The alchemists were not squeamish about what union costs. Gabricus dissolved into Beya; the son-lovers of the Near Eastern cults died on the very ground of their consummation. What looks, from outside, like catastrophe is the text's own word for it — putrefactio, rot, the body of the thing going soft. Jung is insisting that you cannot have the coniunctio and keep your current form. The energy that sustained the tension of opposites was the tension itself; once it resolves, there is nowhere for that charge to go. The pool goes still.

This is why the image carries two captions simultaneously. "Conceptio" and putrefaction are not sequential stages — first rot, then birth — they are the same event read from different angles. The Latin borrowed from Aristotle does the real work: *corruptio unius generatio est alterius*. One thing's undoing is another thing's coming-into-being, and neither side of that equation is more real than the other. What you are asked to sit inside is not a moment of passage toward something better but the full weight of both at once — the stillness that is neither death nor beginning but the hinge between them, which cannot be inhabited and cannot be skipped.