The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (Hecate)

The woman has put a hand on the book, but she is looking somewhere else. Her head turns across a rocky slope towards an owl, a small open-mouthed creature and an ass whose muzzle almost touches the foreground. Behind her shoulders, two younger bodies bend away from our view. Above them a winged head hangs in the dark. William Blake makes a scene full of watchfulness in which scarcely anyone looks at anyone else. The creatures confront us more directly than the people do. ^[1]

The large colour print now called The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy has also been known as Hecate and The Triple Hecate. The names direct attention towards different parts of the scene. One suggests a goddess associated with witchcraft; the other brings the picture into Blake’s own poetry, where Enitharmon claims dominion by teaching people to distrust love and pleasure. Neither is a surviving title written on this print by Blake. The history of naming belongs to the work’s interpretation. ^[1][2]

Tate’s impression, N05056, provides the particular encounter discussed here. The museum dates it about 1795 and describes its medium as colour print, ink, tempera and watercolour on paper. Printing established a surface on which Blake continued drawing and painting. That combination is everywhere apparent: the rocky ground breaks into rough patches, while a few decisive lines can give a creature its expression or separate one finger from another. ^[1]

Three bodies, divided attention

The human group occupies the right half of the picture. The central woman’s raised knees make an upright mass beneath dark drapery. Her bare shoulders and feet remain exposed around it, so that the cloth encloses the body without concealing its posture. One knee rises almost to her chin. Her face turns sideways above this compact arrangement, and a long strand of hair follows the curve of her shoulder. The pose gives her a substantial presence while leaving her remarkably folded in upon herself. ^[1]

The younger figure to the left is seen through a succession of partial disclosures: hair, shoulder, back, a bent leg, a hand resting near the ground. The head disappears behind the central woman. On the other side, a curly-haired figure turns its face into the darkness. Blake gives us the surfaces of their bodies while withholding the expressions that might explain their relationship. Their closeness offers no easy reassurance. They share a small space, yet we cannot see an exchange between them. ^[1]

Look at the two outward hands. The younger figure’s fingers descend beside the rock; the central woman’s extended arm leads to the open book. These separate contacts with the ground give the group a quiet physical stability. Emotionally, however, the arrangement remains unsettled. The bodies lean and overlap without opening towards us. The woman can seem to interpose herself between the younger figures, but her own posture also looks defensive. Authority and exposure coexist in the same body.

The book extends that uncertainty. Its pages are broad and pale enough to attract attention, but their broken dark marks yield no continuous statement to read. Her fingers make its presence purposeful without disclosing its contents. We can see a relationship to knowledge or authority before knowing what kind of knowledge it is. The direction of her head pulls away from the object her hand appears to indicate. Gesture and gaze offer different routes through the scene.

There is no visible lamp or moon to organise the illumination. Flesh, the ass’s pale coat and the book emerge against darker passages with an intensity that the surrounding space does not explain. The result feels less like a room lit from a single source than a field of selectively revealed forms. Each body becomes available to attention in its own way: the shoulders through modelling, the owl through its eyes, the flying creature through the spread of its wings.

The creatures around the book

The ass takes up almost the whole height of the left side. Its long neck bends down, its ears point towards the ground, and its muzzle meets the narrow strip of terrain running beneath the figures. That downward action gives the picture an ordinary bodily activity amid its stranger presences. The animal is occupied with the ground while the woman looks across it. Its rough coat also provides a striking contrast with the smoother modelling of human backs and shoulders. ^[1]

The owl remains almost perfectly upright. Its round eyes interrupt the coloured rock with two small points of red, and the fine lines of its body gather into a compact fringe of feathers. Beneath it, another head protrudes from a crevice, its mouth open and its red eye turned towards the human group. Butlin’s Tate catalogue describes this creature as a toad. Naming the visible form helps locate it without obliging us to assign it a single abstract meaning. ^[1]

Overhead, the largest flying being has a face surrounded by stiff, radiating hair and a pair of dark wings stretching far to either side. Its expression is more recognisably confrontational than the hidden faces below. A smaller silhouette passes behind the younger figure on the right. The two flying shapes place something active in the area that might otherwise have supplied empty background. Darkness keeps producing further occupants as the eye travels through it. ^[1]

Their differing attitudes matter. The owl confronts the viewer; the ass bends to the earth; the small creature looks from its opening; the winged head occupies the air above everyone. This distribution makes the place feel inhabited at several levels. It does not require all the animals to be members of one symbolic category. Their precise appearances and directions are more unsettling than a general announcement that they stand for evil.

