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.