The Alchemical Rubedo: Revivication

Stanton Marlon's "Inquiry into the Alchemy of Soul-making" from Fire in the Stone: The Alchemy of Desire quotes James Hillman's "Concerning the Stone: Alchemical Images of the Goal" from Sphinx 5.

The relationship with [an] emerging energy and descent to its depths can be seen in an alchemical image, taken from the Rosarium, entitled Reviving [image below]. This descent, which depicts the soul’s return to the material body, is also a vitalization and “revivication.” It is a way of imagining what a soul wants and is a relinking with the body and the world. It is a relinking to the instinctual/archetypal lived body—animal, erotic, and sacred. It is the moment where the soul descends from heaven, “beautiful and glad” (Hillman 1993, 264). The soul yearns to enjoy this world and “has its goal a resurrection in beauty and pleasure” (Hillman, 261). It heralds the alchemical rubedo, the vital reddening of life. (Marlan 30-31)

Interior Topography

James Hillman's IN
Spring Journal 63: 1998

James Hillman reminds us of what we already know: “‘In’ is no doubt the soul word.” The word connotates an “interior topography,” a literal defined “place into which we go—the unconscious, the body; or a definite time in the past” (11).

This literalization makes us forget what the master said: not the psyche is in me, but I am in the psyche. We forget and literalize the soul inside the skin, the mind inside the skull, the dream, the emotion, the memory inside the “me” to the neglect of the collective psyche, the anima mundi in which we live our lives all day long. (11)

Any dictionary will explain that the preposition “in” means within the limits of space, time, condition, situation, circumstance (12). Once deliteralized and liberated from “Cartesian conundrums that catch it up in personal subjectivity versus the objective world, or mind versus matter, we can at last realize that anything anywhere offers its interiority and can deepen inward continually” (12). Hillman insists that the archetypal realm of interior topography belongs to the goddess Hestia, the “Goddess of the ‘inner’” (15-21). He defines her image and embodiment as a “glowing warmth-emitting hearth” and that the word “hearth” in Latin means focus translated as “the centering attention that warms to life all that comes within its radius” (15). Hestia is “not an object seen but an enlivening, enlightening focus, the soul essence that inhabits anything” (15), a “sacred space giving focus to psychic contents” (17). Like a cave, Hestia provides, what Ginette Paris describes in Pagan Meditations as, a “sacred asylum where one could take refuge” (qtd, 17).

An Animal Sense of the World

James Hillman's  The Thought of the Heart & the Soul of the World

Please, let me insist: by aesthetic response I do not mean beautifying. I do not mean planting trees and going to galleries. I do not mean gentility, soft background music, clipped hedges--that sanitized, deodorized use of the word "aesthetic" that has deprived it of its teeth and tongue and fingers. Beauty, ugliness, and art are neither the full content nor true base of aesthetics. In the Neoplatonic understanding, beauty is simply manifestation, the display of phenomena, the appearance of the anima mundi; were there no beauty, the Gods, virtues, and forms could not be revealed. Beauty is an epistemological necessity; aisthesis is how we know the world. And Aphrodite is the lure, the nudity of things as they show themselves to the sensuous imagination.

Thus, what I do mean by aesthetic response is closer to an animal sense of the world-- a nose for the displayed intelligibility of things, their sound, smell, shape, speaking to and through our heart's reactions, responding to the looks and language, tones and gestures of the things we move among.