DiotimosReading Desk

Operations of union and perfection

Cohobation

cohobium, “cohobation”; Cohobationes, “repeated cohobations”; cohobiren, “return and redistil”

Returning a separated liquid to its associated body and repeating the passage through distillation.

From the book

The Golden Chain of Homer

Anonymous (traditionally attributed to Anton Joseph Kirchweger) · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordReturning a separated liquid to its associated body and repeating the passage through distillation.
  • In the Golden ChainThe returning movement helps opening, reunion, or further alteration and becomes an analogy for nature itself.
  • TranslationThe translation keeps the technical name while the local argument explains its purpose.
  • A place to readB2C05S028, where repeated watering and drying are called macrocosmic cohobation.

Meaning

Cohobation is a repeated return, ordinarily involving a liquid that has passed over in distillation and is brought back into contact with material from which it was separated. The continued relation between distillate and body distinguishes it from simply collecting a first distillate or refining a liquid apart from its residue. Its aim depends on context: further dissolution, increased mobility, or gradual incorporation into a more fixed body.

Repetition alone is not the author's guarantee of success. A missing intermediary may make repeated contact slow and wasteful. Cohobation belongs within the book's account of affinity, relative predominance, and the sequence of principles; it cannot replace those relations by sheer persistence.

Use in the book

The mineral argument in B1C15S002 uses cohobation to return a vitriolic body toward saline water or spirit. The author takes this proposed reversal as support for his claim that minerals originated in saline waters and can return to them. The significance is genealogical as well as technical: the operation is supposed to make an earlier stage of a body's history accessible again. B2C09S012 later relates cohobation to a vaporous mineral liquor, while insisting that the several generative parts of the ore remain together in the reconstructed subject.

B1C19S015 supplies a caution against reading the operation as automatically efficient. The direct relation of volatile wine spirit to fixed alkali is described as difficult because the appropriate middle has been removed. Numerous cohobations may eventually bring change, but only through “Herculean labour.” The criticism is not of every repeated return. It concerns a return made without the mediating relation the author considers natural. This distinction explains why he can advocate cohobation elsewhere without contradiction.

The natural model becomes explicit in B2C05S028–B2C05S029. Rain does not supply once and for all the whole moisture required for completed growth. Earth receives moisture repeatedly, retains what is needed, and releases surplus that rises and later returns. The author calls this macrocosmic imbibition and cohobation. In this wider application, the landscape supplies the body and atmospheric circulation supplies the repeated return. The analogy joins workshop time with the perpetual exchanges already described in Book I; it does not mean that every movement of air is literally a laboratory distillation.

Places to read

  1. Book I · Ch. 15 · §2A mineral body is returned toward saline water or spirit.
  2. Book I · Ch. 19 · §15Repetition without a middle can be laborious.
  3. Book II · Ch. 5 · §24Cohobation accompanies progressive capacity to endure heat.
  4. Book II · Ch. 5 · §28Nature provides a macrocosmic model.
  5. Book II · Ch. 9 · §12The returning operation belongs to mineral reduction.

Translation in this edition

The attested forms include cohobium, Cohobationes, and cohobiren. The English noun identifies a recurring technical pattern, whereas individual passages may narrate the return without repeating the noun. It is safest to reserve the label for such return-and-repetition relations and explain wider analogies explicitly.

Circulation and imbibition are neighbours rather than exact synonyms. Circulation can name the whole continuing movement; imbibition emphasizes moistening and reception. In B2C05S028 the association of imbibition with cohobation deliberately holds reception, release, and return together. Their overlap reflects the author's model of nature rather than a requirement to erase their differences.