The Seba library treats Circulatio in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Edinger, Edward F., von Franz, Marie-Louise, Hillman, James).
Psychologically, circulatio is the repeated circuit of all aspects of one’s being, which gradually generates awareness of a transpersonal center uniting the conflicting factors.
Edinger offers the canonical depth-psychological definition of circulatio as the iterative traversal of all dimensions of the psyche, whose cumulative effect is the emergence of a reconciling transpersonal center.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
In The Secret of the Golden Flower, and in alchemy, this is called the circulatio, the rotation, and there are many different texts in alchemy in which it is said that the philosopher’s stone has to circulate.
Von Franz locates circulatio within both Eastern and Western alchemical traditions, identifying it with the autonomous rotation of the inner light and the philosopher’s stone’s passage through seasonal time-symbolism.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980thesis
Iteratio, they called it. ‘But I’ve been here before; I’ve done this already.’ The same again and again. The Pelican embodies sacrifice; it is a sacrificial vessel. It is the instrument of ritual. An essence of ritual is the complaint: ‘Yet again.’ Iteratio, circulatio, biting your own tail, eating your own body that feeds your own body.
Hillman interprets circulatio through the Pelican vessel as sacrificial iteratio, emphasizing that the operation’s defining quality is the return of ascending material back into the opus as further nourishment.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
I keep in mind the alchemical circulatio. The life of the soul, as the structure of dreams reveals, is a continual going over and over of the material of life.
Moore transposes circulatio into pastoral and therapeutic register, proposing that the soul’s fundamental mode is the perpetual re-circulation of life-material rather than linear progress toward resolution.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis
This idea corresponds to the alchemical circulatio in which the material is to be repeatedly sublimated and coagulated, circling again and again through all the states of being until the Philosophers’ Stone is created.
Edinger applies circulatio cosmologically to flood mythology, reading the recurring cycle of dissolution and reconstitution in world history as the macrocosmic form of the same alchemical process.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting
circulatio, 88 circumambulation, 89-92
The index entry places circulatio in immediate adjacency to circumambulation, signaling their functional kinship within von Franz’s broader treatment of rotational and cyclical motifs in fairy-tale amplification.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997aside
circulatio, 166, 257, 262 circumambulation, 204, 257
The concordance index of von Franz’s Alchemy confirms circulatio’s structural importance by clustering it with circumambulation and coniunctio, marking its role as a recurring organizational concept throughout the text.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980aside
rotation/rotatio, 104, 124, 164f, 188, 191f, 194, 210, 325 see also circulatio; circumambulation
Jung’s index cross-references circulatio under rotatio and circumambulation, establishing the terminological cluster within which the concept operates in Psychology and Alchemy.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944aside