Allen Ginsberg Naropa class on William Blake’s Europe continues from here
AG: So,
“Albions Angel rose upon the Stone of Night” – (King George III rose upon this formed skull) – “He saw Urizen on the Atlantic;/And his brazen Book,/ That Kings & Priests had copied on earth” – He saw this book “Expanded from North to South” – (Covering the world)
So, in Enitharmon‘s dream, the masculine has fallen. The material skull takes over and that’s why I was pointing out the skull image we had originally, early. Europe – Plate 1, (page 159 in Erdman’s The Illuminated Blake) there’s the skull again, looking out through the eyeball, with a Urizen-like figure, Burke – a counter-revolutionary Urizen-like figure -with a dagger.
I would say on Plate 5, (page 163), we had that scaly figure (which is) Rintrah, the Zoa of wrath, enlisted under the code of Urizen, and in this book he’s equated with William Pitt, who urged war on France, and who set out McCarthy-ite, Draconian, anti-Jacobin repressive laws in England to protect his war against France.
What other important (things)? Okay. I guess it’s 9 (p.m). There’s very little to go further on this. I will cover it, though, at the end, and then we’ll go on to Asia (Song of Los), and (The Book of) Urizen. (The Book of) Urizen I’ve studied at great length and have all annotated so I can maybe run through that fast.