Generation of metals · Lexicon

From the book

Candida Phoenix Philosophica

Anonymous · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordGeneration is the coming-to-be of metals within the earth, distinguished from the practitioner’s operation.
In the CandidaThe author affirms a common origin but treats the detailed underground process as conjectural.
TranslationThe account’s admitted uncertainty is part of its content; it must not be edited into a settled theory.
A place to readRead Chapter Four, pp. 106–114, with the explanation of its placement at pp. 121–122.

Meaning

Metallic generation is both a necessary subject of Hermetic study and a hidden process beyond secure observation. The narrator begins with metals as noble works of God and says that philosophers consider their generation important for learning the art. He immediately qualifies the knowledge available: we know metals are generated in the earth, but nobody, in his judgment, has thoroughly investigated how this happens. He calls it a conjectural science. That qualification governs the entire chapter.

The author distinguishes two levels of confidence. He maintains, with the philosophers, that all metals have one origin and spring from one matter. He does not claim equivalent certainty about the sequence of their underground formation. Common matter is a general principle supported elsewhere by his account of water and the elements. The routes by which places, vapours, sulphurs, moisture, and earth determine that matter into a particular metal remain matters of inference.

Observation of the alchemical subject offers the closest available model, but it does not make mine generation identical with the art. Different philosophers have used different initial processes and interpreted the hidden natural process accordingly. Their agreement on a final magistery does not erase their disagreement about beginnings. The author therefore explains diversity of theory partly through diversity of practical experience.

Use in the book

One account, associated conjecturally with followers of Bernard, reads the subject’s changes of colour and appearance as a sequence of actual metals: Mercury becomes lead, tin, silver, copper, iron, and finally gold. The narrator refuses that interpretation. Silver is, after gold, the purest and noblest metal; making it decline into copper and iron contradicts the tendency of nature towards ennoblement. The sequence of appearances is better read as an account of the subject’s operation than as literal metallic genealogy.

A second account, tentatively linked with Artephius’s process, begins from the vapour of nature. Rising through clean, warm places, it takes up sulphurous moisture from rocks and becomes greasy. It then meets a subtle moist earth, fills its pores, and generates one metal or another according to the purity, warmth, coldness, and sulphur encountered. A third formulation from the True Chemical Foundations describes mercurial vapour cooked by subterranean fire into thick water and determined by the sulphur it absorbs.

The author of On the Metamorphosis of Metals differs again, denying an added sulphurous fatness and assigning Mercury an internal digesting power from celestial influences. The narrator reports this disagreement without dissolving all versions into a single consensus. His own preference is the account in which universal spirit encounters differently disposed places and, after thickening, a predisposed matter and matrix. He explicitly leaves room for a more experienced person’s judgment.

Personal experience supplies evidence but also a restraint. When he worked according to Artephius, a failure in fire management broke vessels. He found differently coloured flowers in the fragments. These appearances did not persuade him that the proposed sequence of metals was true. The episode demonstrates the distinction between seeing colours and correctly identifying what those colours prove.⁸⁸

Chapter Six later explains why these chapters precede its fuller account of the subject. The mineral discussions add remarks about the dry way, just as Chapter Two had given hints about the wet way. Metallic generation thus performs two tasks at once: it concerns a natural process and indirectly describes the art. Neither task licenses forgetting that they are distinct.

The mature argument returns to minerals’ lack of a particular seed. Unlike plants and animals, they arise from universal elements and have essential rather than vegetative or sensitive life. Their improvement by tincture follows their common mineral nature and degrees of perfection. This explains why metallic generation matters to the possibility of transmutation even though its exact underground course remains conjectural.

Places to read

Part II · II.106.1; II.107.12The devotional purpose and explicit classification as conjectural science.
Part II · II.108.1; II.109.12Different processes and the proposed succession of metals.
Part II · II.109.2; II.110.1; II.110.2; II.111.12 3 4The competing vapour, sulphur, and celestial-influence accounts.
Part II · II.111.2; II.112.1; II.112.2; II.113.12 3 4The narrator’s common-origin thesis, experimental restraint, and preferred conjecture.
Part II · II.121.1; II.132.12The chapters’ practical placement and the mineral order’s distinctive life.

Translation

Gebährung and generation are rendered “generation” rather than ordinary biological birth. “Conjectural science” retains scientia while marking the author’s explicit limitation; it is neither complete ignorance nor demonstrated certainty.

Ertz can designate metal or ore according to context. Rendering every occurrence as a modern purified metal would obscure the mining setting and the range of material forms under discussion.

Connections

Experience and conjecture is the methodological companion to this entry. Lazarus Ercker exemplifies the limits of mining expertise, while Artephius and Bernard the Count identify contrasting practical traditions through which the hidden process is interpreted.

Seeds and Transmutation explain why the argument need not give each metal a reproductive seed like an animal or plant. The common mineral basis and different degrees of maturity do the work instead.

Cautions

The chapter reports several theories and selects among them. Do not attribute every reported account to the narrator.

The book’s progressive ennoblement is a teleological claim within its natural philosophy, not a modern geological model.

Gebährung der Metallen

Gebährung der Metallen — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.106.1.

scientiâ conjecturali

scientiâ conjecturali — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.107.1.

Metalla alle einen Ursprung

Metalla alle einen Ursprung — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.111.2.

Source note

Flores, translated “flowers,” designates the coloured products noticed in the broken vessel. The report does not independently establish their modern chemical composition or identify them as successive metallic species.