audysseon: Lapis Chronicle: Preface

Set In Stone: The Lapis Chronicle

A New Mythology

Preface

The following article appeared recently in the society section of the Melrose Messenger:

December 29, 2009

The chair of the Friends of the Library fundraising committee announced today that the construction of the new home for the Central City Library is on schedule to resume in January. The library is being temporarily housed in the Deco Theatre building, which is closed pending negotiations for a new theatrical company to come to our fair city.

An old file cabinet, salvaged by a local citizen from the basement of the library during the move, reportedly contained a mysterious document. Taped to the back of one of the drawers was a flash drive that contained a pdf file of a scanned document called the Lapis Chronicle. The salvager returned the thumb drive to the head librarian, who read the document, but was suspicious about its origins. “There was no validating information with it,” he said. “We have no reason to believe that it has any historical significance.” The reference librarian had no recollection of the library’s acquisition of the original document, although it could have been part of the Price family’s personal collection. None of the assistants could explain why the scanned version had been secreted away. There was some speculation that it was an unpublished manuscript of the last heir, Berkeley Price, who tried her hand at writing fiction from time to time. It was decided that the Lapis Chronicle was a unpublished fictional work, and should be treated as such.

The new library building will be located on the site of the Price Mansion, whose homestead was left to the city in perpetuity for the exclusive purpose of housing the library. The mansion itself was remodeled in 1910 to accommodate the city’s holdings within the family’s extensive personal collection, which was left to the city upon the death of Berkeley Price. When the mansion was determined to be a health and safety hazard in 2008, a group of citizens banded together to raise funds to pay the Deco theatre building owners to temporarily house the collection.

A copy of the mysterious pdf file was sent to me anonymously, along with the above news clipping. The document parallels recent studies I have done with Jungian scholar Robin Robertson, comparing philosophical alchemy and chaos theory. I believe that that the six tellings of the Chronicle parallel the alchemical processes of the lapis philosophorum (thus, its name) as well as significant aspects of chaos theory.

With that in mind, I present the Lapis Chronicle in its entirety. My purpose is not to argue its pedigree, but to offer it as a modern myth that can perhaps facilitate personal (and therefore collective) transformation.▪