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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Carbon is much more than a chemical element: it is a polymorphic entity with many faces, at once natural, cultural and social. Ranging across ten million different compounds, carbon has as many personas in nature as it has roles in human life on earth. And yet it rarely makes the headlines as anything other than the villain of our fossil-based economy, feeding an addiction which is driving dangerous levels of consumption and international conflict and which, left unchecked, could lead to our demise as a species. But the impact of CO on climate change only tells part of the story, and to demonize carbon as an element which will bring about the downfall of humanity is to reduce it to a pale shadow of itself.
In this major new history of carbon, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Sacha Loeve show that this omnipresent element is at the root of countless histories and adventures through time, thanks to its extraordinary versatility. Carbon has a long and prestigious CV: its work and achievements extend far beyond the burning of fossil fuels. The fourth most abundant element in the universe and the second most abundant element in the human body, carbon is the chemical basis of all known life. Carbon chemistry has a long history, with applications ranging from jewellery to heating, underpinning developments in metallurgy, textiles, pharmaceuticals, electronics, nanoscience and green technologies.
A biography of carbon transgresses the boundaries between chemical and social existence, between nature and culture, forcing us to abandon the simplified image of carbon as the anti-hero of human civilization and enabling us to see instead the great diversity of carbon’s modes of existence. With scientific precision and literary flair, Bensaude-Vincent and Loeve unravel the surprising ways in which carbon has shaped our world, showing how unrecognizable the earth would be without it. Uncovering the many hidden lives of carbon allows us to view our own with fresh eyes.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Prologue: Why write a biography of carbon?
Notes
PART I The invention of carbon
1 Mephitis
A thing with many names
A genius of place
Geomythologies
An elixir of youth
Notes
2 An indescribable air
From mephitic air to sylvester spirit
From sylvester spirit to fixed air
From fixed air to carbonic acid
Notes
3 Between diamond and coal
The diamond enigma
A creature of nomenclature
Coal’s footprint
Word battles
Notes
4 An exemplary element
A textbook example
A material abstraction
A metaphysical substance
Notes
5 Carbon liberates itself
One among others
Two or three chemistries?
A quartet of elements
An exchange centre
A measurement standard
Notes
6 A relational being
Atomicity
The C–C bond
Asymmetry
Dispositions and affordances
A philosopher’s stone
Notes
7 Welcome to the nanoworld
Filaments doomed to oblivion
Seeing without discovering
A football
The nanotube jungle
Notes
8 Strategic materials
Nuclear graphite
Graphene as an academic material
A pure surface rich in promises
At the limits of materiality
Unique and generic
Notes
PART II Carbon civilization
9 Traces, stories and memories
Carbon as writer
Carbon as graphic designer
Diamond as engraver and reader
Radiocarbon dating
The carbon archive
Notes
10 The resilient rise of fossil fuels
Memories of life on earth
A carbon liberation front?
Multiple coals
Prometheus unbound
Scarcity foretold
A hoped-for turnaround
Notes
11 The bewitching power of oil
The rush for black gold
A capitalist sorcerer
A gift from the earth
Virtues as traps
Notes
12 The age of plastics
‘Better things for better living . . . through chemistry’
The miracles of plastic
Reinforced with carbon
A continent of waste
Notes
13 Working towards a more sustainable economy
From black gold to green oil
Towards a white carbon?
A universal machine
Notes
14 The carbon market
Carbon finance
The new general equivalent
A common measure
Why carbon?
The price of carbon
Notes
PART III Carbon temporalities
15 Carbon cosmogony
In the mists of time
Unlikely carbon
Anthropogenic carbon?
Carbon as earthling
Multiple cycles
Notes
16 Turbulence in the biosphere
Redox carbon
Selfish carbon?
A melting pot
Star of the oceans:
Emiliana huxleyi
The potential of soils
Notes
17 Rethinking time with carbon
The Anthropocene
A grand narrative
The accelerating arrow of time
Unravelling the scales
Multiple temporalities
Notes
Epilogue: The heteronyms of carbon
Stories of genius
A plurality of modes of existence
Ontography
Who is carbon?
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 11
Table 1.
Comparison of calorific value and CO
2
emissions for different fossil ...
Chapter 16
Table 2.
Concentration of carbon in the biosphere.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 1.
The
Lacus Mephiticus
and its surroundings. Vincenzo Maria Santoli, Roccae...
Figure 2.
Lake Agnano and the
Grotta del Cane
.
Chapter 2
Figure 3.
Experiment by Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks, or, An Account of Some Statical...
Chapter 3
Figure 4.
