The factors which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as opposites, either confronting one another in enmity or attracting one another in love.1 To begin with they form a dualism; for instance the opposites are humidum (moist) / siccum (dry), frigidum (cold) / calidum (warm), superiora (upper, higher) / inferiora (lower), spiritus-anima (spirit-soul) / corpus (body), coelum (heaven) / terra (earth), ignis (fire) / aqua (water), bright / dark, agens (active) / patiens (passive), volatile (volatile, gaseous) / fixum (solid), pretiosum (precious, costly; also carum, dear) / vile (cheap, common), bonum (good) / malum (evil), manifestum (open) / occultum (occult; also celatum, hidden), oriens (East) / occidens (West), vivum (living) / mortuum (dead, inert), masculus (masculine) / foemina (feminine), Sol / Luna. Often the polarity is arranged as a quaternio (quaternity), with the two opposites crossing one another, as for instance the four elements or the four qualities (moist, dry, cold, warm), or the four directions and seasons,2 thus producing the cross as an emblem of the four elements and symbol of the sublunary physical world.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung's list earns its length. Read it slowly and you feel the alchemists doing something more serious than mystical poetry — they are mapping every axis on which experience splits. Moist and dry, living and dead, precious and vile, manifest and hidden: these are not decorative polarities. They are the grammar of a world that refuses to stay unified, and the alchemists knew that the refusal was the starting point, not the problem.
What the passage implies, without quite saying it, is that the coniunctio is not the erasure of the gap but its transformation. The two poles must first be allowed their full enmity or their full attraction — the *confronting* or the *attracting* Jung names in that first sentence. Either way, something between them is live. The danger the alchemists understood, and that modernity mostly skips over, is the premature resolution: moving toward unity before the tension has done its work. Every item on this list has a version that collapses too early — the sacred married off to the profane before the sacred has been fully itself, the masculine and feminine blended before either has been honestly met.
The cross Jung mentions at the end is not incidental. When the pairs arrange themselves as a quaternio, the intersection is load-bearing — it is the point that holds without resolving.
Carl Gustav Jung·Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy·1955