Conceptio seu Putrefactio

The story

Where the previous plate showed two embracing bodies, this one shows a single corpse — double-headed, doubly crowned — laid out in an open coffin, with a dark winged form beneath it and clouds and crescent moons above. The caption reads plainly: "Here lie King and Queen dead, the soul departs with great distress." This is the nigredo, alchemy’s blackening stage: practitioners held that true transformation required the total breakdown of the newly joined substance before anything new could form, and they pictured that breakdown as death and burial. That the two figures have fused into one body, rather than simply lying side by side, marks the conjunction as irreversible — sun and moon no longer exist as separate things to return to. It is widely considered the emotional low point of the sequence, and one of its most frequently reproduced single images.