Burning mirror from the Royal Academy of Sciences,
Œuvres de Lavoisier
, V...
Chapter 6
Figure A.
Formulae for methane, methyl chloride, chloroform and carbon chloride.
Figure B.
Structure of the benzene molecule.
Figure C.
Ortho, meta and para positions.
Figure D.
Formulae for fumaric and maleic acids.
Figure E.
Metathesis diagram.
Chapter 7
Figure 5.
Fullerene, carbon nanotube and graphene.
Figure 6.
Carbon filament lamps, Edison patent, 1888; Ediswan catalogue, 1921.
Figure 7.
H. W. Kroto, J. R. Heath, S. C. O’Brien, R. F. Curl and R. E. Smalley, ‘...
Figure 8.
Various nanotube structures obtained from different hemisphere cuts of a fullere...
Chapter 8
Figure 9.
Graphene sheets isolated in 1962
Figure 10.
Chemical vapour deposition of graphene © National Graphene Institute, Uni...
Chapter 10
Figure 11.
Preparation of charcoal by carbonization, Duhamel du Monceau, ‘De l’...
Chapter 11
Figure 12.
Harold Smith, ‘The petroleum world’ © Chemical Heritage Fou...
Chapter 12
Figure 13.
The synthetic continent created by Ortho Plastic Novelties, published in Fortune...
Figure 14.
The
Recycled Island
project, proposed by the Dutch architectural firm WHI...
Chapter 15
Figure F.
Main loop of the CNO cycle. Carbon-12 (top) acts as a catalyst for the transform...
Figure G.
Complete CNO cycle. Key: p, hydrogen proton; α, helium-4 nucleus; e +, po...
Figure H.
Triple-alpha reaction.
Chapter 16
Figure 15.
Emiliana huxleyi
coccolithospheres.
Figure 16.
The Étretat cliffs.
Chapter 17
Figure 17.
Vision of geological ages suggesting the acceleration of time over the last thre...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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CARBON
A Biography
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
and
Sacha Loeve
Translated by Stephen Muecke
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Carbone. Ses vies, ses oeuvres © Éditions du Seuil, 2018
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5920-6 – hardback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023948422
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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List of figures
1 The Lacus Mephiticus and its surroundings. Vincenzo Maria Santoli, Roccae Sancti Felicis. De Mephiti et Vallibus Anxanti, Libri Tres, Naples, 1783.
2 Lake Agnano and the Grotta del Cane.
3 Experiment by Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks, or, An Account of Some Statical Experiments on the Sap in Vegetables ..., London: Printed for W. and J. Innys; and T. Woodward, 1727.
4 Burning mirror from the Royal Academy of Sciences, Œuvres de Lavoisier, Vol. III.
5 Fullerene, carbon nanotube and graphene.
6 Carbon filament lamps, Edison patent, 1888; Ediswan catalogue, 1921.
7 H. W. Kroto, J. R. Heath, S. C. O’Brien, R. F. Curl and R. E. Smalley, ‘C60: buckminsterfullerene’ © Macmillan Publishers Ltd., Nature, 318, pp. 162–3, doi: 10.1038/318162a0, p. 162, 1985.
8 Various nanotube structures obtained from different hemisphere cuts of a fullerene, M. S. Dresselhaus, G. Dresselhaus and R. Saito, ‘Physics of carbon nanotubes’, Carbon, 33/7, 1995, pp. 883–91.
9 Graphene sheets isolated in 1962 © 1946–2014, Verlag der Zeitschrift für Naturforschung.
10 Chemical vapour deposition of graphene © National Graphene Institute, University of Manchester.
11 Preparation of charcoal by carbonization, Duhamel du Monceau, ‘De l’exploitation des bois’, 1764.
12 Harold Smith, ‘The petroleum world’ © Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia.
13 The synthetic continent created by Ortho Plastic Novelties, published in Fortune magazine, July 1940.
14The Recycled Island project, proposed by the Dutch architectural firm WHIM in 2009 © WHIM architecture.
15Emiliana huxleyi coccolithospheres.
16 The Étretat cliffs.
17 Vision of geological ages suggesting the acceleration of time over the last three million years (the tail of the spiral).
A Formulae for methane, methyl chloride, chloroform and carbon chloride.
B Structure of the benzene molecule.
C Ortho, meta and para positions.
D Formulae for fumaric and maleic acids.
E Metathesis diagram.
F Main loop of the CNO cycle. Carbon-12 (top) acts as a catalyst for the transformation of hydrogen (H) into helium (He) and is regenerated at the end of the cycle.
G Complete CNO cycle.
