Calcination, solution, separation, combination, putrefaction, coagulation, cleansing,

sublimation, fermentation, multiplication, projection.

fire operation -- Calcinatio

water operation -- Solutio
earth operation -- Coagulatio
air operation -- Sublimatio
the quintessence Coniunctio

Amalgamation
Greek: poultice ,s = soft ; Latin: malagma.
a. An alloy of mercury with another metal through fusion.
b. The extraction of precious metals from their ores by treatment with mercury.

Calcination
Latin: calx = Lime.
To intensely heat (as with inorganic materials) to a high temperature, but without
fusion, in order to drive off volatile matter, or to effect changes (as oxidation or
pulverization.) What remains is a fine dry powder.

The heating of limestone Ca CO3, or slaked lime Ca(OH)2 to produce quicklime CaO,
calx vita. -- When water is added, quicklime has the property of generating heat.

The fire of calcination is a purging whitening fire. For example, cremation produces
calx; the fire acts upon the black stuff of the nigredo or mortificatio, and turns it white.
This process is connected with the symbolism of Purgatory, the eternal punitive fire. --
The notion that the wicked are punished in the afterlife was widespread in antiquity:
Ixion was punished for trying to seduce Hera by being bound to a perpetual wheel of
fire. The goddesses called the Erinyes, s , (the Furies or Eumenides) burnt the
damned with their torches. The Pyriphlegethon is an igneous river surrounding
Tartarus. Lucian in his True Histories describes the island of the impious as an immense
brazier. [Edinger]

In the Sibyline Oracles, Book III, "And then shall a great river of flaming fire will flow
down from heaven, and consume all places."

In the book of Daniel (3:12-30), Nebuchadnezzar orders everyone to prostrate

themselves to the golden image of himself. All do this, but the Jews, Shadrack,
Meschack, and Abednego --who are thrown alive into the fiery furnace. They remain
unharmed in the flames, and a fourth unknown man is seen among them, and the form
of the fourth man is like unto the Son of God.
In Revelations (20:13-15), "And the sea gave up her dead, Death & Hades gave up the
dead in them, and all were judged by what they had done, and if anyones name was not
in the Book of Life, he was thrown into the Lake of Fire."

Coagulation
Latin: coagulum =to curdle; from cogere = to drive
together.
a. The process which turns something into earth : Cooling which turns a liquid into a
solid.
b. A solid that has been dissolved into a solvent reappears when that solvent is
evaporated; or a chemical reaction may produce a new compound that is solid.
c. "earth" is one of the synonyms for the coagulatio -- it is heavy and permanent, of fixed
position and shape.
d. In Roland: A Lexicon of Alchemy, the 3 agents of Coagulatio are:
1. Magnesia
2. Lead
3. Sulphur
e. In medieval psychological thought, for a psychic content to become "earth" means it
has been concretized in a particular localized form -- that is, it has been attached to an
ego. The coagulatio has often been equated with Creation.
f. Myths tell us that coagulatio is promoted by action -- diving, churning, whirling
motion.

The Turba Philosophorum states an alchemical recipe for coagulation: "Take quicksilver,
coagulate in the body of Magnesia, in Kuhul (lead), or in Sulphur which does not burn
If mercury is amalgamated with another metal, the amalgam solidifies -- Similarly,
mercury combines with sulphur to form a solid, mercury sulfide." [Edinger]

Conjunction
Latin: jungere = to join; jugum = to yoke together; from the Greek:
zygon; and the Sanskrit: juga.

The Coniunctio is the culmination of the alchemists opus, with both extroverted and
introverted aspects. It is both the chemical and physical combination in which two
substances come together to form a third substance with different properties, such as the
fusion of molten metals, and the amalgams by the union of mercury with other metals.
This is the common alchemical image of SOL & LUNA entering the mercurial fountain,
representing the dissolving of gold and silver in mercury. Another chemical combination
used by the alchemists is the union of mercury and sulphur to form red mercuric oxide,
(Hg + S HgS.) [Edinger]

In the two phases of the Lesser and Greater Coniunctio, the Lesser is the union or fusion
of substances not yet thoroughly separated or discriminated. It is always followed by
death or mortificiato. The product is a contaminated mixture that must be subjected to
further procedures. In alchemical symbolism, the product is pictured as killed, maimed,
or fragmented.
In the Greater Coniunctio -- the Opus -- the goal is the creation of the miraculous
"Philo- sophers Stone," produced by the final union of the purified opposites, which
mitigates and rectifies all "one-sidedness." The Stone has the power to give life, to purify
all corrupt, to soften the hard, and to harden the soft. [Edinger]

Impregnation
Latin: pregnans = to impregnate.
To interpenetrate or saturate thoroughly in order to produce a chemical or metallurgical
crystalization or compound.

In early metallurgy, streams, galleries of mines, and caves are identified with the vagina
of the Earth-Mother : everything that lies in the belly of the earth is alive and in a state
of gestation. The ores extracted from mines are embryonic; they grow slowly as if in
obedience to some temporal rhythm other than that of vegetable and animal organisms,
they "grow ripe" in their telluric darkness.

