Aquaster

The aquaster is the watery aspect of the iliaster in Paracelsus’s secret doctrine — “the Iliaster which animates and preserves the liquids in the body” (Jung 1967, CW 13 §173). Where the iliaster names the spiritual, invisible principle that is also prima materia, the aquaster names its coagulated, liquid presence in the organism. The two terms together compose the continuum by which Paracelsus holds spirit and matter in a single psychophysical substrate without splitting the one from the other.

The anima iliastri — the soul that dwells in the iliaster — has its seat “in the fire of the heart” and is impassibilis, non-sentient; beside it the cagastric soul, which is passibilis, “floats on the water of the capsule” (Paracelsus, De vita longa, quoted Jung 1967, CW 13 §201). The capsule is the heart, “the seat of the imagination” and “the sun in the Microcosm.” In this teaching the aquaster is the bodily medium through which imaginatio operates — the watery substrate that permits the fiery operation of the higher soul.

The aquaster carries mythic coloration. It is associated with the “Melusinian Ares,” which Jung identifies with the figure of Melusina — the half-human, half-serpentine water-creature who personifies, in Paracelsus, the mercurial anima-substance. The aquaster is thus both a technical term in the pharmacology of longevity and a mythic personification of the moist principle in which Mercurius works. Dorn, in his commentary, takes the aquaster up into the tripartite scheme that will become Jung’s unio-mentalis / unio-corporalis / caelum.

Relationships

• iliaster
• melusina
• mercurius
• prima-materia
• paracelsus

Primary sources

• alchemical-studies (Jung 1967)