H Triple-alpha reaction.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following for their invaluable advice and comments:
Christophe Bonneuil
Nadine Bret-Rouzaut
Michel Cassé
Pierre de Jouvancourt
Jean-Pierre Favennec
Jean-Pierre Flament
Jacques Grinevald
Kostas Kostarelos
Christine Lehman
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond
Baptiste Monsaingeon
Marc Monthioux
Alexandre Rojey
Jean-Noël Rouzaud
Jens Soentgen
Pierre Teissier
Sacha Tomic
PART ITHE INVENTION OF CARBON
1Mephitis
At the foot of high mountains, in the middle of Italy, there is a well-known place, whose fame has spread to many lands, the valley of the Amsanctus. A dark forest presses in upon it from both sides with its dense foliage and in the middle a crashing torrent roars over the rocks, whipping up crests of foam. Here they point to a fearful cave which is a vent for the breath of Dis, the cruel god of the underworld. Into this cave bursts Acheron and here a vast whirlpool opens its pestilential jaws, and here the loathsome Fury1 disappeared, lightening heaven and earth by her absence.2
Thus, in the Aeneid, Virgil describes the complex of springs and fumaroles in the Ansanto valley (Amsanctus in ancient times), near the Hirpine mountains in Campania, central Italy (Figure 1). There one finds the small, constantly boiling lake (laghetto dei soffioni), a gorge, the Caccavo river and a ravine into which the Caccavo pours its waters, the Vado mortale. The Samnites, an Oscan-speaking tribe established in central Italy from the sixth to the second century BCE, are said to have built a temple there dedicated to a pre-Roman goddess of emanations, volcanic springs, caverns and fumaroles: Mephitis.
Figure 1. The Lacus Mephiticus and its surroundings. Vincenzo Maria Santoli, Roccae Sancti Felicis. De Mephiti et Vallibus Anxanti, Libri Tres, Naples, 1783.
The name has remained in the designation of the place, the Mefite di Rocca San Felice. By metonymy, we also speak of ‘mofettes’ as another name for fumaroles. The adjective ‘mephitic’ was also used to describe the ‘air’, the ‘spirit’ or, later, the ‘gas’ that we refer to today as ‘carbon dioxide’. It has also been called a ‘lethal’ or ‘deadly’ spirit, a ‘sylvan’ or ‘wild’ spirit, as well as ‘fixed air’, ‘dephlogisticated’ or ‘rotten’.
The Mefite is still as active as ever. This is one of the most constant and abundant natural sources of carbon dioxide on earth. Recent geophysical studies show that the waters from the Mefite lake come from several kilometres underground, a carbonate substratum rich in compressed gas pockets released during tectonic events dating from the Messinian (between seven and five million years ago).3 This particular pocket emits on average two thousand tonnes of gas per day, including carbon dioxide (CO2), but also methane (CH4) and hydrogen sulphide (H2S). It is the sulphur in the latter – and not the carbon – which gives the Mefite its characteristic rotten egg smell. The first two carbon gases are invisible and odourless, but they are just as active.
Virgil’s description highlights the spectacular and frightening character of the place, and for good reason. The site is actually very dangerous, especially when there is no wind. Nowadays, there is a sign to warn the curious: Pericolo di Morte (Danger of Death). There are often corpses of birds and small mammals that have accidentally come to drink. Many incidents with humans have been reported over the centuries. In the 1990s, three people died there. Today, the Mefite is sometimes treated as a natural analogue, a life-size model of ‘leaking CO2’,4 useful for the study of leakage risks in future geological storage sites.
A thing with many names
Is it acceptable to consider Mephitis to be an ancient personification of our modern carbon dioxide?5 And does this imply that only the names change while the thing remains the same?
The two beings – the goddess and the chemical substance – certainly meet very different identification criteria: on the one hand, an indomitable supernatural power; on the other, a well-defined and characterized chemical substance. To consider Mephitis as a name used by the Romans to ‘designate’ carbon dioxide would simply be anachronistic. Firstly, the term ‘gas’ did not exist then. The Latins used spiritus, translating the Greek πνεῦμα (pneuma): exhalation, breath, respiration.6 Secondly, they did not distinguish, among these ‘breaths’, those which are composed of carbon and those which are composed of sulphur (the latter being precisely responsible for the odour described as ‘mephitic’). Finally, although the Latin carbo is attested as meaning ‘ember’ or ‘coal’, the ancients did not seem to associate it with Mephitis’ breath.
