Opus Contra Naturam

when alchemy conceived of itself as an opus contra naturam, ‘natura’ did not refer to nature in our positivistic, materialistic sense, nature as mere fact and physical reality at large, because such a sense did not yet exist.

Giegerich argues that the ‘nature’ opposed in the alchemical opus was the imaginal, fantastically perceived substance of pre-modern experience, not the positivistic nature that emerged only after alchemy’s decline.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This Moses, because of his horns, is unnatural and supernatural, an opus contra naturam – one of the widest definitions of alchemy – a figure who embodies Ostanes’s ever-quoted maxim for the alchemical process: ‘Nature enjoys nature; nature wars with nature; nature rules nature.’

Hillman uses Michelangelo’s horned Moses to exemplify the opus contra naturam as the broadest definition of alchemy — the embodiment of nature’s internal self-opposition — linking it to solve et coagula.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the alchemical process is an opus contra naturam. For Paracelsus, then, color enters more significantly when the profligate profusion of the mind dries up and the essentials of things can stand bare.

Hillman invokes the opus contra naturam to explain Paracelsian color symbolism, where blackening and the nigredo actively oppose naturalistic abundance to expose essential psychological realities.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Only the literal is solely naturam; and once world, nature, body, matter are seen as image, sensed as metaphor, they are in psyche transformed. Reduction by going into the concrete and the natural is the via regia of the opus contra naturam.

Berry argues paradoxically that reduction to the concrete and natural — seeing matter as image — is itself the royal road of the opus contra naturam, dissolving the opposition between literal and psychic.

Berry, Patricia, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The love impulse itself has within it the cultural seeds of internalization and symbolization… The liberating imaginative play which accompanies being-in-love is part of eros itself and points to the way in which the opus contra naturam is, paradoxically, also natural and instinctual.

Hillman argues that the opus contra naturam — here the internalization and symbolization of eros — is not imposed against instinct from without but emerges paradoxically from within eros itself.

Hillman, James, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The fact that the fruits appear in the spring and the flowers in the autumn may be connected with the motif of reversal (arbor inversa!) and the opus contra naturam.

Jung links the reversed seasonal appearance of the alchemical tree’s fruit and flowers to the motif of reversal inherent in the opus contra naturam, where natural order is deliberately inverted.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

opposites, 60, 90, 111 opus contra naturam, 112

Jacoby indexes the opus contra naturam in proximity to the opposites and mystical marriage, situating it within the analytic encounter and transference literature without extended elaboration.

Jacoby, Mario, The Analytic Encounter: Transference and Human Relationship, 1984aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →