"The Book of Los" By William Blake

The prophecy of Asia is foretold in the “The Book of Los” by William Blake. “The Book of Los” is the last of the continental prophecies and also tells the story of Africa. Africa is the first half of the “The Book of Los” and Asia is the ending half. The story begins in Africa, with “Los” singing of “Adam”, “Noah”, and “Moses” as they were witnesses to “Urizen” granting laws to humanity. The laws involve concepts and ideas being granted to Socrates, Pythagoras, and Plato, gospel being given to Jesus, a bible for Mohamet and a book on war given to Odin, who is the mythological God of war, poetry, knowledge and wisdom. The last of the laws are those of the five senses, which were given to John Locke, a philosopher who believed that all knowledge is created from sensory experience, and to Isaac Newton, one of the world’s most famous physicists who discovered the laws of motion and gravity. In Newtonian belief, the material universe is connected through an unconscious power. That puts imagination and intellectual in the realm of accidental aspects. All of these laws were what bound the mind and caused the world. “The Book of Los” is meant to describe how Newtonian reason and the view of the universe traps imagination.

The end of “The Book of Los” is set in Asia. In this part of the book, “Orc”, which is the birth child of “Los” and his emanation “Enitharmon”, creates fires in the mind that provokes a thought revolution. “Los” is the creator of life systems and of the sexes in the prophecies, which leads to the creation of his partner “Enitharmon”. Eventually, humans are created after consciousness appears and “Orc” is born as an evolution of life. This causes the kings of the world to be startled and an apocalypse of different sorts has begun. “The Book of Los” is the last of all the books and is said to be a revision of “The Book of Urizen.” The book is critical to the ideas of imagination that William Blake believes in. But like all of the other books, it was made to make people partake in the construction of meaning.