IT IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN that the designers of the London Underground Tube Map “borrowed” heavily from William Blake’s early attempts to diagram of his own cosmological system. Blake eventually abandoned his graphical effort as incommodious to the three- and four-dimensional representations of the visions he saw, and instead set about writing his Prophecies. Nevertheless here you will find his predictions for our current times, and they’re uncannily specifically spot-on. (He missed Trump, although it appears he envisioned Trump’s Wall.) The worst evils of Hell are to be found at the center; they become more banal the further one moves toward the circumference. If you stand way, way back, you can make out behind it all the face of Satan (which appears elsewhere in Blake’s works as an undated engraving done in the style of Henry Fuseli).

Hell in the twenty-first century is not quite as hellish as it may at first glance appear. Notice the figures drifting around the peripheries. It is as if Blake were saying that salvation for would come not from organizations or policies, but from the visions, insights, efforts, and sacrifices of individuals.