A depiction of putrefactio, or putrefaction of the prima materia, one of the processes involved in the nigredo stage of the Great Work. As George Ripley explains in The Compound of Alchemy, written in 1471:

And likewise unless the matter putrefy,
It may in no way truly be altered,
Neither may thy elements be divided kindly,
Nor the conjunction of them perfectly celebrated,
That thy labour therefore be not frustrated,
The privitie of our putrefying well understand,
Before ever you take this work in hand.

Above: Emblem 9, “Putrefactio.” from Philosophia Reformatis (1622) by Johann Daniel Mylius, engraving by Balthazar Schwan.

Above: Emblem 6, “Of the Secrets of Nature,” from Atalanta Fugiens, depicting the third stage of the alchemical process, citrinitas, following the whitening of the alchemical matter during the previous albedo stage. The epigram for this emblem compares the alchemist’s process for seeding gold in the alchemical matter to that of the farmer sowing seeds to later reap the harvest:

Any matter surviving the transformational decomposition of nigredo was next purified in the albedo (“whiteness”) stage of the Work. The prima materia within the alchemist’s laboratory, reduced during nigredo to its fundamental components, was then ready for purification and refinement during the albedo phase via ablutio, the “washing away of impurities”; this resulted in the prima materia shifting in color from black to white.

Psychically and spiritually, such clarity in the individual’s psychic contents and soul emerges through facing and embracing the darkness of the nigredo and the shadow. From the complete acceptance of the “dark night of the soul,” a plunge headfirst into the depths of despair, comes an inevitable inversion of the totalizing darkness in the emergence of clarity and illumination from above. For this reason, Jung likened albedo to Heraclitus’ concept of enantiodromia (ancient Greek, enantios, “opposite” + dromas, “running” ), the principle that everything in existence must eventually become its opposite—similar to the Daoist doctrine of yin and yang being dual aspects of the natural order of the universe, in which each force taken to its extreme leads to the emergence of other, illustrated by the he tu symbol (often called the “yin yang” in English).

Just as an overabundance of yin reveals within itself a portion of yang, during albedo, in the absolute darkness of spiritual night, the soul’s light emerges, shining from above like the moon to guide the alchemist through the darkest reaches of the psyche. This stage was associated with the production of silver, the metal associated with the moon, and reflected an embrace and examination of one’s shadow aspects. Sifting the psyche to remove fears, attachments, and distortions of the ego would allow for greater emotional equilibrium within, and lead the alchemist to the realization of their soul’s fundamental purity. As light and clarity would be brought to the alchemical matter during this phase, so too would illumination be shed on the psyche—first on conscious and egoic beliefs, desires, motivations, values, and attachments, and then on the depths of the unconscious.

The four stages of the Great Work, followed by Hellenistic alchemists such as Mary the Prophetess and Cleopatra the Alchemist, were known in ancient Greek as melanosis (“blackening”), leucosis (“whitening”), xanthosis (“yellowing”), and iosis (often mistranslated as “reddening,” but derived from the ancient Greek iodes, meaning “violet”; colloidal gold particles show in solution as a violet color). As early as the 10th century, it had become common practice to subsume the third stage, citrinitas (“yellowness” in Latin), into rubedo, the final phase of the alchemical process, as seen in the image above.

Rustics their seed to the fertile earth commit,

When with their harrows they have made it fit:   

The Sophi thus their golden seed do sow

In foliated earth as white as Snow:

This method well observe, and you'll behold,

As in a glass, by wheat, your budding gold.

The final stage of the Great Work, rubedo (“redness”) saw all components of the alchemical matter reunified in a radical new form. Western alchemists following a three-stage process often subdivided rubedo into two phases: citrinitas—described previously as a transitional, yellow phase between the purification undertaken in albedo and the achievement of the Philosopher’s Stone in rubedo—and iosis (“violet”), a final, purple phase of the alchemical matter indicating the culmination of the Work. According to Dennis William Hauck: 

Purple is actually the color of gold in solution and is an indicator of pure gold atoms in chemistry. To alchemists, it meant the minute quantity of gold revealed by the Yellow Stage was being seeded in the experiment and would eventually grow to transform the entire matter. Alchemists also referred to this stage as the “Transmutation of the Venom,” and they believed it meant that any contamination or poisons left over from the Nigredo were now completely purified and assimilated. With the successful completion of the Red Phase, the Philosopher’s Stone was produced and the base metals transmuted into pure gold.

Regardless of the weight given to citrinitas as a phase of the Work in its own right, the achievement of rubedo indicated the success of the entire alchemical project, with the Philosopher’s Stone resulting from the arduous process of breaking down the prima materia in order to cleanse its disparate elements of impurities, to then reconstitute these during rubedo in the exalted form of the ultima materia (“final material”). As George Ripley summarizes in The Compound of Alchemy (1471),

Hide the altitude of bodies, and show out their profundity,
Destroying the first quality in every one of your materials,
And repair anon in them secondary qualities more glorious,
And in one glass, and with one rule, turn four natures into one.

This material process of decomposition for the purpose of reconstruction parallels the psychospiritual process of individuation, in which the ego and false self are dismantled, the conscious and unconscious are illuminated, the soul and true self are recovered, and all aspects of the psyche are embraced as elements of the self. Alchemists frequently depicted rubedo as the union of opposites, the sacred and highly-sought conjunctio oppositorum, symbolically portraying this phase as the marriage of a queen dressed in white, representing albedo, with the red-robed king of rubedo, the conjunction of the sun and moon, and the merging of male and female into one entity. The red phase was also described as the integration of body and soul, as it was achieved through a process of sublimation, followed by a fixing of the alchemical matter in a stable, solid form mediated by substances including mercury and aqua vitae, so as to, per Ripley, “make the body spiritual…that the spirit may be corporeal, / And become fixed with it and consubstantial.”

