The GIANT
Albion
But now the starry Heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of Albion.
The Giant Albion is an art project to incarnate William Blake’s figure of Albion as a tattooed Briton, part of an ongoing transformation.
The giant Albion first appears in William Blake’s The Four Zoas where, as the eternal man, he is the site of the conflict between his warring elements (or Zoas - reason, the passions, the body, and intuition).
In plate 25 of jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion, he is shown as an ancient tattooed briton, bound before an altar before he is sacrificed to druidic religions and thus loses the heavens contained in his body.
Blake was influenced by images by antiquarians who depicted the britons as ornately decorated, their bodies covered with images of animals and celestial objects.
I have been obsessed by this image of Albion as a tattooed Briton since I first wrote about it in my twenties. As such, it has become incredibly influential in my own designs for body decoration.
Albion’s Cosmos is depicted in Milton a Poem. In that epic, illuminated book, Milton descends into the body of Albion, a figure who is simultaneously a man, a country and the universe, among the spaces of the four Zoas. Blake’s vision of Albion was inspired by the myth of the universal man, or Adam Kadmon.
It is a conceptual map of blake’s cosmos, showing how the body of man contracts from the opposing contraries of the Zoas. Albion exists among the flames of eternity, and at his centre condenses into the natural man, Adam, and the antithesis of eternity - Satan, who by believing that he is more than man becomes far less.
