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blackness disappears under the surface as is often the case when dealing
with unconscious contents. This dreamer remains curious and
presses forward again. As he does so, the blackness reappears and
multiplies threefold. He now tries to grab hold of it, and as he does so,
it
becomes more solid and has an elastic texture.
He then tries to eliminate it by pulling it out of his body but discovers
that it is more deeply and ?rmly rooted than he had thought. Once
again, this kind of image is not uncommon in dreams. I have seen it on
a number of occasions in which dreamers are trying to pull something
out of their mouth, only to discover that it is fastened deeply within
the
body and cannot be pulled out. Sometimes this refers to an inability to
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say something that one is having a hard time expressing. The intensity
of a con?ict keeps it deeply connected to the body and the unconscious.
For this dreamer, there seems to be a continuing desire to be rid
of this black stu? but a more than equal desire to understand something
about the darkness within.
He brings his head down to his foot, signifying a change in perspective,
a descent of the head to the lowest part of the body, a coming
down of consciousness to see what is going on at the place of the
soul/sole and of blackness. As he does so, he discovers something that
he had not seen before: The pimple is not just a pimple any longer but
has become a hole, actually several holes, through which he discovers
something alive and breathing. The dreamer’s persistent desire to see
what is going on is met by the subtle body becoming transparent. He
can now see inside. Black ?laments are everywhere, and he sees a black
beast living inside himself.
As one might imagine, to discover this kind of unknown Otherness
inside of oneself, as part of oneself, is terrifying and monstrous. Yet
the
dreamer continues to try to determine where all this is leading. He
follows the blackness in its spiderlike intricacy throughout his whole
body, which is now transparent. This web of tentacles has spread
everywhere inside him. The change from casual curiosity to existential
fear
provokes a desire to get to the bottom of things, to the origin and
source
of the blackness itself. The source is discovered in the solar plexus, a
place where, in literal physiology, a large network of sympathetic nerves
and ganglia meet behind the stomach and form a hard, sunlike center.
In our dreamer these nerves appear as black tentacles, creating what
one might possibly imagine as a black sun center in the pit of the
stomach. Here an important vision occurs; the dark center appears as a
black head that has eyes and can see and speak to him. For the ?rst time
he addresses this darkness and meets it head to head as if engaged in a
spontaneous active imagination.
There is a long tradition of head symbolism in alchemy and early
literature, linking it both to the nigredo experience and to our human
potential for transformation. Edinger believes that “one reason seems
to be the connection between the term ‘head’ and top or beginning.
Blackness was considered to be the starting point of the [alchemical]
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work.”43 Edinger notes that the head also symbolizes the rotundum, the
round, complete man. The separated head and symbolism of beheading re?ect
this wholeness as extracted from the empirical man. “The
head or skull becomes the round vessel of transformation. In one text it
was the head of the black Osiris or Ethiopian that, when boiled, turned
into gold.”44
For our dreamer, the head takes on a less fearsome quality and stimulates
sweet memories of childhood, but it also becomes a paradoxical
interlocutor. The dreamer asks, “What are you doing here?” “You called
me,” he/she answers, “I serve you and I don’t serve you.” These
paradoxical responses make clear that the black head is duplex and
mercurial and re?ects the complexity of the unconscious psyche, which is
both trickster and guide. It is both male and female; it serves the ego
and
yet doesn’t serve the ego. In this sense one might imagine this head as a
pre?guration of the Self or of the whole man, which is never simply a
sweet experience.
What can it mean that the head “serves and doesn’t serve”? Jung
poignantly expresses this paradox when he says, “The experience of the
Self is always a defeat for the ego.”45 Moreover, the oracular head
symbolizes the consulting of one’s wholeness for information beyond
the ego.46 In this sense the black head and/or skull is a signi?er of the
memento mori, the existential knowledge of our own death. Edinger
states that it is “an emblem for the operation of morti?catio. It
generates re?ections on one’s personal mortality and serves as a
touchstone
for true and false values. To re?ect on death can lead one to view life
under the aspect of eternity, and thus, the black death head can turn to
gold.”47
In confrontation with the life of the psyche, the paradoxical truth is
that such engagement brings both defeat and transformation, death
and new life. This ‘truth’ is di?cult to assimilate, if it can be said to
be
“assimilable” at all. Perhaps it is better to say it is the ego that is
assimilated, not into the unconscious but into the larger life of the
soul, a
move that, as Hillman has said, “places man within psyche (rather than
psyche within man).”48
Such a process feels like a great danger to the ego, as if it is in
danger
of dying. This anxiety leads the dreamer to a medical doctor who indiThe
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cates that in these matters he is not competent. So one might imagine
that what the dreamer is dealing with is not in the realm of the “medical
body.” Next, the dreamer goes to see his analyst, but the analyst no
longer occupies the same place as he once did; his space has become
occupied by an alchemist. For the dreamer, it appears that the psyche is
suggesting that help is not to be found in the realm of either medicine
or psychoanalysis.
