Alchemy of words: extracting time from words

 

 

Harley Pequeno Cavalcanti Albuquerque

Psicólogo (UNIFOR), specialist in Analytical Psychology (UNICHRISTUS), trainee in Jungian Analysis at the Brazilian Society of Analytical Psychology (Sociedade Brasileira de Psicologia Analítica - SBPA). e-mail: <harleypca@gmail.com>

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This article intends to reflect on the power and substances that form words. Using words to talk about words is, indeed, a difficult endeavor. Ideas are the time contained in words; poetry, the compass in search of the path; and alchemy, the metaphorical map. Time is a central aspect, as time is hidden in words. The extraction is developed parallel with alchemy and its basic processes for reaching the divine spirit from matter. The studies and concepts of alchemy of C. G. Jung and E. Edinger are explored by comparing the projections of alchemists and poets. Feeling time in words to adjust poetic listening in clinical activities. In poetry, time works differently; the poet is the one who approaches the soul by putting words together. It is these words that break the iron stiffness of clocks. ■

Keywords: Words, Time, Poetry, Alchemy, Psychotherapy.

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John, 1:1 - In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (HOLY BIBLE, 2011).

This bare statement of the case might leave us entirely cold, were there no poets who could fathom and read the collective unconscious (JUNG, 1976, § 321).

This should be a writing that speaks for itself; ideally, there would be no author. Words talking about word, thinking about their own constitution; on their own matter ant the intentions that form them; being one, particularly, the one to whom the eyes and ears turn: time. What do poets do to time, when they put words together? What do we do to time when we speak? Words, in a way, shape time in favor of those who pronounce them. Where does this power come from?

Master, placid

Are all moments

Which we last through,

If, in lasting,

As in a jar,

We place flowers

(PESSOA, 2016c).

How to speak of words without considering the time that inhabits them? There is a time that is hidden by the word, and, specially, by the intentions of the one who pronounces or writes it. An answer? A silence? A pain? A yearning? Another word that was not contained, in the word that was said? All these and other possibilities may reveal the treasure of time stuck in the word. Inside letters and their unique arrangements, there is a component that makes them what they are: magic. Magic because, to a certain point, they delude us. No, "delude" is too strong a word. They create another reality, another environment and another time, in which only they have the control. Sometimes, they are fast arrows that pierce; in others, they come slowly like a breeze at the end of the afternoon. They are powerful because they are timeless. The logic of time as measure of displacement collapses at this very moment. The instant becomes eternal to the sound of certain words, which meet at the exact moment.

Like the alchemists, who tried to decant the soul, the principle or the divine spark that existed in matter, poets expose unequivocally the paradox of time in the union of words. The timelessness of poetry brings us, as Jungian psychologists, a way to make poetry of stories told in prose.

Jung (1980) used to speak about how alchemy intended to reach a treasure hard to be reached and produce it visibly. In his laboratory, projected his psychic treasure in matter and, inside it, tried to bring out what was basically in his unconscious. For Neumann (2014), the state of pre-egoic unconscious, in which conscience is still asleep as a seed, all can be found at the present and at the everlasting of eternal life. There is no time before the birth of man and of the ego; only eternity, not equally space, but just infinity. Hence, the poetical word would be the mean that he disposes of to perpetuate eternity?

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

The hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of

wisdom no clock can measure.

(BLAKE, 2007, p. 114).

William Blake, in his poetry, tries to show us, in his Proverbs of Hell, the difference between the ways that time is measured. He gently compares the time that is measured to the idea of time that is lived. In these words, the paradox of eternity is fixated on the gifts time gives us. As Jung (1976) said, the poet transforms in to words what others can only dream. Therefore, the poet's word makes matter out of what is imponderable in unconscious. Things without measure, unknown, dark, deep, are, in a certain way, presented to mankind in the assembly of the poet's words - and at that very moment, time stops. "Levem o mundo: deixem-me o momento¹" (PESSOA, 2016b, v. 1, p. 181).

Extracting the poetry from the experience of listening should be like arranging words out of their chronological sequence. The understanding of what is not said is ruled exclusively by the unidirectionality of consciousness, in which the end and the beginning might be in the same place.

For example, how much time might be contained in the word "yearning²"? How can we listen to what it conveys? Scrutinize it, break it, dissolve it - why not say it - promote the opus of the word.

