How the elements come to rest in the stone

Alchemical writings circulated long after his death under the name of the Parisian scribe Nicolas Flamel (c. 1330–1418). One of them bears the title Le Désir désiré. Its writer explains the goal of work on a stone in which the four elements are to come to an agreement. To make that condition clearer he invokes an earlier alchemical authority whom he calls Senior. Within a work attributed to one person the reader thus encounters words expressly referred to another.

Four short determinations

For in it the water is fixed, the air is still, the earth is firm, and fire surrounds the whole.

– Pseudo-Nicolas Flamel, Le Désir désiré, 1741, p. 308.^[1]

Each element receives a particular determination. The water is fixed, the air quiet and the earth firm. Readers following the first three statements may already have a settled picture in mind. With fire the wording changes. We learn where it is in relation to the whole. It surrounds the body. The image acquires an inside and an outside, whereas the other three statements were chiefly concerned with conditions of individual elements.

What the fire encloses

The context makes this rest more surprising. Shortly before, the text has spoken of above and below, of ascending and descending and of exchanges between spirit and body. Only after these movements can the account of the finished stone acquire its full weight. The elements keep their distinct names, yet they can now be imagined together in a single body. The final phrase does something very like the last outline in a drawing. It gives the whole a boundary at which it can come into view as one thing.