Nine Books on the Nature of Things

The important question is the relation asserted between mark and meaning. An authorised seal, a bodily feature and a portent do not acquire equal reliability because all can be called signs. The book’s physiognomic judgements can be studied as historical reasoning while being rejected as tests of a person’s character or worth.

Passage NTR-B09-P002: “As we philosophise in this book about the signature of things, we must first explain by whom things are signed, who the signator is, and how many kinds of signs there are.”

Source forms: signatura and signator.

Read in context: Book 9. Read the opening distinction of signators before the later examples in Book 9.

See also: Archaeus, Astrum, Imagination.

Archaeus

The Archaeus is distinguished as a formative or operative agent within the account of signatures. The distinction from human mark-making matters: a natural body’s appearance is not being explained as though someone merely stamped an external label on it. The mark is connected to the making and condition of the body itself.

It is tempting to translate this agent into a familiar modern function, but doing so would settle questions that the source explains differently. The name is therefore retained. Read its particular action beside the other signators and ask what kind of evidence a mark is supposed to provide.

Passage NTR-B09-P002: “In this way there are three signators: the human being, the Archaeus and the stars.”

Source forms: Archeus (also Archaeum in Book 1).

Read in context: Book 9. Compare the accounts of natural generation in Book 1.

See also: Signature, Astrum, Generation.

Astrum

Astrum and its plural astra belong to the work’s vocabulary of stars and stellar powers. Their sense is not exhausted by the visible object in the night sky: the work also assigns stellar relations to bodies and their formation. The immediate argument determines whether a passage concerns the heavens, an inward power, or their supposed correspondence.

In the account of signatures, stellar marking is distinguished from both human signs and the Archaeus. That distinction should be preserved even when the inferred effects are not accepted. The passage is evidence of how this historical text organises causes and signs, rather than proof that a person’s disposition can be read from an astrological relation.

Passage NTR-B09-P053: “First, every metal, while still lying concealed in its first being, has its own particular stars.”

Source forms: astrum and astra.

Read in context: Book 9. Compare imagination and inward stars in Book 1.

See also: Signature, Archaeus, Imagination.