Mountains, vessels and harvesting

Meaning

I.6.2 offers an expressly chymical interpretation of imagery attributed to Rozinus. Mountains become the vessels called cucurbits; their summits are alembic heads; harvesting describes the rising portion; return to roots describes its descent toward the fixed body. These are local equations supplied by the author or his cited gloss, not a universal key to every mountain or harvest elsewhere in the book. The attributed injunction begins by taking things from their souls; that cryptic phrase is retained rather than silently repaired into a modern operation, and the gloss admits that the things themselves have not been named.

The distinction between volatile spirit and fixed body explains why extraction and return both matter. Despite the rhetoric of clarity, the substance itself is not identified by a modern material name. The image can therefore be explained as a relation of rising, gathering and returning without reconstructing equipment or operational settings. In particular, III.17's inaccessible mountain is a different comparison of intellectual vantage, not another vessel-code by default.