Khora / The Receptacle

Khora (χώρα) — the receptacle, the space, the “third kind” — is the Timaeus’s most difficult and most generative concept. Introduced at Timaeus 48e ff., the receptacle is neither Form nor particular copy; it is the medium in which particulars appear. Plato calls it hypodoche (receptacle), ekmageion (that on which impressions are made), and, memorably, the “mother” and “nurse” of generation.

Cornford’s commentary preserves the aporia the concept generates for Aristotelian reading: “The two parents of Becoming — the Form and Space — are alike eternal and unchanging. How can an image cast by an unchanging object on an unchanging mirror be itself inconstant and fleeting?” (Cornford 1997). Aristotle already saw the difficulty and preferred “matter” (hyle) as his explanatory category. But the Timaean receptacle is not Aristotelian matter; it is the spatial-medial condition of appearance itself.

For the Seba tradition, the receptacle is the classical root of what the Hermetic and alchemical traditions elaborate as the prima-materia — the formless, receptive, feminine ground out of which the Great Work proceeds. Jung’s reception of the prima materia as the feminine ground of psychic transformation is the direct inheritance of the Timaean khora. The receptacle is also, in Hillman’s archetypal reading, the classical warrant for the claim that soul requires a place — not merely a form and a matter, but a medial region in which appearance occurs.

Relationships

• plato-timaeus
• prima-materia
• unus-mundus
• neumann-great-mother
• world-soul

Primary sources

• plato-timaeus (Plato, 48e ff.)
• Plato’s Cosmology (Cornford 1997)
• Mysterium Coniunctionis (Jung)