Knight’s coat and chymical battle

Meaning

The anonymous excerpt describes mastery in the separation of fire from earth as winning a knight’s coat in the chymical battle. The military image awards distinction for a difficult achievement; it does not document literal knighthood. It follows an account of elemental descent and ascent whose ascending term contains a missing sign in the supplied text. That gap limits reconstruction of the movement but not the clear rhetorical function of the knightly image: successful art is portrayed as earned recognition after a contest.