The word carries within itself the fire, whose fuel is time. A poetical calcinatio³ warms up the word in the soul of the one who pronounces it, separating it from that which is volatile, allowing the time that has passed - that, reasonably, cannot return - to, possibly, resurface. When pronouncing the words of your yearning, some kind of fire is set, and the images return alive and strong. Sometimes when eyes close, there one is again, living that which was supposed to be in the past. Where did the logic of time go at that moment? There is none; time escapes the word and made itself present in the absence that yearning brought.

Immortality is a quality of the archetypes. Thus, the psychological meaning of the fire - bath of immortality will be that a connection is made between the ego and the archetypal psyche, making the former aware of its transpersonal, eternal, or immortal aspect (EDINGER, 1994, p. 54).

To hear the word in its symbolism and meaning affects the understanding of time as expressed by it. This way, it unfolds into new forms and comprehensions; altering its logic. Poetry contains that which is immeasurable, or maybe, who knows, the hybris that faces up to Cronos. Therefore, poetry talks about yearnings.

Durante tutto il viaggio la nostalgia non si è separata da me

non dico che fosse come la mia ombra

mi stava accanto anche nel buio

non dico che fosse come le mie mani e i miei piedi

quando si dorme si perdono le mani e i piedi

e io non perdevo la nostalgia nemmeno durante il sonno⁴

(HIKMET, 1933/63, p. 94 apud CAROTENUTO, 1994, p. 62).

HiIlman (1975) is quite synthetic when he says that our semantic anxiety makes us forget that words also burn and become flesh as we speak. Within this symbolism, one can reason that words heat up, burn up, and, might, let out the contents that form them.

What does one mean when using figures of speech? Maybe, that there is concrete evidence that there is something words cannot handle. Daily, in the psychological clinics, we hear "It is as is..." because one doesn't own the exact form to express what is desired. Words falter because they do not possess the dimension of the image they mean to express. Even so, it is them, within other meanings that will shape what one desires to say.

Metaphor floods the discourse and, this way, we reach some kind of solutio⁵: what could not penetrate is dissolved. Other words and other meanings "circumambulate" in as attempt to reach the original idea. For Edinger (1994), solutio corresponds to what goes on in psychotherapy because the fixed and static aspects of the personality do not admit change. Thus, so change can happen, the fixed aspects must be dissolved or reduced to prima materia.

Carrego meus primórdios num ardor

Minha voz tem os vícios de fontes

Eu queria avançar para o começo

Chegar ao criançamento das palavras

Lá onde elas urinam na perna

Antes mesmo que sejam modeladas pelas mãos

Quando a criança garatuja o verbo para falar o que tem

Pegar no estame do som

Ser a voz de um lagarto escurecido

Abrir um descortínio para o arcano⁶

(BARROS, 2015, p. 98).

The poem portrays the search for something original; something that, as it goes, takes one to the beginning. The search for words that are children in their innocence, so that, when spoken in a new context, they can be reborn. This way, the understanding that something mysterious is always present - yet not always perceived - is set. This is how it is done in the analytical process, according to Edinger (1994): solutio dissolves the fixed contents to integrate them in their prima forma. Poetically, one can say that these fixed contents are entwined with time. Usually, at the end of the solutio of words, we reach a disagreement with time because that which was certain blooms in doubts. What was done to the time in relationships and, consequently, to the time in life? When one decants words and lets their essence sublimate, the time within them sows its strength. Maybe, here begins a process of looking back - of perceiving the flowers subtlest perfumes and of perceiving each of the thorns along the way once more.

The step that follows the discoveries made at solutio would be to let them shape a new form of understanding the time that is left. Possibly, with an elective affinity, which shows the tendencies of certain elements - in this case, contents - to attract each other, creating something new. These relationships were extraordinarily well transposed from chemistry to human relationships by Goethe⁷. Therefore, one reaches coagulatio⁸, which, according to Edinger (1994), is equal to Creation. Though, somehow, reason may not understand that it is creating something. "God hath created all things by his word, having said unto them: Be, and they were made with the four other elements, earth, water, air, and fire, which He coagulated" (Turba Philosophorum⁹ apud EDINGER, 1994, p. 97).

