You’ve probably seen the picture even if you’ve never heard its name. An old man with a white beard crouches inside a blazing disc, and his hair and beard stream sideways as if a wind is blowing through heaven. He reaches one arm down into the dark and holds a huge pair of compasses, measuring out the world.

It’s usually called The Ancient of Days, though Blake didn’t give it that title. He made it in 1794 as the frontispiece to his book Europe a Prophecy, and it has ended up on posters and album covers and probably a few tattoos. Most people take it for a reverent picture of God the Creator.

It isn’t, or at least not the God Blake loved. The old man is Urizen, Blake’s name for the cold, measuring power that tries to fence the infinite into rules. If you’ve spent any time with the Gnostic texts, you might recognize him. He looks a lot like the demiurge, the lesser god who builds the world and believes he’s the only one.

A Gnostic Without the Library

William Blake lived from 1757 to 1827, almost all of it in London. He trained as an engraver and made a living cutting other people’s designs into copper. His own poems he printed by a method he worked out himself, etching words and pictures together on the same plate, and his wife Catherine helped him print and color the pages by hand.

He never read the Gnostic gospels. Nobody in his century did. The Nag Hammadi jar wasn’t dug up until 1945.

The near miss is what gets me, though. The British Museum bought a Coptic Gnostic book, the one now known as the Pistis Sophia, in 1785, from the heirs of a London doctor named Askew. For most of Blake’s adult life it sat a few miles from his workshop. The first full translation, into Latin, didn’t come out until 1851, twenty-four years after he died.

What Blake could have known came secondhand, mostly through the church fathers who wrote against the Gnostics and summarized their myths in order to refute them. Scholars still argue about how much of that he read. I find the question less interesting than the result. Working from the Bible, his own visions, and a lot of anger at the churches of his day, he rebuilt much of the Gnostic picture on his own.

The Blind Lawgiver

Blake’s Book of Urizen, also from 1794, is a creation story told from the wrong side. Urizen pulls away from the other Eternals into a void of his own making and starts writing laws. When he finally speaks, his program fits in one line, “One King, one God, one Law.”

Compare that with the boast of Yaldabaoth, the ruler who shapes the cosmos in the Secret Book of John. I’m quoting Marvin Meyer’s translation here. Surrounded by the angels he made, the ruler announces:

“I am a jealous god and there is no other god beside me.”

The author can’t resist a dig. “But by announcing this, he suggested to the angels with him that there is another god. For if there were no other god, of whom would he be jealous?”

Yaldabaoth and Urizen share a lot. Both are creators who don’t know what came before them, and both rule by decree. Both are a little pathetic underneath the grandeur. One of Yaldabaoth’s names in that same text is Samael, which Meyer glosses as “blind god,” and Blake’s Urizen keeps closing himself off until, by the end of his book, the people living under his laws find their senses shrinking.

If you want a primer on the Gnostic version, my post on the Secret Book of John walks through the whole myth. It’s worth reading first if the names here are new to you.

Father of Jealousy

Blake’s notebook has a short poem that makes the connection even plainer. He calls it “To Nobodaddy,” a nickname that crunches “nobody” and “daddy” together, and it opens like this:

Why art thou silent & invisible Father of jealousy Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds From every searching Eye

“Father of jealousy” is the same joke the Secret Book of John makes, landed from the other side. A god who has to be jealous is admitting there’s something he’s afraid of. And a god who hides in clouds while demanding obedience starts to look less like the source of the world and more like its warden.

I don’t think Blake was mocking God in these lines. He was mocking a picture of God that he thought the churches had made and then worshipped, the remote judge in the sky who mainly forbids things. The Gnostics did something similar with the god of their Genesis readings. They didn’t throw the Bible away, but they did insist that the one doing the forbidding in Eden wasn’t the highest power there.

Where Blake Parts Ways

Here’s the part I’d want any Gnostic reader to notice. Blake shares the diagnosis, but his cure runs almost the other way.

First, Urizen lives inside us. In Blake’s later myth he’s one of four Zoas, the great faculties of a single cosmic human who fell apart into warring pieces. Urizen is reason cut off from feeling and imagination.

Yaldabaoth, in the Nag Hammadi texts, is an outside ruler with his own heavens and angels. You can read him inwardly, and plenty of us do, but the texts tell his story as cosmology.

Second, Blake loved the world. The Gnostic writers often describe the material cosmos as a prison or a counterfeit. Blake’s most quoted line points elsewhere:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

That line comes from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and it puts the problem in our seeing rather than in the world itself. The grain of sand and the wildflower don’t need to be escaped. They need to be seen properly. That’s closer to the Gospel of Thomas, where the kingdom is spread out on the earth and people don’t see it, than to the darker Sethian myths.

Third, the endings differ. On the Origin of the World, which I mapped in my last post, ends with the chief ruler destroying himself.

In Blake’s long unfinished poem The Four Zoas, Urizen is eventually restored. Once he gives up trying to control everything, he gets his first form back. For Blake, even the tyrant gets to come home.

Imagination as the Spark

What Blake puts in place of the Gnostic spark is imagination. He means something bigger than daydreaming.

On his late engraving of the Laocoön statue, he scratched a line around the figures, “The Eternal Body of Man is The IMAGINATION,” and then, a little further on, “God himself.” For him the creative power in a human being wasn’t a gift from God. It was God, showing up in us.

That gives his work an odd kinship with the Gnostic idea that the divine is hidden inside the person and has to be woken. It also explains his best-known act of defiance, spoken by Los, the blacksmith-poet of his myth, in the long poem Jerusalem:

I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create

You could read that as Blake’s own motto, and people usually do. It’s also a fair description of what the Gnostic writers did with Genesis. They weren’t content with the system handed to them, so they built another one.

Blake’s Jesus fits the pattern too. Elaine Pagels, in The Gnostic Gospels, quotes his poem “The Everlasting Gospel” as an example of someone siding with the Christ the Gnostics preferred over the one the churches preached:

The vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision’s deepest enemy …

Pagels lists Blake among the people “at the edges of orthodoxy,” fascinated by Christ and in revolt against the institutions that claimed him. I think that’s exactly where he stood. He’s a second gateway into this material for a lot of people, alongside Philip K. Dick, and like Dick he got there without the library.

Reading Blake as a Gnostic Reader

If you want to try this yourself, here’s how I’d go about it. None of it needs a background in English literature.

  • Start with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It’s short, it’s funny, and it holds most of the lines people quote. Read the “Proverbs of Hell” section slowly, one or two at a time.
  • Look at the plates, not only the words. Blake meant the text and images to be read together. The William Blake Archive puts high-resolution scans of the original copies online for free, and Urizen looks very different once you’ve seen him drawn.
  • Read The Book of Urizen beside the Secret Book of John. Keep a two-column page. Note every time both stories agree (a creator who doesn’t know his origin, a law laid over the world) and every time they split.
  • Find your own Urizen. Near the end of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake writes “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.” For a week, watch for the voice in you that wants one rule for every situation, and notice what it costs the lion.

The Secret Book of John (NHC II,1) is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), which also supplies the gloss of Samael as “blind god.” The Askew Codex history comes from G. R. S. Mead’s introduction to his 1921 translation of the Pistis Sophia.

Blake’s lines from The Book of Urizen, “To Nobodaddy,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the Laocoön, and Jerusalem (plate 10) keep his original spelling as given in standard transcriptions such as the William Blake Archive’s. “The Everlasting Gospel” is quoted as it appears in Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979).