So, the psyche places the dreamer into connection with an alchemist, with
memory, image, and death within his own soul as he recalls
the man who had introduced him to the “black land” and who died
several years ago.49 The dreamer feels touched and full of respect and
now asks an important question, “What am I doing here?” With this,
a deeper dialogue is initiated with the alchemist, who calls him by
name and tells him that he is here to see the silence. This is a
statement
of the phenomenon of synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is traditionally
understood as a condition in which “one type of stimulation evokes the
stimulation of another.”50 It takes the dreamer out of his experience of
the
ordinary, empirical world and returns him to one in which silence is
not simply heard, but also seen.
Merleau-Ponty notes that from this perspective, the “objective
world . . . and the objective body with its separate organs . . . is
[often felt
to be] paradoxical.”51 The phenomenon of synaesthetic experience is
rather common, but we have lost sight of it because immersion in a
scienti?c Weltanschauung has “shift[ed] the center of gravity of
experience
so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking,
feel.”52 We have left our “natural lived bodies” and deduced from our
bodily organization a way of experiencing that is modeled on the
physicist’s conception of the world of perception.
If Merleau-Ponty is correct, it is not surprising why knowledge of
the objective medical body is inadequate to understand the dreamer’s
experiences. From this perspective, sight and hearing in our everyday
constructed mode are not fundamental in our experience. Might we
imagine, then, that the alchemist is pointing our dreamer toward a return
to both a more primordial way of seeing and to the lived rather
than the objecti?ed body?
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ferent from the “body” seen as an object of mechanistic physiology or
of classical psychology. For him, as for our dreamer, biology and
psychology are not the sources of the deepest understanding of our human
existence. Rather, Merleau-Ponty speaks of a reawakening of our
fundamental ground and of the strangeness and miracle of perception.
Such a strange “perception” occurs in our dreamer. As the alchemist
leads him down a corridor, he is ecstatic and has a feeling of
contentment, grace, and joy. He feels like thanking God. The dream ends
with
the alchemist opening the door to a ?nal complex, luminous, and
mysterious vision—a mobile of the sun and moon.
The theme of the juxtaposed sun and the moon is common in
alchemy and psychologically represents the tension and/or play of the
opposites—of day and night, rational and irrational, conscious and
unconscious. In ?gure 5.3, opposite ?ames are held by the male and the
female and merge in the alchemist’s ?ask. The sun and the moon appear
above the ?ask. Fabricius writes below the image, “Lighting the
?re of oneness in a furrow between two waves of the mercurial sea.”53
Thus, we might imagine that part of our dreamer’s vision has to do
with the bringing together of the so-called opposites re?ected in the
dual snakes entwined around the caduceus near the right knee of the
kneeling ?gure. The sun and moon perspectives are further di?erentiated
by the images of the solar ax and Foucault’s pendulum in the
dream. The individual symbolism of the dreamer complicates the
traditional images of the sun and the moon and gives them further
articulation, truly creating a complexio oppositorum, similar to the
tension
in the alchemical engravings reproduced earlier.
The alchemist here opens a way for the dreamer to contemplate a
vision of the “opposites” suspended on a mobile, which holds a
coincidence of sun and moon, light and darkness. These images hang
together in a mysterious suspension, appearing at the end of the
dreamer’s journey as if responding to the unanswered questioning at
the core of blackness itself. The images of the solar ax and Foucault’s
pendulum add to the mystery of this ?nal image, but here I comment
only on the notion of the mobile itself.
