The Seba library treats Athanor in 5 passages, across 2 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Abraham, Lyndy).
To the right is the athanor (furnace) with the vessel in the centre, from which the lapis (hermaphrodite) will arise. The vessels on either side contain Sol and Luna.
Jung reproduces and glosses an iconographic programme in which the athanor is identified as the generative furnace housing the central vessel, flanked by Sol and Luna, from which the lapis — the individuated self figured as hermaphrodite — will emerge.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis
the secret ‘fire in the ‘athanor or furnace. Paracelsus wrote: ‘The fire in the furnace may be compared to the sun. It heats the furnace and the vessels, just as the sun heats the vast universe’
Abraham establishes the athanor as the locus of the secret transformative fire, citing Paracelsus’s analogy between furnace-heat and solar generativity as the metaphysical ground of the term’s alchemical significance.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis
the humble, regenerate man ‘is placed by God in the furnace of affliction, and (like the hermetic compound) is purged with the fire of suffering until the old Adam is dead, and there arises a new man’
Abraham documents the metaphysical or spiritual reading of the alchemical furnace — the athanor as the interior crucible of moral and psychological purgation — drawing on the Sophic Hydrolith and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella as literary-psychological witnesses.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
Jonson, Ben (1572/3-1637): Adam; alembic; aludel; aqua regia; argent vive; Argus; ark; art and nature; athanor; aurum potabile; bain-marie; bath; bellows; bird
Abraham’s literary index places the athanor within Ben Jonson’s extensive alchemical vocabulary, confirming the term’s currency in early modern literary-alchemical discourse and its place within the broader symbolic network of the opus.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
‘hot foul air rushed out like a blast from a furnace’… Having passed through the trial of the prison-furnace, ‘steeled in the slow fire of convict labour’, he escapes and is transformed
Abraham traces the literary reception of the alchemical furnace-as-transformation in Marcus Clarke’s fiction, where incarceration operates as an athanor in which the protagonist is smelted and reborn to a higher identity.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998aside