A name that arrived after Blake

The question mark in Martin Butlin’s 1990 catalogue title, Hecate (?), is a useful starting point. Following Christopher Heppner, it traces that name to William Michael Rossetti’s lists in the 1863 Life of William Blake. Butlin reports no corresponding title on the mount or in the surviving accounts between Blake and Thomas Butts. He also records an earlier name, The Owls, used by John Ruskin around 1843 for the impression now at the Huntington. The familiar classical title therefore belongs to a later history of looking and collecting. ^[1]

The number three helped make Hecate attractive. Yet the human arrangement also prompted an objection. As Butlin explains it, the familiar triple goddess turns outwards, whereas Blake has placed three distinct figures together, with the younger pair partly concealed. The difference shifts attention from a supernatural being’s multiple aspects towards relations between separate bodies. A woman, a girl and a boy can suggest separation, shame or jealousy in ways that three outward-facing manifestations of one goddess would not. These are interpretive possibilities drawn from the arrangement. ^[1]

Butlin’s account preserves disagreement instead of producing a final substitution. He reports Hagstrum’s jealousy reading, Jones’s emphasis on institutional religion, and Heppner’s willingness to recognise a witch without identifying her specifically as Hecate. Butlin’s discussion shows how the same bodies can support differing accounts of the emotional action. The obscured faces and uncertain hand gesture remain important precisely because the print gives no explanatory inscription. ^[1]

The National Galleries of Scotland now favours Enitharmon, while acknowledging that the subject has received several plausible explanations. Its title retains The Triple Hecate as a former name. Tate likewise uses Enitharmon in its current title and display caption, alongside the older catalogue’s uncertainty. The changed wording represents a persuasive reading gaining institutional acceptance. It does not make Hecate and Enitharmon two interchangeable names for one mythological person. ^[1][2]

Why Enitharmon’s joy is disturbing

The title’s poetic force comes from Europe a Prophecy, whose title page bears 1794. Enitharmon announces her night of joy and asks which messengers she should send to establish women’s dominion. Her instruction is startling: teach humanity that women’s love is sinful, promise eternal life in an unreal allegorical abode, and forbid joy. The apparent celebration becomes a programme of deprivation. Her pleasure depends upon restrictions imposed on other lives. ^[3]

Now comes the night of Enitharmons joy! ^[3]

Blake gives that announcement a larger setting. Before the speech, a shadowy female protests against the solid forms Enitharmon imposes on what she brings forth. Life arrives as an energetic, painful process, then receives a determining stamp. The opening makes control over generation a problem before Enitharmon begins issuing commands. Her later prohibitions extend that problem into human intimacy: a power that shapes life also claims the right to decide which pleasures it may possess. ^[3]

Read beside the print, the speech makes the central woman’s position between the younger bodies especially charged. If the two are understood as lovers, their separation can become the visible consequence of a ban upon desire. The hand on the book then suggests the authority by which such a ban is maintained. The reading brings the interrupted intimacy and the book into a coherent relation. Its force depends on that connection: the painted pages and the young figures supply no labels of their own.