The mobile is a term said to be coined by artist Marcel Duchamp in
1932 to describe the kinetic sculptures of Alexander Calder, who was
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Figure 5.3. Lighting the ?re of oneness, from Nicolas de Locques, 1665.
From Johannes Fabricius, Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists
and Their Royal Art, p. 60
also a painter of a black sun. Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist
philosopher and writer, wrote the following of Calder’s invention:
A mobile does not suggest anything: it captures genuine living
movement and shapes them [sic]. Mobiles have no meaning,
make you think of nothing but themselves. They are, that is
all. . . . There is more of the unpredictable about them than in
any other human creation. . . . They are nevertheless at once
lyrical inventions, technical contributions of an almost mathematical
quality and sensitive symbols of nature.54
The mobile might well be imagined as another provocative model
of the Self. Sun and moon are not joined into any fusion, but each image
has its distinctive place. They hang together in a strange balance,
turning according to the movement of the universe, suspended as if
from some transcendental and invisible point above, as re?ected in the
patient’s dream.
Many of the themes that we have been discussing are expressed in
this single dream. In it we ?nd examples of the subtle-body process,
the monstrous dark sun, the solar plexus, alchemical transformation,
the nigredo, the morti?catio, and the Self. We see the process of psychic
transformation expressed as the dream ego engages the darkness
of the psyche and leads toward an enigmatic and symbolic vision that
deepens his psychic life.
Now we look at a more extensive case vignette, in which the black
sun plays a prominent role. In it a pastoral counselor struggles with
this image and is thrown into an encounter with psychic realities that
challenge his worldview. The pastor whose work I am about to describe
became aware of my research and o?ered to tell me about his
experiences. We corresponded for a little more than three months,
during which time he elaborated his struggle with Sol niger and his
developing understanding of the image. His ?rst experience with the
black sun was in the context of his ongoing Jungian analysis. The image
of Sol niger emerged in an active imagination. He drew a picture
of it (?gure 5.4). In the drawing, there are two human ?gures; he is on
the left, and a slightly larger ?gure of a cowboy is on right. The cowboy
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Figure 5.4. Black sun image. Artwork by analysand. Used by permission.
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He struggled with the depression for another year and a half with
help from another therapist, medication, and a group he was in but
?nally reached the point where he was simply not functioning. He went
into a hospital during the next year for a total of eight months, was
discharged, and gradually began to put his life back in order. Following
his hospitalization, he struggled with many aspects of Sol niger
including a masculine-feminine split and issues of the heart, death,
suicide, and obsessionality as well as with what he called a black hole
and
spiritual transformation.
One of the ?rst things he did upon visualizing the image of the black
sun was to look through Jung’s works for references. One particular
passage impressed him immediately, though it was not until a good
deal later that he started to experience what his intuition told him was
important. This is the passage he found:
Despite all attempts at denial and obfuscation there is an unconscious
factor, a black sun, which is responsible for the surprisingly
common phenomenon of masculine split-mindedness, when the
right hand mustn’t know what the left is doing. The split in the
masculine psyche and the regular darkening of the moon in
woman together explain the remarkable fact that the woman is
accused of all darkness in a man, while he himself basks in the
thought that he is a veritable fount of vitality and illumination for
all the females in his environment. Actually, he would be better
advised to shroud the brilliance of his mind in the profoundest
doubt.55
His personal experience strongly resonated with Jung’s description,
and he wrote in a letter:
My relationships with women have never been particularly satisfactory. I
like women and get along well as friends and colleagues, but intimacy has
been di?cult. This was the case in my
marriage, and in the couple of relationships I have been involved
with since then. Since dealing with the black sun, I have recog-
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nized a lot in myself that the Jung passage implies, and have come
to see that this has been at least part of what has been at the heart
of my di?culties with women.
There were several things that the pastor was almost entirely unaware of
before his experience of the black sun. One was his tendency
to blame women for his problems. He had done this for years, and even
though women, including his former wife, complained about the kind
of superiority, hostility, and condescension that can come from such
an attitude, he simply could never see it. He always felt himself to be
in
the right and usually wondered what in the world was wrong with
them that they could not see it the way he did. However, he did have
the insight that a lot of his feeling life had been deeply buried for a
long
time. He began to sense that the feelings of which he was unaware were
manifested in the ways he experienced and dealt with women. For example,
he writes that he had been guilty sometimes of falling into an
automatic teaching/lecturing posture with women. He then became
aware that this was set o? when women expressed their ideas through
feelings. It was as if he then had to counter this with his “superior”
intellect because he could not deal with it on the feeling level. He
realized
that he believed that a woman’s feelings were inferior and that she
needed his bright intellect to enlighten her. For him, feeling was part
of the unknown and thus part of the black sun, which he feared.