It would also be confusing different modes of spatial inscription and thus be guilty of ‘anatopism’. On the one hand, the genius loci associated with singular places; on the other, a mobile, deterritorialized, globalized, even universalized entity – in a word, modern. Mephitis is associated with specific local climates, but CO2 with the climate itself.
It would therefore be both anachronistic and anatopic to assert that the ancients ‘metaphorically’ represented, in the guise of a goddess, what was ‘really’ carbon dioxide. This would ignore the very real phenomena that took place in the places associated with the goddess while suggesting that our modern CO2 – that evil genie out of the box – would be purged of all metaphorical connotations. No, Mephitis did not emerge in the same time or space as carbon dioxide. The two terms are not interchangeable.7
And yet, reading the stories about Mephitis as if they were talking about carbon dioxide seems to us to constitute a narrative move that is meaningful for our investigation into carbon’s modes of existence. But we need to specify why.
We want to bring the two terms together by inscribing this thing in a world where earth and air are exchanged. Mephitis is not a name that designates or represents a particular gas. It is a way of telling the story of a powerful action, a fearsome breath that makes a place inhospitable, uninhabitable. It is a signature through which the gas is inscribed in the world, distinguishing different heterotopic places. It is therefore less a question of seeing Mephitis as the source or origin of the modern concept of CO2 than of recounting how, by giving realms of memory a signature, the breath of Mephitis has been inscribed in popular language and culture, and then reinscribed in the operating knowledge of chemists and even in the current climate crisis.
A genius of place
What kind of goddess was Mephitis? She is not considered a major deity in the Latin pantheon, perhaps because of her barbarian (non-Greek) origins. According to Virgil, the Romans included her in the nebula of the Erinyes or Furies, the female deities responsible for persecuting the victims of fate, and therefore essentially evil. But the Latin authors themselves only report bits and pieces of anonymous stories, borrowed from the peoples who lived there before them. Thus, although the Ansanto Mefite is referred to not only in Virgil and his commentator Servius, but also in Tacitus, Seneca, Cicero, Ovid, Tertullian, Horace and Pliny the Elder, none of these texts can be identified as ‘the’ source.
The etymology of the name ‘Mephitis’ is controversial. Some experts claim that it has to do with intoxication: Mephitis is said to be ‘the intoxicating one’. For others, it means ‘the one with smoke in the middle’, or ‘who stands in the middle’, or even ‘who holds the middle’ (from the Oscan mefiu, median). According to the palaeolinguist Michel Lejeune, her name is based on fonti, ‘source’, or ‘fountain’: Mephitis would thus be the ‘goddess of sources’.8 Archaeologists now believe that her cult was widespread throughout central Italy from Pompeii to Rome, that it was linked to the volcanic nature of the region and that its centre was the Ansanto site.9 Thus Servius, in his commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid, goes so far as to assert that:
Topographers call this place ‘the navel of Italy’. It is indeed on the border of Campania and Apulia, where the Hirpini are; it has sulphurous waters, and worse smelling for the reason that it is surrounded by forests. An entrance to the underworld is said to be there, because the terrible stench kills those who approach it, to the point that victims were not sacrificed in this place, but when they were put into the water the stench caused them to perish. This was a kind of sacrifice.10
Although the memory of Mephitis is lost in the mists of time, traces of her have never faded.11 Maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries even indicate and locate the temple of Mephitis quite precisely.12 When the ‘new chemistry’ of the eighteenth century took off in Naples, its main laboratory was Vesuvius, so much so that Neapolitan chemistry was first and foremost a Mephitian chemistry, a volcano chemistry rather than a laboratory one.13 Then, as now, the vitality of the memory of Mephitis has less to do with the perpetuation of archaic superstitions than with the volcanic nature of the places and the ‘breaths’ that manifest themselves there. For the stories of the ancients are all topo-narratives: they make places speak. Carbon dioxide thus configures these places. It is always associated with localities, and in cultural memory these places are linked with death.
