A study of the author’s visual interpretations of his mythic figure of reason and law
What the Work Is
William Blake’s Urizen Plate Designs is a 1980 publication collecting and examining the visual representations of Urizen, one of the central figures in William Blake’s personal mythology. The work focuses on Blake’s engraved illustrations of this character across his prophetic books, presenting them as a coherent body of visual art worthy of dedicated study. As a published volume from 1980, it addresses an audience interested in both Blake’s poetry and his printmaking, treating the plate designs as significant artistic achievements in their own right rather than mere accompaniments to the texts.
What the Book Is About
The book centers on Urizen, the figure in Blake’s mythological system who embodies conventional reason, law, and restraint. Across Blake’s illuminated books, Urizen appears repeatedly as a bearded old man, sometimes carrying architect’s tools to create and constrain the universe, sometimes wielding nets with which he ensnares humanity in webs of law and conventional society. The plate designs collected in this volume trace how Blake visualized this complex character across different works and periods of his career, showing both consistency in the figure’s essential attributes and evolution in how Blake depicted him. The designs reveal Urizen as a figure of profound ambiguity—simultaneously creator and tyrant, lawgiver and imprisoner—and the visual record of his appearances offers insight into how Blake’s thinking about reason, imagination, and authority developed over time.
Key Ideas and Themes
Urizen represents one half of a fundamental duality in Blake’s early mythological system, with his opposition being Los, the embodiment of imagination. In Blake’s reworking of his mythic system, Urizen becomes one of the four Zoas—the fourfold division of the primordial man Albion—and continues to represent reason among them. His name carries multiple possible meanings, from “Your Reason” to a Greek word meaning “to limit,” and both interpretations illuminate his function in Blake’s cosmology. He is the entity who bounds, restricts, and imposes order, and his very name suggests the limiting function he performs.
The character originates in Blake’s version of Genesis, created when a voice declared that light should be born. He is the fourth child of Albion and Vala, and though he represents the Heavenly host, he experiences a Satanic fall through his desire to rule. Motivated by pride, he becomes a hypocrite, and when Albion calls for him, Urizen refuses and hides, precipitating his fall. After this fall, Urizen sets about creating the material world, and his jealousy of mankind brings forth both Wrath and Justice.
In Blake’s early works, Urizen represents the chains of reason imposed on the mind, and like mankind, he himself is bound by these chains. These works describe how Newtonian reason and the Enlightenment view of the universe trap the imagination. The poems emphasize an evolutionary development within the universe, presenting an early version of a “survival of the fittest” cosmos connected to a fallen world of tyranny and murder. Urizen’s rule is thus not merely personal tyranny but a cosmic principle—the application of abstract law to living experience, which Blake saw as fundamentally destructive.
Urizen is described as having multiple books—Gold, Silver, Iron, and Brass—which represent science, love, war, and sociology, four aspects of life. These books are filled with laws that seek to overcome the seven deadly sins, yet the attempt to force love through law encourages the Eternals to put forth the very sins Urizen hoped to prevent. The Book of Brass sets forth Urizen’s social beliefs that seek to remove all pain and instill peace under one rule, while the Book of Iron, lost in the Tree of Mystery, represents how Urizen can create wars but cannot control them. This paradox—that the attempt to legislate virtue produces vice, that the effort to impose peace generates conflict—lies at the heart of Blake’s critique of Urizenic thinking.
Urizen’s daughters and sons populate his realm in complex ways. His daughters started as children of light, possible images of the planets or stars, and after his fall they gain human form. Three of his daughters—Eleth, Uveth, and Ona—represent the three parts of the human body, organize the waters of Generation, create the Bread of Sorrow, and read from the Book of Iron. His sons are organized differently in different poems: sometimes as Thiriel, Utha, Grodna, and Fuzon, aligned with the four classical elements; sometimes as twelve, aligned with the signs of the Zodiac, builders of the Mundane Shell who seek to keep mankind from falling. In Blake’s early myths, these sons dwell in various cities and do not abide by Urizen’s laws; Fuzon directly rebels against his father, cuts Urizen’s loins, and is crucified for his actions.
Structure and Approach
The book examines Urizen’s appearances across Blake’s illuminated works, tracing the figure’s development from his first direct mention in “A Song of Liberty” (1793), where he is described as a “starry king” in dispute with Orc. In To Nobodaddy, he receives the title “Father of Jealousy” and appears as an enslaver. In America a Prophecy, he is the evil God who rules during the Enlightenment, and the work describes how Urizen created the world. The Songs of Experience (1794) present him as the creator of the Tyger and feature him in several poems including “Earth’s Answer,” “The Tyger,” “The Human Abstract,” and “A Divine Image.” Later that year, in Europe a Prophecy, Urizen is freed from his bounds and opens the Book of Brass in response to the American Revolution.
In The Book of Urizen, the figure is an eternal self-focused being that creates itself out of eternity, and only Urizen exists in the beginning. He creates the rest of creation but is tormented by the rest of the Eternal essence. He is seen as the essence of the eternal priest, opposed by Los, the eternal prophet. Parts of the story were later revised in The Book of Los and The Book of Ahania: the latter describes Urizen’s relationship with his son Fuzon, while the former describes Urizen’s creations from Los’s viewpoint. The Song of Los (1795) describes how Urizen’s laws are given to humanity and their destructive effects, ending with Orc’s appearance and Urizen weeping.
