Alchemical Operations
Conjunction
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Origin 1 to 400 CE
Conjunction is the fourth operation of the Great Work and its turning point. It is the recombination of the saved and purified elements into a new, unified substance, the chemical wedding or marriage of opposites, of Sulphur and Mercury, sun and moon, the masculine and feminine; on the inner path it is the union of the recovered parts of the self into a new and balanced center. It is often regarded as the birth of the lesser stone, the first tangible fruit of the work, and in the common planetary scheme it is attributed to Venus, who joins what was divided.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1 to 400 CE 1Tradition: Greco-Egyptian alchemy Origin Period1100 to 1700 1Tradition: Latin operative alchemy Origin Period1944 2Tradition: Psychological reading (C. G. Jung, Psychologie und Alchemie) Place of OriginGreco-Roman Egypt, and Alexandria in particular 1 Place of OriginTransmitted through Arabic alchemy into Latin Europe from the 12th century 1 Attributed Author / CompilerCirculates under names like Hermes Trismegistus, Geber, Basil Valentine 1 Attributed Author / CompilerNo single author; the corpus is anonymous and pseudonymous 1 Attributed Author / CompilerSeveral of those names belong to no historical person at all 1 Learn More
The Alchemical Operation of Conjunction
Conjunction is counted the fourth of the seven operations into which the alchemical Great Work is often divided. In the laboratory it named the recombining of the saved elements into a new whole.
Operation and its meaning
Read symbolically, as the alchemists read their own work, Conjunction stood for the marriage of opposites, the joining of the purified parts into a fresh and more unified body. In the scheme of correspondences that links the operations to the seven classical planets, it is attributed to Venus.
The alchemists worked at once with real chemical processes and with a language of spiritual transformation, so that a single term carried both a bench meaning and an inner one. The operation is described here within that documented tradition of European alchemy, whose sources run from the Hellenistic and Arabic writers through the Latin Middle Ages and the early modern laboratory.
Coniunctio in the Laboratory, and the Trouble With Counting Seven
Conjunction is the operation on which the imagery of the whole art turns, and it is also a plain description of putting two things back together.
What the word describes
Coniunctio means the recombination of what separation divided, the joining of two prepared substances into a third that is neither. On the bench that is a mixture, an amalgamation or a reaction. In the illustrated treatises it is drawn as a marriage, and the king and queen of the alchemical woodcuts are this operation in emblem form.
The emblematic register is not decoration added afterwards. Many of the surviving treatises are emblematic first and operational second, and the two readings ran together for the people who wrote them.
Where the number seven comes from
Exactly seven numbered operations, one per planet, is a modern arrangement rather than a historical one. The sources give different counts: Ripley's fifteenth-century Compound of Alchymy sets out twelve gates, and other authors give other lists in which these operations appear in other orders and alongside operations this scheme omits.
The atlas records the seven-step sequence because it is the one a reader will meet today, and records here that the tradition behind it was considerably less uniform than the numbering suggests.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Originates in Language
Produces
Aethiops Mineral is formed by the direct conjunction of mercury and sulfur ground together.
Amalgam is the direct product of mercury uniting with another metal, a natural real-world instance of the operation of conjunction.
Related To
Union of substances within the sealed vessel was pictured as taking place inside the philosophical egg.
Sources
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