The Alchemical Operation of Dissolution

Dissolution is counted the second of the seven operations into which the alchemical Great Work is often divided. In the laboratory it named the dissolving of the calcined ash in water.

Operation and its meaning

Read symbolically, as the alchemists read their own work, Dissolution stood for the return of the hardened matter to a fluid state, and, in the spiritual reading, the loosening of fixed structures and the surfacing of what lay beneath. In the scheme of correspondences that links the operations to the seven classical planets, it is attributed to Jupiter.

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.