Discovery of the Blake Password

In the subterranean crypt of Barcelona's Sagrada Família, Robert Langdon and Ambra Vidal finally locate the key to Edmond Kirsch's hidden presentation: a forty-seven-character password concealed in a line of poetry by William Blake. The discovery, which comes after a night of assassination, flight, and pursuit, represents the culmination of their desperate quest to release Kirsch's scientific revelation to the world. The password is not merely a string of letters but a carefully constructed code within a code, reflecting Kirsch's genius for layered security and his lifelong war against superstition.

The Crypt and the Blake Volume

Father Joaquim Beña, the presiding priest of Sagrada Família, leads Langdon and Vidal down a winding staircase into the crypt, a vast neo-Gothic chamber beneath the basilica. There, in a dimly lit display case beside the tomb of Antoni Gaudí, lies a massive bound edition of The Complete Works of William Blake. Kirsch had loaned the book to the church as part of a large donation, with the specific condition that it always remain open to page 163. Beña had assumed the page was chosen for its illustration—Blake's famous watercolor The Ancient of Days, depicting the god Urizen measuring the heavens with a geometer's compass. But Langdon and Vidal quickly realize the true purpose: the facing page, page 162, contains the handwritten text of Blake's epic prophetic poem The Four Zoas.

The Prophetic Line

As Vidal holds a lantern over the open tome, Langdon scans the final stanza of the poem. The concluding line reads: "The dark religions are departed & sweet science reigns." This line is not only a prophecy that Kirsch would endorse—it is essentially a synopsis of his presentation earlier that night, in which he declared that religion would fade and science would rule. Langdon recalls that his Princeton professor had once described this very line as the best summary of Blake's hope for the future. However, when Vidal counts the letters, she finds only forty-six, not the forty-seven Kirsch specified. Langdon then spots the solution: the ampersand "&" is a typographic ligature of the Latin letters E and T, meaning "and." By substituting the ligature "et" for the ampersand, the line becomes exactly forty-seven characters: "thedarkreligionsaredepartedetsweetsciencereigns." This clever twist, rooted in a lesson Langdon once taught Kirsch about the origin of the ampersand, ensures that even if someone discovered the correct line, they would still fail to type it correctly.

The Moment of Triumph and Its Aftermath

With the password confirmed, Langdon and Vidal share a moment of relief and gratitude in the solitude of the crypt. The discovery gives them the means to trigger Kirsch's presentation, which they believe will change the world. However, their triumph is immediately overshadowed by chaos: Father Beña's screams from above alert them to the murder of the Guardia Real agents and the arrival of the assassin Admiral Luis Ávila. The ensuing confrontation on the spiral staircase nearly kills Langdon, but he survives, and the password is ultimately used to launch Kirsch's broadcast to a global audience of over two hundred million. The line from Blake, which Kirsch had chosen as his final message, becomes the key that unlocks his legacy—a prophecy that the dark religions would depart and sweet science would reign.