Why is this gas associated with death? Carbon dioxide is not toxic in itself – otherwise drinking soda water would be dangerous – but at a certain concentration it makes people dizzy, and then at high doses fatally asphyxiates them: hence the ‘lethal spirit’ name in some texts. However, certain natural phenomena can make CO2 an invisible and silent mass killer. Such as limnic eruptions: the sudden degassing of a deep lake, often of volcanic origin, whose lower and upper waters barely mix and form layers strongly differentiated by their concentration in compressed gases. In 1986, the collapse of a rock face released a layer of carbon dioxide that had been stagnating for centuries at the bottom of Lake Nyos in Cameroon. This outgassing, equivalent to the explosion of a one cubic kilometre CO2 bubble, instantly decimated more than 1,700 people, thousands of livestock and countless wild animals, all killed by asphyxiation in an area of several kilometres.14 The cataclysm was of such magnitude and strangeness that conspiracy theories abounded (some imagined the explosion of a neutron bomb). However, limnic eruptions are not uncommon in the volcanic regions of Central Africa and are often referred to by the Swahili term makuzu (evil wind). For some local people, the makuzu of Lake Nyos was a revenge of the spirit of the lake against villagers who were disrespectful towards it, as portrayed by the Cameroonian playwright Bole Butake in Lake God.15For others, it was the work of Mami Wata, the powerful water goddess. Is there an African Mephitis? There are local spirits16 in all civilizations (except ours, it seems) and some are closely associated with the thunderous and sometimes deadly eruptions of underground gaseous carbon compounds.
Geomythologies
Even among authors considered more ‘naturalist’ than Virgil, the crafter of legends, natural phenomena are always qualitatively different in different places. This localization gives them a flavour of myth, of geomythology.17 In his Natural Histories, Pliny devoted a chapter to the ‘products of the earth … emanations’. He used the same term as Virgil, spiracula: ‘places called breathing holes [spiracula] or by other people jaws of hell [Charonea]’;18 ‘ditches that exhale a deadly breath; also the place near the Temple of Mephitis at Ampsanctus in the Hirpinian district’. Pliny also mentioned ‘the hole at Hierapolis in Asia’, a spa in Asia Minor built on a geological fault, ‘harmless only to the priest of the Great Mother’.19 As for Cicero, he mentioned both the ‘mortal lands’ of Amsanctus and those of the Plutonia of Hierapolis. In his treatise On Divination, he associated the qualitative difference among lands and their climatic effects on human behaviour with the breath of the gods, sometimes spread in the subsoil, sometimes in ‘inspired’ individualities:
Do we wait for the immortal gods to converse with us in the forum, on the street, and in our homes? While they do not, of course, present themselves in person, they do diffuse their power far and wide – sometimes enclosing it in caverns of the earth and sometimes imparting it to human beings. The Pythian priestess at Delphi was inspired by the power of the earth and the Sibyl by that of nature. Why need you marvel at this? Do we not see how the soils of the earth vary in kind? Some are deadly, like that about Lake Ampsanctus in the country of the Hirpini and that of Plutonia in Asia, both of which I have seen. Even in the same neighbourhood, some parts are salubrious and some are not; some produce men of keen wit, others produce fools. These diverse effects are all the result of differences in climate and differences in the earth’s exhalations.20
Cicero suggested that while the Pythia utters her oracles under the influence of Apollo’s fumes emanating from the ground, the Sibyl performs her dignified function as a prophetess in full possession of her faculties. But in the Aeneid Virgil depicted an ecstatic Sibyl, a woman ‘in wild frenzy’.21 It should be remembered that Aeneas’ dead father, Anchises, had appeared to his son and urged him to consult the Sibyl; she was to guide Aeneas to the entrance of the underworld so that Anchises could show him his future descendants. In his funeral appearance, Anchises locates the entrance to the underworld in Lake Averno, an ancient crater lake in the Phlegrean Fields (literally ‘burning fields’), a volcanic area extending to the west of Naples. It is in nearby Cumae that Aeneas came to consult the Sibyl, in a temple of Apollo that Virgil describes more accurately as a ‘cave’ or ‘den’. When ‘the god came to her in his power and breathed upon her’, her breast heaved and her face transfigured.22 This is, on the evidence, the effect of gases going to her head.
Some geologists have linked Pliny’s23 or Cicero’s24 accounts of the ecstatic behaviour of the Pythia of Delphi with an ancient leak of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide into a seismic fault.25 Whether one is with Pluto in Ansanto or Hierapolis, or with Apollo in Delphi or Cumae, Mephitis is not far away, and there is CO2 in the air.
Mephitis is also known to lodge in caves. Poisoning by ‘heavy air’ (carbon dioxide) has been one of the dangers feared by miners and cavers alike since ancient times. Caves, especially limestone caves, are generally etched out by acidic water because it is rich in carbon dioxide. A large quantity of this gas can remain trapped in a cave or reach other caves through cracks. This is the case of the Grotta del Cane, located in the Phlegrean Fields, a few steps from Lake Agnano (drained in 1870), whose waters were constantly boiling, and not far from the Solfatare (‘land of sulphur’), an ancient dried-up crater lake. The cave is named after the custom of using a dog to show if mephitic exhalations were present. Dogs in distress were taken from the cave and thrown into the Lake of Agnano and they came out fully revived (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Lake Agnano and the Grotta del Cane.
