You Didn't Fall Out of Love. You Just Never Reached the Coniunctio Stage
Most people are sure that relationships end because of incompatibility.
The alchemists of the sixteenth century would probably have put it far less romantically: you never even began the Great Work.
In the treatise Rosarium Philosophorum, love is almost never treated as an emotion. The alchemist was suspicious of feelings in general: they are too changeable. He was interested in another question: can the meeting of two opposites give birth to a third thing that never existed before?
That is exactly what the famous cycle of engravings with the King and the Queen is about.
The King is the Sun (Sol), philosophical sulfur (Sulphur), the principle of form, will and activity.
The Queen is the Moon (Luna), philosophical mercury (Mercurius), the principle of receptivity, fluidity and the capacity for transformation.
It is important to understand: this is not a man and a woman. These are two fundamental alchemical principles, which can exist both inside one person and in the relationship between two people.
Until they are joined, the Great Work is impossible.
That is why the cycle begins not with a wedding, but with a meeting.
In the first engravings they stand facing each other.
They are still separate.
They still exist as two independent worlds.
And this is exactly where modern people usually make their first mistake.
We try to find someone who will be completely like us.
The alchemist, on the other hand, looked for an opposite.
Because identical elements do not create a new nature.
The next scene is the famous Coniunctio.
It is the embrace of the King and the Queen.
Today it is easy to mistake it for a romantic scene.
But practically every classical alchemical author warns: Coniunctio is the most dangerous operation of the Great Work.
Because union does not begin with harmony.
It begins with dissolution.
Each principle is forced to give up its absolute independence.
That is why the next engraving shocks the modern viewer.
The King and the Queen lie in one sarcophagus.
For the alchemist, this is not a tragedy.
It is the stage of Mortificatio, the symbolic death of the old forms.
The old structures can no longer exist.
If the old personality does not fall apart, the new one is not born.
Only after this does a mysterious figure appear: the Rebis.
Not a man.
Not a woman.
Not a biological hermaphrodite.
But a philosophical symbol of the completed unity of opposites: Sun and Moon, sulfur and mercury, spirit and matter.
That is why alchemy never considered love the goal.
Love was only the furnace.
The firebox.
The place where a person either goes through their own Great Work, or walks out of the relationship exactly the same as they walked in.
What can a modern person take from the Rosarium Philosophorum?
- Stop looking for a copy of yourself.
Alchemy claims the exact opposite of popular psychology.
Growth begins where you meet a different nature.
Not necessarily a convenient one.
Not necessarily a comfortable one.
But one capable of revealing what you would never have noticed in yourself.
- Do not try to avoid your own Mortificatio.
Practically every deep relationship sooner or later destroys your image of yourself.
We call it a crisis.
The alchemist would call it a necessary stage of the work.
Sometimes it is not love that collapses.
It is the old personality, which can no longer exist in its former shape.
- Do not ask: "Does he love me?"
That is perhaps the least alchemical question there is.
Another one is far more interesting:
"Does this meeting give birth to a new form of my consciousness?"
Because that was precisely the goal of the Great Work.
Not to hold on to another person.
But to be transformed yourself.
Perhaps that is why, almost five hundred years later, the engravings of the Rosarium Philosophorum look so modern.
They are not about romantic love.
They show the price of any real inner transformation.
Anna Inskaya
House of Wanderers