The Lady’s Accession as Empress

The Lady’s Accession as Empress is the decisive turn in the Lady’s passage through the Blazing-World: brought before the Emperor at Paradise, she refuses divine worship but is made his wife and given absolute power to govern. Her ascent places a foreign woman at the head of a unified realm, even as the institutions she inherits exclude women from public religious and political life.

Arrival at Paradise

After the Lady’s attendants have learned enough of her language to communicate, their passage brings them to Paradise, the Emperor’s seat. The approach is through a cleft in towering rocks and a winding river route that admits only small boats. The guarded, labyrinthine entrance protects the realm from invasion; beyond it, islands and cities of precious materials lead to the imperial center.

The political order is presented as a source of internal peace. The inhabitants submit to one Emperor and share one language, and the narrative associates that unity with a life free from foreign wars and domestic insurrections. The Lady’s arrival at this center therefore brings her not just before a ruler, but into a state whose security and order are organized around singular sovereignty.

Marriage and Sovereignty

When the Emperor sees the Lady, he takes her for a goddess and offers to worship her. She corrects him: although she comes from another world, she is mortal. The Emperor rejoices at this answer, marries her, and gives her absolute power to rule the whole world as she pleases. His subjects, however, remain inclined to regard her as divine and offer her the veneration they would give a deity.

The accession thus begins with a distinction between the Lady’s own account of herself and the reverence projected onto her by others. She claims mortality rather than sacred status, but her position as the Emperor’s wife and sovereign gives her authority over the realm. The text does not describe a contest for the throne: her power is conferred by the Emperor, and the people’s devotion strengthens the public image of her rule.

The Empress’s Public Image

The narrative marks her new office through an elaborate ensemble of jewels. A pearl cap and diamond crescent frame a crown topped by a broad carbuncle shaped like the sun. Her pearl coat is mixed with blue diamonds and edged with red ones; green-diamond buskins and sandals complete the dress. The objects in her hands make sovereignty legible as both protection and force: a many-coloured diamond shield signifies the defense of her dominions, while a white-diamond spear, shaped like a blazing star, signifies readiness to attack enemies.

This imagery gives her rule a double charge. The shield presents the Empress as guardian of the territory entrusted to her, while the spear announces that her authority can also be exercised against opposition. Her accession therefore establishes both the grandeur of her public status and the capacity for power that later becomes consequential beyond the realm’s borders.

The Inherited Political and Religious Order

The accession places the Empress above a government already organized around political and religious uniformity. Its statesmen defend monarchy by comparing a political body with a natural body that should have one head; they also connect one Emperor to worship of one God and obedience under one faith. The realm’s apparent stability rests not on a multiplicity of competing authorities but on their consolidation in a single sovereign.

Religious life is likewise described as unified: the people acknowledge one eternal God and worship through prayers framed according to their needs. Yet this common faith is institutionally unequal. Women are absent from the public congregations and are expected to pray at home, while priests and governors are made eunuchs to prevent marriage and its perceived disruptions to church and state. The Empress enters a position of supreme authority in a society whose ordinary arrangements deny women a public religious role.

Accession Revisited in Her Rule

In a later consultation, the Empress recalls that the Blazing-World was wisely governed when she first became its ruler, but says she has altered its form after receiving absolute power from the Emperor. She now sees contention among the learned societies and fears that disputes may become rebellion and disorder. Her account makes the accession the reference point against which she measures political change: the initial order she inherited becomes an ideal of peace that she worries her own alterations have unsettled.

Her response to religious difference also develops the tension within her sovereignty. Troubled that the people lack what she regards as knowledge of divine truth, she builds churches and establishes a congregation of women, leading and instructing them herself. Through preaching she converts women and wins affection across the realm; she then uses two chapels, one lit by Fire-stone and one by Star-stone, to accompany sermons of warning and comfort. The accession had placed a woman at the head of a system that excluded women from public worship; her later actions create a public religious role for women, while making the Empress herself the central organizer of belief.

The political ideal associated with her accession is eventually restated as one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language, a unity imagined as protection against faction. Yet the Empress’s authority also reaches beyond preserving internal peace: in a later campaign she uses naval destruction and threatened fires to compel neighboring nations to pay tribute to the ruler of her native country. The accession thus opens a story of female rule whose claims to order coexist with coercive expansion, and whose original promise of unity does not prevent the sovereign herself from changing the polity she inherited.