The Alchemical Operation of Calcination

Calcination is counted the first of the seven operations into which the alchemical Great Work is often divided. In the laboratory it named the reduction of a substance to ash by fire.

Operation and its meaning

Read symbolically, as the alchemists read their own work, Calcination stood for the burning-away of the gross and the ego, the breaking-down of the dross so that what endures may be found. In the scheme of correspondences that links the operations to the seven classical planets, it is attributed to Saturn.

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.