The mining of metals from the bowels of the earth is an operation executed before its
time. With these metals the metallurgist was succeeding the work of Nature, which in
time would have ripened these metals to "perfection." [Eliade, p. 42]

Precipitation
Latin: praecipit = to throw violently; praeceps = to fall or
come suddenly into some condition.
a. To cause to separate from solution or suspension.
b. To cause vapor to condense and fall or deposit.
c. To fall or cascade as rain or snow, as is the aspect of the fertilization of the earth by
the Tiamat Dragon of the Rain as described in the Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian
creation epic.

Purification
Sanskrit: panati = he cleanses; Latin: purus, akin to Old
High German: fowen = to sift.
a. To clear from material defilement, imperfection, or extraneous matter.
b. In The Phaedo, Plato states, "Purification consists in separating the soul as much as
possible from the body, and accustoming it to withdraw from all contact with the body,
and to concentrate itself by itself, and have its own dwelling, free from the shackles of
the body." [Plato, Phaedo 67c-68b]
Reverberation
Latin: verber = a rod, hence to lash.
a. To reflect < ~ heat or light >
b. To become driven back.
c. To subject to the action of a reverberatory furnace (i.e. a kiln or furnace in which heat
is radiated from the roof.

Solutio
Latin: solutio; solvere = to loosen, to solve.
a. To turn a solid into a liquid.
b. An act or process by which a solid, liquid, or gaseous substance is homogeneously
mixed with a liquid, or sometimes a gas or solid.
c. The homogeneous mixture formed by this process : especially a single-phase
liquid system. (From 1904, a solvate is an aggregate that consists of a solute ion or
molecule with one or more solvent molecules; also a substance (such as a hydrate)
containing such ions.)
d. In the solutio process, the solid seems to disappear into the solution as if it had been
swallowed up.
e. Solutio is the return to differentiated matter to its undifferentiated state --its materia
prima.
f. Mercury has the capacity to dissolve or amalgamate with gold and silver. The process
ancient process for extracting gold from crude ore is to pulverize and treat the ore with
mercury which dissolves the gold; the mercury is then separated from the gold by
distilling it with heat.

In spiritual alchemy, SOL & LUNA represent the personalitys masculine and feminine
principles "concretely" manifested in the personality at the beginning of the process.
SOL = the dominant conscious attitude, and LUNA = the anima of its current state of
development -- these two are dissolved by "friendly water," which is mercury, and
equated in the womb, corresponding with the materia prima. In this incest symbolism of
SOL & LUNA, Love and Lust are the agents of Solutio.

Sublimation
Latin: sublimis = to elevate over a threshold.
To cause to pass off from the solid to the vapor state by heating, and again to condense
into solid form.
a. A low substance is translated into a higher substance by an ascending movement:
Earth is transformed into Air; a fixed body is volitatized; that which is inferus into that
which is superus. The sublimate flies up from earth, and is transported to heaven. The
alchemists vessel was equated with the Macrocosm, its lower retort representing the
earth, its upper retort heaven.
b. The "expulsion of the quicksilver" is done by sublimatio, which releases the spirit
hidden in matter. Sublimatio can also mean "hammering" or "grinding" down
to rhinisima ("filings") to bring about a complete attenuation of the material : very fine
powder approaches a gas in its consistency. The symbolism of grinding contains the
moral categories of good and bad: i.e. "fine" and "coarse." [Edinger]

c. In psychological terms, Carl Jung criticizes Sigmund Freuds theory of sublimation

thus: "Sublimation is not a voluntary and the forcible channeling of instinct into a
spurious field of application [as Freud states], but an alchemical transformation for
which fire and the black materia prima are needed. Sublimatio is a great mystery. Freud
has appropriated this concept and usurped it for the sphere of the will, and the
bourgeois, rationalistic theos." [C.G. Jung, Letters, I:171]

d. Comment: Item c. brings to this curators (J.R.) mind many questions of political
perspective, and while Jung is quoted here, I steadfastly resist Jung's narrow political,
non-dialectical, non-Keynesian perspective, clearly implying
that anyone should easily be at liberty to avoid the repressive economic and social forces
pressed upon the individual personality, the forces of organized religion against free
mystical thought, and especially the organized categorical methods of "formal
education" pressed against independent intellectual
inquiry and determination.

Sublimination is a critical universal function which works on every level of biologic and
physical "reality" -- the biophysical and astrophysical, the
instinctual, the subconsious, the "Unconscious", the historical, the
developmental, and economic and social, the expansive, the implosive,
and the transformative.

: For a further discussion and review of the problem of "sublimation," I strongly

recommend a reading of Norman O. Browns seminal work Life Against Death, [Vintage
Press, 1959], especially the chapters: "The Ambiguities of Sublimation," and "The
Excremental Vision." I also recommend, regarding this controversy, Georg Groddecks
(a correspondent of Freud), The Book of the IT, (Psychoanalytischer Verlag; Vienna;
1923), Herbert Marcuses Eros and Civilization, (Beacon Press, 1955); Fredrich Engels'
The Origin of the Family
(1846), and reference to my own "Psychles: The Nagging Question of Cyclic Time vs.
Apocalyptic Time : A Table," under the page titled Origins of the Specious.

Volitilization
Latin: volate = to fly.
a. To cause to pass off into a vapor.
b. Readily vaporizable at relatively low temperature.
c. Also, tending to erupt violently.
d. In psychological terms, characterized as subject to unexpected or rapid change; also,
lighthearted, lively; explosive; unable to hold the attention fixed because of an inherent
lightness or fickleness of disposition.