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Opus Alchymicum

Opus Alchymicum

The opus alchymicum — the Great Work — is the alchemists’ name for the process by which the prima materia is transformed, through the colored stages and the paired operations, into the lapis philosophorum. Jung’s psychological recovery of the tradition rests on the claim that the opus was never chemistry: “The alchemist encounters in matter, as apparently belonging to it, certain qualities and potential meanings of whose psychic nature he is entirely unconscious” (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy). What was projected onto the retort was the substance of the unconscious itself. The opus is therefore, read back, a phenomenology of individuation — the work the ego undertakes on its own darkness to bring it into relation with the Self.

The work is called contra naturam — against nature — because consciousness must act against its own spontaneous tendencies, descending where it would ascend, dissolving where it would fix. The opus is simultaneously a process and an ethic. It is governed by color (nigredo-albedo-rubedo, nigredo-albedo-rubedo, citrinitas, rubedo) and by operation (alchemical-operations — calcinatio, solutio, coagulatio, sublimatio, mortificatio, separatio, coniunctio). Edinger’s achievement, in Anatomy of the Psyche, is to show that each operation names a distinct, recognizable psychic movement that can be tracked in dreams, moods, and clinical presentations.

The opus is not a single performance but an iterated one. Hillman: “These conditions indicate that the soul is already engaged in its opus. The psychological initiation began before therapy’s first hour” (Alchemical Psychology). The work begins when the darkness arrives; it ends — if it ends — only at the coniunctio.

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