Three principal colors: black, white, and red. Regimes of the work.
color replaces direct access to the substance. Because the vessel is sealed, the alchemist cannot touch or intervene. Color becomes the primary language through which the matter communicates its condition. This is why authors obsess over shades, sequences, timing, and peripheral signs like rings, vapors, and condensates.
Black is the first decisive sign. It indicates putrefaction, corruption, and the death of the former form. Alchemists treat blackness as the key confirmation that the work has truly begun. Without blackness, nothing has died, and therefore nothing new can be born. This is why black is repeatedly equated with Saturn, earth, night, death, west, raven, and eclipse. The matter has entered a state of dissolution where its previous identity is no longer intact.
Generation requires corruption. Life proceeds from decay. In the laboratory, putrefaction manifests as blackening, odor, instability, and internal movement. The raven’s head becomes the emblem because it marks the threshold between inert material and generative matter.
White follows black but only after a gradual transition…. the appearance of gray and peripheral whitening before full albedo. Whiteness signifies purification, resurrection, and the first stabilization of the matter. It is associated with life returning after death, with washing, with lunar qualities, and with the union of fixed and volatile. Whiteness does not mean completion. It means the matter is now alive, clean, and capable of further perfection.
The allegory of resurrection: White is repeatedly described as life overcoming death, the King rising from the tomb, and the soul returning to the body. A compound that has survived putrefaction and now resists immediate decay. It is stable enough to endure continued work.
Red is the goal rather than the process. Red indicates full maturity, fixation, and perfection. The matter is no longer moist or unstable. It has become dry, coherent, and enduring. Red is associated with fire, gold, carbuncle, blood, and the sky. The cracking and swelling described at the end corresponds to final internal reorganization before complete fixation.
The colors are mentioned in the desired order and have the same names as in Philalethes. Let's finish by saying quests metal symbols applied to colors when we designated the colors by the names of the metals. We also symbolized the colors by fruits; in the following passage, we are talking about the intermediate colors between white and red and red itself. “Then giving the third degree of fire, all kinds of excellent fruits came to grow and grow, like quinces, lemons and oranges pleasant to the sight, which transmuted in a short time into pleasant red apples” (Cassette du petit paysan). Bernard the Trevisan speaks of colors in allegorical form. “For this, it is said that the thing whose head is red, whose feet are white and whose eyes are black, is the whole magisterium” (The Abandoned Word), and elsewhere “So, I asked him what color the King was? And he answered me that he was dressed in cloth of gold on the first floor. And then he had a black velvet doublet and a snow-white shirt and flesh as sanguine as blood. (Bernard leTrévisan: the Book of the natural philosophy of metals). Finally, the colors were assimilated to the four elements: “Four colors appear in the work. Black: like coal; white: like the fleur-de-lis; yellow: like the feet of the bird called merillon; red: like ruby. We call blackness: air, whiteness: earth, yellow : water and red: fire” (David Lagneau: Harmonia chimica). It must be added that the alchemists varied in the application of the names of the elements to the colors, one called the darkness air, and another called it earth, so the following passage differs notably in this respect from the preceding one. “In the first regime the stone is black, we calls it Saturn, earth, and names of all black things. Then, when it whitens, it is called living water and names of all waters, salts, white earth. Then when it yellows and sublimates , it is called air yellow oil and the names of all volatile things. Finally, when it turns red, we call it sky, red sulfur, gold, carbuncle and the names of all precious red things, whether mineral, animal or vegetable” (Changor buccinœ). We will now look specifically at the three main colors, black, white and red. The first to appear is black, the alchemists have spent a lot of time on this color because it is what indicates that the work is on the right path: “The matter put moving in suitable heat begins to turn black. This color is the key and the beginning of the work. It is in it that all the other colors, white, yellow and red, are understood” (Huginus a Barma: The reign of Saturn). The Hermetic philosophers gave several names to black. “It is blackness, a sign of putrefaction; philosophers called it west, darkness, eclipse, leprosy, raven's head, death “(Ariadne Net). But its main symbol was the raven. “Know also that the raven which flies without wings in the darkness of the night and in the light of the day, is the head or the beginning of art” (Hermes; The Seven Chapters). It was also called crow's head. “The index of this fertilization is this Aleph or dark