Premodern miners treated mining as violating the Earth Mother’s sacred body

Evidence

As long as the earth was considered to be alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical behavior to carry out destructive acts against it. For most traditional cultures, minerals and metals ripened in the uterus of the Earth Mother, mines were compared to her vagina, and metallurgy was the human hastening of the birth of the living metal in the artificial womb of the furnace—an abortion of the metal’s natural growth cycle before its time. Miners offered propitiation to the deities of the soil and subterranean world, performed ceremonial sacrifices, and observed strict cleanliness, sexual abstinence, and fasting before violating the sacredness of the living earth by sinking a mine. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 81

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Direct supporting material for the sacrifice article — ritual propitiation before violating the living earth.
• CANDY: Mines as vagina of Earth Mother, metallurgy as hastened abortion of metal’s birth — striking, tweetable.
• XREF: connects to: Premodern nature was a female imagined alternately as nurturing mother and wild disorder — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 77; The image of the beneficent mother earth functioned as an ethical restraint on mining — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 173; The earth-mother metaphor survived as a legal argument against mining into the 1490s — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 202 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The image of the beneficent mother earth functioned as an ethical restraint on mining #corroborates (0.95) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 173
• The nurturing-mother earth image carried a normative prohibition against mining deep minerals. #corroborates (0.92) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 210
• The earth-mother metaphor survived as a legal argument against mining into the 1490s #expands (0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 202
• Early modern poets equated mining the earth with sexual violation of women #qualifies (0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 231
• Agricola reframed mining as legitimate by marshaling and refuting its ancient critics #complicates (0.78) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 208