The Golden Chain of Homer

Discussion and Study Questions

These 400 questions invite close reading, comparison and historical interpretation. They ask the reader to assess the author’s observations, arguments and language; they do not direct practical experimentation.

The Original Preliminary Matter

Read with: PRE00, Editor’s preface, PRE02, PRE03, Author’s preface.

1. What does the extended title promise to explain about the birth and destruction of natural things?

2. How does its final question connect earthly understanding with heavenly understanding?

3. What does the original editor know about the author, and what does he leave unknown?

4. How does the comparison of three manuscripts affect your understanding of the printed text?

5. What is gained and what is risked by the editor’s decision to preserve imperfect readings?

6. How do the reported prices of manuscripts contribute to the opening presentation of the work?

7. What kinds of evidence support the editor’s claims about the book’s value?

8. Why does the editor withhold the proposed third part?

9. How should that decision affect a modern claim to publish the original work?

10. What changes when the volatile dragon kills the fixed and the fixed kills the volatile?

11. How do the dragons express an operation through their relation to one another?

12. Which line of the double-abyss poem most clearly links ascent with descent?

13. How does the chain diagram preserve distinctions within an account of unity?

14. What role do Adam and Eve perform in the explanation of the chain?

15. How does the soup image translate a cosmological relation into an everyday experience?

16. What does the final promise of overcoming poverty and sickness ask the reader to believe?

17. Why does the author compare his exposition with teaching children their ABC?

18. What distinguishes a disputant from a practitioner in the author’s preface?

19. What relationship between head and hands does the preface propose?

20. Which promise in these preliminaries would you most want to test after reading both books?

Book I Chapter 1 What Nature Is

Read with: I.1.

21. What is included in the mass that the author calls nature?

22. Why does the definition include invisible creatures within a visible world?

23. What boundary does the author draw between God and nature?

24. How does the word mass shape the opening account of the world?

25. Why does the author set aside the distinction between natural and supernatural things here?

26. What work is done by saying that everything was made naturally by God?

27. How are chaos and nothing related in the wording of this definition?

28. What would change if the definition excluded invisible created beings?

29. Which question about activity is left open by this initial definition?

30. How would you explain the definition without adding a modern theory of nature to it?

Book I Chapter 2 the Origin of Things

Read with: I.2.

31. How does the divine word enter the account of material origins?

32. What sequence connects word, vapour and water?

33. How can water be one visible thing while containing an invisible principle?

34. Why does the author insist that spirit needs a body for bodily effects?

35. What functions are assigned to water as instrument and dwelling?

36. What functions are assigned to spirit as worker and smith?

37. Which observations make the movement between vapour and water familiar?

38. How does the example of sweat contribute to a cosmological argument?

39. What does the passage from centre to circumference ask the reader to do?

40. Where does the author move from an observed change to a claim about all things?

Book I Chapter 3 How Generation Occurs

Read with: I.3.

41. What changes as the original water begins to act within itself?

42. How does the appearance of earth alter the initial account of a simple water?

43. What distinctions are introduced by counting one, two, three, four and five?

44. How does the order of separation follow relative subtlety?

45. Why does the author use the familiar degrees of comparison to explain that order?

46. What connects the division of elements with their power to reproduce?

47. How is a particular seed distinguished from the universal seed?

48. Why is a regenerated common seed needed after the primordial division?

49. How do influence and effluence contribute to its production?

50. What does this chapter add to the opening claim that all things share one origin?

Book I Chapter 4 the Generation of Universal Seed

Read with: I.4.

51. How do the four elements become two active and receptive sides?

52. What does the command to grow and multiply require of the divided elements?

53. Why can the most subtle and the most fixed not be joined directly?

54. What work does a medium perform between extremes?

55. How does the author complicate a simple four-step ladder of elements?

56. Why must degrees within an element be considered as well as differences between elements?

57. What is meant by following nature’s order in an operation?

58. How does the example of earth and water illustrate successive extraction?

59. What distinguishes an appeal to a common origin from a sufficient account of conjunction?

60. Which failure would show that the practitioner had selected an unsuitable intermediate stage?

Book I Chapter 5 Regenerated Chaotic Water

Read with: I.5.