The Seba library treats Dung in 9 passages, across 5 authors (including Abraham, Lyndy, Hillman, James, Jung, C. G.).
The alchemical treatises stress that the dung-hill or balneum is really philosophical mercury, the secret fire which burns within the alchemical vessel, not outside it.
This passage establishes the central alchemical doctrine: the dunghill is not waste but a coded name for the secret internal fire — philosophical mercury — essential to the transmutative work.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis
whosoever understands not this Dunghill, horsebelly, and moist fire, shall labour in vain, and shall never attain this Science
Mastery of the alchemical opus is made contingent upon understanding the dunghill as a technical symbol for the moist internal fire, making ignorance of it fatal to the entire work.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis
Shit is the great leveler. We are crossing a border. Diarrhea signals the daylight order at its ‘end.’ The old king falls apart and shits like a baby—decomposition and creation at once.
Hillman reframes excremental imagery as a phenomenology of underworld initiation, in which decomposition and evacuation mark the boundary between ego-order and psychic dissolution.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
dung, dunghill texts as a most violent and bloody copulation in which tw
This index entry places dung and dunghill within the alchemical network of coniunctio imagery, linking excremental symbolism to the violent union of opposites at the heart of the opus.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
Pictures in old manuscripts of excretory acts, including vomiting, likewise belong to this sphere of the ‘underworldly Hermes.’
Jung situates scatological and excretory imagery within the symbolic domain of chthonic Mercurius, establishing a depth-psychological lineage for alchemical dung symbolism.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
dragon; dung; egg; egg shells; faeces; glass; gold and silver; golden fleece
The concordance listing for Ben Jonson’s alchemical references clusters dung with faeces, egg, dragon, and gold, confirming its consistent symbolic proximity to transformation motifs in literary alchemy.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
Dung smokes and reeks, is that which in a quite distinctive way gives off, ‘breathes out’ a smell… The French have found it natural to express ‘dung’ as fumier, ‘to dung’ as fumer.
Onians traces the etymological kinship of dung with smoke and breath (fumus/fimus), grounding excremental symbolism in archaic Indo-European conceptions of vital exhalation and the soul.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
‘Aurora consurgens’, University of Glasgow, Ferguson MS 6 (sixteenth century): dragon; dung
The bibliographic index confirms that the pseudo-Augustinian Aurora consurgens — a text of central importance to Jung’s alchemical studies — employs dung as a key symbolic term alongside the dragon.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
Empousa’s other foot was so befouled with the mule’s dung that it seemed to be not a mule’s foot, but a foot of mule dung.
Kerényi records a mythological instance in which dung literally constitutes a body part of the underworld being Empousa, a detail that bridges excremental imagery and chthonic deity in Greek tradition.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951aside