ALchemical psychology remarkably condenses the two traits of the lion heart–the conformity of its thought and its objectification- into the alchemical substance, sulfur, the principle of “combustibility,” the magna famma. “Where is the sulfur to be found?
asks Kramer, a fourteenth-century English Benedictine. “In all substances, all things in the world–metals, herbs, trees, animals, stones,
are its ore.
Everything that suddenly lights up, draws our joy, fares with beauty–each bush a god burning: this is the alchemical sulfur, the flammable face of the world, its phlogiston, its aureole of desire,
enthymesis everywhere. That fat of goodness we reach toward as consumers is the active image in each thing, the active imagination of the anima mundi that fires the heart and provokes it out.
(James Hillman, Thought of the Heart )
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is that which sticks, the mucilage, “the gum,” the joiner, the stickiness of attachment. Sulfur literalizes the heart’s desire at the very instant that the thymos enthuses. Conflagration and coagulation occur together. Desire and its object become indistinguishable. What I burn with attaches me to it; I am anointed by the fat of my own desire, captive to my own enthusiasm, and thus in exile from my heart at the very moment I seem most to own it. We lose our soul in the moment of discovering it: “Sweet Helen,” says Marlowe’s
Faustus, “make me immortal with a kiss./Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!” Hence Heraclitus had to oppose thymos and psyche: “Whatever thymos wishes, it buys at the expense of soul.”
sive projection. The alchemical basis of this kind of projection is actually the sulfur in the heart that does not recognize it is imagining. The objective himma is literalized into the objects of its desire. Imagination is thrown outward, ahead of itself; and the task is less to take back these kinds of projections -who takes them back and where are they put–but more to leap after the projectile reclaiming it as imagination, thereby recognizing that himma demands that images always be experienced as sensuous independent bodies. There are styles of projection: it is not a unitary mechanism. Cordial
projection requires an equally leonine mode of consciousness: pride, magnanimity, courage. To desire and to see through desire–this is the courage that the heart requires.
sun… the motive factor in consciousness, on the one hand Will and on the other Compulsion” (CW 14, S15t). Compulsion becomes will through courage; it is in the heart that the operations upon sulfur are performed. We shall come back to these operations in the second part. For now it is enough to recognize compulsive projection to be a necessary activity of the sulfur, as the way in which this heart thinks, where thought and desire are one.
We cannot let loose our aesthetic outrage in its simple form. Alchemical psychology recognized this need for work on the lion. Alchemical psychology considered the black and red sulfurs, and the green lion, in desperate need of subliming. One well-known method cuts off the green lion’s paws, depriving it of its reach into the world. Yet it stays alive as a succus vitae in the heart, for “green is the color of the heart and of the vitality of the heart,” as we know from Corbin. The color of the himma must be green like the natural
driving sulfur that is also the green/red copper goddess Venus. This ardent green has to be enlightened, the sulfur chastened: a whitening of the heart.
the heart to be red as its natural blood, green as its hopeful desire. This heart operation originates in the dilemma presented by sulfur: the imagination captive in its sulfur that both burns and coagulates at the same instant, imagination held fused into its desire and its desire fused with its object. The himma blinded, unable to distinguish between feeling and image, image and object, object and subject, true imagining and illusion.
This is not only an operation of calming and cooling, the “Doves of Diana.” In fact sublimation requires going with the fire, like curing like, raising the temperature to a white heat so as to destroy all coagulations in the intensity of the desire, so that what one desires No longer matters, even as it matters most, mattering now sublimed translucent, all flame.
(James Hillman,Thought of the Heart)
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