Citrinitas

Citrinitas, the yellowing, is the third of the colour-stages through which the alchemical Great Work (magnum opus) was said to pass. It names the ripening of the white matter toward a golden yellow.

The colour-stages of the Work

Symbolically Citrinitas marked the dawning of a solar, mature wisdom; in later schemes this stage was sometimes folded into the others and the sequence reduced to three. 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.

Citrinitas is the stage most often dropped from the sequence in the later Latin tradition: by around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many alchemical texts work with a threefold black, white, red sequence and treat the yellowing as a brief, transitional shade within the passage from white to red rather than as a distinct fourth stage in its own right, which is one reason it receives comparatively little independent discussion compared with the other three. Where it is kept as a separate stage, it is generally read, including by the depth psychologist C. G. Jung in his 1944 study Psychologie und Alchemie, as a dawning solar consciousness distinct from albedo's cooler, lunar clarity, a bridge stage rather than an end in itself. 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

Citrinitas is the stage of the Great Work that most later accounts do not have, and its disappearance is the most interesting fact about it.

The Greek sequence had four

The Graeco-Egyptian alchemical writings describe the work as four colour changes: melanosis, leukosis, xanthosis the yellowing, and iosis. Citrinitas is the Latin for the third of these, and it is securely part of the older scheme.

Three, not four

By the later Latin tradition the yellowing has in many authors been absorbed into the stages on either side of it, leaving a sequence of three: black, white, red. That three-stage version is what a great deal of later writing uses, including much of the modern psychological literature that borrows the vocabulary.

Neither version is wrong. They are different periods of the same tradition, and a reader who meets three stages in one book and four in another is not looking at an error.

Why it went

No single reason is documented. Proposals include the practical difficulty of distinguishing a yellow stage from the reddening that follows it, and the general tendency of a threefold scheme to be easier to teach than a fourfold one. The atlas records the four-stage sequence because it is the older, and records that the three-stage version is at least as widespread.