Cibation
Cibation is the 'feeding' of the work: the measured addition of fresh matter or moisture to the developing substance, as one feeds an infant, to sustain and nourish it through the operation. The name comes from Latin cibus (food). It is the seventh of Ripley's twelve gates and is distinctive to the English alchemical tradition; it does not appear in Pernety's zodiacal list.
Historical Development
Cibation is the careful feeding of the work, replenishing the matter with new material or liquid in measured portions, on the nurturing analogy of feeding a child. The aim is to sustain the process without drowning or starving it, a matter of judgement and timing as much as of recipe.
Cibation is best known as the seventh of the twelve gates in George Ripley's Compound of Alchemy (1471) and is characteristic of the English tradition that grew from it. It is one of the Ripley gates absent from Pernety's zodiacal twelve, and so it appears here among the major extra operations.
Textual Tradition
The term and its imagery are documented in Lyndy Abraham's dictionary, and the gate itself is traced through its many English readers and adaptors. Ripley's scheme, including cibation, was copied, glossed and reworked in manuscript for more than two centuries.
Modern Scholarship
Jennifer Rampling's study of English alchemy reconstructs how Ripley's gate-scheme was read and practised across three centuries, making cibation a useful case in the historiography of vernacular alchemy and of how practitioners turned cryptic verse into bench procedure.