Alchemy's colors
Alchemists tracked their Great Work in colors: black, white, yellow, red. Along the way they made vermilion.
- Four stages
- Nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo
- Alchemy's red
- Vermilion: mercury + sulfur
Alchemists hoped to turn base matter into gold, and they judged progress by color. The Great Work ran through four stages, each named for one: nigredo, the blackening; albedo, the whitening; citrinitas, the yellowing; and rubedo, the reddening. Black meant decay and dissolution, white purification, yellow dawning, red completion. The philosophers' stone itself was often imagined as red.
After about the 15th century many writers folded yellow into red and kept three stages: black, white, red. Others described a flash of every color between, the cauda pavonis or 'peacock's tail'. The prize at the end was gold, the metal of the sun.
Alchemy left a real pigment behind. Heat mercury with sulfur in a sealed flask and you get black mercury sulfide, which sublimes into brilliant red crystals: vermilion. Chinese alchemists, who linked red cinnabar with long life, were probably making it this way centuries BCE. Recipes reached Europe by the 8th or 9th century, and vermilion became a favorite red of medieval manuscripts and altarpieces.
In the 20th century Carl Jung read the stages as a map of the psyche, from the despair of nigredo to the wholeness of rubedo. Whatever alchemists meant, the sequence is one of the oldest stories told in colors, alongside heraldry and the church calendar.
Swatches
- Nigredo · blackening, decay
- Albedo · whitening, purification
- Citrinitas · yellowing, dawn
- Rubedo · reddening, completion
- Gold · the goal
- Vermilion · alchemy's red pigment
Colors
Sources
- Principe, L. M. (2013). The Secrets of Alchemy. University of Chicago Press.
- Thompson, D. V. (1956). The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting. Dover.
- Jung, C. G. (1944). Psychologie und Alchemie (Psychology and Alchemy).
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