Urizenic Container Magick

 Urizenic Container Magick 

1. Container magick

For William Blake, Urizen is the reductive analytic impulse to reduce and confine, measure and compare, divide and generalize into rules. The term Urizen evokes the concept of reason, the horizon, and a sense of otherness “your reason.” In Blake’s schema, the reasoning negative essentially hijacked the broader environment of the Albion figure’s soul and took over the whole show to become the lone eternal burdened with executive decision-making. This causes the other eternals in Blake’s system to occupy subordinated positions to this machine-logic figure. They also fall out of place in this scheme and become specters or processes meant to fulfill the will of the Urizen figure. 

Urizen’s modus operandi is containment, imprisonment, and categorization. Urizen’s role in the play of differences is to trap, confine, and stifle any new change that occurs. Urizen does this by Rule of One Law, and the establishment of one standard against which all others are judged.

Today, the play of containers is much different. While we still operate on a single standard, America is not a place where that functions properly. There’s too much difference here to create one standard. All standards in a place like America will become oppression in due time. Japan or some other homogenized culture may not have this issue or the issue would not be as big of a problem there than it is here. 

Instead, our container magick operates along a vector of corporate conglomeration. Larger companies eat up smaller ones to control a greater share of the market, which is a limited pie, but always has the opportunity to get bigger and smaller. So, it’s fixed in the now, but variable in the future. The economy is not infinite. It is always finite. Growth is related to population size. An economy that remains a fixed size while more individuals are being added to the market is contracting. Opportunities are becoming fewer. The rate of growth should be forever tied to population size. It is no good thing for an economy to rob other economies of their share. There is a price to paid when managing a limited pie, even if the pie is growing. Of course, this is an improvement over the conquest of nations, but the priority set is still ugly, built on megalomania, and destructive toward those in lesser positions of power. 

2. Composite persons

Corporations are composite persons the same way a single individual is a composite of all of the cells of their body. It makes as little sense to see a corporation in pieces as it would to see an arm when we were looking at a person. While personhood benefits corporations in the form of First Amendment rights, it also harms the corporation which is treated as a single entity when one of their employees causes harm to another individual. The conduct of the employee imparts vicarious liability on the entire company because the company is treated as a person. 

 At some point in the history of evolution, single-celled lifeforms decided to band together forming primitive bundles in the form of jellyfish. By what impulse did they do this?

Humans too followed a similar trajectory, creating composite beings out of multi-cellular individuals in the form of governments, religions, and corporations. Often, these were conflated and mystified with gods. The genius of a country would be its patron god. Marduk was the patron god of Babylon.

Today, corporations have powers far in excess of Lovecraft's primitive octopus gods. The Eldritch Horror is that beyond personhood, corporations in this country are invested with a type of godhood. And that is worth fearing. Because the system of incentives that drives the corporate ecosystem forward is perverse and beyond the point of redemption. Power consolidates. Corporations conglomerate and contain sort of like Blake's Urizen but somehow even more horrific. 

You see how they’re all just trying to put everything under one name?