The poem’s books matter here. Later, Albion’s Angel sees Urizen’s brazen book, which kings and priests have copied on earth. As the night continues, London’s churches, palaces and towers disappear within mist, and its young people hide in gloom. The association allows the open volume in the print to be considered alongside systems of belief and command. Calling it Urizen’s book remains an identification made through comparison; the picture’s marks cannot independently establish the author or the material of its imaginary volume. ^[3]

Enitharmon sleeps for eighteen hundred years. Her night expands from a private scene into an immense history of enclosure. During that sleep, prohibition and fear appear across houses, and inhabitants become physically bound. The poem brings its extravagant powers into contact with homes, streets and institutions. The small group in the print can consequently acquire a wider pressure: intimate separation may be one place where a governing belief becomes bodily experience. ^[3]

The gendered language also needs to remain attached to its speaker and consequences. Enitharmon seeks power through a doctrine that condemns women’s love. The poem lets us hear her instructions and witness the constricted world around them. Her speech cannot responsibly be converted into a general claim that women are naturally deceitful or that female authority must be oppressive. The difficulty concerns a particular exercise of dominion, whose promises and effects the surrounding narrative exposes. ^[3]

Nor does Enitharmon occupy one unchanging emotional position. When morning approaches, the creatures of her night disperse and she weeps. In the closing movement, Orc’s appearance in France brings red light, blood and predatory violence; she cries in anguish. The poem carries her beyond the satisfaction of the announcing speech. The broader guide to Blake’s mythology follows such changes across his writings. Here, they keep the print’s modern title from hardening into a complete definition of the woman before us. ^[3]

How far does Macbeth take us?

The older Hecate interpretation also prompted Shakespearean comparisons, recorded in Tate’s catalogue. Macbeth, Act 4, scene 1, offers an immediate point of contact: the witches’ ingredients include a toad, bat and howlet, while Hecate enters to commend their work. The scene turns animal bodies into materials for an enchantment. Blake’s owl, small creature and winged presences can recall that atmosphere without reproducing the action. His people sit together beside a book; there is no cauldron or Macbeth receiving an apparition. ^[1][14]

The scene continues well beyond its spell. Apparitions appear, Macbeth seeks assurance about his future, and the ambiguous promises encourage a confidence that remains mixed with fear. He ends by planning violence against Macduff’s household. This is a particular dramatic sequence, not a universal explanation of nocturnal animals. Folger’s editorial note also identifies the Hecate material among passages widely considered later additions to the play. A comparison with the received dramatic text therefore needs more care than naming its goddess and announcing that Blake illustrated her. ^[14]

Butlin proposes that the design was a companion to Pity, noting similarities between the Tate impressions’ colouring and signatures. That suggested relationship is useful without making the present picture an established Shakespeare scene. It invites a reader to compare different human predicaments within Blake’s large prints, while leaving the specific source and meaning of each composition to be argued from its own evidence. ^[1]

A repeatable picture with an individual surface

The irregular colour is part of the design’s physical intelligence. Across the rock, flecks and short broken passages give the surface a grain that changes from place to place. Around the people, finer contours organise that variety into shoulders, fingers and hair. The book is particularly revealing: its recognisable leaves enclose marks that remain blurred and resistant to reading. Blake can make something materially definite while keeping what it communicates uncertain. ^[1]

Joseph Viscomi describes most of the large colour-print designs as painted on prepared millboard and transferred to paper. His 2017 study distinguishes a monoprint, which has a repeatable underlying design but individually varied colour and finish, from a wholly improvised monotype. His account helps explain why three impressions of this composition can preserve the same group and still differ in expression. Repeatability supplies the arrangement; renewed painting and work on the resulting sheet supply further decisions. ^[15]

In his 2022 essay, Viscomi describes the larger process through direct and indirect applications of paint. An engraver’s press brought the painted surface against dampened paper; after this transfer, Blake continued with colours and pen. Each transfer could generate a broken or netlike texture to be developed afterwards. Looking at the owl’s feathers against the speckled rock makes those different scales of work palpable. A broad coloured foundation and a tiny eye belong to successive kinds of attention. ^[16]

The exact support used for this design has also been discussed cautiously. The Huntington’s catalogue notes the absence of the indentations associated with relief plateaus and considers either an unincised copperplate or millboard. Viscomi’s prepared-millboard account is a more specific reconstruction. The surviving sheets combine transferred colour and handwork; the original printing surface is not available to settle every operation by direct inspection. The differing technical descriptions should remain attached to their sources. ^[15][17]

