Post #18. The Blackening: The Great Plague of 1665 as Alchemical Nigredo
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In the grand and terrible alchemical working that was 17th-century London, the Great Plague of 1665 was the Nigredo. This was the blackening, the putrefaction, the stage of dissolution where the old, corrupt matter is broken down into its primal, chaotic state. Before the city could be reborn in fire, it first had to die, to be reduced to a state of utter despair and decay. The plague was not just a random biological disaster; it was a necessary and terrifying stage in a massive magical operation.
The City of the Dead
The plague, when it came, was swift and merciless. It transformed the bustling, vibrant metropolis of London into a ghost city, a vast, open-air tomb. The rich fled, leaving the poor to their fate. The streets, once teeming with life, fell silent, punctuated only by the mournful cry of the bellman, "Bring out your dead!" and the rumble of the dead-cart on its nightly rounds.
This was a city in the grip of a profound spiritual and psychological trauma. The social order collapsed. The bonds of family and community were dissolved by fear. The air itself, thick with the smoke of cleansing fires and the stench of death, seemed to have become a toxic, malevolent entity.
The Magical Significance of the Plague:
Spiritual Cleansing: From an occult perspective, the plague was a brutal but necessary purification. It scoured the city of its physical and spiritual impurities, creating a blank slate for the work that was to come. The immense emotional energy generated by the plague – the fear, the grief, the despair – saturated the city, creating a powerful charge of raw, chaotic energy.
The Dissolution of the Ego: The Nigredo is the stage where the individual ego is dissolved, where the alchemist confronts the darkness within. The plague was a city-wide dark night of the soul. It stripped away the illusions of social status, of wealth, of power, and confronted the people of London with the raw, terrifying reality of their own mortality.
The Saturnian Influence: In traditional astrology, plagues and epidemics are associated with the planet Saturn, the great malefic, the lord of death, of limitation, and of time. The Great Plague can be seen as a massive Saturnian working, a period when the forces of darkness and dissolution held absolute sway over the city.
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The Symbolism of the Plague Pits
As the death toll mounted, the city’s graveyards overflowed. Great pits were dug to accommodate the dead, vast, anonymous graves where thousands of bodies were thrown together without ceremony. These plague pits, like the one at Aldgate, were not just a practical solution to a logistical problem; they were powerful magical sites.
They were wounds in the earth, places where the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead was worn thin. They were crucibles of putrefaction, where the physical bodies of the city’s inhabitants were reduced to their primal matter. The energy of these sites, the concentrated grief and terror of a thousand unhallowed deaths, would linger for centuries, a permanent scar on the city’s spiritual body.
The Preparation for the Fire
The Nigredo is not an end in itself; it is a preparation for the next stage of the Great Work, the Albedo or the whitening, which is often achieved through a process of fiery purification. The plague had done its work. It had broken down the old London, reduced it to a state of chaos and despair, and charged it with a massive amount of raw, undifferentiated emotional energy.
The city was now a tinderbox, not just physically, but spiritually. It was a chaotic mass of primal matter, ready to be subjected to the transformative power of the fire. The stage was set for the final, spectacular act of the 17th-century magical drama: the Great Fire of 1666.
For the hidden architects of London’s destiny, the plague was not a tragedy; it was a success. The first and most challenging stage of the Great Work was complete. The city was dead. Now, it was ready to be reborn.
In our next post, we will explore the Great Fire of 1666, not as an accident, but as a deliberate and brilliantly executed act of ritual magic, the fiery culmination of a century of turmoil and the true birth of the modern black magic temple of London.
Death is not the end. It is the beginning of the transformation. Follow the Secret City series.
Join us as we continue to uncover the secrets of the Secret City.
Solomon Jones (Author/Researcher)
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