The nurturing-mother earth image carried a normative prohibition against mining deep minerals.

Evidence

According to Agricola, people who argued against the mining of the earth for metals did so on the basis that nature herself did not wish to be discovered what she herself had concealed: … The earth does not conceal and remove from our eyes those things which are useful and necessary to mankind, but, on the contrary, like a beneficent and kindly mother she yields in large abundance from her bounty and brings into the light of day the herbs, vegetables, grains, and fruits, and trees. The minerals, on the other hand, she buries far beneath in the depth of the ground, therefore they should not be sought. … This argument, taken directly from Pliny, reveals the normative force of the image of the earth as a nurturing mother. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 210

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the book’s earlier chapters on the earth as nurturing mother carrying an ethic of restraint against mining. — connects to: Premodern miners treated mining as violating the Earth Mother’s sacred body — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 81; 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 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: The organic image functioned as environmental ethic: what the mother conceals should not be violated.

Broader Connections

• Shifting metaphors converted restraint on exploiting the earth into sanction for it #contradicts (0.75) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 78