Aniadus

Aniadus (or Aniadum) is, in Paracelsus’s secret-doctrine treatise de-vita-longa, the regenerated spiritual man — the heavenly body that is the fruit of the longevity operation. Ruland, a pupil of Paracelsus, defines it as “the regenerated spiritual man in us, the heavenly body implanted in us Christians by the Holy Ghost through the most Holy Sacraments” (quoted Jung 1967, CW 13 §194). Bodenstein and Dorn gloss it as “the efficacity of things.”

Jung reads the term carefully against its Christian-sacramental frame: “it is equally clear that there was no question of arousing or implanting the inner man in the Christian sense, but of a ‘scientific’ union of the natural with the spiritual man with the aid of arcane techniques of a medical nature” (Jung 1967, CW 13 §194). Paracelsus, Jung argues, “carefully avoids the ecclesiastical terminology and uses instead an esoteric language… for the obvious purpose of segregating the ‘natural’ transformation mystery from the religious one.” The welter of terms — Adech, Edochinum, Aniadus, Cagastrum — is camouflage, not obscurity.

Operationally, Aniadus is produced when the anima iliastri is “wholly filled with that air which renews itself again, and is then moved into the centre… then as a tranquil thing it is not heard at all by anything corporeal, and resounds only as Aniadus, Adech, and Edochinum” (Paracelsus, De vita longa, quoted Jung 1967, CW 13 §201). This is a transformation achieved by imaginatio — “by psychic means” — not by bodily technique. In Dorn’s commentary the Aniadus is received into the tripartite coniunctio scheme that will become Jung’s unio mentalis; the concept is therefore a direct ancestor of individuation‘s alchemical grammar.

Relationships

• de-vita-longa
• imaginatio-vera
• iliaster
• unio-mentalis
• individuation
• paracelsus

Primary sources

• alchemical-studies (Jung 1967)