The Tygers of Wrath are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction

**Wood** · 4th December 2003, 03:27 PM

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

Anybody here read any William Blake? I particularly mean the hard stuff, the wild prophetic stuff. He's got a weird cosmology all of his own. Of particular interest is the depiction of Urizen, the "Ancient of Days", a creator and judge.

What particularly gets me is that Urizen is basically how an Elder God should be portrayed. Rather than a white-hat heroic deus ex machina, the Blake's Elder God is terrifying in his own right, an unfeeling imposer of law and conformity on a world that doesn't particularly need order, a stifler of creativity and a destroyer of love.

Oh, look, he says, another Mythos deity. Gosh, like we need another one. But hey, I was reading poetry and I was feeling Lovecraftian. What can I say?

Urizen (Elder God)
Lo, a shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!
Self-closd, all-repelling: what Demon
Hath form'd this abominable void
This soul-shudd'ring vacuum?--Some said
"It is Urizen", But unknown, abstracted
Brooding secret, the dark power hid.

Times on times he divided, & measur'd
Space by space in his ninefold darkness
Unseen, unknown! changes appeard
In his desolate mountains rifted furious
By the black winds of perturbation

For he strove in battles dire
In unseen conflictions with shapes
Bred from his forsaken wilderness,
Of beast, bird, fish, serpent & element
Combustion, blast, vapour and cloud.
William Blake, The Book of Urizen

Urizen is the father of the Elder Gods. In some mythologies, he dragged the original man scremaing from the earth. He is the arbiter and the judge, the imposer of order; he is the implacable enemy of the Outer Gods, the one who sentenced Azathoth to an eternity of mindlessness. But he is also the harsh destroyer of creativity and life. To serve Urizen means to suffer at the hands of one who would leach the life from a man’s heart. Cthulhu eats souls; Urizen crushes them.

Those who call Urizen should beware. He may well drive away the menance at hand, but can very probably become a worse menace.

If called (a very rare occurrence), he appears as an ancient, giant member of of the race of the being who called him, wreathed in darkness and rolling clouds.

Urizen can harness the lightning and the wind as his weapons; once per turn he can also tame the soul of any non-divine being with a touch. A victim who, when touched by the god’s hand and who fails in a POW vs. POW struggle becomes the mechanistic, emotionless servant of the Elder God’s will for ever more.

Urizen, the Self-Contemplating Shadow

Code:

STR  32   CON  50   SIZ  38   INT  44   POW  60
DEX  20   Move 10   DB  +3D6            HP 44

Armour: No armour. If reduced to 0HP, Urizen returns to the unearthly palace whence he came.
Spells: Any, as appropriate, particularly spells to dismiss Outer Gods, Great Old Ones and their Servitor Races.
SAN:0/1D4 SAN to see Urizen.

Code:

Attacks             Attack %  Damage
Lightning Bolt      100%      6D6
Touch/Fist          95%       1D3+DB 
                              or POW vs. POW 
                              struggle to avoid 
                              soul destruction

**TheSteelTsar** · 4th December 2003, 07:11 PM

There's also a fine song; Gates of Urizen on Bruce Dickenson's masteful solo LP The Chemical Weeding, a record any fan of both occult horror and heavy metal should own, referencing Blake, Rosencreutz, and plently of other esoterica. The description in the intro, a quotation from the above Blake, sounds to me delightfully Lovecraftian, and evocative of Nyarlathotep, or perhaps Yog-Sothoth, both of whom, of course, also have the 'gate' association. The lyrics are here; http://213.86.54.13/brucedickinson/d.../cw/index.asp# if anyone's interested.

I'm sorry to drag this once promisingly intellectual thread from lyric balladry into heavy metal lyrics, but well, I can appreciate both William Blake and Iron Maiden, so why not? The write-up of Urizen is very good, though, indeed I've thought in the past that in Blake's weird esoterica there lay the seeds of a decent Cthulhu story. Has anybody ever tried to write one? In the same vein, has anybody out there written up Lord Dunsany's Gods of Pegana material for Call of Cthulhu?

**ThothAmon** · 4th December 2003, 10:18 PM

I've used Pegana and other Dunsanay as inspiration in the past for fantasy games.

Blake is a good hook for cultists in general. Very macabre images and writings. IIRC Blake was a turn on for Mr Dollarhyde in 'Manhunter'.

**Mithras** · 4th September 2004, 10:06 PM

Originally Posted by Wood

Anybody here read any William Blake? I particularly mean the hard stuff, the wild prophetic stuff. He's got a weird cosmology all of his own. Of particular interest is the depiction of Urizen, the "Ancient of Days", a creator and judge...

Wood, this is virtuoso work.

I've mused with the 'Blake' cosmology as RPG material for some years too.

Check out this missed opportunity from an interview with John Wick
by James Maliszewski on RPG.net:

Maliszewski: I've always been a big fan of the swashbuckling era of musketeers and pirates. This setting has never gotten very good treatment in RPGs previously. What made you decide to set the game in this sort of setting?

Wick:My wife. We were sitting at dinner a year and a half ago, and I was telling her that I was done with samurai. "Why don't you a role-playing world based on William Blake?" she asked. It was a joke, but the more we thought about it, the more sense it made. William Blake was a poet in the eighteenth century who wrote about passion and rapture in a religious context that challenged the puritan ethic that was so popular at the time. I took a look at the time-frame and realized that it was also the age Alexandre Dumas was writing in, it was the golden age of piracy and the time of Sir Isaac Newton. At first, we talked about doing a world that looked like the film Dangerous Beauty. Bringing a fantastic Venice to the role-playing world was very exciting. Jennifer's always loved the concept of sorcery in the noble blood and I was fascinated with a rational church. From there, "fantastic Venice" turned into "fantastic Europe." We brought in England, France, the Prussian states and a few other friends and Théah was born.

Unfortunately, John Wick's a bit off in his history. It's more Bernard Cornwell/Patrick O'Brian/Lord Byron/Mary Shelley/Jane Austen/Ann Radcliffe, which would have made for a much better game than 7th Sea IMHO. Still, I must create a system, or be enslav'd by another man's...

There was a great exhibition a few years back:
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhib...blakevents.htm

Alan Moore (at that time) wrote:
"I read Blake at O level, but studied him seriously when I was researching From Hell, my book about Jack the Ripper, which has lots of references to Blake; him seeing a spectre at his house in Hercules Road, for example. Blake represents the visionary heroism of the imagination. He was living in a London which was not much more than a squalid horse toilet, on which he superimposed a magnificent four-fold city and populated it with angels, and philosophers of the past. Art at its best has the power to insist on a different reality".

Check out the amazing CD performance 'Angel passage' by Alan Moore and Tim Perkins (RE: PCD04) which is all about Blake's magickal life and resonances.
http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog...ype=13&page=10

Iain Sinclair (also at the time of the exhibition) wrote:
"William Blake of Soho. Child Blake seeing angels in a tree on Peckham Rye. Naked Blake reciting Paradise Lost in a leafy Lambeth bower. Blake the engraver, in old age, walking to Hampstead. Blake singing on his deathbed in Fountain's Court. Blake, lying with his wife Catherine, in Bunhill Fields. Blake the prophet. Blake the psychogeographer. Blake the red-cap revolutionary, watching Newgate burn. Blake the happy-clappy revivalist of Glad Day, banging a tambourine with Michael Horowitz. Blake, at the last night of the proms, burning in the mad eyes of sentimental imperialists.

We force the poet on to a Procrustean bed, squeezing and shaping him to fit our fantasies. We insist on seeing him as a London figure, coeval with Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Henry VIII. Blake declines into a heritage token, an emblem to be bolted on to the bonnet of any old banger.

What we should go back to, and what can serve us still, is the work; the great, complex freewheeling derangements of the prophetic books, the savage wisdom of the parables, the unnerving directness of the lyrics.

There is no reason on earth why Blake, his poetry or his art, should be of any use. It was never his business to be useful. Shovels are useful. Paper clips are useful. Blake astounds, terrifies, delights. He gives us a richer sense of ourselves and of our city. His presence animates certain dusty corners. The incantatory rhythms of his poems drum in our heads and fire our blood. He doesn't grant entrance to a lost garden of time. He challenges us to risk everything, the kind of possession he himself underwent when he rewrote Milton, became Milton, revised his errors. Blake is there and the rest is up to us."

**MisterEntropy** · 5th September 2004, 03:41 PM

Quite a better write-up of an Elder God than I've seen...well...pretty much ever. Good show old man!

Perhaps a thread wherein people detail their own anti-Derlethian takes on EG's is in order?