Karen Carducci: Pregnant and Gendered Minerals according to Pagans and Christians

Ancient writers sometimes considered minerals more human than simply as inert, inhuman objects. Halleux (1970, 25), for instance, suggests that some classical Greek writers had a “conception biologique du monde mineral.” Cohen (2015) also argues that Theophrastus, then Medieval Latin Christians, were the first to ascribe a sex life to minerals. The present survey of catalogs of minerals finds that Roman writers, pagan and Christian, were in fact the first to conceive of some minerals as fecund or as exhibiting sexual dimorphism. These notions were irreducible to metaphors about geodes; they implied the existence of ancient debates about gender and fecundity even in the mineral realm.The paper first shows that Theophrastus did not ascribe gender or pregnancy to any true minerals. Then, to exemplify how Roman catalogers of minerals humanized their subject, the paper surveys concepts of pregnancy and gender associated with the aetites (eagle stone). The third century Solinus (37.14) and the sixth century Priscian (Periegesis 985-86) argued that aetites was truly pregnant through the action of some “spirit" (spiritus). The sixth-century physician Aetius of Amida ascribed pregnancy to the aetites as an ontological explanation for how it helps in childbirth (Tetrabiblon2.32). Like Aetius, Isidore of Seville (Etym. 16.4.21) also simply identified the existence of male and female varieties of the aetites, as a correlation for their aid in birth. More generally, Gregory of Nazianzus agreed that lithic reproduction might exist, but he aligned the pregnancy of minerals with sexual dimorphism and never with a spirit (1.2.1B 245ff.=PG 37.541).