At the height of the Enlightenment, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie devoted an article to the Dog Cave, recounting how many animals and humans were exposed to the continuous stream of its deadly exhalations and with what effects, which were very precisely described. They make the connection with other similar places – mines, caves – in Hungary, Sicily and Italy.26
Finally, earthquakes can also create faults that release compressed air pockets from the subsoil to the surface. This is what Seneca wrote in Book VI of his Natural Questions, dedicated to ‘earthquakes’. As a good Stoic, Seneca explained earthquakes by material causes: the flatulence of the earth, which expels the overflow of winds that it has absorbed and retained in its entrails. ‘The earth is naturally porous and has many voids. Air passes through these openings. When air in large quantities flows in and is not emitted it causes the earth to tilt.’27 Even though it is often translated as ‘air’ or ‘wind’, what Seneca calls spiritus is not entirely confused with simple air, that which we breathe (aer). While being material, this spirit-air is perceived above all by its effects. It is, for Seneca, the most powerful and energetic element of nature, without which the others would have no strength. Without it, there is no fire; without it, water sleeps. It is the element that reeks of earth. Its dynamic characteristics explain the curious phenomena that accompany earthquakes, such as the unexplained death of six hundred sheep in Pompeii the day after an earthquake.28
Compared to Virgil’s text, Seneca’s very naturalistic explanation seems to banish mythology by erasing any reference to the ‘hated goddess’. The tone is medical, even hygienic. From mephitic breaths, Seneca moves on to ‘pestilential vapour’ and ‘noxious air’:
In several places in Italy a pestilential vapour is exhaled through certain openings, which is safe neither for people nor for wild animals to breathe. Also, if birds encounter the vapour before it is softened by better weather they fall in mid-flight and their bodies are livid and their throats swollen as though they had been violently strangled.
As long as this air keeps itself inside the earth, flowing out only from a narrow opening, it has power only to kill the creatures which look down into it and voluntarily enter it. When it has been hidden for ages in the dismal darkness underground it grows into poison, becomes more deadly by the very delay, becomes worse the more sluggish it is. When it has found a way out it lets fly the eternal evil and infernal night of gloomy cold and stains darkly the atmosphere of our region. For the better is conquered by the worse. Then even pure air changes into noxious air; from it come sudden and continuous deaths and monstrous types of disease arising from unknown causes. Moreover, the disaster is brief or long according to the strength of the poison, nor does the pestilence stop before the clearing of the sky and the tossing of the winds have purified that deadly air.29
Yet the emphasis on natural causes does not change the connotations associated with mephitic breaths: death, darkness, plague, calamity, stench, poison, etc. Thus, from mythical history (Virgil) to natural history (Seneca), the accounts of the ancients seem to seal from the outset the identification of carbon dioxide with a demonic being escaping from the infernal depths.
From late antiquity, the theonym Mephitis gave way to the adjective ‘mephitic’, which designates anything that is stinky, fetid, unhealthy and nauseating: from the skunk, a cousin of the polecat belonging to the Mephitidae family, to the famous rue Mouffetard in Paris, whose name comes from the stinking waters (mouffeteuses) that ran down its slope. The French slang word moufter is a catch-all verb meaning to denounce, protest, sniff and smell bad. In Christian writers such as Augustine, the toponym Amsanctus also became a synonym for ‘bad smell’, even though – ironically enough – it is etymologically close to ‘sacred’ and ‘sanctuary’.30 Christians made Mephitis one of the names of the devil, from Dante’s Mephisto to Goethe’s Mephistopheles.
But why worship a ‘hated goddess’ to the point of building temples to her? Is Mephitis really to be feared?
An elixir of youth
Not everything that is mephitian is mephitic. The focus of ‘mephitoclasts’ of all kinds on smoke and on everything, as in Seneca, to do with elemental air tainted by the earth conceals the no less important association of Mephitis with elemental water. And what if the Romans had already demonized the Oscan goddess before the Christians did?
The waters of Mephitis are not all ‘mephitic’, far from it. For example, another Mephitis sanctuary unearthed at Rossano di Vaglio (Lucania) was built near a pure water spring and even for this spring, whose waters crossed the main piazza in an open-air pipe. Mephitis was also associated with the beneficial virtues of thermal waters before the Madonnas of the baths in the Naples area took over with the expansion of Christianity.31 Called both ‘god Mephitis’ and ‘goddess Mephito’, she also embodied vegetarianism and androgyny: the priests who venerated her did not eat meat and dressed in female clothes. Some even identified Mephitis with the Venus of Pompeii,32 associated with clear fountain water and rejuvenating baths. For Lejeune, the inscriptions found in the Lucanian sanctuary of Rossano plead in favour of a beneficent Mephitis, even a healer. She watched over peasant life, the fertility of women and the fertility of the fields, and protected ploughing and animals. Even long after the Mephitis of Ansanto cult ended and the sulphur mine was installed under Napoleon’s reign, shepherds, despite the recognized danger of the site, continued to take their sick sheep there during the transhumance.
