The albedo is the stage alchemists named for whitening — the soul's emergence from the blackness of the nigredo, not yet gold, not yet complete, but no longer undifferentiated. What Jung is tracing here is the convergence of two symbols at that threshold: the earth, which has been burned and calcined until it reveals its own whiteness as *terra alba foliata*, and Luna, who presides over this stage as the feminine principle that mediates between darkness and the coming light. That these two images — one chthonic, one celestial — meet at the same moment is not decorative. It tells you something about what whitening actually requires.

The soul does not ascend to clarity. It descends into its own body — into the earth of it — until that earth releases a whiteness that was already latent. Luna as *mediatrix* is not leading the process toward spirit; she is the principle that holds the tension between above and below long enough for something to become visible. The femina alba of the coniunctio is not yet the hieros gamos, not yet the full union of opposites. She stands at a threshold, and what she offers is not resolution but legibility — the soul becoming able to read itself against the white ground it has become.