Calcinatio occupies a foundational position in the depth-psychological reception of alchemy, functioning as the operation of intense psychic heat — the burning away of ego-identified accretions to reveal an indestructible, transpersonal residue. Edward Edinger, whose treatment in Anatomy of the Psyche (1985) remains the locus classicus for Jungian engagement with this operation, reads calcinatio as the purging of ‘radical moisture,’ the dissolution of desirousness that binds archetypal energies to ego-pleasure and ego-power. The fire here is at once literal in its alchemical derivation — the heating of limestone to produce quicklime — and thoroughly psychological: it is the flame of affect, frustrated ambition, jealousy, and grief that, when consciously borne, transmutes passion into what Edinger, following Jung, calls ‘ethereal fire.’ The theological amplitude of calcinatio is enormous in Edinger’s treatment, drawing on Origen’s doctrine of purgatorial fire, the Dies Irae, the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, Isaiah’s refiner’s fire, and the shirt of Nessus. Hillman, by contrast, situates calcinatio structurally within the stone’s composite nature, noting it as one of the two initiating operations that persist within the completed lapis. Jung’s Collected Works gesture toward calcinatio within the broader sequence of mortificatio, putrefactio, and combustio. Across these voices a key tension persists: whether calcinatio is primarily a suffering undergone or a transformation actively sought.