The Pluto–Apollo duality noted above – dark god of the depths on the one hand, celestial god of divination on the other – is a good reason for Mephitis’ essential ambivalence. Source or breath, healer or poisoner, Mephitis is a mediator between the underworld and the upper world. She makes the two realms communicate, ensuring the passage from one to the other. She ‘stands in the middle’ between several kingdoms: between fertility and death, masculine and feminine, savage and civilized, the elemental pairs earth–air and water–fire, the Chthonic depths and the Uranian air. As Virgil writes, she helps the earthly to gain solace in the heavenly. Conversely, she absorbs their wrath and fertilizes the land. Mephitis is a pharmakon: both poison and remedy, poison because it is a remedy, remedy because it is poison . . . and also a scapegoat – like CO2 is for us today. We are therefore tempted to choose, from among the hypotheses on the etymology of Mephitis, the one that presents it as ‘standing in the middle’ between myth and science. Mephitis is a fine example of myth and science intermingling and shows how the two can nourish each other.
Notes
1
Dis is a Roman god of the underworld not unlike Pluto; Acheron is the underground river leading to the underworld; and the Furies are avenging deities.
2
Virgil,
The Aeneid
, trans. David Alexander West, London: Penguin Books, 1990, 7.563–71, p. 180.
3
Giovanni Ghiodini, Francesco Frondini and Francesco Ponziani, ‘Deep structures and carbon dioxide degassing in central Italy’,
Geothermics
, 24/1, 1995, pp. 81–94.
4
Giovanni Ghiodini et al., ‘Non-volcanic CO
2
earth degassing: Case of Mefite d’Ansanto (Southern Apennines), Italy’,
Geophysical Research Letters
, 37/11, 2010. DOI: 10.1029/2010GL042858.
5
Jens Soentgen, ‘On the history and prehistory of CO
2
’,
Foundations of Chemistry
, 12/2, 2010, pp. 137–48.
6
On Roman, particularly Stoical, thought on breath and atmospheric ontology, see Emanuele Coccia’s excellent book
The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture
, trans. Dylan J. Montanari, Cambridge: Polity, 2018.
7
It is in order to discuss these kinds of questions that the historian of science Lorraine Daston suggested biographies of scientific objects. The biography enables a reconciliation of realists and constructivists because it assumes that scientific objects are both real and at the same time historical. Lorraine Daston, ed.,
Biographies of Scientific Objects
, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp. 2–4.
8
Michel Lejeune, ‘Méfitis, déesse osque’,
Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres
, 130/1, 1986, pp. 202–13.
9
Olivier de Cazanove, ‘Le lieu de culte de Méfitis dans les Ampsanctiualles: Des sources documentaires hétérogènes’, in Olivier de Cazanove and John Scheid, eds,
Sanctuaires et sources: Les sources documentaires et leurs limites dans la description des lieux de culte
, Paris: Publications du Centre Jean-Bérard, Collège de France, 2003, pp. 145–81.
10
Translated by Frances Muecke from
Servii Grammatici qvi fervntvr in Vergilii carmina commentarii: Aeneidos librorvm VI–XII commentarii
, recensvit G. Thilo et al., Lipsiae: B. G. Teubneri, 1883–4.
11
Antonio Di Lisio, Filippo Russo and Michele Sisto, ‘Un itinéraire entre géotourisme et sacralité en Irpinie (Campanie, Italie)’,
Physio-Géo
, 4, 2010, pp. 129–49.
12
For example, Philipp Clüver (Cluverius),
Italia antiqua
, Elzevir, 1624, pp. 1086–7.
13
Corinna Guerra, ‘If you don’t have a good laboratory, find a good volcano: Mount Vesuvius as a natural chemical laboratory in eighteenth-century Italy’,
Ambix
, 62/3, 2015, pp. 245–65.
14
Eugenia Shanklin, ‘Beautiful deadly lake Nyos: The explosion and its aftermath’,
Anthropology Today
, 4/1, 1988, pp. 12–14.
