Solutio : we dissolve and reform on the path of awakening.

Have you ever felt like you were dissolving?   I have felt this way many times during my dark night of the soul experience which began to come upon me at age 36.  I went through the deep depression of the nigredo first, and indeed I think I have only begun to come out of it in the past few years.  But the solutio (or dissolving), well that began from about 50 years onwards and is part of the alchemical work to become a more fully individuated person, less captured by emotion, more open to feeling and the inner feminine.  It also helps us to gain access to our spiritual selves the way to which may have been blocked before the nigredo or solutio.

Solutio in every way continues the work done in nigredo – in fact so much so that these two stages are really two sides of the same coin that we can imagine side by side as the black and the white of the yin and the yang symbol merge and mirror each other.

In solutio we come to the whiteness beyond the blackness: we pass from emotion into feeling, from the solar plexus to the heart.  Emotion and feeling are frequently confused – solutio clarifies the difference.  Emotions belongs to everything we’ve seen in the nigredo, whereas feeling, always softer, more receptive, freer and clearer is something quite different.  It connects us to spirit.   At the same time, emotion , rightly understood is the fuel that feeling can come out of through purification and fire.  So now, after the descent of the mind in nigredo, in solutio we are rising – we are going into the heart.

Solutio brings us to the core alchemical saying solve and coagula, dissolve and re-form, which we can understand as purify and reform, or re-unite.

The essence of solutio is whitening, which is why it is also called ablutio (ablution, washing) baptisima (as in baptism, here with fire as well as with water) and albedo, with its connotations of albino. It has specifically to do with the soul which is the deep part of us that is feeling, and spirit, the wiser higher part that reaches beyond our minds.  It is where Luna and the feminine principle come into their own as a transforming power.  

Solutio is literally the softening of the soul itself,.. freed from the carapace of ego … associated with Jupiter (rather than Saturn which rules nigredo.)  Jupiter relieves and releases us into expansion – like breathing out…. and with Neptune… the deep sea or oceanic ancestral or collective unconsciousness and dreaming.  Going by the way of the Moon.  

 The white stone – as opposed to the black sun of nigredo – is where light becomes solid as a result of repeated distillation and coagulation. It is the pure spiritual substance and end point of the Lesser Work and for some alchemists it was the goal of the whole work. (I love the symbolic image of a luminous pearl for this process as grains of sand are repeatedly washed through our tears we turn the grit of our experiences into gifts or luminescent wisdom – at times.)

We come out of the solutio far more compassionate people, more awake and alive to the subtleties of feeling, the inner feminine and open to the inner life, but also more enlivened and less weighted down by the entrapment we so often feel in the depression and heaviness of the nigredo. 

NOTE :  Some of the paragraphs in this post are taken from Jay Ramsay’s book Alchemy : The Art of Transformation, interspersed with my own observations and writing.