The Seba library treats Vitrification in 7 passages, across 3 authors (including Hillman, James, Edinger, Edward F., von Franz, Marie-Louise).
lest everything should rise to the top of the vessel, and be consumed or vitrified to the ruin of the whole work.
Hillman cites the alchemical caution that excessive heating drives the spirit to the vessel's summit where it vitrifies, destroying analytical precision and granulated awareness in favor of violent abstraction.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
The very danger alchemy warned of, vitrification, has taken place. Glassiness of animation, the world a glass menagerie.
Hillman identifies vitrification as the realized psychological catastrophe when Luna usurps Sol, producing a silvered world drained of warmth, compassion, and living value.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
Vitreous body means glassy body — vitrum means glass. Now, the chief feature of glass is its transparency. Glass itself is invisible and there's something miraculous about it.
Edinger elaborates the symbolic phenomenology of glass — transparency, vessel-function, and laceration — providing the imaginal substrate that makes vitrification psychologically legible.
, The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995supporting
glass is a substance which can be seen through, but which is a very bad conductor of warmth. One could say that it has to do with the intellect; that it represents an intellectual system which makes one able to see through something but which cuts off the feeling relationship.
Von Franz frames the glass state as an intellectual modality that preserves perceptual clarity while severing affective and embodied relatedness, directly illuminating the danger of vitrification.
, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting
glass is a substance which can be seen through, but which is a very bad conductor of warmth... you are cut off from the smells, the temperature, the wind, and so on. All such perceptions are excluded, and therefore, so is the feeling relationship.
In the parallel Puer Aeternus text, von Franz reiterates that glassiness marks an enclosure that enables observation while blocking sensory and feeling contact with living reality.
, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting
Premature drying only destroys the germ of life, strikes the active principle on the head as with a hammer, and renders it passive.
Hillman frames premature calcination and desiccation as the broader family of errors to which vitrification belongs, warning against scorching the living germ of soul-making through excessive analytical heat.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
it would all be a matter of symbols and measurements, like chemistry, objective, going on only in glass vessels.
Hillman uses the image of glass vessels as shorthand for an evacuated, purely objective psychological stance that loses the subjective warmth necessary to the opus.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010aside