The Work: Part One

I love the phrase The Work. It’s such an almost vague phrase. I love to hear a witch talking of “getting on with the Work” or “doing the Work”. I love that the Craft is a work. Work, of course, is shortened or the essential form of the term, the Great Work, originally referring to the alchemical process which is all that the magician does to bring about the Philosopher’s Stone. We have taken it into the Craft understanding the very process of creating the Philosopher’s Stone, Alchemy, is what the work is about.

            The concept of The Work is what separates an adept and a devotee from people dabbling around in Wicca books on the shelves of Barnes and Noble, that what we are doing is not a business of learning one off spells, but that, we are involved in something whole, something that encompasses all of what we do, the spells, the rituals, the gestures, the meditations, the surrenders, the sacrifices, the adherence to principles which take place in the seemingly ordinary sphere of life. We are saying that The Work is ongoing, not a matter of instant success, that The Work is something we are inviting to take place in our lives though we will not see the whole of it, and we may not truly have much of a concept of what it is doing.

           

Wikipedia describes the alchemical definition of Work. We have inherited a medieval concept which may have, or may have never been thought to create an actual Philosopher’s Stone. The phases used by the magicians, are the phases we, in our way, use in our own devotion in one way or several.

The Great Work (Latin: Magnum opus) is an alchemical term for the process of working with the prima materia to create the philosopher's stone. It has been used to describe personal and spiritual transmutation in the Hermetic tradition, attached to laboratory processes and chemical color changes, used as a model for the individuation process, and as a device in art and literature. The magnum opus has been carried forward in New Age and neo-Hermetic movements which sometimes attached new symbolism and significance to the processes. The original process philosophy has four stages:^[1][2]

• nigredo, a blackening or melanosis
• albedo, a whitening or leucosis
• citrinitas, a yellowing or xanthosis
• rubedo, a reddening, purpling, or iosis

So those are the very bare bones of Alchemy, of going about the Great Work. Now that we know what the work is, creating the Philosopher’s Stone, let us turn to a small exploration of just what that is.