Plate 2 – The Prima Materia Revealed

Above, the two angels hold a droplet representing the prima materia. In the heavens above, it is pure potentiality, a prism radiating the life giving energy of the sun.

The man holding the three-pronged trident is the embodiment of Chronos — time and space of a single life, expressing all the elements of that life through the dualities of an innocent form of male and female energy. The heavens are eternal, but our time-based linear lives are held in him as a symbol.

The same droplet is mirrored on earth, bound to a grounded furnace where a more matured and human male and female energy are in prayer and contemplation around it.

Jung's Reading

For Jung, the prima materia was the depth of unconscious material in our psyche, a raw undifferentiated mass of autonomous complexes, shadow material and archetypes waiting to come forth in our lives either integrated or bursting forth as fate.

A Broader Interpretation

I have a slightly different reading here, more all-encompassing, perhaps more accurately alchemical in both physical and psychological senses.

As when we cook, we take the raw materials available to us to form a dish of our choosing. No matter what the opus (work) might be, great or small, we hold both the unconscious depths and the mundane resources of life:

• The relationships we care to nurture
• The financial resources available to us
• The context of our daily lives
• The skills and knowledge we have thus far accumulated
• Even the suffering and joys we work with every day

It is this sum total of our lives — inner and outer, conscious and unconscious — that we must first acknowledge, understand and be grateful for.

The First Task

For no work of any kind can be started or completed without this prima materia. And it is in the contemplation and recognition of this absolutely unique and infinite raw material in our lives, that we prepare ourselves for the rest of the work ahead.

Any good project manager starts the plan with a statement of the resources available to them, and it is in this plate that we do that, not glossing over even the parts of the prima materia that might initially seem inconvenient or shameful or contradictory.

The undifferentiated unknown potential of heaven finds form and recognition in the earthly furnace below.

As Above, So Below

In that droplet we see the limitless condensed into the finite, the eternal distilled into the now. And so we begin the work, not with perfection, but with gratitude for the raw, infinite prima materia of our lives.