Heraclitean Flux as the Classical Root of Solutio

The classical inheritance of alchemical solutio is explicitly Heraclitean. At the pivotal moment in Anatomy of the Psyche where the operation’s severest form is named, Edinger cites the fragment directly: “Solutio thus may become a mortificatio. This is understandable because that which is being dissolved will experience the solutio as an annihilation of itself. It is here that the saying of Heraclitus applies: ‘To souls it is death to become water’” (Edinger 1985). A dream in the same chapter prompts the analysand’s own Heraclitean recognition: “On awakening the dreamer thought of the doctrine of Heraclitus that ‘all things are in flux’ (panta rhei). The dream is thus picturing the solutio aspect of existence — life as perpetual change and becoming” (Edinger 1985).

Heraclitus’ cosmology of fire supplies the prior term. “Heraclitus describes the cosmos as ‘an everliving fire, being kindled in measures (metra) and extinguished in measures’. What this fire does in the cosmos is to ‘die’ into all things and ‘live’ again as itself” (Sullivan 1995, citing B 30). The four elements exchange through death: “fire lives the death of earth and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of air and earth that of water” (B 76a, quoted Sullivan 1995). The alchemical operations are the same four-element exchange made psychological — solutio is water living the death of air, coagulatio is earth living the death of water, calcinatio is fire living the death of earth. The Heraclitean vision that the soul’s death is to become water is the classical charter under which the alchemical solutio later operates.

Sources

• edward-edinger: Heraclitus’ “to souls it is death to become water” cited as the charter of greater solutio (Anatomy 1985)
• heraclitus: fire and flux as cosmic transmutation; the four elements living each other’s deaths (Fragments B 30, B 76a)
• shirley-sullivan: Heraclitean logos as measured exchange, fire as divine logos (Psychological and Ethical Ideas 1995)
• richard-seaford: logos as account — the verbal-monetary ambiguity that underwrites Heraclitus’ reckoning (Money and the Early Greek Mind 2004)