The Secret Work of the Hermetic Philosophy

64The demonstrative intermediates or signs are colours that affect the matter successively and in order, showing its conditions and changes. Three principal ones must be noted as critical signs; some add a fourth. The first is black, called the crow's head from the deepest blackness that emerges. Its twilight indicates the beginning of the action of nature's fire and dissolution; its darkest night indicates the completion of liquefaction and the confusion of the elements. Then the grain putrefies and is corrupted, so that it becomes better fitted for generation. White succeeds black, and in it the first degree and white sulphur reach perfection. Here the stone is called blessed; this is the white, foliated earth in which philosophers sow their gold. The third colour is yellow, produced in the passage from white to red, intermediate, as it were, and mixed from both. It is like saffron-haired dawn heralding the sun. The fourth colour, red or blood-coloured, is drawn from white by fire alone. Whiteness, because it is easily altered by any other colour, loses its brightness as soon as the daybreak glow arises. Dark redness, however, completes the work of solar sulphur, which is called the male seed, the fire of the stone, the royal crown, and the son of the sun. In it the practitioner's first labour comes to rest.