The alchemists divided their work into stages and named each for a color. The last was red, the color of the finished stone. The first was black. They called it nigredo, the blackening, and they were unanimous that it could not be skipped. Before anything could be made perfect it had to be broken down, dissolved and left to putrefy. The work began with a death.
An archive devoted to decay has an obvious interest in the one tradition that regarded decay as the necessary first step toward something. This essay gives a brief account of what alchemy was, and then looks more closely at what its practitioners meant by the black phase and what later readers have made of it.
What alchemy was
Alchemy arose in Egypt under Roman rule in the first centuries of the common era, at the meeting point of metalworkers' craft knowledge and Greek philosophy. It was developed with great sophistication in the Arabic-speaking world from the eighth century, and reached Latin Europe through translation in the twelfth. It remained a serious pursuit until the eighteenth.
Its theoretical basis was the belief that all metals are one substance in different states of maturity. In the earth, over long ages, base metals slowly ripen toward gold. The alchemist proposed to do in the vessel, quickly, what nature does in the mine. The agent of this acceleration was the philosophers' stone: a substance that, added in small quantity to molten lead or mercury, would complete its perfection. The same or a related preparation was credited with the power to cure disease and prolong life.
This program was called the great work. The texts that describe it are notorious for their obscurity. They speak of green lions, kings devoured by wolves, and marriages of the sun and moon. Recipes are deliberately scattered across several books, or given with a crucial step withheld. The alchemists said openly that they wrote in this way to keep the art from the unworthy.
The colors of the work
The stages are not given identically by every author, but the most widespread scheme has four.
- Nigredo, the blackening
- The starting material is dissolved, killed and putrefied until it becomes a black mass. Its emblems are the raven, the skull, the grave and the eclipse.
- Albedo, the whitening
- The black matter is washed and purified until it turns white. Its emblems are the dove, the swan and the moon. This is the stage of the white stone, said to transmute base metal to silver.
- Citrinitas, the yellowing
- A dawning or ripening, the white turning to gold. Many later authors dropped this stage and passed directly to the last.
- Rubedo, the reddening
- The completion. The matter becomes a deep red and is fixed as the stone. Its emblems are the phoenix, the king and the risen sun.
The sequence is a narrative. Something dies, is cleansed, and is raised in a more perfect form. It needs no pointing out that this is also the shape of the central story of the religion in which the European alchemists lived, and they drew the comparison themselves.
What happened in the vessel
For a long time it was assumed that the colorful language concealed nothing: that alchemy was either fraud or a purely spiritual exercise in chemical dress. Historians working over the last few decades have overturned this. They have taken the old recipes into the laboratory and followed them, and found that many describe real and repeatable procedures.
The alchemists were skilled practical workers. They perfected distillation, sublimation and the preparation of the strong acids. They produced alloys, pigments and medicines. Their symbolic names can frequently be decoded into ordinary substances, and the color changes they report are those that actually occur when certain metallic compounds are heated, dissolved and reduced. The blackening, in this light, is first of all an observation. Matter subjected to the early operations does turn black.
In the seventeenth century the same activity was known interchangeably as alchemy and chemistry, and several of the figures remembered as founders of modern science devoted years to it. The separation of a respectable chemistry from a disreputable alchemy came later, and was in part an exercise in tidying the family history.
The inward reading
None of this means that alchemy was only a laboratory craft. Its authors insisted that the operator's moral state mattered, that the work was a gift of God, and that what happened in the vessel mirrored a process in the soul. This follows from the doctrine of correspondence set out in our entry on Hermeticism: if the great world and the small world answer to one another, the purification of a metal and the purification of a person are two views of one event.
In the nineteenth century some writers went further and argued that the chemistry had always been a blind, and that the true subject of alchemy was the transformation of the practitioner. In the twentieth, an influential school of psychology took up the alchemical images as a record of the mind's own development, projected onto matter by men who did not realize what they were describing.
On the psychological reading, nigredo is the first stage of any real change in a person: a period of darkness, confusion and collapse, in which a settled idea of oneself breaks down. It is experienced as a death, and it cannot be hurried or avoided. What is rotting is something that needed to rot.
Historians are now cautious about these interpretations as accounts of what the alchemists themselves intended. They remain powerful as accounts of why the imagery still speaks to readers who will never light a furnace.
The uses of the black phase
What is distinctive in the alchemical view, and what makes it worth setting beside the essays on the theory shelves, is its attitude to decomposition.
In most systems of thought, decay is simply loss. A thing was whole and is now less so. The alchemists held that putrefaction is an operation. It does work. It frees what was locked up in a fixed form and makes it available for recombination. A substance that will not rot cannot be changed, and the adept's first difficulty was not to prevent corruption but to bring it about thoroughly. Their texts warn repeatedly against impatience at this stage, and against mistaking a partial blackening for a complete one.
The alchemists' first difficulty was not to prevent corruption but to bring it about thoroughly.
It is tempting to apply this directly to the condition described in The Slow Apocalypse, and to say that our institutions are merely in their black phase and a whitening will follow. The temptation should be resisted. The alchemists never claimed that everything which rots is on its way to gold. Most of what rots simply rots. The great work required a sealed vessel, a regulated fire and an operator who knew what he was about. Putrefaction was the beginning of a process only where someone was prepared to carry the process through.
The lesson that survives is narrower and more demanding. It is that breakdown is not in itself the opposite of making, and that some things cannot be remade until they have been allowed to come apart completely. Whether a particular darkness is the first stage of a work, or only a darkness, depends on what is done next. The texts are clear that the blackness must be endured. They are equally clear that enduring it is not the same as finishing.