Coniunctio as the Symbolic Form of Heraclitean Justice

What the medieval alchemists inherited through Paracelsus and Dorn, and what Jung reads out of them in Mysterium Coniunctionis, is genealogically a Heraclitean universe. For Heraclitus, “justice is strife (eris), and all things come into being according to strife” (B 80, as glossed by Sullivan 1995, p. 218). The cosmos is held together not by the absence of opposition but by the balanced tension of opposites — a view Sullivan distinguishes carefully from Anaximander’s, in which injustice is at the core and balance must be restored by time (Sullivan 1995, p. 237).

The alchemical coniunctio is the symbolic form of that Heraclitean cosmology. When Jung writes that the opposites are “usually derived from the quaternio of elements” and that the whole opus “had to be material as well as spiritual, living as well as inert, masculine as well as feminine” (Jung 1955, §§655, 676), he is translating Heraclitus into Latin alchemy. Empedocles’ philia and neikos — Love and Strife as the two moving principles that arrange the four elements (Sullivan 1995, pp. 48–49) — supply the same structure: a cosmos composed of contraries kept in motion by their ongoing reconciliation.

The thread heraclitean-ground-of-coniunctio already records this lineage; the present thread notes specifically that CW 14’s quaternio of elements inherits the Presocratic architecture whole, and that Jung’s insistence that the coniunctio produces a fourth from the three (“quadrangle will answer to quadrangle,” Jung 1955, §656) is a direct descendant of Empedoclean balance.

Sources

• heraclitus: B 80 — “justice is strife; all things come into being according to strife” (via Sullivan 1995, p. 218).
• shirley-sullivan: Psychological and Ethical Ideas, pp. 48–49, 218, 237 — Heraclitus versus Anaximander on opposites; Empedocles on philia / neikos.
• carl-jung: Mysterium Coniunctionis §§655–656, 676.