Often depicted as a phoenix rising anew from the ashes, rubedo signifies the individual’s consolidation of all aspects of the psyche discovered and explored in the previous three stages into a unified, indestructible sense of self, now ready to reintegrate into the world newly whole and self-realized. Having embraced their shadow and overcome their ego to recover the truth of their soul, the alchemist is guided by their soul’s light toward the emergence of their true self dawning on the horizon. They now emerge into the light of a new day, whole and at peace within themselves, liberated and forever transformed.

Symbols: A crow, a raven, a black sun, a skeleton, an ouroboros

Element: Lead, earth

Tarot Cards: Death, The Devil, The Tower

Planets: Saturn, Pluto

“Go to the woman washing clothes, and do you after the same manner.”

Above: Emblem 3, “Of the Secrets of Nature,” from the alchemical treatise Atalanta Fugiens (1617) by Michael Maier. The emblem depicts the albedo phase of the Work as the second stage of the alchemical process, a phase associated with the water element and the ablution of the alchemical matter. As Maier explains in the accompanying discourse:

“if any impurities happen to linen clothes, whereby they are spotted and black, as with earthy recrements, they are washed away by the next Element, namely water…the clothes, which before were foul and unclean, do become pure, and free from Spots…reduced to perfect whiteness: The same also were observed in the Philosophical subject (the alchemical matter), whatsoever crudities and feces appear, they are purged and taken away by waters poured on, and the body brought to great clarity and perfection.”

At some point during the first millennium, it became common practice for many alchemists to subsume the third stage of the alchemical process, citrinitas (“yellowness”), into the final stage of rubedo (“redness”), reducing the number of phases of the Work from four to three. A three-stage process in which albedo is directly followed by rubedo is described in the Turba Philosophorum (c. 900 AD), an Islamic alchemical text presenting pre-medieval alchemical principles through a discussion between nine Greek philosophers on the nature of matter and the cosmos; its seventeenth dictum states:

O Turba of Philosophers and disciples, now hast thou spoken about making into white, but it yet remains to treat concerning the reddening! Know, all ye seekers after this Art, that unless ye whiten, ye cannot make red, because the two natures are nothing other than red and white.

The common practice of incorporating citrinitas into the the final stage of the Work has resulted in a relative lack of literature on this stage of the process today. Nevertheless, it seems like an oversight to omit citrinitas from the alchemical process as an important stage of psychic and spiritual transformation in its own right, necessary for transition from the more passive, reflective period of the albedo phase to the self-actualization and full integration of one’s creative agency occurring during the final stage of the process, rubedo.

This stage of the Work would mark the beginning of the alchemist’s transmutation of the White Stone achieved during albedo, which transmuted other matter into silver, into the Red Stone which could produce gold. The association of this stage of the Work with the initial appearance of trace amounts of gold, and the change in color of the alchemical matter from white to yellow, links citrinitas to the dawning of the sun, and thus to an awakening to one’s authentic identity and true nature. Just as the first rays of dawn follow the moonlight, citrinitas ensues from the illumination of the psyche and soul undertaken in the preceding albedo stage. The wisdom acquired during albedo—namely, a realization of the soul’s inherent purity, along with an understanding of one’s conscious and unconscious beliefs and drives—is now ready to be brought to the level of conscious awareness as valuable insight into the true identity of the individual and who they might become.

Symbols: Dawn

Element: Gold

Tarot Cards: The Magician, Strength, The Sun

Planets: Sun

Above: Illustration of rubedo from the Thesaurus thesaurorum (1725), in which the ultima materia is pictorially depicted as the Red King, the Red Rose, and the risen sun, all common symbols of the Philosopher’s Stone. The caption reads:

English:

red Lion, Sulfur of multiplication, Son of the Sun, King of the higher and the lower, to whom all things obey, who crowns his brothers with golden Crowns with one word blessed red Tincture and true elaborate Stone

Symbols: A red sun, a red rose, a phoenix, a crown, a red lion, the Red King

Element: Gold, fire, water, air, earth

Tarot Cards: The Sun, Judgment, The World

Planets: Sun, Mercury

Welcome!

My name is Rachel, and I am a tarot reader and astrologer in my late twenties. I was captivated by astrology, tarot, nature, spirituality, and magic as a child, but lost touch early on with the mystical and magical aspects of life due to the all-too-common experiences of childhood trauma and over-acculturation within a society that demands its standards of productivity and normativity be met at the expense of our creativity, sensitivity, uniqueness, passion, and soul life. Though I’ve been reading tarot cards for myself and others since I was a teenager, by then I considered tarot an interpretive and observational practice solely based on one’s psychological responses to the cards—an encounter with one’s own psyche rather than with something sacred and cosmic.

Only in my mid-twenties did I begin to have experiences that showed me the possibility for tarot and other forms of divination to be means of communion with both oneself and the numinous. Connection to the divine through divination, astrology, dream messages, and time spent in nature has not only anchored me through a slew of traumatic and challenging events over the past four years, but has also helped me to unpack and heal traumas and wounds experienced over a lifetime. My hope is to share these practices of divination and astrology to help others connect to the divinity within and around them, in order to heal, cultivate community, find clarity and direction, and truly thrive in life by honoring and embracing their true selves.