced by the followers of Moloch. [1] No such rites are described in the "Nativity Ode," but this would seem to be the activity Blake pictures in the lower part of this illustration. Two children reach toward the idol just below his right foreleg; a third dangles limply from his left hand. The saddened man (right) and horrified woman (left) in the foreground have apparently cast their child into the furnace. But this babe strides miraculously out of the flames in an energetic posture that recalls Jesus in the first design. [2] As with the triumph of Christ over paganism, this innocent child is more powerful than the forces of evil now literally going up in flames. In the earlier, Whitworth, version the posture of the idol and the positions of the male and female dancers are reversed. Some of the dancers in the background play large pipes. We can see the saddened faces of both the man (left) and the woman (right) in the foreground. The left hand of the man and right hand of the woman touch the babe, who leans to the right and looks at the woman. The furnace and its circular plinth are larger, in relation to the adult figures and idol, than in the Huntington design. Its larger, transverse roof reaches to the idol's waist and its three portals are steeply pointed. The general effect is that of a black giant squatting on top of a cruciform church. Two children reach upward on each side of the idol's left leg. In his left hand, he holds a scepter topped by a fleur-de-lis ornament like the old Dragon's staff in the third Whitworth design. We can see the face of the (dead?) child dangling from the idol's right hand. His crown has five (rather than three) points, he is bearded, and there are flames above the furnace's roof right and left of the idol's upper arms. We see only the back of the bat-winged monster's head and his right foot is partly obscured by his left calf. Jagged mountains fill the distant horizon. A pencil sketch for the design (David Bindman collection, London; Butlin 1981, No. 541) shows the major figures in the postures they have in the Huntington version. A few faint lines indicate that Blake had first sketched at least the foreground couple and the babe between them in a position closer to the Whitworth watercolor, and thus the drawing appears to be a transition between the two series. Notes 1. 1:392-96. Blake names "Molech" in several of his works and refers to Moloch's "Furnaces" and "Victims of Fire" in Milton (Blake 1982, 137). 2. Hagstrum 1964, 123, identifies the child with both Christ and Orc. See also for example the babe in flames on Pl. 20 of The Book of Urizen (1794). The relationship between Orc and Blake's concept of Jesus in his nineteenth-century work is most complex; the figures are not equivalent. Yet the association of Orc with the infant Jesus in these illustrations is supported by the fact that the beginning of Blake's Europe (1794), a poem in which Orc is a major character, is based closely on the "Nativity Ode."
Credit
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
Department
European Art
Find out more
View in the Art Museum catalog(Opens in new tab)
As with Apollo (illustration 4), the spirit of the devil-god Moloch departs from his statue. The followers of Moloch, like those with raised tambourines right and left, practiced child sacrifice, but now the intended victim springs Christ-like out of the flames below the statue. His sorrowing parents have do not yet see his salvation.

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