It is perceivable that the power of word once again fixes itself to the thoughts and ideas of the psyche, such as in a process of coagulation. New ways of seeing and new lenses are given to the eyes of the soul, that, now, sees the word, the time that has passes and what is to come in a mew way. According to Edinger (1994), in psychological terms, this means that the activity and the psychic movement promote the ego. The exposure to the storm, to the tension of the action, and to the beating of reality will solidify the personality. In other words, the assimilation of a new complex is, thus, a contribution to the coagulatio of the Self. In terms of the analytical practice, continues Edinger (1994), at this stage, the individual assumes the person responsibility for the fantasies and inconstant ideas throw their expression before the analyst or another significant person and points out the difference between the idea that was thought and the idea that was said.

The use of words, at this moment, tries to find a way to stand still. The fixation of the idea in the form of words is, in a way, the search for eternity within a static moment in which one can perceive the change that process presents. One has the impression that the solution will turn into a new eternal illusion. What would be time before the eternal?

The tolling bell

Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried

Ground swell, a time

Older than the time of chronometers, older

Then time counted by anxious worried women

lying awake, calculating the future,

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future,

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless, before the morning watch

When time stops and time is never ending;

And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,

Clangs

The Bell

(ELIOT, 2002, p. 190).

The fragment of the poem touches one's soul by exposing the idea of a time that tries to rebuild itself within its impossibility. The idea of a time that fights for men to understand the force of nature, that moves it; that searches for the answers in its past for a future that refuses to obey it, because the force that causes the bell to toll is the same that ends the pulsation of the earth. It is this force that gives life and meaning to the hours. Perhaps, the impossibility of entwining the future and the past in a perfect patch exists, because the time contained in words of the poet precedes measurable time - precedes the Moirai¹⁰, because it is in the moment of sense that the spindles lose itself.

At the end, there will always be a new beginning because in the discoveries one makes about oneself, there is always something more. Neumann (2014) points out to species of the beginning that occurs in the (secondary) personalization of the human being, in which one turns to the tendency of taking transpersonal contents as personal; this, in a certain way, might describe is a poetical way, coagulatio, in which archetypical contents fall from the sky and are incorporated by the ego.

Words that have been submitted to fire, water and earth, now meet the air: reaching sublimatio¹¹. The meanings are elevated beyond themselves; one searches for words that can rise to reach the soul that is hidden behind the ears that hear them, or the eyes that see them. Concrete meaning is lost before the multiple possibilities rising toward understanding. Edinger (1994) says that the simple fact of finding adequate words or concepts for a psychic state might be enough for one to walk away long enough to look it from above

Perdi-me dentro de mim
Porque eu era um labirinto,
E hoje, quando me sinto,
É com saudades de mim

Passei pela minha vida
Um astro doido a sonhar.
Na ânsia de ultrapassar,
Nem dei pela minha vida.

Regresso dentro de mim
Mas nada me fala, nada!
Tenho a alma amortalhada,
Sequinha, dentro de mim.

Não perdi a minha alma,
Fiquei com ela, perdida.
Assim eu choro, da vida,
A morte da minha alma¹²
(SÁ-CARNEIRO, 2004, p. 22).

Perhaps, this is the place where poetry makes itself more present or, simply, where it is itself the elevation. Which word (meaning only it, by itself) would not feel diminished, before the vastness of so many others that could modify, enlarge or complete it? Time, here, crumbles before the elevation. The word rises and elevates itself, so the hands of the clock go mad and forget the direction of their movement. The vertigo of high places is surpassed in favor of the understanding of the dream when looking from above.

Flutuo em mim próprio

Sem já saber quem sou…

Sem presente,

Sem futuro,

Nem sequer passado

Demasiadas imagens

Na minha alma

Que transborda…

Demasiados fatos,

Datas,

Na minha memória

Que saiu do seu leito

E me inunda,

Me destrói,

Se destrói a si própria¹³

(FERRO, 1957, p. 50).

The poet captures the moment of elevation and transposes it into words. He seeks to immortalize the instant in which he wanders in the meanings of what he is. The image of being above oneself in a gap of time and space and observing oneself leads to a place of destruction and construction - of trials and errors, and then, new attempts "Upward movement eternalizes; downward movement personalizes" (EDINGER, 1994, p. 156).

So one reaches circulatio¹⁴. It is a stage of extreme importance in the therapeutical process because, for Jung (2012b), psychologically, the circulation would be the act of moving in a circle around oneself, so all the sides of personality are involved. Therefore, Edinger (1994) points out that the circular movement around the center, as well as up and down, promotes the possibility of going through the circuit of our own complexes during their transformation.