15
Bole Butake,
Lake God and Other Plays
, Yaounde: Editions CLE, 1999. See also Eugenia Shanklin, ‘Exploding lakes in myths and reality: An African case study’, in Luigi Piccardi and Bruce W. Masse, eds,
Myth and Geology
, London: The Geological Society Editions, 2007, pp. 165–76.
16
Augustin Berque,
Les Raisons du paysage: De la Chine antique aux environnements de synthèse
, Paris: Hazan, 1995.
17
Luigi Piccardi et al., ‘Scent of a myth: Tectonics, geochemistry and geomythology at Delphi (Greece)’,
Journal of the Geological Society
, 165, 2008, pp. 5–18.
18
From Charon, the ferryman of the underworld, an old man who, for a fee, carries the wandering shadows of the dead in his boat across the river Acheron to Hades.
19
Pliny,
Natural History
, II, 95, trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, Loeb Classical Library eBooks Collection. See also Servius,
Servii Grammatici
, VII, 563–71, which mentions a list of geographical locations of the gates of Hades drawn up by Varron.
20
Cicero,
On Divination
, I, 36, trans. William Armistead Falconer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, Loeb Classical Library eBooks Collection, p. 311.
21
Virgil,
The Aeneid
, p. 134.
22
Ibid.
23
‘[P]rophetic caves, those intoxicated by whose exhalations foretell the future, as at the very famous oracle at Delphi. In these matters what other explanation could any mortal man adduce save that they are caused by the divine power of that nature which is diffused throughout the universe, repeatedly bursting out in different ways?’ Pliny,
Natural History
, II, 95.
24
‘I believe, too, that there were certain subterranean vapours which had the effect of inspiring persons to utter oracles. … It is in this state of exaltation that many predictions have been made … and the cryptic utterances of Apollo were expressed in the same form.’ Cicero,
On Divination
, I, 50.
25
Piccardi et al., ‘Scent of a myth’; Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, ‘The Oracle at Delphi: The Pythia and the pneuma. Intoxicating gas finds, and hypotheses’, in Philip Wexler, ed.,
History of Toxicology and Environmental Health
, Vol. 1,
Toxicology in Antiquity
, Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2014, pp. 83–9; Hardy Pfaz et al., ‘The ancient gates to hell and their relevance to geogenic CO
2
’, ibid., pp. 92–116.
26
‘Cave’ (
grotte
), entry in
Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers
, Vol. VII, 1751, pp. 967–9, attributed to Baron d’Holbach and Louis de Jaucourt. In addition, there are the no less incredible corrections made by Abbé Jean Saas, canon at Rouen cathedral, in his
Lettres sur l’Encyclopédie to serve as a supplement to the seven volumes of this dictionary
(Isaac Tirion, 1764). He comments: ‘The encyclopedists give the Dog Cave the name
Fameuse Mofeta
. This is apparently how they translate the Latin word
Mephitis
. If they ever give this Article
Mophete
, it will be a curious Article. They provide a sample here’ (p. 154). The article ‘moufettes’ appears in a later volume of the
Encyclopedia
(Vol. X, pp. 778–80). It is attributed to Baron d’Holbach, who specified how many different types of
moufettes
there are to be distinguished: sulphurous
moufettes
(which, according to him, is what the Dog Cave is), arsenical or mercurial
moufettes
and carbonaceous
moufettes
. [The University of Michigan’s online Collaborative Translation Project has not yet reached ‘grotte’ – Trans.]
27
Seneca,
Natural Questions
, VI, 23, trans. Thomas H. Corcoran, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972, Loeb Classical Library 457, p. 193.
28
‘There is no reason you should think this happened to those sheep because of fear. For they say that a plague usually occurs after a great earthquake, and this is not surprising. For many death-carrying elements lie hidden in the depths. The very atmosphere there, which is stagnant either from some flaw in the earth or from inactivity and the eternal darkness, is harmful to those breathing it. Or, when it has been tainted by the poison of the internal fires and is sent out from its long stay it stains and pollutes this pure, clear atmosphere and offers new types of disease to those who breathe the unfamiliar air. … I am not surprised that sheep have been infected – sheep which have a delicate constitution – the closer they carried their heads to the ground, since they received the afflatus of the tainted air near the ground itself. If the air had come out in greater quantity it would have harmed people too; but the abundance of pure air extinguished it before it rose high enough to be breathed by people.’ Seneca,
Natural Questions
, VI, pp. 205–7.
29
Seneca,
Natural Questions
, VI, 23, pp. 207–8.
30
Servius recalls that the name
Amsanctus
means ‘inviolable’: ‘of a place “amsanctus”, i.e. inviolable on all sides [
id est omni parte sancti
