Anaxagoras’s Nous Giving Rise to the Whirlpool in Chaos

Jung, in Psychology and Alchemy, locates the classical origin of the alchemical prima materia in a single line of Pre-Socratic cosmogony: “The original idea is to be found in Anaxagoras, where the nous gives rise to a whirlpool in chaos.” Anaxagoras’s fragment — that nous, mind, sets chaos rotating and by that rotation begins to separate the opposites — is the philosophical seed from which the alchemical prima materia as massa confusa descends. The undifferentiated substance awaiting the ordering mind is the primal scene that alchemy replays in the laboratory and that depth psychology replays in the opening of analysis.

The filiation matters for arche because it grounds the prima materia not in medieval obscurantism but in the Pre-Socratic inquiry into what precedes and underlies form. richard-onians, in The Origins of European Thought, traces the allied conception: the universe as an egg surrounded by Ocean, psyche identified with the procreative liquid and with breath (pneuma), the cosmos generated from a fluid matrix by a differentiating principle. The Anaxagoran nous is the differentiator; the chaos is the substrate; the whirlpool is the first act.

When Jung reads the alchemists’ prima materia as the unconscious encountered at the start of the individuation process, he is reading through a lineage that runs: Anaxagoras → Plato (the chōra of the Timaeus) → Plotinus (soul’s moulding of matter) → the Greek and Latin alchemists → CW 12. The recon records the filiation without flattening it. The prima materia is not the unconscious; it is what the Pre-Socratics and the alchemists said about something the unconscious also is.

Relationships

• prima-materia
• massa-confusa
• timaeus-as-alchemical-charter
• logos-self-augmenting

Primary sources

• jung-psychology-and-alchemy (Jung 1944)
• richard-onians, The Origins of European Thought (1951)