Europe a Prophecy

‘Europe A Prophecy’ is one of several attempts by William Blake to render the history of his own time in terms of his own complex personal mythology. Though he was baptised within the Church of England, Blake’s religion was a particular artistic reinterpretation of Christian doctrine that separated him from the established church. Using a mixture of art and poetry, he represented the momentous historical events of his time by conflating biblical and political events. He also rejected the classical ideals of Ancient Greece and Rome, calling their imitators ‘slaves of the sword’ on the grounds. Instead, he created his recurring pantheon of mythological characters to blur his personal understanding of religion with the symbolic vocabulary of his own time. The godlike figure in this image is one of Blake’s recurring symbols, Urizen, whose name is derived from ‘horizon,’ the limit of what an individual can see. Blake frequently used this character to represent the fear and corruption brought about by authority. Urizen’s resemblance to an Old Testament representation of God is no coincidence; Blake openly believed that much of the Bible had been misinterpreted in his own time; that God was frequently in the wrong, and Satan in the right. This method of criticising the political system and the established church of his time made him an icon of the 1960s counterculture after his symbolic universe was interpreted by Canadian Blake scholar Northrop Frye. Superficially, the image refers to how the universe is alleged to fit into the span of God’s hand. However, Urizen’s open hand has been distorted to resemble a pair of geometrical compasses – an image that Blake elsewhere uses to invoke the damaging effects of scientific empiricism. Blake attempted to legislate humanity into submission by stressing as real only factual existence, rather than acknowledging the nuanced reality of imagined possibilities. The image is not a straightforward devotional work, but rather an allusion to how religion and empiricist philosophy has conspired together to limit the possibilities of human expression and experience within Blake’s lifetime.