The nigredo is a time of blackness and death and is often conceived of as the night of the opus. Ripley referred to the nigredo as the 'shade of Night' (t c b, 180), and Synesius called it 'the sable Robe [and] Night' (The True Book, 171). At this point of blackness and death it is as if the sun has been eclipsed forever and the adept may experience the deep despair associated with the black night of the soul (see eclipse, melancholia, sun and shadow). The opus alchymicum connigredo 134 sists of a reiterated cycle of dissolutions and coagulations of the Stone's matter in the alembic, and this cycle is sometimes compared to the sun's continual rotation around the earth (according to the Ptolemaic system). In this particular metaphor of the ' solve et coagula, night signifies the time of dissolution (the nigredo) while day signifies the coagulation. See opus circulatorium. nigredo the initial, black stage of the opus alchymicum in which the body of the impure metal, the matter for the Stone, or the old outmoded state of being is killed, putrefied and dissolved into the original substance of creation, the ' prima materia, in order that it may be renovated and reborn in a new form. The alchemists, along with popular seventeenth-century belief, held that there could be no regeneration without corruption. Nature could only be renewed after first dying away. The biblical parable of the grain of wheat was cited to support their theory: 'Chryst do it wytnes, wythowt the grayne of Whete / Dye in the ground, encrease may thou not gete' (Ripley, in t c b, 158). In the process of generating the ' philosopher's stone, the two seeds of metals, philosophical ' sulphur (hot, dry, male) and philosophical ' argent vive (cold, moist, female), must be obtained from the prima materia and then joined together. After they are united in the ' chemical wedding, they are then killed and dissolved into their first matter by the universal solvent, ' Mercurius. At the dissolution, the soul and spirit of the matter rise to the top of the alembic, separated from the body, which lies below, blackening and putrefying. The body is then washed by the ' dew of mercurial water so that it may become pure and white, ready for reunion with the soul (or with the soul and spirit which have already united to form an entity). The dissolution that takes place at the nigredo - sometimes called the mortification - is said to smell of the stench of graves and is frequently represented by the image of the bodies of the united lovers (sulphur and argent vive) lying in a coffin or grave while their souls float above them. Sometimes their united bodies are depicted as one hermaphroditic body (see hermaphrodite). Other symbols of the dissolution and putrefaction at the nigredo are the skeleton, the skull, the angel of death, ' Saturn with his scythe, the ' eclipse of sun and moon, the beheaded king or bird, the crow's head, the severed head, and all things black - ' night, ' the crow, ' the raven, coal, pitch, ebony, the black man, Moor or ' Ethiopian. Ripley wrote of the nigredo: 'But hyt hath Names I say to the infynyte, / For after each thyng that Blacke ys to syght' (t c b, 134) (see black). The dissolution is also symbolized by the ' flood, tears, the ' sweat bath, the dismemberment of the mercurial ' serpent or ' dragon, the truncated ' tree, the ' beheading of the bird or chopping off of the ' lion's paws and the death of the ' king (sometimes compared to Christ's crucifixion). The beginning of the opus is a time of bloodshed and lamentation. Fabridus commented on the opening emblem of Trismosin's Splendor Solis: 'Its season of spring is a season of sacrifice, its river a life stream of blood' {Alchemy, 17). During this black time of suffering, despair and melancholia may cast their shadow over the alchemist. In Johann 135 Nile Andreae's The Chymical Wedding the adepts become sad as they watch the beheading of the ' philosophical bird: 'His Death went to the heart of us* (160). The beginning of spiritual realization is always accompanied by some kind of sacrifice or death, a dying to the old state of things, in order to make way for new insight and creation.
— Lyndy Abraham
Ripley's image is precise and merciless: the matter does not weaken, it blackens. The soul and spirit rise, yes, but the body below them rots — and the alchemists do not hurry past the rotting. They catalogue it. The stench of graves, the skull, the crow's head, the severed limb, the lovers who have just been joined now lying together in a coffin. What makes the nigredo genuinely hard to hold is not its darkness but its sequencing. The chemical wedding comes first. Union precedes dissolution. What you most longed for has to die before anything else can begin, which means the desire that organized everything — the reunion, the completion — is precisely what gets killed. The alchemists disguised this with regeneration-language, the grain of wheat, the promise of the reborn stone, and there is nothing wrong with noting that the cycle continues. But Abraham's catalogue of symbols does not stay long at the resurrection end. It dwells in what is severed, beheaded, dismembered, blackened. The beginning of the opus is a time of bloodshed and lamentation. That is the actual ground note, not the renovation. Whatever the nigredo discloses, it discloses it in the failure of the united thing to hold — and the soul's work is not to escape that failure but to stay in the alembic while the body below goes on rotting.
Lyndy Abraham·A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery·1998