From the book
Nine Books on the Nature of Things
Attributed to Paracelsus · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Meaning
The verb connects water, fire and the animal examples, but its object changes the sense. Water is said to drown people; a stopped-up flame is suffocated; flies are drowned in water in the restoration narrative. This range illustrates the text’s analogical language of life and death without making a flame’s extinction physiologically identical to an animal’s loss of apparent life.
Places to read
- Book 4 · Life · Passage 18Latin“suffocari necesse est”