Babylon

William Blake and the Spiritual Form of Tony Blair, by Rod Tweedy

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The Rise and Fall of Urizen: Psychopathy and Rationality

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Introduction: The Triumph of the Left Hemisphere

In his startling conclusion to his illuminated prophecy Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Blake depicts Urizen (“your Reason”) in his final, contemporary form: completely dissociated or divided: no longer the originally luminous and enlightening power within the human brain, that he had once been, but now a totally unempathic, ruthless, manipulative drive, obsessed only with power and control. Blake refers to this “debased” or “insane” and dysfunctional form of the former “Holy Reasoning Power” as the “Red Dragon”, “the Dragon Urizen”.

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Blake’s Snakes: The Image of the Serpent in Blake’s Vision

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The Symbol of Symbolism: Unravelling the form and nature of the underlying Energy

 

Introduction: Entering the Serpent

Sometimes it’s good just to look at Blake’s images, and let them approach you, without any verbal text, theory, or explanation.  An encounter with their other-ness. Over the next few weeks this site will be posting a number of articles exploring the meaning and importance of the symbol of the serpent in Blake’s work, which weaves throughout his vision, and twists and turns throughout his images. 

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The End of Nature:  Blake and Pantheism, by Rod Tweedy

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Babylon, Nature-worship, and the Sleep of Albion 

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‘Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!’

As Kathleen Raine has noted, “the sleep of Albion is in a word the materialist mentality of the modern West.” However, this “materialist mentality”, for Blake, denotes not only the belief in the Newtonian universe of orthodox Science, which many are now questioning, but also the belief in “Nature” itself. For Blake, the “Creation” – the emergence of an apparently objective, natural, and material world – and Albion’s fall into “Sleep” were one and the same event.

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