ABSTRACT
Urizen is repeatedly associated by Blake with the human brain, and indeed that is where he is located. Los, who shares this location with him, specifically describes Urizen’s world as being within “the Brain of Man”. The emergence of Urizen as the dominant power within the human psyche, and the self-enclosure of consciousness within one part of the human brain, is also for Blake the result of a primary “division” within man. Man’s previous connection with the world of eternity is severed through the very development of Urizenic, civilising, conscious thought. One of the most fundamental aspects of Urizenic consciousness, and perhaps the one that stands as the basis for all the others, is its immense power of abstraction. Urizen’s primal separation of Self from Others, Mind from Matter, Finite from Infinite, and Subjective from Objective, precipitates a series of further separations: joy from pain, moral from immoral, time from eternity, human from animal, vegetable, and mineral.
