Lapis Philosophorum is the alchemists’ Latin name for the final object of the Great Work, which recurs across several chronicles under three forms: the stone, the golden sphere and the egg of the serpent.
| Type | Object (recurring, cross-chronicle) |
| Forms | Stone, golden sphere, egg |
| Spanish entry | Lapis Philosophorum |
As stone
Torreluces is “the city of those who found the philosophers’ stone, and administer it, of course”: alchemists’ workshops, towers belonging to immortals (Bruno, Campanella, Dee, Rosencrutz), and a circle very few enter. The stone sustains, outside conventional space and time, the heart of the hidden cities, the same threshold where “the Game of Shadows has begun”.
As golden sphere
In the Egypt of the cycle, around the year 1401, when Tii and her High Priest Ai took power, they founded a secret cult of the Golden Sphere. From the same era comes the episode of the Egg and the Claw in Greek Thebes: Auro seizes the Claw and is dominated by the Egg, on the day a red dragon kills Agatha and Amitlai brings her back to life. In the chronicle of the Crown of the North, a worn stretch of the record keeps a golden sphere left behind as a “heavy burden”, a warning about a seed that, if the curse is not cured, “will turn golden and blind”, and ritual care that no one pervert “its golden shell”.
As egg
In the gesta of the Templars, the inner chamber of the Omniporal Labyrinth holds the Infernal Egg, an egg proportioned to the colossal serpent that guards it, “an egg of hers”; it was later kept in the Temple. A hooded figure handed it over whispering “harvest this creature of good as if it were of evil”. Whether salvation or damnation waits inside was never resolved.
Under the waters, Cakravartin, King of Atlantis and Lord of the Wheel, commissions a mission of dragon eggs (gold and silver against red and green; tin and copper later) for his alchemical Great Work, with the Atlantean Sparrows assisting an operation they cannot carry out themselves, and a parchment bearing the uroboros, the serpent biting its tail, as the cipher of the whole system.
Related
- Azufre Rojo is an alchemist whose name is a name of the Stone (Sulphur Rubeum).
- Torregrises is the gray twin, the heart of the hidden cities where the secret is paid for with cold.