The reddening — the rubedo — is not a reward. It follows the blackness and the whiteness not because the soul has earned something but because the process has its own rhythm, indifferent to the ego's timeline. Von Franz is tracking a late-medieval alchemist who cannot quite hold the distinction between himself and the bridegroom of Canticles, and that collapse is the point: the coniunctio works precisely by dissolving the boundary between the personal and the divine, the human author and the Christ-image. Jung called this "becoming Christlike," and the phrase is careful — not becoming Christ, not identifying with the archetype wholesale, but taking on its form from the inside, as a lived pressure in the psyche rather than an imitated ideal.

What makes this passage worth sitting with is the direction of the sacred feminine. The Godhead here is not the father, not the logos descending from above — it is Sophia, the Wisdom that the soul in its reddened state weds. That inversion matters. Alchemy consistently returned the feminine to the center of the divine drama at precisely the moment ecclesiastical Christianity was working to remove her. The bridegroom's red garment is not triumph; it is the signal that something has been endured long enough that union became possible — not as conquest, but as recognition.