1790s

The 1790s were the decade in which the English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake produced two of his most important prophetic works, America a Prophecy and Europe a Prophecy, as well as his celebrated watercolor etching The Ancient of Days. These works, created during a period of intense political and artistic ferment, are central to the novel Origin because Edmond Kirsch, the murdered futurist, chose a line from Blake's epic poem The Four Zoas—"The dark religions are departed & sweet science reigns"—as the forty-seven-character password to unlock his world-changing scientific presentation. Blake's fusion of visionary art, radical theology, and poetic prophecy made him a kindred spirit to Kirsch, who saw in Blake's work a prefiguration of his own mission to replace religious dogma with scientific truth.

Blake's Prophetic Works and Their Thematic Resonance

In the 1790s, Blake wrote and illustrated two dark, ominous poems explicitly titled America a Prophecy and Europe a Prophecy, which Langdon, recalling from his own collection, recognizes as works that align perfectly with Kirsch's worldview. Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, also from this period, contains aphorisms that could almost have been written by Kirsch himself, such as "All Religions Are One" and "There Is No Natural Religion." The novel emphasizes that Blake was not only an artist and illustrator but a prolific poet whose revolutionary ideas challenged Christianity, making him a natural touchstone for Kirsch's atheistic project. Langdon, standing in Kirsch's library, immediately connects the locked cabinet containing The Complete Works of William Blake to the password search, recalling that Blake's "prophecies" were published as large-format illuminated texts.

The Ancient of Days and the Primordial Soup

Blake's 1794 watercolor etching The Ancient of Days, which Kirsch arranged to have displayed in the crypt of the Sagrada Família, depicts a bearded, wizened figure—not the Christian God but Blake's own invented deity Urizen—measuring the heavens with a geometer's compass. The novel notes that the physicist and atheist Stephen Hawking selected this image as the jacket art for his book God Created the Integers, and that Blake's timeless demiurge also watches over New York City's Rockefeller Center in an Art Deco sculpture titled Wisdom, Light, and Sound. Langdon, upon seeing the image in the crypt, reflects that it pays homage to the scientific laws of the universe, and that Kirsch's choice to display it in a Catholic church was a deliberate act of provocation, a slap in the face to the Christian Church. The illustration's theme of a divine geometer measuring the cosmos resonates with Kirsch's own computer modeling of the primordial soup, which he used to simulate the emergence of life from the laws of physics.

The Password and the Final Line of The Four Zoas

The critical moment of discovery occurs when Langdon and Ambra Vidal, having followed the loan card to the crypt, realize that Kirsch's book is displayed open to page 163, which contains not a poem but the Ancient of Days illustration. Ambra deduces that Kirsch chose this page because it is impossible to display without simultaneously showing the facing page—page 162—which contains the handwritten final lines of Blake's epic poem The Four Zoas. Langdon, recalling a lecture from his Princeton "Brit lit" class, remembers that the poem's final line summarizes Blake's hope for the future. Ambra reads the line aloud: "'The dark religions are departed & sweet science reigns.'" Langdon immediately recognizes it as the password, noting that it is a prophecy Edmond would endorse and a synopsis of his presentation. The line, however, contains only forty-six letters, not the required forty-seven. Langdon solves the puzzle by realizing that the ampersand "&" is a logogram derived from the Latin et, and that Kirsch, remembering a lesson from Langdon's symbology class, used the ligature "et" to create a forty-seven-character password: "thedarkreligionsaredepartedetsweetsciencereigns." This clever typographic trick ensured that even if someone discovered the correct line of poetry, they would still not be able to type it correctly.

Blake's Legacy and Kirsch's Vision

The novel draws a direct parallel between Blake and Kirsch, with Langdon reflecting that Blake was "the Edmond Kirsch of the eighteen hundreds"—an idiosyncratic genius whose painting style was so progressive that some believed he had magically glimpsed the future in his dreams. Blake's symbol-infused religious illustrations depicted angels, demons, Satan, God, mythical creatures, biblical themes, and a pantheon of deities from his own spiritual hallucinations, and like Kirsch, he loved to challenge Christianity. The final line of The Four Zoas—"The dark religions are departed & sweet science reigns"—serves as the key to unlocking Kirsch's presentation, which argues that life emerged spontaneously from the laws of physics and that humanity is on the cusp of a new era where science will replace religion. Langdon, reflecting on the line, notes that Blake was a deeply spiritual man who believed religions came in two flavors: the dark, dogmatic ones that oppressed creative thinking, and the light, expansive ones that encouraged introspection and creativity. He assures Father Beña that Blake's concluding line could just as easily mean that "sweet science will banish the dark religions … so the enlightened religions can flourish."