Ingham's Mythos: Urizen

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Forum Call of Cthulhu The Game The Tygers of Wrath are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction

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Thread Too ls D isplay

4th December 2003, 04:27 PM

The Tygers of Wrath are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

Anybody here read any William Blake? I particularly mean the hard stuff, the wild prophetic stuff.He's got a weird cosmology all of his own. Of particular interest is the depiction of Urizen, the"Ancient of Days", a creator and judge.

What particularly gets me is that Urizen is basically how an Elder God should be portrayed. Ratherthan a white-hat heroic deus ex machina, the Blake's Elder God is terrifying in his own right, anunfeeling imposer of law and conformity on a world that doesn't particularly need order, a stifler ofcreativity and a destroyer of love.

Oh, look, he says, another Mythos deity. Gosh, like we need another one. But hey, I was readingpoetry and I was feeling Lovecraftian. What can I say?

Urizen (Elder God)Lo, a shadow of horror is risen

In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!

Self-c losd, all-repelling: what DemonHath form'd this abominable void

This soul-shudd'ring vacuum?--Some said

"It is Urizen", But unknown, abstracted

Brooding secret, the dark power hid.

Times on times he divided, & measur'dSpace by space in his ninefold darkness

Unseen, unknown! changes appeard

In his desolate mountains rifted furious

By the black winds of perturbation

For he strove in battles dire

In unseen conflictions with shapesBred from his forsaken wilderness,

Of beast, bird, fish, serpent & element

Combustion, blast, vapour and cloud.

William Blake, The Book of Urizen

Urizen is the father of the Elder Gods. In some mythologies, he dragged the original manscremaing from the earth. He is the arbiter and the judge, the imposer of order; he is theimplacable enemy of the Outer Gods, the one who sentenced Azathoth to an eternity of

mindlessness. But he is also the harsh destroyer of creativity and life. To serve Urizen means tosuffer at the hands of one who would leach the life from a mans heart. Cthulhu eats souls; Urizencrushes them.

Those who call Urizen should beware. He may well drive away the menance at hand, but can veryprobably become a worse menace.

If called (a very rare occurrence), he appears as an ancient, giant member of of the race of the

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being who called him, wreathed in darkness and rolling clouds.

Urizen can harness the lightning and the wind as his weapons; once per turn he can also tamethe soul of any non-divine being with a touch. A victim who, when touched by the gods handand who fails in a POW vs. POW struggle becomes the mechanistic, emotionless servant of theElder Gods will for ever more.

Urizen, the Self-Contemplating Shadow

Code:

STR 32 CON 50 SIZ 38 INT 44 POW 60DEX 20 Move 10 DB +3D6 HP 44

Armour: No armour. If reduced to 0HP, Urizen returns to the unearthly palace whence he came.Spells: Any, as appropriate, particularly spells to dismiss Outer Gods, Great Old Ones and theirServitor Races.SAN:0/1D4 SAN to see Urizen.

Code:

Attacks Attack % DamageLightning Bolt 100% 6D6Touch/Fist 95% 1D3+DB

or POW vs. POWstruggle to avoidsoul destruction

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There's also a fine song; Gates of Urizen on Bruce Dickenson's masteful solo LP The ChemicalWeeding, a record any fan of both occult horror and heavy metal should own, referencing Blake,Rosencreutz, and plently of other esoterica. The description in the intro, a quotation from theabove Blake, sounds t o me delightfully Lovec raftian, and evocative of Nyarlathotep, or perhapsYog-Sothoth, both of whom, of course, also have the 'gate' association. The lyrics are here;http://213.86.54.13/brucedickinson/d.../cw/index.asp# if anyone's interested.

I'm sorry to drag this once promisingly intellectual thread from lyric balladry into heavy metallyrics, but well, I can appreciate both William Blake and Iron Maiden, so why not? The write-up ofUrizen is very good, though, indeed I've thought in the past that in Blake's weird esoterica therelay the seeds of a decent Cthulhu story. Has anybody ever tried to write one? In the same vein,has anybody out there written up Lord Dunsany's Gods of Pegana material for Call of Cthulhu?

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I've used Pegana and other Dunsanay as inspiration in the past for fantasy games.

Blake is a good hook for cultists in general. Very macabre images and writings. IIRC Blake was aturn on for Mr Dollarhyde in 'Manhunter'.

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4th September 2004, 11:06 PM

Mind-forg'd manacles

Wood, this is virtuoso work.

I've mused with the 'Blake' cosmology as RPG material for some years too.

