An alchemist examines a pale stone in the light of his workshop.

A stone crowned with light

The Gloria Mundi is an anonymous alchemical work. Its writer addresses the philosophers’ stone directly. He chooses language that might equally well greet a royal figure. The reader hears a human voice welcoming an initially unassuming object with considerable ceremony. The English edition published in 1893 preserves the changes of register between workshop instructions and these striking addresses to the reader.

How completion becomes visible

O thou that resemblest Nature, which dissolvest her tractable nature, that exaltest Nature—that art crowned with light, and preservest in thyself the four elements, out of which the quintessence is made!

– Gloria Mundi, Gloria Mundi, 1893, p. 173.[1]

A crown ordinarily rests on a human head. It can be lifted off, and its presence tells anyone watching something about the person who wears it. A crown made of light behaves differently. It comes into being when something shines and can scarcely be separated from the shining. Applied to a stone, the image raises a precise question. Has an honour been bestowed on it, or does the brightness make visible a change it has already undergone? The course of the speech invites the second reading. The speaker recalls the elements that the stone preserves within itself. The light gives that history a visible form.

What the radiance reveals

Addressing the material directly also changes the reader’s relation to the work. A list of operations would present the making from the worker’s point of view. Here the speaker turns to the material on the bench as one might turn to a companion and invites it, as it were, to witness the work that has been done. An unremarkable beginning and a royal appearance belong to one continuous history. The distance between those two images helps explain how much an alchemical reader might hear in the word perfection.