Paradise

Paradise is the imperial capital of the Blazing-World and the seat of the Emperor’s court. The Lady reaches it by a guarded, winding route through towering rocks, then enters a city of waterways, bridges, precious materials, and monumental buildings. Its striking design presents political unity as a carefully ordered place, while later debates at court expose the exclusions and tensions beneath that ideal.

Setting and Approach

The Lady and her escorts travel past rich islands and kingdoms toward Paradise. From a distance, its high rocks seem to touch the sky and form an unbroken wall. As the ships draw nearer, a cleft appears, and boats emerge from it in a line. The boats and ships meet courteously; the inhabitants share one language and submit to one Emperor.

The Lady transfers from her ship to a small boat and passes through the cleft, the only entrance to the imperial region. The route winds among the rocks like a labyrinth, and only small boats carrying no more than three passengers can pass. This difficult approach protects the country from foreign invasion while channeling every visitor toward the imperial center.

The City and Palace

Within the rocks, the imperial region is mild and pleasant, divided by broad rivers into islands described as healthy, fertile, and rich. Cities along the narrow river are built of marble, alabaster, agate, amber, coral, and other materials unfamiliar to the Lady’s world. Paradise itself appears as a cluster of islands: rivers run between its streets, and numerous bridges connect them. The city is built of gold.

The buildings are broad rather than tall, with none exceeding two stories above ground. The Emperor’s palace stands on a gradual ascent above the city. A broad arch supported by pillars circles it for four English miles, with a gate at every half-mile; each gate has a different design. The palace’s central space resembles the nave of a church, extending a mile and a half in length and half a mile in breadth. Its vaulted roof rests on pillars arranged so that a visitor could lose direction without a guide. Attendants’ lodgings line the sides, while the Emperor’s rooms occupy the center, with lights at the tops of the rooms to moderate the sun’s heat.

Gold marks the palace’s outer portion; the imperial apartments are adorned with diamonds, pearls, rubies, and other precious stones. In the state room, green diamonds pave the floor as if it were a single piece, and pillars set closely with diamonds stand between arches decorated in bands of differently colored stones. Blue diamonds cover the arches, with a carbuncle at the center representing the sun and rubies representing sunrise and sunset on the eastern and western sides. The scale and materials make the court’s authority visible through architecture.

Political and Religious Center

Paradise embodies a polity whose inhabitants are said to live in continuing peace, without foreign wars or domestic insurrections. Its single language and single Emperor are presented as foundations of unity. When the Empress later asks the Statesmen why they prefer monarchy and maintain few laws, they argue that a political body, like a natural body, should have one head, and that numerous laws can breed division and faction. Their account gives the city’s ordered geography a political counterpart: one center, one ruler, and a limited number of rules.

The city’s religious life is similarly unified in belief and worship, though different kinds of inhabitants have separate churches. The priests say that all acknowledge and worship one God, and that devotion consists of prayers shaped to different needs. Women are excluded from public congregations and pray privately at home; the priests defend this arrangement by claiming that mixed assemblies would distract worshippers. The Empress also learns that priests and governors are princes of the imperial blood made eunuchs to prevent marriage, which the Statesmen regard as a way to limit disturbances in Church and State. Thus the capital’s promised harmony rests alongside restrictions on women’s public participation.

Meaning and Later Reassessment

Paradise is both a physical refuge and a political ideal. Its single, hard-to-enter route protects it from invasion, while its rivers, bridges, and island-like streets bind its internal spaces together. The court’s later account of the city’s original government becomes a standard against which the Empress judges her own changes: when factional disputes grow among the learned societies, the Duchess advises restoring one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language, and dissolving the societies if their disputes threaten the state.

The city’s centrality also shapes the world’s account of sacred geography. Asked where Paradise lies, the Immaterial Spirits identify it with the place where the Empress keeps court and where her palace stands, in the middle of the Imperial City. Paradise is therefore not a remote immaterial realm but a particular, inhabited place within the material world. Its importance lies in the union of court, capital, and sacred reference, even as the story’s claims of peace remain in tension with exclusion at home and coercion beyond the city’s protected center.