Spectre (Blake)

The Spectre of Urthona torments Los in Jerusalem. Printed 1821, in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art

The Spectre in William Blake's mythology is one aspect of the fourfold nature of the human psyche. It is introduced in Blake's prophetic book Jerusalem:

I see the Four-fold Man, The Humanity in deadly sleep

And its fallen Emanation, the Spectre and its cruel Shadow.

Elsewhere in Jerusalem, Blake defines it this way: "The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, and when separated from Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio of Things of Memory, It thence frames Laws and Moralities [...]." The Spectre also appears in Milton and The Four Zoas.