“As soon as we begin to think of the relation of Orc to Urizen, it becomes impossible to maintain them as separate principles. If Orc represents the reviving force of a new cycle, whether of dawn or spring or history, he must grow old and die at the end of that cycle. Urizen must eventually gain the mastery over Orc, but such a Urizen cannot be another power but Orc himself, grown old. The same is true of the dragon: the dragon must be the hero’s predecessor and the hero in his turn must become a dragon. But if the dragon is death, then when the hero dies he is swallowed by or otherwise absorbed into the dragon. The Book of Jonah portrays its hero as swallowed by a leviathan who is death or hell and vomited up again—a humorous image befitting the most humorous book in the Bible. (The medieval paintings showing Jesus walking into the open mouth of a monster when he descends into hell may also be noted, as Blake might have seen one.) But if the dragon is itself the old Orc, then surely is not Orc simply a dragon who has the power to shed his skin from time to time? This is a very abrupt change from our young and heroic dragon-killer, but nevertheless Blake continually associates Orc with the serpent, which is an easy modulation of the dragon symbol.”
[…]
“Implicit in the myth of Orc and Urizen is the allegory of the young striking down the old, the most obvious symbol of which is a son’s revolt against a father. This form of the myth meets us in the story of Dionysus. But Urizen is sterility: he can only destroy children, not beget them, and can no more be the father of the succeeding Orc than Herod could be the father of Jesus. However, in The Book of Ahania Blake changes his mind and makes the rebel of the Exodus a son of Urizen, Fuzon, the element of fire (focus, feu) in nature which is never quite put out. The use of a son of Urizen in place of Orc in a poem engraved in 1795 indicates that Blake is becoming increasingly aware that by ‘Orc’ he means something inseparably attached to Urizen.
[…]
“The spear and arrow in Blake are quasi-phallic symbols of the release of imaginative power; the bow is the tense energy of the human body. The shield, on the other hand, is an image both of the impervious heaven (compare Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles) and the carapace of the brooding Selfhood. In The Book of Ahania Fuzon’s ‘pillar of fire’ is hurled like a spear and tears open the sterile loins of Urizen; Urizen opposes to this his ‘pillar of cloud’ in the form of a ‘broad Disk’ or shield. The fact that Jesus, Odin and Absalom are all pierced with spears is thus linked with the fact that they are sacrifices to themselves, as Odin says, or dead forms of what they were.”
[…]
“As we find out more about Orc, he seems to take on an increasing resemblance to Milton’s Satan, who also begins as a Promethean rebel and ends as a banished and execrated serpent. This is the key to the famous attack on Paradise Lost in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Milton’s God, Blake says, is the real Satan, the prince of the power of the air, the creator of a physical universe which is the subterranean cave or hell of eternity. The real God dwells in the real Eden, a city of flaming fire. Milton’s Satan is Orc, the power of human desire which gradually and inevitably declines into passive acceptance of impersonal law and external reason. Thus Blake’s point is not that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost, but that there is no hero of Paradise Lost.The poem simply traces the Orc cycle to the point at which all the characters, from God the Father to Eve, are caught in the same quicksand of fatalistic morality. The implication is that if Blake is to do better than Milton he will need a hero, whom we have not found in Orc.”
[…]
“Urizen, we are not surprised to learn, finds that the relation of the fallen intelligence to the world must always be that of Atlas: wherever we look, an indefinite stretch of stars is always over our heads, with its constant suggestion of our own insignificance. If we go around to the Antipodes, we shall find only more stars, and no mountain leading up to heaven such as Dante imagined. In Paradise Lost, Satan, that is, Orc, first begins to show his transformation into Urizen when he makes his journey through chaos to the Adamic world. This is the correct vision, for the object of the journey is to bring chaos into cosmos, and make the order of nature chaotic. But as the Creation was the product of the Fall, the real chaos which Urizen stumbles and flounders through is what he considers the cosmos, the yawning abyss of the sun and the other stars.”
[…]
“We should not fail to notice here the association of uniformity with a frigid paternalism. What Urizen wants is mental uniformity, common sense, and the social product of this is the rule of tyrants over victims. Two friends of equal status are not necessarily uniform in their minds; a master and a slave are, because the master is as much a product of a slave state as the slave, and is equally enslaved by it.”
[…]
“In the first place, while within the individual form of life Orc always insensibly merges into Urizen, yet as states of existence Orc and Urizen, youth and age, are eternally different things. They represent, roughly speaking, the ‘two contrary states of the soul’ which Blake calls innocence and experience.”
