The Golden Compass and the Lunar Flux: William Blake, Bimetallic Meta-stability, and the Architecture of Value

This manuscript overlays the history of British and American bimetallism with the mythopoetic architecture of William Blake’s prophetic corpus, reading the disintegration of the gold–silver standard as a material enactment of the catastrophic cosmological fracture Blake dramatized. We trace this trajectory from the Newtonian golden compass of rigid, atomistic metrology, identifying the 1717 Mint ratio (1:15.21) not merely as a failed economic policy but as the operationalization of "Newton's sleep"—a cognitive pathology of pathologically rigid priors that crushed variable sensory evidence of silver’s circulation. This Urizenic enclosure unleashed Gresham's entropy, draining silver and hollowing out domestic coinage, leading to the 1797 Bank Restriction and the subsequent 1816 codification of a golden "Single Vision". This entropic pattern resonated transatlantically, reflecting the revol