Ascent and descent, above and below, up and down, represent an emotional realization of opposites, and this realization gradually leads, or should lead, to their equilibrium. This motif occurs very frequently in dreams, in the form of going up- and downhill, climbing stairs, going up or down in a lift, balloon, aeroplane, etc. It corresponds to the struggle between the winged and the wingless dragon, i.e., the uroboros. Dorn describes it also as the "circular distillation" and as the "spagyric vessel" which has to be constructed after the likeness of the natural vessel, i.e., in the form of a sphere. As Dorn interprets it, this vacillating between the opposites and being tossed back and forth means being contained in the opposites (JUNG, 1977, §296).

Time exposed in words has a certain organizing linearity. There is information to pass and, in this process, one looks for constructing a sequence that goes through the course in the most effective way possible. Words are attempts to communicate images. The deconstruction of time in words might happen when they get close to the image and, instead of finishing them in their meanings, they just circumambulate because, perhaps, that is all they can do. Poetry might be the via regia to subvert this rule. In a certain way, it breaks the linearity of both time and the idea contained in words, leaving them suspended on what one wants to convey. Poetry floats through the meanings for those who read or listen, leaving them the task of fitting that which touches the soul. "O poeta inventa viagem, retorno, e sofre de saudade¹⁵" (HILST, 2018, p. 29).

In the circumambulation of images, the new arises and the words advance to a field in which they modify themselves in their meaning. Thus, something dies, something is modified. One reaches mortificatio¹⁶. Edinger (1994) considers mortificatio the most negative alchemical operation, which is linked to murk, defeat, torture, mutilation, death, and addlement. However, differently than one might think, the negativities are bridges that lead to positive images, such as growth, resurrection, and rebirth. Poetically, one might say that it is not always that one buries what is dead. The attachment to the dead image that once lived in plenitude as a way of acting and thinking shows the strength still contained in it. There is still the putrefactio¹⁷, a process that, according to Edinger (1994), can be interchangeable with the mortificatio - poetically comprehending it as the need to see that which once lived come apart. Time is required for the assimilation of the new that is yet to emerge. Both processes are linked to dark images.

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance (JUNG, 1979,(§14).

Time, once again, vices itself through words. One takes on a journey by looking back or projecting what is to come. Making choices always leave pieces on the roads. However, these pieces are set on the moment and interfere much more than one can imagine. They are like shadows that did not get lost in time, timeless words resurrect. The essence and the power to create life where there was only death live in them. As Hillman (2010) said, "Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us" (p. 9).

Triste, a escutar, pancada por pancada,
A sucessividade dos segundos,
Ouço, em sons subterrâneos, do Orbe oriundos
O choro da Energia abandonada!

É a dor da Força desaproveitada
- O cantochão dos dínamos profundos,
Que, podendo mover milhões de mundos,
Jazem na estática do Nada!

É o soluço da forma ainda imprecisa…
Da transferência que se não realiza…
Da luz que não chegou a ser lampejo…

E é em suma, o subconsciente aí formidando
Da natureza que parou, chorando,
No rudimentarismo do Desejo¹⁸

(ANJOS, 1998, p. 171).

The poet is consumed by the mourning of what is gone; his words wander through a time that is lost, through those forces that, without use, were lost at this same time. It is in the mourning of death that one realizes the life that is gone and the one that is left. Time, in the words of the poem, once again, gives the impression it is standing still - that there is no exit and no way out through which the displacement might create the time that makes pain inert. The opposites are exposed in an unmistakable way; they heart in their impossibility of choosing, in their imprecision, in that which does not come to pass. This is separatio¹⁹.

For Edinger (1994), separatio is an important aspect of psychotherapy because it is in this process that the most relevant, the separation between subject and object will take place - a separation between the objective and the subjective components of experience. Word and time come together differently: there is now a consistent (why not say conscientious) thread that unites them. The choice sets time free and, now, it flows in another rhythm.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep-

No more [...]

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

Soft you now [...]

(SHAKESPEARE, 2011, p. 60-1).

