Melusina

Melusina is the half-human, half-serpentine water-creature who, in Paracelsus, personifies the mercurial anima-substance. “The mercurial serpent of the alchemists is not infrequently called virgo and, even before Paracelsus, was represented in the form of a Melusina” (Jung 1967, CW 13 §218). Jung reads her as “the harbinger of fate, the anima, an archetype of the collective-unconscious” who appears at the moment of collapse — Raymond’s moment of ruin in the medieval legend.

In Paracelsus’s text, “Melusines dwell in the blood, and, since blood is the ancient seat of the soul, we may conjecture that Melusina is a kind of anima vegetativa. She is, in essence, a variant of the mercurial spirit” (Jung 1966, CW 15 §26). She is bound to the aquaster as the watery aspect of the iliaster, and to mercurius as the feminine-serpentine mode of the alchemical transformer. Conrad Vecerius locates her on an island where nine sirens dwell who can change into any shape — a figure the tradition carries back through Pomponius Mela to the Senae, beings who “cause storms, can change their shape, cure incurable diseases, and know the future.”

The Paracelsian Melusina is therefore the specifically Renaissance iteration of an ancient image-complex: the serpent-anima at the threshold between body-soul and spirit-soul, the feminine bearer of transformation. In Dorn’s commentary on de-vita-longa, Melusina’s shape-changing grounds the first phase of the coniunctio — the dissolution that precedes unio-mentalis.

Relationships

• anima
• mercurius
• aquaster
• iliaster
• paracelsus

Primary sources

• alchemical-studies (Jung 1967)
• jung-spirit-man-art (Jung 1966)