Conjunction
Conjunction is the union of opposed principles, classically the 'chymical wedding' of a masculine sulphur and a feminine mercury, or of fixed and volatile, into a single body. It typically follows separation and purification, joining what has been refined. It is the fourth of Ripley's twelve gates ('matrimonial conjunction') but does not appear in Pernety's zodiacal twelve. Practically it denoted the combining and amalgamation of prepared substances.
See also the concept page: Conjunction
Historical Development
Conjunction is the operation of union, the joining of contraries (sulphur and mercury, fixed and volatile, male and female, sun and moon) into one body. It typically follows separation, recombining what has been purified, and it is among the most richly allegorized of all the operations, the centrepiece of the 'chymical wedding' imagery.
Conjunction is the fourth of Ripley's twelve gates, his 'matrimonial conjunction.' It is one of the Ripley operations Pernety's zodiacal scheme omits, and so it sits here among the major extra processes rather than under a zodiac sign, another marker of the difference between the two twelve-fold lists.
Textual Tradition
Conjunction is depicted vividly in emblem books such as the Rosarium philosophorum and Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1617), whose images of royal marriage encode both laboratory operation and philosophical meaning. Stanton Linden and Lyndy Abraham trace this imagery across the tradition.
Modern Scholarship
Scholars of emblematic alchemy read the chymical wedding both as coded laboratory instruction and as a vehicle for philosophical, psychological and theological meaning. Negotiating that duality, without collapsing the operation into either pure chemistry or pure symbol, is central to current historiography.