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Caelum

Caelum

The caelum — literally “heaven” — is gerhard-dorn‘s name for the azure quintessence that mediates the unio-corporalis, the second stage of the coniunctio. It is not a metaphor but a recipe. In Dorn’s Philosophia Meditativa the caelum is compounded of honey (the pleasure of the senses and the joy of life, carrying also the “secret fear of the poison”), Chelidonia (the highest meaning, the Self as total personality), rosemary (spiritual and conjugal love), Mercurialis (sexuality), the red lily (passion, the red slave), and human blood (the whole soul). Jung summarizes: “All this was united with the azure quintessence, the anima mundi extracted from inert matter, or the God-image imprinted on the world — a mandala produced by rotation” (Jung 1955, §704).

The caelum is, in other words, the blue tincture in which the anima mundi is made manipulable. Dorn writes that it is “the best medicament not only for the body but also for the mind (mens)” and that, though corporeal, it is “essentially spiritual” (Jung 1955, §663). It is the substance in which the gap between spirit and body is closed — the medicine that makes the second coniunctio a chemical as well as a psychological fact.

Hillman takes the caelum as a color before it is a substance. The blue is the albedo arriving after the nigredo — the opening of psychic space in which imagination becomes possible: “blue can activate. Despite Goethe’s reflective remoteness and cool distancing of blue, the unio mentalis is spirited, animated; animus in the anima. A wind blows through it” (Hillman 2010). For Hillman the caelum is the imaginal ground itself.

The caelum is therefore neither pure spirit nor pure matter but the third thing by which they can be rejoined — a hermetic tertium quid, the operative substance of the second coniunctio.

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