Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur: Mythology and Geology of the Underworld by Kroonenberg Salomon

Author:Kroonenberg, Salomon [Kroonenberg, Salomon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2013-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

How to descend into a mine, according to Agricola in his De re metallica (1556).

Others say that the Creator hid metal ore inside the Earth for a reason: that he did not intend it to be removed, as metal brings only misery. But then they also criticize the Creator, says Agricola, as that would mean he intentionally created things that have no use or which are evil. The Earth does not contain ore because it does not want man to remove it, but because nature, which is providential and wise, has given everything its place. It placed ore in rock, because the ingredients it requires to exist cannot be found elsewhere. If ore were formed in the air, it would fall to the ground.

In the remainder of the book Agricola describes in detail the characteristics of miners, the search for ore, the classification of different ores and rock, and all the techniques that are required for mining. It is a very readable text, written by someone who was both a scientist and an engineer, and who was familiar with and, where necessary, commented on, the historical works of Theophrastus, Pliny and many others.

It therefore comes as a great surprise when you suddenly read in Book VI: ‘In some of our mines, however, though in very few, there are other pernicious pests. These are demons of ferocious aspect, about which I have spoken in my book De Animantibus Subterraneis. Demons of this kind are expelled and put to flight by prayer and fasting.’ In a footnote, the Hoovers quote what Agricola says in his other book: ‘Then there are the gentle kind which the Germans as well as the Greeks call cobalos, because they mimic men. They appear to laugh with glee and pretend to do much, but really do nothing.’ Then there are trulli and suions, which take on the form of people. But, Agricola writes a little later: ‘The fifth cause [of evil] are the fierce and murderous demons, for if they cannot be expelled, no one escapes from them.’

What else did the demons do? They played tricks on the miners. They made stones glitter, even though they contained no gold, silver or lead. Miners were blinded by the stones and called them ‘blende’. ‘Blende is a glittering stone, black and sometimes yellow, that contains no metal and often blinds and misleads the miner’, wrote Johann Heinrich Zedler in 1733 in his Great Encyclopedia. Blende usually refers to zinc blende, zinc ore, but zinc had not yet been discovered as a metal. Miners did not learn how to extract zinc until later in the eighteenth century. Agricola’s cobalos, Kobolde in German, teased the mining engineers in the same way, and gave their name to a glittering stone that was of no value. ‘Cobalt is a toxic, predatory, malignant kind of ore, that dilutes the good ore, or makes it wild and cold, and many believe that it steals the silver’, wrote Johann Hübner in 1727 in his mining lexicon.

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