"To decide", that is the search, in the words of the poet. What to do before something that presents itself as irrecoverable? To decide, or to remain, still in thoughts. To accept the word that arrest and convicts one to eternal suffering, where time fades away, or to search, in the same word, another choice, a detachment that prompts one to move along uniting the unthinkable opposites into something restorative? The strength contained in the word that puts together the imponderable is the same that is capable of destroying the linearity of time. Thus, poetry along with its suspended time would be a way towards comprehension.

This is coniunctio²⁰: according to Edinger (1994), the target of the opus, supreme creation. It is the union of opposites, so none would stand out. It is a result from the final addition of the purified opposites and, as it combines the opposite, it softens and rectifies all unilaterality. Perhaps, poetry in its art of handling and combining words is what gets closer to this idea because there is, in a certain way, the union of a time that passes to one that stands still. Past and future, presence and absence, unite in words tied that, like magnets in their opposites, search each other. Opposites find each other because they are born for each other. It is an answer and a question, maybe an answer to a life. Rilke (2011), when writing to young poet, said:

Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future. (p. 29).

Answering to life, giving it full meaning, maybe this is the sacred union it proposes to us. For Jung (2012c), coniunctio is the creation of men, which are considerably informed of its paradoxical totality. One may speak of a complete integration, body and spirit, good and evil, life and death; this would be the conjunction that would offer the paradoxical image of the totality of men. To create time listening to the poetry of the words that reach us and give them back with the same strength they bring us - at long last, to unite time and life.

Master, placid
Are all moments
Which we last through,
If, in lasting,
As in a jar,
We place flowers.

Neither sorrows
Nor elations
Are there in life.
Thus, let us learn -
Misled savants
Not how to live,

But how to flow,
Tranquil, placid,
Having children
As our masters
And the eyes filled
Wide with Nature…

At riverside,
At roadway side,
As comes to be,
Ever in the
Same soft respite
Of existing.

Time wears on and
Tells us nothing.
Our years go by.
Let us, quasi
Maliciously,
Feel ourselves go.

All our gestures
Are inutile.
One resists not
The gruesome god
Whose own offspring
Ever devours.

Gathering flowers -
Let us softly
Move our hands through
Calm rivulets,
So as to learn
Calmness ourselves.

We - sunflowers
Towards the sun -
Shall leave this life
With tranquil climes,
Unremorseful
Of having lived
(PESSOA, 2016c).

 

Conclusion

There will be no conclusion because it would be nonsense, considering the idea of poetry. The time that turns on itself does not walk on the space, does not search for an end or a destiny. Its destiny is to turn and to search in itself for new interpretations and, at the same time it finds them, it destroys them, to begin the search once more. The conclusion will be the way each reader, during ten or fifteen minutes of reading, will modulate one's time after this words, after the poems enter their soul. The conclusion, for the analyst, will be the memory of the words and of the times hidden by them, when facing a life that presents itself as images through words. Therefore, the words in prose of the listened history will be able to leap for a listening in poetry. The listening of those moments in which, for a few seconds, the words shut and the eyes speak.

There is no way of concluding or ending because the idea is that of infinity. A poem begins at its end because its meaning carries continuity. It carries the strength of living words, gifted of the greatest treasure life could wish: time.

PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance, I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. [...] all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; [...] No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee (DONNE, s/d. p. 135).

May the end always bring the taste of the beginning. May the tolling of the bells is perceived by all of us in each smile, in each look and in every dream. Finally, may words be savored as the greatest treasure that time could wish: life. ■

 

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Received: 02/18/2022
Revised: 06/05/2022

 

 

