Mortificatio

The most severe of the alchemical operations. If solutio softens, mortificatio kills. The operation is the putrefaction of the matter — the old king must die before the new king can be born; the green lion must devour the sun; the body in the flask must blacken, stink, and decompose. Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche (1985) places mortificatio at the heart of the nigredo and tabulates its image cluster: corpses, graves, crucifixion, dismemberment, “mutilation, impotence, poison, dragon, king blackness, innocent, slaying, defeat, sacrifice, torture.”

Abraham’s Dictionary summarizes the technical content: “at this stage the body becomes blackened and putrefies. The nigredo is a time of blackness and death and is often conceived of as the night of the opus. Ripley referred to the nigredo as the ‘shade of Night’” (Abraham 1998). The corpse imagery is not metaphor for the alchemists — it is the visible indication that the prima materia has yielded, that the reduction has succeeded, that the matter is now passive to the new form.

Psychologically, mortificatio is the operation the analysand resists most. It names the death of an identity, a marriage, a profession, a self-image. Edinger reads it against Jung’s insistence that individuation requires the passing of the first half of life: nothing new is born without something dying. The classical background is the dismemberment of Dionysos, the Osirian sparagmos, the Christ of the pieta. Hillman’s contribution is to insist the operation is recurrent, not developmental — the soul dies many times in the making of soul.

Relationships

• alchemical-operations
• nigredo-albedo-rubedo
• solutio
• calcinatio
• dismemberment
• individuation
• opus-alchymicum

Primary sources

• edinger-anatomy-of-the-psyche (Edinger 1985)
• abraham-dictionary-alchemical-imagery (Abraham 1998)
• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955)