Mother and Womb

Use in the book

Page 75 describes metals entering destruction and dissolution in their mother’s body so that they can reach new birth. Page 92 makes the identification explicit: the mother’s body is first matter, the pri-material fountain or water given through Nature in the chaos of Magnesia. The mother is not the ordinary metal’s remaining parts after its sulphur has been removed.

The first constructive road treats seed and mother or field together. Page 95 adds that in natural metallic generation the universal mother, seeded by special sparks of Nature, becomes the fruit herself. The text therefore envisages the receiving ground’s participation in the generated product. It is not simply an inert container in which a separate metallic object changes.

The subsequent objection makes that distinction necessary. If sulphur, mercury and salt are all essential parts of silver or gold, then calling two of those parts the mother does not establish a return to the source from which the whole metal was generated. Pages 119–12123 insist upon a common mother outside the ordinary metals and distinguish the true pri-material Rebis from one fetched out of corporeal metallic bodies.

The language should not be reduced to a loose fertility ornament, but neither should its argumentative necessity be converted into literal human anatomy. The page 95 marginal caution says that analogies from animal and vegetable generation do not fully prove metallic processes. The mother image specifies dependence upon a suitable source and the passage through productive corruption; the treatise does not describe a biological mechanism.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 75The mother’s body is the place of destruction and new birth.
2. 1599 p. 92The mother is expressly identified as the first matter’s pri-material fountain.
3. 1599 p. 95The seeded mother participates in becoming the metallic fruit.
4. 1599 p. 96 · marginConfusion over mother, womb and sperm is said to lead into a dangerous labyrinth.
5. 1599 p. 119The return into the common mother is distinguished from treating the metal’s own parts as its ground.
6. 1599 p. 121The true common mother is a pri-material Rebis, not the metal-derived substitute.

Translation in this edition

“Mother’s body” is preferable where the original says Leib, since translating every occurrence as womb hides the author’s changing terms. The Latin matrix family can be indexed under womb without assigning an anatomical identity to the material. The text’s own warning requires careful relational reading.