1 "Take the world: leave me the moment" (our translation).
2 Originally, instead of "yearning", we had used the Portuguese word "saudade", that has no direct translation to English, but is used to convey the meanings of nostalgia, longing, and homesickness as well.
3 "Calcinatio derives in part from a chemical procedure. The chemical process of calcination entails the intense heating of a solid in order to drive off water and all other constituents that will volatilize. What remains is a fine, dry powder" (EDINGER, 1994. p. 31).
4 "During the whole journey, nostalgia did not leave me/ I am not saying it was like my shadow,/ it was by my side in the dark/ I am not saying it was like my hands and feet, / when you sleep, you lose your hands and feet, / and I did not lose my nostalgia not even in my sleep (our translation)".
5 "Solutio turns a solid into a liquid. The solid seems to disappear into the solvent as if it had been swallowed up. For the alchemist, solutio often meant the return of differentiated matter to its original undifferentiated state-that is, to prima materia" (EDINGER, 1994, p. 62).
6 "I carry my primeval with fervor/ My voice has the vices of fountains./ I wish I could advance to the beginning/ Reach the childing of the words/ There where they pee down their legs/ When the child doodles the verb to say what they want/ To hold the stamen of sound/ To be the voice of a darkened lizard/ To open the unveil for arcane" (our translation).
7 Cf. Elective Affinities, by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe.
8 "In essence, coagulatio is the process that turns something into earth. "Earth" is thus one of the synonyms for the coagulatio. It is heavy and permanent, of fixed position and shape" (EDINGER, 1994, p. 97).
9 To Jung (2011), the Turba Philosophorum is, among the classical works of alchemy, the one of the greatest authority. It was translated from Arabic to Latin between the XI and the XII centuries.
10 Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos are the moirai that spin the thread of life that was fixated by the gods. Each one has a specific function: Clotho was the "spinner", she spun the thread of life from her distaff into her spindle; Lachesis is the "allotter", measured the thread of life allotted to each person with her measuring rod; Atropos, the "unturning", was the cutter of the thread of life. She chose the manner of each person's death; and when their time was come, she cut their life-thread with her shears. (BRANDÃO, 2015).
11 "The term "sublimation" derives from the Latin sublimis, meaning "high". This indicates that the crucial feature of sublimatio is an elevating process, whereby a low substance is translated into a higher form by an ascending movement" (EDINGER, 1994, p. 131).
12 "I got lost inside myself/ Because I was a labyrinth,/ And today, when I feel me/ It is yearning for myself./ I passed my life/Dreaming on a crazy star/ yearning to surpass it/ I didn't even see it.// I come back inside myself/ But nothing speaks to me, nothing!/ I have my soul shrouded,/ dried, inside me.// I did not lose my sol,/ It stayed with me, lost./ Thus I cry, of life,/ The death of my soul" (our translation).
13 "I float in myself/ Without knowing who I am.../ Without present/ Without future,/ Or a past even/ Too many images/ In my soul/ That overflows.../ Too many facts/ Dates/ In my memory/ That has left its bed/ And floods me,/ Destroys me,/ Destroys itself" (our translation).
14 "Chemically, circulatio refers to the process in which a substance is heated in a reflux flask. The vapors ascend and condense; then the condensed fluid is fed back into the belly of the flask, where the cycle is repeated. Sublimatio and coagulatio are thus repeated alternately, again and again" (EDINGER, 1994, p. 161).
15 "The poet devises the trip, the return and suffers, missing all of it" (our translation).
16 "Mortificatio has no chemical reference at all. Literally, it means 'killing' and hence will refer to the experience of death. As used in religious asceticism, it means 'subjection of the passions and appetites by penance, abstinence, painful severities inflicted on the body' (Webster). To describe a chemical process as mortificatio is a complete projection of a psychological image" (EDINGER, 1994, pp. 161-162).
17 "Putrefactio is 'rotting', the decomposition that breaks down dead organic bodies. It, likewise, is not something that would occur in the operations of inorganic chemistry, with which the alchemists were largely concerned. However, witnessing the putrefaction of a dead body, especially a human corpse, which was not an unusual experience in the Middle Ages, would have a powerful psychological impact" (EDINGER, 1994, p. 162).
18 "Sad, listening, stroke by stroke/ The succession of the seconds/ I listen, in subterranean sounds, arising from the Orb/ The weeping of the forsaken Energy!// It is the pain of the unenjoyed Strength/ - The plainsong of the deep dynamos/ That being able to move millions of words,/ Remains at the static of Nothing!// It is the sobbing of a still inaccurate shape.../ Of the transference that does not come to be.../ Of the light that was nothing but a sparkle...// It is, in short, the subconscious there tremendous/ Of the nature that halted, weeping,/ At the crudeness of Desire" (our translation).
19 "The prima materia was thought of as a composite, a confused mixture of undifferentiated and contrary components requiring a process of separation" (EDINGER, 1994, p. 196).
20 Edinger (1994) divides coniunctio in inferior and superior. Inferior coniunctio is the union or fusion that are not yet completely separated or discriminated. Superior coniunctio, on the other hand, is the target of the opus, the supreme creation. Concerning this article, the word coniunctio refers only to superior coniunctio.