Quintessence

The quintessence (Latin quinta essentia, “the fifth essence”) is, in the alchemical-cosmological tradition that runs from Aristotle’s aither through the Latin scholastics and into the Renaissance alchemies of Paracelsus and his heirs, the fifth element that stands beyond the four sublunary elements (earth, water, air, fire) — the incorruptible substance of the heavens, or, in the inward alchemy, the subtle essence at the heart of a thing that remains when its grosser elements have been separated from it.

The alchemical opus in its distillation phase aims at the extraction of the quintessence from the materia — at the point where the subtle, incorruptible, celestial principle has been separated from the corruptible grosser matter in which it had been mixed. Paracelsus makes the doctrine central: every substance has its quintessence, and the physician’s art is partly the art of releasing it. Jung reads the figure psychologically in [[jung-mysterium-coniunctionis|Mysterium Coniunctionis]]: the quintessence names the subtle-spiritual dimension of the personality that the individuation process distills from the grosser admixture of the everyday life. See caelum and substantia-coelestis.

Relationships

• caelum
• substantia-coelestis
• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis