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The Alchemical Operations

The Alchemical Operations

Edinger‘s Anatomy of the Psyche organizes the mass of medieval alchemical imagery around seven operations: calcinatio, solutio, coagulatio, sublimatio, mortificatio, separatio, and coniunctio. The method is an act of clarification performed on Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis and Psychology and Alchemy: “My method of ordering the chaos of alchemy is to focus on the major alchemical operations … Each of these operations is found to be the center of an elaborate symbol system. These central symbols of transformation make up the major content of all culture-products” (Edinger 1985).

The operations are not chemical procedures but psychological categories. Edinger uses the Latin terms “instead of calcination, solution, and so on, in order to distinguish the psychological processes from the chemical procedures” (Edinger 1985). Each operation names a phase of individuation and draws to itself the cognate imagery of myth, religion, and folklore. Calcinatio gathers images of purifying fire, desire burnt to ash, purgatorial cleansing. Solutio gathers the dissolution of the hardened ego in the waters of the unconscious. Coagulatio gathers incarnation, embodiment, the solidification of psychic content into lived reality. Sublimatio gathers ascent, abstraction, the spirit rising clear. Mortificatio gathers death, decay, the nigredo. Separatio gathers discrimination, the drawing of distinctions. Coniunctio gathers union, the marriage of opposites, the philosophical stone.

Edinger’s justification, in Jung’s own words, is that “the protean mythologem and the shimmering symbol express the processes of the psyche far more trenchantly and, in the end, far more clearly than the clearest concept” (Jung, Alchemical Studies, CW 13, cited in Edinger 1985). The operations are not a reduction of the symbol to the concept; they are a cartography of the symbol.

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