Prophecies

William Lilly's Fire and Plague Hieroglyphics

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "William Lilly's Fire and Plague Hieroglyphics." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/prophecies/william-lillys-fire-and-plague-hieroglyphics.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). William Lilly's Fire and Plague Hieroglyphics. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/prophecies/william-lillys-fire-and-plague-hieroglyphics

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-william-lilly-s-fire-and-plague-hierogly,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {William Lilly's Fire and Plague Hieroglyphics},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/prophecies/william-lillys-fire-and-plague-hieroglyphics},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

In 1651 the astrologer William Lilly published Monarchy or No Monarchy in England, sixteen pages of deliberately cryptic hieroglyphic woodcuts, among them a city burning by a river and a pair of twins hanging over flames, Gemini being held the ruling sign of London. Fifteen years later, after the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in September 1666, readers matched the images to those events and Lilly was summoned to explain himself before a Parliamentary committee investigating the fire's cause.

Facts

Disputed

Claimed Fulfillment

That two of the 1651 hieroglyphs, a burning riverside city and twins over flames, depicted in advance the Great Fire of London of 1666. This record states the claim as it was popularly read after the fire, without asserting that Lilly intended or achieved literal foreknowledge of a specific future event. 1

Documented Response

Modern scholarship disputes that the hieroglyphs were ever intended as, or amount to, literal precognition of the Fire. Ann Geneva's study reads them as encoded commentary on the political and religious conflicts of 1651 aimed at Lilly's contemporary readers, with the Fire reading applied only in hindsight after 1666. The London Museum's own catalogue record of the pamphlet notes that many other Londoners made broadly similar fire predictions across the seventeenth century, so Lilly's case is one of several retrospectively matched to the event rather than a singular verified prophecy. This record states the popular claim and the modern challenge to it side by side. 1

Fulfillment

Documented Response

The Great Plague struck London in 1665 and the Great Fire burned from 2 to 5 September 1666, destroying more than 13,000 houses, 87 parish churches and St Paul's Cathedral. On 25 October 1666 a House of Commons committee investigating the fire's cause summoned Lilly to explain the 1651 images. He acknowledged making them but stated he had not known the specific dates they would later be read against, and the committee released him without charge. 2

Sources

Primary Source

Lilly's own 1651 pamphlet Monarchy or No Monarchy in England, and his 1668 autobiography (published 1715), which records his own account of the 1666 Parliamentary interrogation. 2

Dating

Predicted Date

No calendar date named in the 1651 pamphlet itself; the hieroglyphs were published that year and read only after the fact, in 1666, as having depicted the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London of 2 to 5 September 1666. 1

Date Attributed

1651, the year Monarchy or No Monarchy in England was published. 1

Origins

Attributed Author / Compiler

William Lilly, who published the hieroglyphs under his own name in 1651. 1

Attributions

Tradition

English astrology of the Civil War and Interregnum period, in which Lilly's almanacs and pamphlets were widely read political documents as much as astrological ones. 1

Cross-Tradition Connections