Alchemical opus

The alchemical opus, or Great Work, is the old alchemists' four colour stages of change, black, white, yellow and red, which writers borrow as a structure for a character being broken down, purified and remade.

Spoilers for all seven Harry Potter books follow.

The old alchemists said that to make gold you first had to destroy what you started with. Their process, the Great Work or magnum opus, ran through four colours: the matter turned black, then white, then yellow, then red. Writers took that pattern and turned it on people. A character is broken down, washed clean, woken up and finally remade, and the colours mark the way.

The four stages as story

• Black, nigredo. Rot and despair. The old self falls apart, often through grief or a loss of everything certain.
• White, albedo. Washing. What was dark is purified, usually slowly and with more loss.
• Yellow, citrinitas. Dawn. A new understanding breaks through. Many later alchemists dropped this stage, so it is the one stories mark least clearly.
• Red, rubedo. The finished work. Opposites are joined and the hero is made whole, often at the cost of a sacrifice. The result is the philosopher's stone.

Harry Potter as an alchemical opus

The series announces its subject in the first title, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The stone belongs to Nicolas Flamel, a real fourteenth century Parisian whom legend turned into an alchemist, and the stone that drops into Harry's pocket from the Mirror of Erised is blood red, the colour of a finished stone. Harry's two guides in that book are Rubeus Hagrid and Albus Dumbledore. Rubeus is Latin for red and albus for white, the two main colours of the work.

Read the last three books as the opus and Harry himself is the matter being refined, a boy who carries a piece of Voldemort inside him that must be burned away.

• Order of the Phoenix is the blackening. Harry spends the book angry, isolated and shut in the gloom of Grimmauld Place, the dark house of the Black family. The book is named for the phoenix, the alchemists' bird of death and rebirth. It ends when Sirius Black falls through the veil. A man named Black dies to close the black stage.
• Half-Blood Prince is the whitening. The book is a slow washing of the past through Dumbledore's memories in the Pensieve. It ends with the death of Albus, whose name means white, laid in a white marble tomb.
• Dobby marks the yellowing. The yellow stage has no name sign in the books, but one reading puts it at Dobby's death. Harry digs the grave at Shell Cottage by hand, without magic, and in that grief his head clears. He gives up chasing the Hallows and understands what Dumbledore's plan asks of him. It is the dawn of the yellow stage, an awakening rather than a death of the old self.
• Deathly Hallows is the reddening. It opens with a wedding, the alchemists' image for the union of opposites, between red haired Bill Weasley and silver blonde Fleur. The Minister who dies early is Rufus Scrimgeour, and rufus is Latin for red. The red haired Weasleys stand around Harry to the end, and Fred dies in the battle. Then comes the sacrifice the stage demands: Harry turns the Resurrection Stone in the forest, walks to Voldemort to die, and comes back with the impurity gone. Harry has become the stone, the thing that turns death into life, and the epilogue joins him in marriage to Ginny Weasley.

The critic John Granger did the most to make this reading popular. Whether every detail was planned matters less than how well the frame explains the books' shape: three deaths, three colours, and a hero refined by each.

The same colours in other books

Alchemy has fed literature for centuries, sometimes as structure and sometimes as satire.

• Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Tale and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1610) mock alchemists as frauds and their customers as fools.
• The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616), credited to Johann Valentin Andreae, is a whole allegory of the work, a seven day story built around a royal wedding.
• Goethe's Faust has Faust remember his father, an alchemist, marrying a red lion to a lily in a warm bath: red joined to white, the reddening's wedding in one image.
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein gives Victor a boyhood spent reading Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. His failed act of creation is an opus with no purification at all.
• Marguerite Yourcenar's L'Œuvre au noir (1968), published in English as The Abyss, takes its French title straight from the blackening and follows a sixteenth century alchemist and doctor.
• Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (1988) turns the work into a shepherd's journey toward his own purpose, with the lead to gold image kept as a metaphor for the self.
• Hiromu Arakawa's Fullmetal Alchemist builds a whole world on the rule of equivalent exchange and reveals that its philosopher's stone is made from human lives, a dark take on the sacrifice of the red stage.

The psychologist Carl Jung read the stages as a map of the mind, nigredo as depression and the meeting with one's own shadow, which is part of why modern writers reach for them. The pattern also turns up where nobody called it alchemy. Tolkien's Gandalf the Grey falls into darkness in Moria and returns as Gandalf the White.

Why it matters to a writer or editor

The opus gives a character arc a shape the reader can feel even without knowing its name: loss first, then cleansing, then insight, then a costly union. Colour does the foreshadowing, since a name or an image can mark a stage before the plot reaches it. An editor reading a story built this way checks that each stage costs something, and that the red stage is earned rather than declared. For the single image version see symbolism, and for a story that runs on a second meaning throughout see allegory. The alchemists' own terms, from the tria prima to the chemical wedding, are in the Bossfeed glossary.

Frequently asked questions

What are the four stages of the alchemical opus?

Nigredo, the blackening, when the old self breaks down. Albedo, the whitening, a washing clean. Citrinitas, the yellowing, a dawn of understanding. Rubedo, the reddening, when the transformed self is made whole, often through sacrifice.

Did J.K. Rowling use alchemy on purpose in Harry Potter?

The first book is named for the philosopher's stone and features the real alchemist Nicolas Flamel, and Rowling has said she read a great deal about alchemy while building the wizarding world. How far the colour pattern runs through the later books is a reading, made popular by the critic John Granger.

Is the alchemical opus the same as the hero's journey?

They overlap, since both take a hero down into darkness and back changed. The opus is narrower: it is about purification, it marks each stage with a colour, and it ends in a union of opposites rather than a return home.