Nigredo

For the character in Xenosaga, see Gaignun Kukai. Nigredo is also an album by Diary of Dreams.In alchemy, nigredo, or blackness, means putrefaction or decomposition. Many alchemists believed that as a first step in the pathway to the philosopher's stone, all alchemical ingredients had to be cleansed and cooked extensively to a uniform black matter.In analytical psychology, the term became a metaphor 'for the dark night of the soul, when an individual confronts the shadow within'.