Nigredo - The Black Stage
The first stage of alchemical transformation involving putrefaction.
Nigredo is the necessary first stage of the work - the breaking down of fixed forms, confronting shadow aspects, experiencing the 'dark night of the soul.' Nothing new can be created until the old is dissolved.
The matter must first become black before it can become white.
Nigredo corresponds to psychological confrontation with the shadow.
Alchemical Literature
Written about in
- What Hermeticism says about failure
The first stage of the work is named for blackness and defined as putrefaction — the deliberate breaking down of fixed forms. The claim is not that failure is survivable but that nothing new can be created until the old is dissolved, which makes a collapse a stage rather than an interruption.