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 wordPlants occupy the middle between animal volatility and mineral fixedness.
- In the Golden ChainThe vegetable kingdom mediates nourishment, transformation, and historical dulcification.
- Translation“Vegetable” means belonging to plant nature throughout these entries.
- A place to readB1C22S001–004: the tree, Janus image, and vegetable Gur.
Meaning
The vegetable kingdom is the intermediate of the three terrestrial kingdoms. It can become animal through nourishment and decay, or mineral through further fixation and stony transformation. The author accordingly calls it a hermaphrodite and Janus, looking toward both neighbours. This middle condition is a material and operative relation rather than simply a botanical classification (B1C08S002–003; B1C22S003).
Plants nevertheless have their own specified generation. A dry seed becomes moist, swollen, and slimy in a nitrous and saline earth; this vegetable Gur develops root, stalk, leaves, flower, and finally a hardened seed. The tree of generation organizes the development by successive bodily formations, while the prose connects them to relative volatility and fixation (B1C22S001; B1C22S004).
Use in the book
Nourishment extends the Golden Chain through the plant. Roots act as magnets, taking the suitable portions of earth, water, atmospheric supplies, and subterranean vapours. The author explains their passage through stalk and leaves by subtilization and vapour, comparing plant nutrition with the human digestion of food. Different pores and different mixtures of spirit and watery matter account for unequal durability. These explanations belong to his historical physiology, not modern plant science (B1C22S005–013).
The vegetable middle is also indispensable to medicinal harmony. The text claims that mineral matter cannot become homogeneous with animal nature by an immediate leap. Vegetable acid and volatile spirit provide intervening degrees, while animal participation completes a further transformation. The kingdom is therefore called sweetening even though its individual plants may be bitter or poisonous. The quality assigned to a kingdom’s function does not erase differences among its members (B1C22S002; B1C22S029–031; B1C22S036; B2C09S015–016).
Book Two follows plant subjects through separation and reunion in parallel with animals. Their main difference lies in the quantities and character of their principles: the vegetable volatile is a burning spirit, the animal volatile urinous. Hard and succulent plant parts require different treatment; a deficient principle can be supplied from a related individual or from universal matter. Wine and grain receive representative status for the kingdom. Even a volatile oil is not a foreign essence to be rejected, because all the parts remain one matter under changing degrees (B2C08S001–006).
Places to read
- Book I · Ch. 22 · §1The tree moves from seed and Gur to complete hardened seed.
- Book I · Ch. 22 · §3The kingdom is called Janus and hermaphrodite between two others.
- Book I · Ch. 22 · §12Mountain trees exemplify the role assigned to subterranean vapours.
- Book I · Ch. 22 · §36Vegetable mediation makes animal and mineral degrees homogeneous.
- Book II · Ch. 8 · §5Representative subjects and universal supplements supply missing principles.
Translation in this edition
Vegetabilia is the Latin collective; vegetabilisch qualifies materials, spirits, acids, salts, or qualities belonging to plants. It does not mean only edible vegetables. “Vegetable vinegar” can accordingly name an acidic product in the plant sequence rather than ordinary wine vinegar in every case. The book also describes a vegetable becoming animal through a changed material condition; this must be distinguished from merely adding a plant ingredient to an otherwise mineral preparation (B1C20S003; B2C08S003–005).