The Huntington impression, 000.126, provides a concrete example of the composition’s variability. Its catalogue describes a more downcast gaze, differences in hair and hands, and substantial trimming along the bottom. Its 2022 label identifies the development of transferred, netlike colour into vegetation. These are observations about that particular sheet. They show how the gesture or expression central to an interpretation can change through finishing, as well as how later alteration can change the space around the figures. ^[17]

Why the printing order is disputed

Three impressions survive, at Tate, the Huntington and the National Galleries of Scotland. Tate’s historical catalogue places its own sheet first, Edinburgh second and the Huntington last, all around 1795. The 2004 display caption similarly reads Tate’s dense colour as evidence of an early pull. Its paper carries a 1794 Whatman watermark. That paper date establishes a material boundary, but cannot by itself identify the order in which three impressions were printed. ^[1][2]

Viscomi’s 2017 reconstruction changes the sequence. He places the Huntington first and Edinburgh second in 1795, with Tate’s impression belonging to a separate printing around 1795–96. In that account, the darker and more finished Tate surface comes from a renewed act of printing, rather than occupying the beginning of one sequence of increasingly depleted transfers. The difference explains why greater density alone cannot settle the chronology: colours could be reapplied when a design was printed again. ^[15]

The scratched surname at Tate’s lower left contributes to Viscomi’s argument. He compares it with similarly incised signatures on Pity and Satan Exulting over Eve, proposing that Blake signed and sold the three together before the middle of 1796. This is a reconstructed history of transactions, not a surviving dated receipt for this print. It depends on comparing signatures, printing groups and patterns of ownership. His account also challenges the assumption that a signature invariably records the moment of completion. ^[15]

The distinction matters beyond an exact year. A design, a printed sheet, its further colouring and its sale are different events. Viscomi’s 2022 account places the Huntington Hecate among impressions still in Blake’s stock in 1818 and allows a possible later return to its finishing. Such an argument concerns the duration of an individual object’s life. It does not mean that the picture was invented in 1818, or that all twelve large designs were printed and finished together. ^[16]

Reading the face again

The modern name has a specific scholarly history. Gert Schiff’s catalogue entry appeared in Japanese for the 1990 Blake exhibition in Tokyo; his English text was published in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly in 2002, with an introduction by Morton D. Paley. The entry concerns Edinburgh’s impression. Schiff proposes Enitharmon as the most persuasive explanation, drawing together the separation of the younger figures, an identification of the book with Urizen’s law, and the central woman’s apparent approach to sleep. His conclusion is an interpretation of those relations. ^[18]

Schiff also distinguishes the impressions. He sees the pointing forefinger as particular to Tate, while Edinburgh’s and the Huntington’s hands rest more passively on their books. He interprets their differing eyes through a progression towards drowsiness. This supplies a revealing connection with Enitharmon’s long sleep in Europe, while making clear how an argument about the composition can depend upon details of a particular sheet. ^[18]

Christopher Heppner disputed Schiff’s account of the woman’s indifference in 2002–03. He pointed to the frown lines and pronounced sideways turn of her head, details that complicate the suggestion of an untroubled controller. He also questioned how fully Schiff’s explanation accounted for her appearance as a witch. Heppner offered an alternative reading connected with Medea, while acknowledging that his own proposal remained hypothetical without a supporting text or inscription. The modern title did not bring interpretive disagreement to an end. ^[19]

At Tate, the extended finger gives the book a precise claim upon attention, while the head turns elsewhere. Heppner’s objection asks us to return to that divided movement and the tension in the face. Enitharmon’s possible presence can sharpen the encounter without dictating its emotional outcome. An apparent authority may also be anxious; a book can be possessed without bringing the person beside it peace. ^[18][19]

Tate’s sheet passed through the Butts family, was bought by W. Graham Robertson in 1906 and entered Tate as his gift in 1939. Its present title carries another kind of accumulated history: later viewers have recognised a goddess, a witch, jealousy, imposed shame and Enitharmon’s prohibited joy in the same arrangement. The compelling point of return is the woman’s divided attention. Her hand holds our eye to the book, her face turns across the rock, and the younger bodies remain withdrawn behind her. Every proposed explanation must answer to those particular, difficult relations. ^[1]