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Originally Posted by Wood

Anybody here read any William Blake? I particularly mean the hard stuff, the wild

prophetic stuff. He's got a weird cosmology all of his own. Of particular interest isthe depiction of Urizen, the "Ancient of Days", a creator and judge...

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Check out this missed opportunity from an interview with John Wickby James Maliszewski on RPG.net:

Maliszewski: I've always been a big fan of the swashbuckling era of musketeers and pirates. Thissetting has never gotten very good treatment in RPGs previously. What made you decide to set

the game in this sort of setting?

Wick:My wife. We were sitting at dinner a year and a half ago, and I was telling her that I wasdone with samurai. "Why don't you a role-playing world based on William Blake?" she asked. Itwas a joke, but the more we thought about it, the more sense it made. William Blake was a poetin the eighteenth century who wrote about passion and rapture in a religious context thatchallenged the puritan ethic that was so popular at the time. I took a look at the time-frame andrealized that it was also the age Alexandre Dumas was writing in, it was the golden age of piracyand the time of Sir Isaac Newton. At first, we talked about doing a world that looked like the filmDangerous Beauty. Bringing a fantast ic Venice to the role-playing world was very exciting.Jennifer's always loved the concept of sorcery in the noble blood and I was fascinated with arational church. From there, "fantastic Venice" turned into "fantastic Europe." We brought inEngland, France, the Prussian states and a few other friends and Thah was born.

Unfortunately, John Wick's a bit off in his history. It's more Bernard Cornwell/PatrickO'Brian/Lord Byron/Mary Shelley/Jane Austen/Ann Radcliffe, which would have made for amuch better game than 7th Sea IMHO. Still, I must create a system, or be enslav'd by anotherman's...

There was a great exhibition a few years back:http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhib...blakevents.htm

Alan Moore (at that time) wrote:"I read Blake at O level, but studied him seriously when I was researching From Hell, my bookabout Jack the Ripper, which has lots of references to Blake; him seeing a spectre at his house inHercules Road, for example. Blake represents the visionary heroism of the imagination. He wasliving in a London which was not much more than a squalid horse toilet, on which hesuperimposed a magnificent four-fold c ity and populated it with angels, and philosophers of thepast. Art at its best has the power to insist on a different reality".

Check out the amazing CD performance 'Angel passage' by Alan Moore and Tim Perkins (RE:PCD04) which is all about Blake's magickal life and resonances.http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog...ype=13&page=10

Iain Sinclair (also at the time of the exhibition) wrote:"William Blake of Soho. Child Blake seeing angels in a tree on Peckham Rye. Naked Blake recitingParadise Lost in a leafy Lambeth bower. Blake the engraver, in old age, walking to Hampstead.Blake singing on his deathbed in Fountain's Court. Blake, lying with his wife Catherine, in BunhillFields. Blake the prophet. Blake the psychogeographer. Blake the red-cap revolutionary, watchingNewgate burn. Blake the happy-clappy revivalist of Glad Day, banging a tambourine with Michael

Horowitz. Blake, at the last night of the proms, burning in the mad eyes of sentimentalimperialists.

We force the poet on to a Procrustean bed, squeezing and shaping him to fit our fantasies. Weinsist on seeing him as a London figure, coeval with Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Henry VIII.Blake declines into a heritage token, an emblem to be bolted on to the bonnet of any old banger.

What we should go back to, and what can serve us still, is the work; the great, complexfreewheeling derangements of the prophetic books, the savage wisdom of the parables, theunnerving directness of the lyrics.

There is no reason on earth why Blake, his poetry or his art, should be of any use. It was neverhis business to be useful. Shovels are useful. Paper clips are useful. Blake astounds, terrifies,delights. He gives us a richer sense of ourselves and of our city. His presence animates certaindusty corners. The incantatory rhythms of his poems drum in our heads and fire our blood. Hedoesn't grant entrance to a lost garden of time. He challenges us to risk everything, the kind of

possession he himself underwent when he rewrote Milton, became Milton, revised his errors. Blakeis there and the rest is up to us."

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Quite a better write-up of an Elder God than I've seen...well...pretty much ever. Good show oldman!

Perhaps a thread wherein people detail their own anti-Derlethian takes on EG's is in order?

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This site details the Books of Urizen in full. It sounds an amazing take on the EGs.

http://facstaff.uww.edu/hoganj/contents.htm

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6th September 2004, 06:41 AM

Amazing stuff

This is really a brilliant find Wood. Thank you!

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Ingham's Mythos: Urizen