Between the death of the nigredo and the clarity of the albedo, the alchemists inserted a stage that has no analogue in any purification logic that moves cleanly from dark to light. The peacock's tail interrupts that movement. It doesn't point toward whiteness so much as it delays it — flooding the material with every colour simultaneously, none dominant, none resolved. Roger Bacon's observation is the one worth sitting with: all the colours that can be imagined appear *before* whiteness. Not a sample, not a preview — everything, at once, in the moment just preceding coherence.

The temptation is to read this as promise, as the dawn-light before full illumination. The alchemists themselves edged toward that reading, calling the cauda pavonis a "welcome sign." But what the image actually depicts is a soul that has been washed — not yet reconstituted. The iridescence is real; it belongs to the surface of molten metal, which is neither solid nor formed. This is the soul in solution, after the burn-off and before the setting, when it genuinely contains everything and has committed to nothing. That state is not a transit corridor. It is itself a condition — unstable, excessive, incapable of use — and the alchemists, to their credit, gave it a name rather than hurrying past it.