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Mortificatio as alchemical katabasis

Mortificatio as alchemical katabasis

Edinger‘s Anatomy of the Psyche reads the alchemical mortificatio as the katabasis in its alchemical register. The symbolic field is unmistakably underworld: “blackness, putrefactio, slaying, mutilation, exile, castration, sickness, wound, lameness, rotting flesh, corpse, skeleton, grave, worms, excrement, poison, dragon, humiliation, suffering, sacrifice” (Edinger 1985, Anatomy of the Psyche). These are the phenomenological marks of the ego’s descent into what alchemy calls nigredo — the same movement Homer calls nekyia and Hillman calls Hades.

The Christian Passion enacts the same pattern as canonical Western narrative. In The Christian Archetype, Edinger treats the sequence — arrest, trial before Caiaphas, scourging, crucifixion, descent into hell — as the ego’s ritual submission to the Self (Edinger 1987). The Passion is not read as substitutionary atonement but as the archetypal image of the ego’s willing descent. The Crucifixion is the moment of maximum mortificatio; the Descent is the three-day katabasis; the Resurrection is the albedo that follows. Edinger’s reading is therefore continuous with Jung’s — the Passion is imago Christi and imago individuationis in one figure.

The connection across registers is structural. The Homeric Odysseus digs the pit and pours the blood; the alchemist seals the vas and lets the prima materia blacken; the Christ is crucified and descends; the analysand confronts the shadow and the anima. The register differs; the movement does not. Each is a surrender of the upperworld ego to a region where only the soul’s dissolution yields the substance of the next stage. This is the alchemical charter for reading nigredo-albedo-rubedo as a three-stage katabasis: the descent, the whitening that begins underground, and the reddening that is the return.

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