Ensouling and genaturing · Lexicon

From the book

Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum

Heinrich Khunrath · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordTo ensoul is to give the subject its living formative principle; to genature, in Khunrath's hybrid vocabulary, is to give it nature.
In KhunrathAt p. 21 Nature ensouls and genatures Magnesia with one synoptically catholic spark.
In this editionThe English “given nature to” keeps genaturet literal.
A reading distinctionThe uncertain German forms are introduced by “animirte oder” and “animiret oder”; that local syntax supports the sense of ensouling while leaving the exact reading open.

Meaning

To ensoul is to give the subject its living formative principle; to genature, in Khunrath's hybrid vocabulary, is to give it nature. The two verbs occur together when he explains how Nature has left Magnesia catholic. They name a positive constitution, not merely the absence of specification.

Use in the book

At p. 21 Nature ensouls and genatures Magnesia with one synoptically catholic spark. Ordinary things receive special formative sparks and become fixed in particular kinds. Magnesia instead retains universality through the kind of animation it receives. This distinction is essential: catholic matter is neither lifeless residue nor an abstraction obtained by imagining all characteristics removed. Its universal nature has itself been bestowed.

The passage about creation at p. 49 enlarges the account. First matter was created out of nothing and catholicly ensouled with universal Nature, identified here as the hidden Spirit or Soul of the World. The corresponding present subject occupies its own catholic being, neither vegetable, animal, mineral nor metallic. Khunrath's phrasing joins divine creation to natural mediation without making those two acts indistinguishable. Nature supplies and shapes the material subject; the Artist subsequently begins where Nature has left it.

Ensouling also operates within the numerical description. Twofold Mercury is called ensouled Mercury, and the four elements are ensouled with fifth essence. These descriptions belong to one natural subject, not to a sequence of independent additions. The vocabulary carries the same insistence on a living, internally related constitution through its dual, triadic and elemental analyses.

At pp. 97–982 the purified Azoth is the ensouled, catholic, living Mercury of the Philosophers, and retains the ensouled designation after regeneration and more-than-perfecting. Animation therefore does not merely mark the raw beginning and disappear once Art intervenes. It helps name the continuity of the subject through preparation. Reading “animate” only as a modern verb for setting something in motion would miss that continuity, just as reading ensouling as exclusively human would contradict the deliberately non-human chymical microcosm.

Places to read

1599 p. 21Magnesia is universally ensouled and given nature through a comprehensive spark.
1599 p. 22The Stone derives from first matter which is also catholicly ensouled.
1599 p. 49Created first matter and the present catholic subject are described through ensouling.
1599 p. 54Mercury and the four elements receive ensouling descriptions within the one subject.
1599 p. 97Purified Azoth is ensouled, catholic and living Mercury.
1599 p. 98The same ensouled Mercury is named after regeneration and more-than-perfecting.

Translation in this edition

The English “given nature to” keeps genaturet literal. The source prints the uncertain forms Geschligte and geschliget at pp. 49 and 542; the modern editor leaves them unamended and reports, without adopting, a conjecture related to ensouling. Their typography should not be silently normalized into a secure German word.

Source note

The uncertain German forms are introduced by “animirte oder” and “animiret oder”; that local syntax supports the sense of ensouling while leaving the exact reading open.