From the book
Nine Books on the Nature of Things
Attributed to Paracelsus · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordMors is death; mortificatio is mortification, the making-dead or alteration of a thing.
- In the workBook V defines death through alteration and overthrow of forces and virtues, suppression of a former nature and generation of another.
- In this editionThe edition preserves the difficult “predominance of badness and goodness,” since the Latin has malitiae & bonitatis, not an explicit conquest of goodness by badness (note 36).
- A place to read“generatio novae & alterius naturae”
Meaning
Mors is death; mortificatio is mortification, the making-dead or alteration of a thing. Mori means to die, while mortificari means to be mortified. Book V often brings death and mortification together as changes of powers and nature. Book VI then insists on a sharper distinction because its question is whether a thing can return. Reading the later distinction backward as though every earlier occurrence were already technical can obscure the work's developing argument.
Use in the book
Book V defines death through alteration and overthrow of forces and virtues, suppression of a former nature and generation of another. It immediately rejects the inference that a dead thing must be useless. Some substances lose their useful qualities; others, bad in life, become powerful and beneficial through preparation. The author offers alchemical experience against opponents who deny that anything can be obtained from dead materials. This is a polemical defence of transformation, not a simple praise of destruction.
Book VI narrows the distinction. What dies by its natural, predestined end cannot be restored by ordinary human power; what has been mortified can, according to the author, be revived. Natural death may occur through diseases and accidents, so “natural” cannot be reduced to peaceful old age. Violent death and human destruction supply the opposed category, but the examples operate through remaining resources rather than a universal clinical rule. A violently killed body retains balsam in the mummia doctrine; wholly rust-consumed metal has lost it. Calx retains what allows return to metal; exhausted ash does not.
The distinction is therefore both causal and material: how the thing reached its state and what remains in it bear on restoration. It is not a modern claim that traumatic death is reversible. Nor does the work's general language license practical resuscitation procedures. Its human, mineral and legendary examples must be recognized as components of an early modern natural-philosophical argument with explicit theological limits.
Places to read
- Book 5 · Death · Passage 1Latin“generatio novae & alterius naturae” Death can mean the arising of a new nature.
- Book 6 · Resuscitation · Passage 1Latin“mors est duplex, nempe violenta & spontanea” The twofold death introduces the limits on restoration.
- Book 6 · Resuscitation · Passage 2Latin“maximum discrimen est inter mori & mortificari” The later book explicitly warns against conflating the terms.
Translation in this edition
The edition preserves the difficult “predominance of badness and goodness,” since the Latin has malitiae & bonitatis, not an explicit conquest of goodness by badness (note 36). Book VI's irregular Una potest resuscitare is interpreted by the ensuing distinction, not emended into a new theory (note 54).