beginning which the ancients called a raven's head” (Huginus a Barma: The reign of Saturn). According to Rouillac (Abrégé du Grand Œuvre) black was symbolized by the crow, because, he says, crows are born white and their parents abandon them until they have black feathers like them, likewise the alchemist must abandon the work if darkness does not appear. This is then a sign that the work has been failed and that we must start again. Raven's head, raven, black color, are absolutely synonymous among alchemists. Flamel calls black: "black raven teste of very black black." We have also seen that Saturn is the symbol of darkness, and when the philosophers say: “Saturn must overcome all the other planets”; this means that the black color precedes all others in the work. Black was the indicator of the operation called putrefaction. These terms were often taken interchangeably. Here is the reason, according to a theory popular in the Middle Ages, nothing can be born without putrefaction, life proceeds from it. dead. “It is not possible for there to be any generation without conception” (Huginus a Barma: The Touchstone). It was believed that flies were born from corrupted silt, and Van Helmont claimed to have seen old rotten linens give birth to mice. This theory applied to the three kingdoms of nature; the beginning of the work must therefore be corruption and putrefaction, after which the vivified matter evolved and perfected itself until it turned red. Furthermore, putrefaction is the symbol of death from which life will spring. Death is night, “black, life is light, white, so we understand why the alchemists called black putrefaction. “Thus the first operation of our Stone was given the name of putrefaction, because then our Stone is black” (Roger Bacon: Mirror of Alchemy). The black appears about forty days after we begin to heat the philosophical egg: “Heat the philosophical solution moderately in a hermetically sealed vessel for forty days, until black matter forms on the surface. , which is the head of the raven of philosophers” (Alain de Lille: Dicta Alani de lapidi philosophico). During darkness, according to Philalèthe and Flamel, there is a strong odor that can be smelled if during this part of the work the vessel ruptures. Before making, the material is very fetid, but afterward its smell is pleasant; therefore the wise man said: This water removes its odor from the dead and inanimate body” (Morien: De transmusatione metalorum). The water spoken of here is the liquid formed by the condensation of vapors in the philosophical egg. Indeed, during the dark, yellow, red, green vapors are released (oxygenated compounds of chlorine, chlorine, hypoazotic acid) which fill the egg, these gases mixed with water vapor condense and fall back onto the matter finally no more gas is released , complete darkness arrives, everything is at rest. The Alchemists dealt at much less length with the color white. After black comes gray “The gray color then appears black” (Handwritten note in the margin of the Library of Chemical Philosophers). Finally white appears but by degrees. “The sign of perfect whiteness is a small circle? very thin which appears in the vessel at the periphery of matter, its color tends towards orange” (The Ladder of Philosophers). Then this circle grew, it emitted small white extensions, fine convenient hairs (hence the name sometimes: capillary whiteness) converging towards the center, these extensions multiplying, finally the whole mass became white. Flamel in his book says that whiteness is the symbol of life, black the symbol of death , and that he therefore represented in his hieroglyphics of the cemetery of the Innocents, the body, the spirit and the soul or matter of the stone, like men and women dressed in white, and resurrected from among the tombs, to signify the life-giving whiteness which comes after death, black, putrefaction. Philosophers have given several names to whiteness: nummus, ethelia, arena, boritis, corsulfe, cambar, albor œris, duenech, ronderic, kukul, thabitris, ebisemeth, ixir. Finally, as for the allegories and symbols of whiteness, Pernety summarizes them perfectly in his Mytho-Hermetic Dictionary.» Philosophers say that when whiteness comes to the matter of the Great Work, life has conquered death, that their King is resurrected, that the earth and the water have become air, that it is the regime of the Moon, that their child is born, that the sky and the earth are married, because the whiteness indicates the union or marriage of the fixed and the volatile, the male and the female.» As for the color red, alchemists talk little about it; it indicates the happy ending of the work. The material dries up completely and turns into a bright red powder, we heat it more strongly than we have done before, we break the egg and we have the Philosopher's Stone. “When the stone, having reached red, begins to crack and swell, it is calcined in a streetlight where it finishes setting completely and perfectly.» (Arnauld de Villeneuve: Novum lumen). The symbol of the completed work is a triangle with a lower apex, the base of which is surmounted by a cross. It is found in the 12th card of the Tarot." — Theories and Symbols of the Alchemists The Great Work by Albert Poisson, c. 1891