From the book
The Golden Chain of Homer
Anonymous (traditionally attributed to Anton Joseph Kirchweger) · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordMinerals are the more fixed, earthy, and strongly digested terrestrial bodies.
- In the Golden ChainTheir formation and reduction provide the longest test of material degrees.
- TranslationThe category includes ores, metals, stones, salts, and intermediate matters.
- A place to readB1C23S001 and B2C09S001–003: generation and reduction.
Meaning
The mineral kingdom is one of three specifications of the same universal matter. Compared with animals and plants, its subjects are more thoroughly fermented, dried, coagulated, and fixed. Their apparent opposition to living bodies follows from degree and condition, not from an unrelated first substance (B1C08S002–003; B2C09S001).
Its membership is broader than modern mineralogy alone. The account includes vitriol and alum, sulphur and arsenic, marcasites and metals, earths, stones, and vitrified bodies. Universal nitre and salt are a special case: the author contests their confinement to the mineral kingdom merely because they are dug from earth, since they occur throughout all three kingdoms and universal waters (B1C23S001; B1C23S006–007; B2C09S002).
Use in the book
The mineral genealogy begins with a corrosive, saline vapour arising within the earth, not with a ready-made metal. The vapour condenses, dissolves earth, and becomes vitriolic or aluminous Gur; further alteration produces sulphur, arsenic, marcasite, and metal. Differences of earth, supplied acid, heat, and duration account for different outcomes or arrested stages. The author repeatedly distinguishes remote from proximate first matter to prevent a broad ancestry from being mistaken for an immediate recipe of composition (B1C23S008–016; B1C23S033).
Minerals also exemplify the maxim that a thing must be reduced through that from which it arose. Book Two argues that dry fixed subjects require a penetrating moisture appropriate to their own origin; when their own moisture is insufficient, universal spirits can awaken their specified spirit. Yet a newly dissolved mineral remains mineral and corrosive. The author makes vegetable and animal mediation necessary before the imagined medicinal transformation becomes homogeneous with a human body. These are historical medical claims whose appearance in the text does not establish their safety or efficacy (B2C09S003–006; B2C09S013–016).
The difference between natural ore and processed metal is a methodological warning. Smelting removes vitriolic, sulphurous, arsenical, marcasitic, and stony portions. A refined sample can therefore obscure the genealogy that an ore is supposed to display. The author’s comparisons treat these removed parts as nourishment and principles of life within the mineral body. His larger objection is to an inquiry that looks only at a finished product, then invents its beginning without examining the intermediate degrees (B1C23S023; B1C23S037–038; B2C09S012).
Places to read
- Book I · Ch. 23 · §1The mineral tree supplies the sequence and its qualified final stage.
- Book I · Ch. 23 · §6Nitre and salt are not simply mineral by virtue of location.
- Book I · Ch. 23 · §13Earth, acid, and digestion produce different mineral outcomes.
- Book II · Ch. 9 · §2Unprocessed natural subjects must be distinguished from altered materials.
- Book II · Ch. 9 · §15Medicinal dulcification is described as transformation of kingdom.
Translation in this edition
Mineralia and Regnum minerale are broad historical classifications. “Mineral” can qualify a vapour, spirit, acid, salt, or final body, according to its specification and place in the sequence. It does not always mean a solid specimen. “Ore” often provides the more precise reference where the source concerns a body taken from the mountain; “metal” names a later or more fixed product. Keeping those distinctions avoids making the whole kingdom interchangeable with refined metallic substances (B1C23S004; B2C09S001–003).