metamorphist

English

Noun

metamorphist (plural metamorphists)

1. (Christianity, theology) One who believes that the body of Christ was merged into God when he ascended.
   • 1604, George Abbot, The Reasons which Doctour Hill Hath Brought for the Upholding of Papistry, page 97:

     I would you did but see what I have seene in these Conntries, as concerning the deadly hatreds, contentions & differensions of Luther has of-fspring: as of the Muntzerans, Anabaptists, Adamists, […] Metamorphists, Iudaists, Neutersacramentaries, Image-breakers, […] , & of such like: al which have sucked their errours out of the dregges of Luthers doctrine, and yet forsooth will be found Protestants all.

2. (Islam, theology) One who believes that some species were not part of the original creation but arose as the transformed souls of sinners.
   • 2022, Pavel Pavlovitch, Muslim al-Naysābūrī (d. 261/875): The Sceptical Traditionalist, page 121:

     Concerning the progeny of the transfigured sinners, Muslim scholars split into two groups, which Cook figuratively designated as "creationists" and "metamorphists.” The former held that swine and monkeys were created in the form they exist today, whereas the latter believed that their contemporary apes and swine were the progeny of the transfigured sinners.

   • 2022, Michael Cook, Studies in the Origins of Early Islamic Culture and Tradition, page 54:

     On the other hand, there was the metamorphist position that some species were not created at all; instead they were brought into existence through metamorphosis in later epochs, after which they enjoyed a biological fitness no less than that of created species.

3. (historical, geology) A proponent of one side of an early geological controversy in the late 19th and early 20th century who held that differences between various nonsedimentary rocks and minerals could be explained by metamorphic processes rather than the opposing viewpoint that these differences resulted from cooling of different types of magma.
   • 1876, Hugh Miller, Sketch-book of Popular Geology, page 233:

     I am inclined to hold that there is a wide segment of truth embodied in the views of the metamorphists; but there seems to be also a segment of truth on the other side ; and so I must likewise hold with their antagonists, that there existed long periods in the history of the earth in which there obtained conditions of things entirely different from any which obtain now, —periods during which life, either animal or vegetable, could not have existed on our planet; and further, that the sedimentary rocks of this early age may have dreived, even in the forming, a constitution and texture which, in present circumstances, sedimentary rocks cannot receive.

   • 1889, Kevin J. Donohoe, ‎Annick Van den Abbeele, Teaching Atlas of Nuclear Medicine, page 73:

     A general laissez-faire sort of acceptance of the views of the more advanced metamorphists consoled some of us perhaps with the notion that it did not matter much whether tides had been greater agents of degradation of denudation and of transport in the remote ages of the Palaeozoic Period than in more recent times, since it was assumed that the oldest rocks we know were derived from other still older rocks.

   • 1894 January, J.G. Goodchild, “Augen-structure in Relation to the Origin of the Eruptive Rocks and Gneiss”, in Geological Magazine, volume 1, number 1, page 24:

     It has very properly been objected to the extreme views held by metamorphists that no kind of fusion or rearrangement of any kind is competent to metamorphose an ordinary greywacke into a granite, for the simple reason that the most important constituent of one of the essential minerals of the granite, to wit, the patash of the felspars, did not orignally occur in the material acted upon.

   • 1897, Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art, page 396:

     In commenting on Mr. Ussher's views as they had been presented to the Society by his critic, Mr. Hudleston proceeded to say the Mr. Ussher was an ingenious metamorphist, who had evaded contradiction by assuming certain rocks not now existing to have been pre-Devonian, rocks obviously now beyond the disproof of chemical analysis.

   • 1954, American Journal of Science and Arts, page 1954:

     As a metamorphist from the onset ( 1934-1935 ) I am afraid I might be partial.

   • 1957, International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, Assemblée Générale - Volumes 11-13, page 50:

     Thus started the war between magmatists and metamorphists which, like that classical one between plutonists and neptunists, degenerated sometimes to personal quarrels.

4. A metamorphic rock.
   • 1965, The American Journal of Science - Volume 263, Issues 1-5, page 5:

     Various grades of metamorphist up to staurolite-sillimanite rocks, are present in the formation.

   • 1986, Mohan Lal Sharma, Geomorphology of Semi-arid Region, page 11:

     […] rock types ranging from the oldest archaean metamorphist to sub-recent and recent alluvium.

5. One who undergoes transformation to take on various forms.
   • 1823, Constantin-François Volney, The Ruins, Or, A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, page 209:

     The sun was the grand Proteus, the universal metamorphist.

   • 1991, Strathclyde Modern Language Studies - Volume 11, page 46:

     […] metamorphist, able to disguise himself as somebody else; Hermes the concealer, who hides to make his traps work; Hermes Trismegistos, the thrice great;

   • 1993, Mary Hommann, City Planning in America: Between Promise and Despair, page 88:

     The metamorphist becomes proficient in the needs and demands of the marketplace, struggling to make something happen virtually to the exclusion of concern for the needs of the people to be served or for the objectives of the development plan. As in all cases of pure naiveté, the metamorphist's transformation usually occurs despite the total absence of any factual knowledge of the developer's assets or percentage of profits.

6. One who believes in social transformation.
   • 1999, Richard Marsden, The Nature of Capital: Marx After Foucault, page 123:

     Marx was a metamorphist, as well as a realist. He believed social relations pass through a series of material forms before becoming social relations once more.

Adjective

metamorphist (not comparable)

1. (historical, geology) Believing in the metamorphic formation of nonsedimentary rocks and minerals.
   • 1847, Antoine Claude Gabriel Jobert, The Philosophy of Geology, page 108:

     The deductions, in the works of Professor Keilhau, with which I have become acquainted since the publication of the first part of this work; the passages of the granite, which this geologist points out, to the stratified forms, considered together with the obscurity in which he confesses that the origin of the great mass of crystalline rocks is still involved, can only strengthen me in the opinion, that the theory of an igneous stratification of crystalline schists offers the only guide which can direct the geologist throught the labyrinth of difficulties with which a too limited interpretation of the general principle of stratification had encircled science, leaving it entirely to the speculations of the metamorphist geologists.

   • 1953, Report of the Session - Volume 19, page 5554:

     This strict identity of feldspars (and other crystals) has been for us, then for some other authors such as H.H. Read, a base for the metamorphist conception of the genesis of granites.

   • 1954, American Journal of Science and Arts, page 450:

     Such was still the case a few years ago when authors of a metamorphist tendency, such as Read (1943, 1944) still seemed to think that the intrusive appearance was consistent with a liquid intrusion only.