The Ancient of Days shows a naked, bearded old man crouching inside a ring of light and reaching down into darkness with a compass. It looks like God making the world. William Blake made it in 1794 as the opening picture of his book Europe a Prophecy, and the man is probably Urizen, a tyrant from Blake's own mythology who stands for law and cold reason. It is a creator, but not a kind one.
The title is not Blake's. It comes from the Book of Daniel in the Bible, where "the Ancient of days" is a name for God. The British Museum describes the figure as "probably Urizen," and the Morgan Library in New York says that, despite his godlike appearance, Urizen "represents tyranny."
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Yet Blake could not leave this tyrant alone. John Thomas Smith, a writer who knew Blake, reported in 1828 that Blake spent more time on coloring this print, and took more pleasure in it, than on anything else he ever made.
That is a strange habit for a man who meant the picture as a warning. It is stranger still that two early writers, Smith in 1828 and the biographer Alexander Gilchrist, in the 1880 edition of his life of Blake, wrote about the print with awe, and neither calls the figure a villain.
Where did the compass in The Ancient of Days come from?
From two famous accounts of God creating the world. The first is in the Book of Proverbs, where Wisdom recalls being present "when he set a compass upon the face of the depth."
The second is in Paradise Lost, John Milton's epic poem about the fall of Adam and Eve, and it is the one Smith quoted in 1828. In Milton, the Creator takes "the golden compasses" and sets one foot at the center. He turns the other "round through the vast profundity obscure" and says: "Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, This be thy just circumference, O World!"
Milton meant it as praise. Blake kept the compass and the circle of light, and changed the character who holds them.
What You'll Discover
What Urizen does in Blake's poems.
Where Blake said the figure came from.
Why no two copies match.
What Blake did with it at the end.