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Nigredo, Albedo, Rubedo

Nigredo, Albedo, Rubedo

The three canonical color-stages of the alchemical opus — blackening, whitening, reddening — name the sequence of psychic transformation the adept undergoes in the work. They appear in the rosarium-philosophorum as the Death image (nigredo), the Return of the Soul as white dew (albedo), and the emergence of the Rebis (rubedo).

The nigredo is the alchemists’ putrefaction — the “melancholia” that Jung identifies with the depressive encounter with the unconscious. “The old Masters identified their nigredo with melancholia and extolled the opus as the sovereign remedy for all ‘afflictions of the soul’” (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1955). The Rosarium’s own text praises it: “O blessed Nature, blessed are thy works, for that thou makest the imperfect to be perfect through the true putrefaction, which is dark and black” (quoted in Psychology of the Transference, Jung 1954). Jung places the nigredo beside St. John of the Cross’s dark night: “the ‘spiritual night’ of the soul as a supremely positive state, in which the invisible — and therefore dark — radiance of God comes to pierce and purify the soul” (Jung 1954).

The albedo is the sunrise that follows: “the whitening (albedo or dealbatio) is likened to the ortus solis, the sunrise; it is the light, the illumination, that follows the darkness” (Jung 1954). Symbolically the soul returns from its ascent as dew — Gideon’s dew, the ros Gedeonis — to the purified body.

The rubedo is the final reddening in which “the work comes to an end, the retort is opened and the philosophers’ stone begins to radiate a cosmically healing effect. He unites all the opposites in himself and binds together the four elements of the world” (von Franz 1975). The Self is the psychological name for this result.

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