Dorn writes in his “Philosophia speculativa”: “No one ascends into the heaven which ye seek, unless he who descends from the heaven which ye do not seek, enlighten him.”553 Dorn was perhaps the first alchemist to find certain statements of his “art” problematical,554 and it was for this reason that he provided his foetus spagyricus, who behaves in an all too Basilidian manner, with a Christian alibi. At the same time he was conscious that the artifex was indissolubly one with the opus.555 His speculations are not to be taken lightly as they are occasionally of the greatest psychological interest, e.g.: “The descent to the four and the ascent to the monad are simultaneous.”556 The “four” are the four elements and the monad is the original unity which reappears in the “denarius” (the number 10), the goal of the opus; it is the unity of the personality projected into the unity of the stone. The descent is analytic, a separation into the four components of wholeness; the ascent synthetic, a putting together of the denarius. This speculation accords with the psychological fact that the confrontation of conscious and unconscious produces a dissolution of the personality and at the same time regroups it into a whole. This can be seen very clearly in moments of psychic crisis, for it is just in these moments that the symbol of unity, for instance the mandala, occurs in a dream.
© 2024 jon wilson
Substack is the home for great culture