Substantia Coelestis

The substantia coelestis — the heavenly substance, the caelum — is Gerhard Dorn‘s name for the quintessence that completes the second stage of the coniunctio. Jung, reading Dorn across Part Six of [[jung-mysterium-coniunctionis|Mysterium Coniunctionis]], takes the concept as the alchemical name for knowledge of the inner light — “the self or imago Dei which is here united with its chthonic counterpart, the feminine spirit of the unconscious” (Jung 1955, §736).

The heavenly substance is not found outside the human being. Dorn’s instruction, in the passage Jung transcribes, is explicit: “Learn not heaven therefore through the earth, but learn the virtues of one by those of the other. Seek the incorruptible medicine … you can find nowhere but in heaven… . Learn from within thyself to know all that is in heaven and on earth” (Dorn, in Jung 1955, §685). The caelum is therefore the psychologically realized imago Dei — not a theological posit but an achieved interior state produced by the unio-mentalis, the first stage of the opus, in which the mind is separated from the body and turned upon itself.

The substantia coelestis is the material through which the unio mentalis, once achieved, can be returned to the body — the second stage. The third and final stage is the union of the recomposed person with the unus-mundus, the potential world outside time. Without the heavenly substance as mediating third, the opus would stall at the first stage and produce only a disembodied spirituality. Dorn’s contribution to the tradition is to have named the mediator — and, in doing so, to have given Jung the key to the whole architecture of late alchemy.

Relationships

• unio-mentalis
• unus-mundus
• coniunctio
• self
• gerhard-dorn

Primary sources

• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955)
• von-franz-alchemy (von Franz 1980)