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Solve et coagula

Solve et coagula

Solve et coagula — “dissolve and coagulate” — is the alchemical dictum that names the entire opus in three words. Jung opens the Mysterium Coniunctionis by letting the phrase stand as the work’s entire method: “the alchemist saw the essence of his art in separation and analysis on the one hand and synthesis and consolidation on the other” (Jung 1955). Abraham records the textual formula: “Dissolve and congeal again and again, dissolve and congeal, till the tincture grows in the stone”; the opus consists of a repeated cycle in which matter is dissolved into the prima-materia and coagulated into a new and purer form (Abraham 1998).

The pairing is not a sequence but a rhythm. Hillman insists that the operations are “one process through time,” an “art of time” whose order no two alchemical authors fix identically (Hillman 2010). What makes the pair the signature of the art is that each needs the other. “Whatever is permanent and habitual must be dissolved by heat or water, and whatever is wishy-washy, floating, uncertain, and vaporous must be thickened, hardened, fixed and reduced” (Hillman 2010). The psyche’s own substance is “obdurate and compacted, shall we say stone-like”; solve is needed precisely because coagula has worked too well.

Traditional symbolism assigns the two motions to the luminaries: “The solve or dissolution is associated with the moon (moisture and coldness), while the coagula is associated with the sun (dryness and heat)” (Abraham 1998). The Jungian reading re-reads the pair as the grammar of ego-Self work itself — dissolution of identification with the persona, coagulation of an authentic relation to matter; solve that the ego may be opened, coagula that the Self may be incarnated.

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