Tria Prima

The tria prima — the three primary substances: Mercurius, sulphur, and salt — is Paracelsus’s re-founding of alchemy on a tripartite rather than quadripartite scheme. Where the Aristotelian natural philosophy rested on four elements and Galenic medicine on four humors, Paracelsus introduced a third term that altered the architecture: salt, elevated for the first time to the status of a primary substance.

Hillman, in hillman-alchemical-psychology, preserves the philological precision of the innovation: “Although various salts were alchemically known in antiquity (Theophrastus, Pliny, and later Geber and Rasis), not until Paracelsus was salt elevated to one of the tria prima, more fundamental than the seven planets and the four elemental temperaments. Paracelsus refounded alchemy on a tripartite scheme by introducing salt as a new third term. This ‘third’ position is characteristic of Paracelsus in that he opposed both Aristotle and the Scholastics on one side and Galen on the other” (Hillman 2010).

The move is characteristically Paracelsian: a third term that refuses the binary, placing a new foundation beneath the received system. Mercurius names the volatile spirit, sulphur the combustible soul, salt the fixed body — a trinity that maps the inner man as much as the outer substance. For later Jungian elaborators, the tria prima becomes the formal structure beneath the alchemical analysis of psychic transformation: volatile, combustible, and fixed as three modes of psychic substance undergoing the opus.

Relationships

• paracelsus
• iliaster
• mercurius
• coniunctio

Primary sources

• hillman-alchemical-psychology (Hillman 2010)
• alchemical-studies (Jung 1967, CW 13)