Occultum Lapidem, the Philosopher's Stone

This is the plainest plate in Hall's book and the one that argues most by arrangement. There is one object: a faceted white gem, filling the picture, on a dark blue ground with a cross of pale rays behind it. In a round window at its heart a double-headed eagle stands in flames.

The argument is containment. The fire is not around the stone, burning it, and the eagle is not perched on it. Both are inside it, seen through a window in the facets, so the hardest and coldest thing in the picture has the hottest and most alive thing at its centre and is not consumed. That is the alchemical claim about the Stone stated without a word of text.

Hall's caption gives the reading twice, once for the philosopher and once for the mystic. He calls the Stone a symbol of the perfected and regenerated man whose divine nature shines forth through a chain of purified and unfolded vehicles, and then, for the mystic, perfect love, which transmutes all that is base and raises all that is dead. Both readings are about something inside a person rather than in a crucible, which is why the picture is a window and not a furnace.

The eagle has two heads and the caption does not mention it, so the archive marks it and leaves it. In this material a doubled head is normally the two natures held in one body, which would sit well with everything else here, but Hall does not say so on this plate and the record does not say it for him.