Yellow Bile

Four stages [of the alchemical opus] are distinguished, characterized by the original colors mentioned in Heraclitus: melanosis (blackening), leukosis (whitening), xanthosis (yellowing), and iosis (reddening) … the xanthosis, otherwise called the citrinitas, gradually fell into disuse

Hillman establishes yellow bile’s alchemical correlate, citrinitas, as the omitted fourth stage of the opus whose loss reduces the quaternary symbolic system and forecloses a dimension of psychic transformation.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

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One’s nature goes through a temperamental turn, a change in humors from choleric to sanguine, which the dictionary defines as confident, optimistic, cheerful. So does citrinitas become the reddening.

Hillman maps the yellowing stage directly onto the humor of yellow bile (choler), arguing that the transformation from choleric to sanguine temperament is precisely what citrinitas accomplishes on the way to the rubedo.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

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“When one yellows, three becomes four, for one yellows with yellow sulfur.” Albertus Magnus says, “The yellow color in metals is caused by sulfur, which colors them.”

Hillman links yellow bile’s alchemical expression to sulfur as the agent of yellowing, identifying the chemical process as the ground of a symbolic and psychological transformation.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

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I am led to propose that the omission of yellow as the neglected fourth color eliminates the earthly stasis and inhe

Hillman argues that yellow’s elimination from the alchemical color sequence enacts a structural suppression of a psychic quality associated with earthly stasis and embodied arrest within individuation.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

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yellow bile to fire. Each of these humors, in turn, was believed to be the cause of a psychological temperament … yellow bile vindictiveness. … Jung investigated the four temperaments but found that they did not relate well to his psychological observations.

Place situates yellow bile within the classical humoral-elemental system, noting its correspondence to fire and vindictiveness, while recording Jung’s critical distance from the fourfold temperamental scheme.

Place, Robert M., The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting

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The Spanish amarillo relates to the bitterness of bile and the Hebrew yerek derives from yarak, to spit. Yet yellow has a host of cheerfully sunny implications, from the etymological link of “yellow” with “yolk” to the metaphorical association with ripening grains, spring flowers, honey, sunlight

Hillman excavates yellow’s etymological ambivalence — bitterness and spitting against solar abundance — to argue that simple symbolic or oppositional readings of yellow bile cannot exhaust its alchemical significance.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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the blood itself … having variegated colours and bitter properties, as well as acid and saline qualities, contains all sorts of bile and serum and phlegm … at war with themselves, because they receive no good from one another

Plato’s Timaeus presents bile, including the yellow variety, as a product of bodily corruption and civil war within the humoral constitution, a pathological breakdown of ordered natural proportion.

Plato, Timaeus, -360supporting

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the bitter element refines away, becomes acid. When tinged with blood the bitter substance has a red colour, and this when mixed with black takes the hue of grass

Plato describes the chromatic and qualitative transformations of bile as it moves through stages of decomposition, prefiguring the alchemical color sequence later elaborated by Hillman.

Plato, Timaeus, -360supporting

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The doctrine of the four humors of the body (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile) corresponding to the four elements of astrology (fire, earth, air and water), and leading to the Arabian enumeration of four temperaments … is an alchemical doctrine.

Rudhyar explicitly classifies the four-humor system — including yellow bile’s correspondence to fire — as fundamentally alchemical rather than merely medical, connecting it to the broader psycho-physiological framework he sees underlying astrology.

Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting

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Namely the three species above described: black, ‘bilious’, and yellow. The contrast is between the generic name ‘bile’, and these three names for the species.

The commentary on Plato’s Timaeus taxonomizes bile into black, bilious, and yellow species, establishing the differentiated typology of bile that the alchemical tradition and depth psychology would later absorb.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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the blood, the phlegm, the choler, and the melancholer (melancholy) … “humours” … because they have “moisture and fluxure” … one of the “humours” may take precedence in a particular person, acting as a sort of controlling metaphor

Miller invokes Jonson’s humoral theory — in which choler (yellow bile) functions as a potential dominant ‘controlling metaphor’ — as a psychological prototype for archetypal comedy and character formation.

Miller, David L., Achelous and the Butterfly: Toward an Archetypal Psychology of Humor, 1973supporting

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“The bitter principle, which we call yellow choli…” cf. the color and processes described in Pl. Ti. 82E–83D. Choli is cognate with German gelb, “yellow,” and Latin helvus.

Padel traces the etymological kinship of yellow bile (choli) with the Greek and Indo-European color terms for yellow, grounding the physiological substance in a linguistic and archaic imaginal field.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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May we imagine that within yellow lies the blackness whose intention is stopping, bringing to the dead stop of stasis all forward motion whatsoever? Remember Dürer’s morbid yellow spot, Bergotte’s tiny yellow patch in contemplation of which he falls dead.

Hillman argues that yellow bile’s psychological function includes a mortifying cessation of forward movement — a hidden blackness within the yellow that belongs to the alchemical drama of the work.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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yellowing operates upon the unio mentalis, it would have to be a transmutation of the mind, a change in intellect … the yellowed mind cannot be captured by whitened reflection.

Hillman identifies citrinitas as a specific transmutation of the intellect — a ‘yellowed mind’ — that cannot be comprehended from within the preceding white (lunar) condition, requiring its own mode of knowing.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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the bitterness and the yellowness of bile, the assertion of the identity of both cannot be the act of either of the senses; hence the illusion of sense, e.g. the belief that if a thing is yellow it is bile.

Aristotle uses yellow bile as the paradigm case for a cross-modal sensory error, noting that perceiving yellowness and bitterness simultaneously produces the illusion that all yellow things are bile — an early instance of humoral projection.

Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima), -350supporting

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it is Achilles’ liver, which Hecuba in her feeling for Hector slain would like to devour … the liver thus came to be regarded as the inmost spring of the deeper emotions … it is a huge blood-gland.

Onians links the liver — the organ of bile production — to the archaic Greek conception of deep emotion and cholos, situating yellow bile within a pre-Galenic psychology of visceral passion.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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the yellowing of her dreams also corresponds with the phases of the analysis itself: ending to return to her obligations in the world … Hers had been a very white analysis

Hillman illustrates the clinical appearance of citrinitas through a case vignette, showing how yellow’s emergence in a patient’s dreams marks the transition from a ‘white analysis’ back toward worldly engagement.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010aside

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to disclose the yellow light within a process we ourselves are in and to leave on it an indelible yellow stain … I have, in part, been yellowed.

Hillman’s personal confession that his own thinking has been ‘yellowed’ — stained by the citrinitas — enacts the reflexive dimension of his argument that psychological theory participates in the very processes it describes.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010aside

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Is there some connection between the melancholy tendencies of the right hemisphere and the mediaeval belief that the left side of the body was dominated by black bile?

McGilchrist briefly invokes the humoral system, distinguishing black bile (melancholy) from the broader bile complex, in the context of a neurological hypothesis about hemispheric emotional asymmetry.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside

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the king in his sweatbath ‘bathes and bathes again under the glass arch, / Till by the wet-dew he is freed from all bile’

Abraham’s alchemical dictionary cites the purification of the king from bile as a step in the ablution stage of the opus, connecting bile removal to the cleansing of the Stone’s prima materia.

Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998aside

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