The Alchemical Operation of Coagulation

Coagulation is counted the seventh of the seven operations into which the alchemical Great Work is often divided. In the laboratory it named the fixing of the purified essence into a stable, permanent form.

Operation and its meaning

Read symbolically, as the alchemists read their own work, Coagulation stood for the completion of the work, in which the refined matter is made solid and enduring; the goal toward which the earlier stages tend. In the scheme of correspondences that links the operations to the seven classical planets, it is attributed to the Sun.

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.