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Spiritus Mercurialis

Spiritus Mercurialis

Spiritus mercurialis — the mercurial spirit — is the alchemists’ name for the volatile, mediating, life-giving substance that pervades and unites the cosmos. Mercurius is often called the spiritus vegetativus (spirit of life) or spiritus seminalis; the Iliaster names it the true spirit in man, which pervades all his limbs, the moist, breathlike or vaporous soul dwelling in all bodies (Jung 1967, citing Ruland’s Lexicon). It is a life-giving power like a glue, holding the world together and standing in the middle between body and spirit (Jung 1967, citing the alchemical corpus).

The concept gathers what the Stoic πνεῦμα, the Plotinian psyche, and the biblical spiritus sanctus had separately named. It is clear from a number of texts that the alchemists related their concept of the anima mundi on the one hand to the world soul in Plato’s Timaeus and on the other to the Holy Spirit, who was present at the Creation (Jung 1967). The substance is at once cosmological and individual: a spirit of the macrocosmic as of the microcosmic world. To work with spiritus mercurialis is to work with the volatile principle whose proper operations are vaporization, sublimation, and the carrying of soul-substance from one state to another.

In the tria-prima of Paracelsus the spiritus is the mercury, set against sulphur (the soul) and salt (the body). In Jung’s reading it is also the anima-mercurius-identity — the place where spirit and soul become structurally inseparable.

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