The Complete Works of William Blake

The Complete Works of William Blake is a rare, large-format illuminated manuscript owned by the futurist Edmond Kirsch, which he loaned to the Basílica de la Sagrada Família under the condition that it be displayed open to page 163. The book becomes the crucial object in the search for Kirsch's forty-seven-character password, as the final line of Blake's prophetic poem The Four Zoas on the facing page—"The dark religions are departed & sweet science reigns"—conceals the password through a typographic trick involving the ampersand's Latin origin.

Provenance and Display

Kirsch kept the volume in a locked glass cabinet in his library at Casa Milà, inside a leather box engraved with the title The Complete Works of William Blake. When Robert Langdon broke the cabinet open, he found the box empty; taped inside the lid was an ivory note card indicating that the book was on loan to La Basílica de la Sagrada Família. The card specified that the book must be displayed lying open to page 163. Father Joaquim Beña, the presiding clergyman, had accepted the loan as part of a large donation from Kirsch, believing the request to display an image of God—Blake's watercolor The Ancient of Days—might signal a dying man's attempt to make amends with the deity he had scorned. Beña placed the volume in a dimly lit display case in the crypt, near Gaudí's tomb, where it remained largely unnoticed.

The Hidden Password

When Langdon and Ambra Vidal examined the book in the crypt, they discovered that page 163 was not a poem but an illustration—Blake's The Ancient of Days, depicting the demiurge Urizen measuring the heavens with a geometer's compass. Ambra realized that displaying page 163 necessarily exposed the facing page, 162, which contained the handwritten final lines of Blake's epic poem The Four Zoas. The concluding line read: "The dark religions are departed & sweet science reigns." This line, a prophecy of religion's decline and science's ascendancy, perfectly matched Kirsch's worldview and his description of his favorite line as a prophecy already coming true. However, the line contained only forty-six letters, not the required forty-seven. Langdon recognized that the ampersand "&" was a logogram derived from the Latin et; by substituting the ligature "et" for the ampersand, the line became exactly forty-seven characters: "thedarkreligionsaredepartedetsweetsciencereigns." This typographic trick, which Langdon had taught in his symbology class at Harvard, served as an additional layer of security.

Thematic Significance

The Blake volume functions as the narrative's key to unlocking Kirsch's scientific revelation. The poem's final line encapsulates Kirsch's central thesis—that science will replace religion as humanity's guiding framework—and directly echoes the title of Blake's earlier work All Religions Are One. The book's placement in a Catholic crypt, displaying an image of a god-like figure measuring the universe, creates a deliberate irony: an atheist's prophetic poem housed in the heart of a Christian church, its message of scientific triumph literally facing the symbol of the faith it predicts will fade. The password's discovery enables Langdon and Vidal to launch Kirsch's presentation to a global audience of over two hundred million, fulfilling the futurist's final ambition.