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Urizen
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Urizen

fictional character
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Article History

Urizen, character in the mythology of William Blake. A godlike figure, Urizen personifies reason and law, and Blake believed him to be the true deity worshipped by his contemporaries. Blake first told Urizen’s story, the struggle against the chaos caused by the loss of a true human spirit, in the so-called “Prophetic Books,” including America, a Prophecy (1793), The Book of Urizen (1794), and The Song of Los (1795), and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala, or The Four Zoas, written from approximately 1796 to 1807. In an engraving from Europe, a Prophecy (1794), Blake depicts Urizen as a grim scientist, creating the Earth with a huge pair of compasses.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.