The Alchemical Operation of Separation

Separation is counted the third of the seven operations into which the alchemical Great Work is often divided. In the laboratory it named the drawing-apart of the dissolved matter into its components.

Operation and its meaning

Read symbolically, as the alchemists read their own work, Separation stood for the sifting of the valuable from the worthless, the conscious choosing of what to keep and what to discard. In the scheme of correspondences that links the operations to the seven classical planets, it is attributed to Mars.

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.