Rubedo

Rubedo, the reddening, is the fourth stage and the completion of the Magnum Opus. It is the reunion of purified spirit with purified body, of soul with matter, yielding the Philosophers Stone, called also the red stone, the red king, and the elixir.

The colour-stages of the Work

Symbolically Rubedo marked the union and perfection of the whole, the attainment of the goal figured as the Philosophers' Stone or the red king. The classic sequence, nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo, describes the transformation of base matter into the perfected end of the Work through a succession of colours seen in the vessel.

The red stage is frequently pictured in alchemical emblem literature as a marriage, the chymical wedding of a red king and a white queen, or of sun and moon, imagery that runs through texts such as the sixteenth century Rosarium Philosophorum and its many illustrated successors, and which the depth psychologist C. G. Jung, in his 1944 study Psychologie und Alchemie and in the later Mysterium Coniunctionis, took as the clearest alchemical picture of what he called the union of opposites, the psychological integration he saw the whole colour sequence as figuring. The stage is described here within that documented tradition of European alchemy and its later interpretation.

Sources The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe with Psychology and AlchemyC.G. Jung

Rubedo closes the Great Work, and the Greek term behind it carries a shade of meaning the Latin loses.

The Greek names

The Graeco-Egyptian alchemical corpus gives the work as melanosis, leukosis, xanthosis and iosis. The Latin sequence in general use, nigredo, albedo, citrinitas and rubedo, translates it. The Greek word for the final stage is related to terms for a violet or purple tint as well as for rust, and it is not simply the word for red; the Latin rubedo narrows it.

That narrowing matters when reading a description of the finished work, because the sources are not all describing the same colour.

The end of the sequence

In the practical reading, the reddening is the completion of the operation on the metal. In the spiritual and later psychological readings it is the completed work in whatever sense that author intends. This atlas records the stage, its colour and its position, and records the interpretations as interpretations.

What the whole sequence is

Four stages, a colour each, running from a blackening through to a reddening, attested in the earliest substantial alchemical writings that survive and translated forward from there. Later Latin authors frequently reduce it to three by dropping the yellowing. Nothing in the sequence is a modern invention, which distinguishes it from several other schemes in general circulation.