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Unio Corporalis

Unio Corporalis

The unio corporalis is the second stage of gerhard-dorn‘s coniunctio: the reunion of the achieved unio-mentalis with the body. It is the stage at which abstract realization must become lived reality. Jung: “The reuniting of the spiritual position with the body obviously means that the insights gained should be made real. An insight might just as well remain in abeyance if it is simply not used” (Jung 1955, §679).

The second coniunctio is what makes Dorn unique in the medieval mystical literature. Where the Christian mystics terminated at the mors voluntaria, Dorn refused to leave the body behind. Von Franz: “he feels sorry for this body which has been cast out… Through a process of meditation the body has to be reunited with the rest, and that he describes as the unio corporalis. It is the producing of the immortal body within the mortal body” (von Franz 1995, p. 172).

The mediating substance is the caelum, an azure quintessence compounded — in Dorn’s recipe — of honey, Chelidonia, rosemary, Mercurialis, the red lily, and human blood. Blood is structurally decisive: “human blood, which was regarded as the seat of the soul… a ‘ligament’ for binding the soul either to God or the devil, and hence a powerful medicine for uniting the unio mentalis with the body” (Jung 1955, §690). Edinger draws the Homeric parallel: the katabasis of Odysseus, who must sacrifice blood to summon the shade of his father, is the classical cipher of this reunion (Edinger 1995, p. 295).

In the color-scheme of the opus, the unio corporalis is the rubedo, the reddening — the stage at which whitened insight becomes blooded life. In the arc of individuation, it is the passage from the intellectual recognition of wholeness to its incarnate living-out.

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