theology.6 Originally, Florensky subtitled 'Celestial Signs' 'Meditation'. As early as 1905 Florensky had begun to gather materials pertaining to the image and meaning of Sophia. As his correspondence with Bely reveals, in his initial approach to the idea of Sophia he emphasised her link not only with the Apocalypse, but also with the Symbolist identification of her as the Beautiful Lady and specifically with Liubov' Blok (Mendeleeva) who inspired Aleksandr Blok's 'Verses about the Beautiful Lady' and was revered by Bely and Sergei Solov'ev in particular: Over recent times I have been collecting materials on Sophia. It's not easy to collect them, because I have to read through a pile of raw material, examine lots of icons, drawings, etc. so as to catch a few pearls. But I do have a totally apocalyptic icon (and that's one of my pearls), i.e., The Woman clothed in the Sun, the Mother of God, the beast and the abyss, ete. It will still be a while before I finish my research ... Recently, I finished [working on] types of growth. This is preparing me (mathematically and psychologically) for the issue of individuals enjoying the special patronage of S[ophia], as, for example, your Lady and the other Lady that I know from Aleksei SergeevichJ This kind of iconological research, and 'Celestial Signs', contains specific references to the Beautiful Lady, even though by the time the essay was published in 1922 the intimacy ofFlorensky's friendship with Bely had waned. Nevertheless, the subtitle of 'Celestial Signs', 'Reflections on the Symbolics of Colours', elicits the Symbolist vocabulary, especially that of Bely, who, in his own considerations of sacred colours, had subjected 'colour correspondences' to a very personal interpretation. 8
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