The Empress’s conversion of the Blazing-World

The Empress’s conversion of the Blazing-World transforms a society already united in worship into one instructed in her own religion. Her program joins female religious participation to carefully staged teaching: two chapels, one seemingly aflame and the other lit by a star, make punishment and consolation visible. The narrative calls this conversion peaceful and grounded in persuasion, while the Empress’s position as sovereign lets her organize the institutions through which that persuasion takes effect.

Religious Order Before the Conversion

The Empress’s subjects have distinct churches associated with different kinds of people, but their priests insist that these are not separate religions. They say that all acknowledge and worship one omnipotent and eternal God, share one understanding of divine worship, and pray through petitions, humility, and thanksgiving. Their account presents religious unity as already established, even though congregations are institutionally separate.

That unity rests alongside the exclusion of women from public worship. The priests explain that men and women do not assemble together because mixed company would distract worshippers; women, they say, pray at home in private. They also explain that priests and governors are made eunuchs to prevent marriage, arguing that women and children can influence men in ways that disturb Church and State despite holding no public office themselves. These answers reveal a religious order that declares one faith while restricting women’s participation in its public institutions.

The political account offers a parallel principle of unity. The statesmen defend having few laws because numerous laws breed divisions and factions, and they prefer monarchy because a political body, like a natural body, should have one head. Their account connects one emperor with the subjects’ worship of one God and submission to one authority. Against this background, the Empress’s religious program belongs to a broader order that prizes unity, but her effort to convert the people also exposes the limits of the faith they already share.

Establishing a Women’s Congregation

After hearing the learned societies and religious authorities, the Empress considers the existing religion defective in its knowledge of divine truth. She wonders whether the people can be converted to her own religion and resolves to build churches and establish a congregation of women, of which she will be the head. She intends to instruct the women in the articles of her faith herself.

The women become devout and zealous in a short time. The narrative attributes this change to their intelligence and judgment, as well as to the Empress’s gift for preaching and instruction. Through the congregation, she gives women a religious community of their own rather than leaving them, as the existing priests prescribe, to pray separately at home. Her program thus opens a public religious role to women under her leadership, even as it establishes the Empress as the central authority over the new instruction.

The Empress also gains extraordinary affection from her subjects as the conversion proceeds. Yet she worries that human beings are inconstant: they might tire of divine truth, abandon it, and follow their own desires. Her anxiety is not simply about whether the people can be persuaded once; it is about whether their belief will endure. That concern prompts her to devise a continuing, visible means of religious instruction.

The Two Moving Chapels

The opportunity comes from a report by the Bird-men about a mountain in flames. The Empress sends the wisest and most subtle of the Worm-men to investigate. They descend to the mountain’s bottom and report that a kind of stone grows intensely hot and burns when wet, then stops burning when dry. The Empress asks them to bring her some, secretly. She also asks the Bird-men for a piece of the Sun-stone; they say they cannot take it without diminishing the world’s light, but offer instead to demolish one of the many stars, whose loss, they say, would go unnoticed.

Using these materials, the Empress constructs two chapels, one above the other. She lines one throughout with diamonds, covering its roof, walls, and pillars, and places the Fire-stone against that lining because fire cannot harm diamonds. Artificial pipes carry water into the chapel; when released, the water runs over the stone, which then appears to set the room aflame. The second chapel is lined with Star-stone, whose light is bright and comforting but gives off no heat.

Both chapels stand on pillars in the middle of a round cloister as dark as night. Their light comes only from the stones, and the chapels are open to view from within the cloister. They move continuously in a circle around their own centers, in opposite directions. The arrangement turns religious instruction into a public spectacle: the dark setting frames two distinct, visible forms of light, while the chapels’ motion keeps the contrasting images in view.

Persuasion, Fear, and the Limits of Authority

In the Fire-stone chapel, the Empress preaches sermons of terror to the wicked, warning that sinners will suffer everlasting fire after death. In the Star-stone chapel, she comforts those who repent and are troubled by their wrongdoing. The first chapel serves as an emblem of Hell; the second, where the Empress appears like an angel, serves as an emblem of Heaven. The chapels therefore make the emotional contrast in her teaching architectural and visible, not merely verbal.

The fire’s operation is also important to the scene’s account of art and nature. The water poured over the Fire-stone becomes flame through the stone’s natural motions, and that flame is weaker than fire fed by other fuel; the Empress can endure its heat while preaching. The Star-stone, by contrast, sheds great light without heat. The Empress’s ingenuity arranges these natural properties into a didactic design, using controlled appearances to make religious consequences intelligible.

The narrative says that she converts the Blazing-World and keeps its people in belief without compulsion or bloodshed. It states her principle directly: belief cannot be forced or pressed upon people but must be instilled through gentle persuasion. Fear may produce obedience, she holds, but love is a more lasting and reliable means of keeping people to their duties. Her paired sermons nevertheless retain an appeal to fear, as the Fire-stone chapel stages punishment alongside the consoling promise of the other chapel. The episode thus distinguishes persuasion from coercive enforcement without making the Empress’s teaching free of warnings or sovereign direction.

From Religious Settlement to a Wider World

Once the Church and State have reached an orderly, settled condition, the Empress turns her thoughts to the world from which she came. She wants to learn what has happened there, especially to the places where she was born and raised and to her friends and acquaintances, and concludes that only Immaterial Spirits can provide such knowledge. Her ensuing dealings with them show that religious settlement does not end her questioning: she asks about the limits of their knowledge and later considers making a Cabbala.

The Spirits’ answers themselves place limits on claims to supernatural authority. They explain that they have no general or perfect knowledge and distinguish present knowledge from remembrance of the past. When the Empress declares her wish to make a Jewish Cabbala, the Spirits disappear. She interprets their disappearance as a possible punishment for faults in their answers and becomes distressed that she may have caused them harm. The scene complicates the image of a ruler who can arrange religious instruction with confidence: even after establishing a settled faith, she remains vulnerable to uncertainty about divine and supernatural matters.

The Empress’s conversion also provides a pointed contrast for the later conflict with her native country. There, she offers assistance against its enemies and tells its commanders that she has left her own tranquility, riches, and pleasure to protect them. That aid develops into a demand that neighboring maritime nations pay tribute to the King of Esfi; when some refuse, she threatens their towns and sends forces to burn them. The contrast does not erase the Blazing-World conversion’s stated commitment to persuasion, but it distinguishes her peaceful religious method at home from the forceful imperial expansion undertaken abroad. Together, these episodes show how the Empress’s authority can be exercised through instruction and institutional design in one setting, and through military pressure and tribute in another.