Chapter X: The Stone Is The Cycle
This is not a reinterpretation of alchemy, but its operational closure. Once the missing material reference is supplied, the Stone is revealed not as object, but as cycle.
A Note to Scholars
This chapter is offered as an operational closure, not a corrective.
It does not propose that ancient authors possessed modern scientific categories, nor that symbolic language should be reduced to material explanation. Its purpose is narrower and, I believe, more respectful: to show how multiple traditions preserved the same operational roles using different symbolic grammars, and how those roles remain stable even when names shift or disappear.
Readers grounded in Scripture, theology, Hermeticism, alchemy, philosophy, philology, or the history of science are invited to test this framework against their own sources. If it succeeds, it will not settle debates. It will reopen texts many of us thought we already understood.
What follows is not a claim of superiority, but a clarification of timing. No single scholar articulated the interpretation presented here, not because the Hermetic canon resists material meaning, but because the material reference was missing.
