The Great Work

The operation is described by what the matter in the vessel looks like. First the blackening, nigredo, in which the starting material is broken down and putrefied and the mass goes dark. Then the whitening, albedo, often described as a washing or a purification and associated with the moon and with silver. Then in many accounts a yellowing, citrinitas, which some authors omit. Finally the reddening, rubedo, associated with the sun and with the stone itself, which is described as capable of perfecting base metals into gold and, in some traditions, of extending life.

Around this run the standard elements: a prima materia which the texts refuse to name plainly, a sealed vessel, a fire that has to be maintained at exactly the right degree for a long period, and a sequence of operations named for what they do to the matter.

Modern history of science has recovered a good deal that earlier readers assumed was allegory throughout. Lawrence Principe and others have reconstructed alchemical recipes in the laboratory from the original texts and obtained the described results, showing that the deliberately obscure language often encodes real and repeatable chemistry rather than only spiritual instruction. That does not settle what any given author intended. It does mean that reading the whole literature as symbolic is a modern habit rather than a discovery.

By the nineteenth century the phrase had been detached from the furnace. In the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the orders descended from it, the Great Work names the whole course of initiation, and its central attainment is described as the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, a term the order took from an earlier grimoire tradition. The alchemical vocabulary is retained as a map of stages rather than as a set of instructions about matter.

Aleister Crowley used the phrase constantly and defined it in several ways: as the union of opposites, as the accomplishment of the True Will, and as the process by which an individual identity is brought into right relation with what lies beyond it. In Thelemic writing the operation of the alchemists and the operation of the magician are treated as one thing described in two vocabularies.

Carl Jung read the literature a third way, as a record of processes in the psyche projected onto matter by people who had no other language for them, and he mapped the colour stages onto stages of individuation. His reading has been enormously influential and is also the one that historians of alchemy most often push back against, on the ground that it treats the chemistry as merely a screen.

The two senses of the phrase are best understood as one term used by two trades that overlapped for centuries, and a reader meeting it has to ask which trade is speaking.