New from AMERICAN ELdRITCH: high-quality facsimile editions of two of William Blake’s continental prophecies. America a Prophecy (1793) features an introduction by Aladdin Collar, and Europe a Prophecy (1794) features an introduction by William Butler Yeats. Both volumes of premium cosmic horror are published in full color, and contain supplemental plain-text versions of the poems, as well as a diagrammatic interpretation of the cosmology.

Blake’s system repurposes gnostic philosophy, Quabbalic mysticism, and greco-roman/pagan tradition with an almost wholly new order of celestial deities. The poet himself seems to have lived a persistently visionary existence; he explained his writing process as taking dictation from spirits. As WB Yeats describes him, “He saw in every issue the whole contest of light and darkness, and found no peace. To him, the universe seemed filled with an intense excitement, at once infinitesimal and and infinite, for in every grass blade, in every atom of dust, Los, the ‘eternal mind’, warred upon the dragon Urizen, ‘the God of this world.’” – Aladdin Collar, from the Introduction to America a Prophecy