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Salt (alchemical)

Salt (alchemical)

The third of the Paracelsian tria-prima (sulphur, salt, Mercurius), and for Hillman the one most tightly bound to the phenomenology of psychic experience. Jung notes in Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955, §§61–64) the association of salt with sapientia and with the bitter tears of Niobe: amaritudo, the moral bitterness that cannot be washed off. Salt is what remains after the fire — the incombustible residue, the crystalline fixing of what was once fluid.

Hillman’s Alchemical Psychology (2010) makes salt the governing substance of the book. “Alchemical salt, like any other alchemical substance, is a metaphoric or ‘philosophic’ salt. We are warned in various alchemical texts not to assume that this mineral is ‘common’ salt.” But the philosophic salt is nonetheless common — it is the experience of experiencing. Where sulphur is excitable urgency and Mercurius is volatile between-ness, salt is what fixes: the part of the psyche that holds, crystallizes, preserves, remembers. Salt is also sal desiderat seipsum — salt desires itself: “the experience of feeding on experience.”

Hillman’s most original move is on psychic grief: “The soul has a drive to remember; it is like an animal that returns to its salt licks; the soul licks at its own wounds to derive sustenance therefrom. We make salt in our deep hurts.” Remorse, regret, resentment — what the recovery register treats as pathology — are for Hillman’s alchemical reading the soul’s salt-making, the substantial psychological work by which experience becomes crystalline. The excess is the terror: “Each planet, each worship, each archetypal perspective has its kind of terror. There is a terror in the moon, in the purity of a single-minded devotion which its salt can claim.” Salt fixates; fixation of principle is salt gone toxic.

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