Urizen also appears within Blake’s illustrations of Job as an image of Apollo. In Milton a Poem, his realm is described as including his children and being surrounded by justice and eternal science, and the work describes Urizen’s Satanic fall. The Urizen of Milton is in the form of reason, and it is he that Milton follows. He appears again in the image “Milton’s Dream” as illustrated for Il Penseroso, where he is with images of despair and interfering with the image of the true God. In Vala, or The Four Zoas, Urizen was born as the son of Albion and Vala, made the leader of Heaven’s host, and commanded the material sun. In Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion, he appears in a form similar to the previous works, as the organizer of the universe while Los is the forger. He creates Natural Religion, and in his returned form after Albion awakes, he is a farmer.
Significance and Influence
The figure of Urizen has clear similarities with the creature called the Demiurge by Gnostic sects, who is likewise largely derived from the Old Testament god. Like Blake’s Urizen, the Demiurge is a radical remodelling of that figure achieved by expanding the figure’s original contextual setting or removing him to one that is almost completely new. This connection places Blake’s creation within a broader tradition of heterodox religious thought that reimagines the creator god as a flawed or even malevolent being.
Speculative Freemasonry is another possible source of Blake’s imagery for Urizen. Blake was attracted to the Masonic and Druidic speculations of William Stukeley, and the compass and other drafting symbols that Blake associates with Urizen borrow from Masonic symbolism for God as the “Great Architect of the Universe.” This visual vocabulary—the tools of the architect and surveyor—reinforces Urizen’s character as the being who measures, bounds, and constrains, applying geometric order to the living world.
The plate designs collected in this volume thus document not only a character but a mode of visual thinking about reason, law, and their discontents. Urizen’s repeated appearances across Blake’s works, always recognizable yet always shifting in context and meaning, demonstrate how Blake used recurring visual motifs to develop his mythological system over decades. The designs show a figure who is at once the biblical creator, the Enlightenment rationalist, the oppressive lawgiver, and the fallen aspect of a greater whole—and in doing so, they give visual form to Blake’s lifelong critique of what he saw as the tyranny of abstract reason over imaginative life.
Within the context of Blake’s Orc cycle, Urizen functions as a Satanic force comparable to the Satan of John Milton. The narrative describes a sequence of events following Urizen’s defeat of the serpent/Orc figure in the Garden of Eden story. In this subsequent phase, the Orc figure, appearing as Urizen’s son Fuzon, engages in a battle with his father in a narrative based on the Book of Exodus. In this conflict, Urizen manifests as a pillar of cloud that obstructs the Israelites’ journey, while Fuzon appears as a pillar of fire that guides them by night. Urizen ultimately destroys his rebellious son and imposes laws upon the Israelites in the form of the Ten Commandments. This act leads to the death of the Israelite society, and the people under Urizen’s rule become imprisoned in a manner similar to their previous enslavement under the Egyptians. The symbolic meaning of this cycle is that Urizen and Orc are part of a unified whole, with Urizen representing the destructive and older essence while Orc embodies the young and creative essence.
The Zoas and the Material World
In Blake’s later mythological system, Urizen is one of the four Zoas, the fourfold division of the central god. While the other three Zoas represent aspects of the trinity, Urizen represents the fallen, Satanic figure, though he is also the creator figure. Among the Zoas, he represents the south and the concept of reason, and he is described as what binds and controls the universe through the creation of laws. He is connected to his Emanation, Ahania, who represents pleasure, and he is opposed to the Zoa named Urthona, who represents Imagination. In the material world, Urizen possessed Steeds and a Chariot of Day that were stolen from him by Luvah. This theft occurred because Urizen, representing reason, sought to take over the Northern lands of Luvah, which represented Imagination. After this attempt to dominate Imagination, Luvah’s stealing of the horses, which symbolized instruction, demonstrated how emotion could dominate over reason. Following Luvah’s fall and transformation into Orc, Urizen attempts to regain his horses but can only witness them bound. The horses are eventually returned to him after the Final Judgment.
The Children of Urizen in Later Myth
In later versions of Blake’s myth, Urizen’s children are described as wise and dwelling with him. They, along with Urizen, fall after Luvah takes over Urizen’s realm. Following their fall, they are tortured in hell, and Urizen’s creation of science is seen as his domination over them. However, the four sons are placed in charge of Urthona’s armies and rebel against Urizen’s rule. During the Last Judgment, the sons discard their weapons and celebrate Urizen’s return to the plow, joining together for the harvest. At the Last Judgment, Urizen’s daughters Eleth, Uveth, and Ona watch over Ahania. Urizen’s books are described as being constantly added to, even when he faces his opposition in Orc, but they are ultimately destroyed in the Last Judgment.
Further Appearances and Attributes
In Milton a Poem, Urizen is described as having a throne of silver, which represents love. In Vala, or The Four Zoas, Urizen is described as the fourth son of Albion and Vala, and the work also describes his fall.
