Citrinitas and Rubedo

We start off the chapter on yellow with a brief mention

that many alchemists did not include the stage of yellow,

especially in the later years of alchemy’s heyday,

but moved directly from white to red.

Hillman, who was himself trained as a Jungian analyst,

suggests that Jung included the yellow because he was fond of the fourfold nature of things,

seeing the quaternity as a suggestion of wholeness.’

 (click here for Ptero’s blog)

I wondered why I had not come across James Hillman’s Psychological Alchemy until I went looking on Amazon and found that they start at $250 for a used copy- ouch!  Regardless, this statement about skipping the yellow phase was one of those titrational statements that suddenly brought a huge amount of information into focus for me.  Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival that has become part of my piece on the Fisher King’s Wife has kept showing…