The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun. But these “mills” are the Urizenic programs that he believed lay behind both the God of orthodox Christianity and the methodology of post-Newtonian science: the “Starry Mills of Satan”, as he refers to them in Milton. Indeed, one of his most famous lines of poetry refers to this final domination of Urizenic rationality: the “dark Satanic mills” that many people often mistakenly believe allude to actual mills and industrial factories. Blake was both a horrified and perceptive witness to this historical development and a vivid and accurate analyser of its character and tendencies. This new, “daring assault” also perhaps helps to explain why Blake, writing at the very beginning and in the epicentre of the industrial revolution in London, was so outraged by what he astutely saw as the start of its final phase-or what McGilchrist refers to as the “triumph of the left hemisphere”.

“the innate structures of the left hemisphere are, through technology, being incarnated in the world it has come to dominate” Blake analyses this celebrated function of the human brain and reveals that it was actually a peculiar and peculiarly distorted form of reason that was being developed and harnessed – “ratio-nality” (rather than reasonableness) – a self-enclosed, rapacious, and manipulative power that was being released into the world via the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism. The enormously powerful, as well as devastatingly disruptive, destructive and dehumanising, energy unleashed on Britain (and later Europe) on a vast – indeed global – scale was, Blake believed, the unregulated and domineering character of the instrumental left brain itself: what many Enlightenment thinkers rather naively simply called ‘Reason’. The term derives from the Biblical Book of Revelation, where the reality of things is supposed to be finally uncovered (‘ apocalypsis‘, meaning “uncover, disclose, reveal”), but as usual with Blake, it’s given a surprisingly modern twist – one that is both psychological and politically radical in nature.īlake’s presentation of the “dragon” form of Urizen as his final dissociated apotheosis (his “logical conclusion”, if you like), is a stinging critique of the very power and cognitive process that drove and underwrote much of the ‘Enlightenment’ project – the period in which he was living. Blake’s term for the psychopathic power of the Urizenic ‘rational’ mind when it is dissociated and divided from man’s imaginative and empathic consciousness was the “Red Dragon”.

Novel red dragon