Conversion of the Blazing-World

The Conversion of the Blazing-World is the Empress’s campaign to bring her subjects into her own religion. It begins with a society that already professes one God and one shared form of worship, but bars women from its religious assemblies. The Empress responds by creating a congregation for women and by turning the material resources of the world into a public lesson in faith. Her achievement is presented as a conversion accomplished through instruction, artifice, and affection rather than bloodshed; its method nevertheless belongs to a political vision that associates unity with a single faith and disciplined public life.

Religious order before the conversion

The Empress’s inquiries reveal that the Blazing-World’s inhabitants are not divided into several religions. Although different kinds of subjects worship in separate churches, the priests tell her that they share one belief and one manner of worship: prayer, shaped into petitions, humiliations, and thanksgiving according to need. They acknowledge and adore one omnipotent and eternal God, but do not identify themselves as Jews, Turks, or Christians, saying that they do not know those religions.

That common creed coexists with a sharp gender boundary. The priests explain that women are absent from their congregations because mixed assemblies, in their view, hinder devotion. Women have no congregation of their own; they remain at home and pray privately. The Empress’s question exposes the difference between universal religious language and unequal access to its public institutions: women are expected to worship, but are excluded from collective religious life.

The political ideal surrounding this religious settlement prizes unity at every level. The statesmen defend monarchy by comparing the political body to a body with one head, and connect one Emperor’s authority to the subjects’ worship of one God. They describe multiple governors as a many-headed monster and present single sovereignty as fitting their religion. The Empress’s conversion project thus develops within a culture already disposed to see religious and political oneness as mutually reinforcing.

A congregation led by the Empress

After conferring with the learned societies, the Empress judges the existing account of religion defective and considers whether the whole population can be converted to her own faith. She resolves to build churches and establish a congregation of women, with herself as its head and teacher. The women, described as quick-witted, subtle in conception, clear in understanding, and sound in judgment, become devout and zealous members in a short time. The Empress’s ability to preach and instruct them in the articles of faith helps her win not only their adherence but also extraordinary affection from subjects throughout the world.

The new congregation alters the earlier arrangement without requiring women to enter the men’s assemblies: instead, women receive a religious community of their own, under the Empress’s direction. Her female sovereignty therefore becomes religious as well as political. She does not merely urge a belief; she organizes a congregation, teaches its members, and takes responsibility for its leadership.

Success does not end her concern. Reflecting on what she sees as the inconstant nature of humankind, she fears that people may tire of divine truth, abandon it, and follow their own desires. Rather than treating conversion as a once-completed change of allegiance, she seeks a way to sustain belief over time. That concern leads her to enlist natural knowledge and architectural spectacle in religious instruction.

The two chapels

The Empress recalls the Bird-men’s report of a mountain burning with fire and sends the wisest and most subtle of the Worm-men to discover its cause. They find a stone that grows intensely hot when wetted, burns until it dries, and then ceases to flame. The Empress asks them to bring her some, secretly. She also asks the Bird-men for a piece of Sun-stone. They say that obtaining it would diminish the world’s light, but offer instead to demolish one of the many stars, whose loss, they claim, would go unnoticed. The Empress accepts the proposal.

While the two groups carry out their assignments, she builds two chapels, one above the other. One is lined throughout with diamonds, including its roof, walls, and pillars, and holds the Fire-stone; the other is to be lined with Star-stone. Water reaches the Fire-stone through artificial pipes. When a tap is turned, water pours over it, and the stone’s reaction makes the chapel appear engulfed in flame. The diamonds protect the lining from the fire, while the arrangement makes the display controllable rather than an uncontrolled blaze.

Both chapels stand on pillars in the middle of a circular cloister that is dark as night. They are open to view from around the cloister and revolve continuously in opposite directions around their own centres. The Star-stone chapel gives off a comfortable light without heat. Its companion’s apparent flames are likewise presented as manageable: the Empress can endure the warmth, which the narrative explains is limited because the stone’s own motions produce the flame rather than ordinary fuel. Their opposed movement, light, and heat make the paired buildings a designed setting for public instruction.

Punishment, comfort, and persuasion

In the Fire-stone chapel, the Empress preaches sermons of terror to the wicked, warning of everlasting fire as the punishment for sin. In the Star-stone chapel, she offers sermons of comfort to those who repent and are troubled by their wrongdoing. The narrative explicitly makes the chapels emblems: the firelit space stands for Hell, the radiant and heatless one for Heaven. Their contrast gives the Empress a means to address both feared punishment and the hope offered to the penitent.

The chapels combine physical construction, natural materials, and theological imagery. Fire-stone’s reaction to water creates the appearance of flame; Star-stone supplies light without heat; diamonds and pillars make the structures durable and elevated; rotation and the dark cloister set their displays apart from ordinary surroundings. The Empress’s preaching gives these effects their religious meaning. The chapels are not simply ornaments but instruments of instruction, joining visual demonstration to spoken teaching.

The account insists that this campaign does not rely on compulsion or bloodshed. The Empress understands belief as something that cannot properly be forced or pressed upon people, but must be instilled through gentle persuasion. She applies the same governing principle beyond conversion: fear may secure obedience, the narrative says, but love is a more lasting and reliable way of keeping people to their duties. Her rhetoric of punishment is therefore paired with comfort, while her stated method of securing belief rests on persuasion and affection rather than violence.

Achievement and political significance

The narrator presents the Empress as having converted the Blazing-World and kept its people in a constant belief through her ingenuity. The outcome links her personal authority as preacher and head of the women’s congregation to the ordering of the whole society. The episode follows an earlier account in which the Empress permits learned societies to continue only on the condition that their disputes remain within their schools and do not disturb the state. Religious unity and the containment of public division thus belong to a broader pattern of government that welcomes organized activity while limiting its capacity to fracture civic order.

That ideal of unity also has limits and tensions. The initial society already has a shared religion, yet the Empress judges its religious knowledge deficient; its public worship excludes women, yet her remedy creates a women’s congregation under her own leadership. The conversion expands women’s participation in religious community without erasing the earlier separation of congregations. Likewise, the story distinguishes persuasion from force even as it presents an Empress with sovereign power, institutional authority, and purpose-built displays for shaping belief. The episode’s religious achievement is therefore inseparable from its politics: a unified faith offers consolation and instruction, while the Empress’s organization of worship gives that unity a public form.