Iron Maiden's song "If Eternity Should Fail" was written by Blake artist Bruce Dickinson (you can read about his "Blake album" The Chemical Wedding (1998) here and here.) It was actually intended as part of a future solo project, but was then recorded and released as an Iron Maiden song on their most recent album The Book of Souls (2015) instead. (cf. his autobiography What Does This Button Do (361)) So, rather unfortunately, the song was removed from its original context (the intended solo album) and added to a Mayan themed album (concerning the title track and the visuals), which might slightly change its reception. As it is, it fits in neatly with the Mayan themed album and tour. The song begins with a human sacrifice, focuses on various questions of religion, and ends with the appearance of what I call a Blakean character who is linked to death. The Mayans were a civilisation which practised human sacrifices and vanished under mysterious circumstances, thus mirroring the topic of human sacrifice, the aspect of religion, and the embodiment of death in the song. Moreover, the disappearance of their culture demonstrates definitely an eternity that has failed. You can see this Mayan setting in the live recording below (I have seen this live twice and the video does not even do it justice). Here, Dickinson plays a character who seems to be both a shaman and an adventurer. But the Blakean references get a bit lost in the jungle.

I put it here for two reasons. First, the ending features a spoken part which seems to introduce a mythology featuring god-like characters. The idea to write your own mythology is probably one of the most Blakean creations in art I have ever seen. We hear a narrator introducing himself as Nekropolis. Nekropolis is, as his name suggests, linked to death. In a classical understanding, a Nekropolis is a city of the dead. Our narrator Nekropolis is both a person and a city and might thus be the little brother of Jerusalem. He further introduces his sons; sons he has breathed life into himself. We do not only have a mystical figure, but the start of a genealogy. This is why the change of albums may be problematic because it may turn Nekropolis into a Mayan settlement or at least lets me think of jungles, ruins, and bloody knives, associations which overshadow the obvious Blakean nature of this mini mythology.