Apeiron

The apeiron (ἄπειρον, “the unbounded” or “the indefinite”) is the principle Anaximander of Miletus named as the arche — the first source of all things — against Thales’s water and Anaximenes’s breath. It is the oldest Greek term for the undifferentiated ground from which all determinate beings arise by separation and to which they return by dissolution.

For the Seba lineage, the apeiron is the classical ancestor of what Renaissance alchemy called the [[prima-materia|prima materia]] and what Jung called the [[massa-confusa|massa confusa]] of the unconscious — the unformed psychic substrate out of which the determinations of consciousness crystallize and into which, in periods of dissolution, they return. Anaximander’s surviving fragment — “whence things arise, thither they pass away of necessity; for they pay the penalty and make reparation to one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time” — reads, in depth-psychological register, as the earliest Greek articulation of what Jung later called the enantiodromia of the unconscious. See arche and chaos-cosmogony.

Relationships

• arche
• prima-materia
• chaos-cosmogony