The pastor re?ected that in relation to the black sun, whatever its
ultimate signi?cance, a man needs somehow to come to terms with
these feelings of superiority in order to also be aware of the duality in
himself. If a man can do this, then he might not have to project the
unseen aspect onto a woman, a displacement that had occurred not only
for himself but also for other men with whom he had worked professionally
or who were his friends and colleagues. While he knew this
kind of attitude could be very hard to make conscious, he never really
believed that it was buried in him. According to Jung, men often prefer
to see their thinking associated with the light of consciousness,
and thus it is very easy for them to project their own dark moods and
thoughts upon women.
Although the pastor did not think of it in this context, after writing
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to me about the preceding observations, he recalled an earlier encounter
with the theme of Sol niger and the heart. One day he had developed a
pain around his heart and had gone to the emergency room
at a hospital, but the doctors found nothing physically wrong. One
week from that day, the same thing happened, and he went back to the
hospital, and again nothing was found. When he next went to see his
analyst and told him what had happened, the analyst suggested that
since nothing physical was found, the problem must lie elsewhere. He
suggested that the pastor do some active imagination in relationship to
the heart to see what might happen. For fourteen days in a row, he
actively imagined what was going on in his heart, and each time he drew
a picture of what he had “seen.”
He came to relate what he had considered his masculine-feminine
split to problems of the heart that he traced back to wounds associated
with his father. As he meditated and actively imagined what was going
on inside his heart, he saw an angry ?st, a crowbar, a large black stake
piercing his heart, and later a large black iron ball that later he had
identi?ed with the black sun. He speculated on the relationship between
depression and heart disease and commented that it cannot be healthy
to carry around a twenty-four-pound ball of iron in your heart.
The work with active imagination eventually led him to a healing
process: images of a surgical procedure and the extraction of the iron
ball, a black snake with green vegetation leading the way to the
emergence of blue waters and a dolphin accompanying a small sailboat in
the ?nal picture of the series. The image that most struck him, however,
was the black iron ball that had emerged and was now outside.
Although there was a healing of the heart, this image pointed to
something outside of himself and outside the realm of consciousness. For
him it was some darker expression of the soul—instinctual, emotional,
symbolic, and archetypal. At its core the darkness of this other
was uncanny and strange and perhaps even unknowable, he thought.
It could have devastating consequences, physiologically and in his
relationships, and it was as unrecognized as a black hole.
The theme of a black hole became important to him as an “outer
image” that helped him to grapple with his inner darkness. Just becoming
aware that such things exist in the universe helped him when
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he felt he was losing his sanity or even “becoming a bit psychotic.” He
began to do some spontaneous active imagination on the model of a
black hole. He writes that when he was in the throes of the depression,
he would draw a blackened circle on a piece of paper. Then, when he
looked at it and realized what he had drawn, he was horri?ed by it. It
was as if it was able to draw attention and consciousness right down
into it. As he thought more about what black holes are, he was able to
see that they did exactly the same thing in the outer universe that the
inner image had been doing to him. Black holes are so dense that no
light escapes them. There were times when his depression felt exactly
like that. In addition he had the sense that he could literally be pulled
down into this thing and lost, in just the way things do not come out
of black holes, at least not where they went in.
At one point, the pastor’s concerns turned toward death, and he
re?ected on it as it appeared in his depressive states. He connected
death with the black sun. He noted that the primary way that thoughts
about death entered in was with the preoccupation that he was going
to die. The pattern was that the death thought would be most prominent
from the morning into the early evening, but through the late
evening it would subside completely. He would then go to bed somewhat
peacefully, and then in the morning, it would start again. This
continued over a three-year period. Every morning for three years, he
woke with the same concern about death. During that whole time, not
once did it make any di?erence on any of those mornings that he knew
the fear had subsided the night before and had done so every time.
Every single day was a repeat of the identical pattern, seemingly
disconnected from the day before.
Although he felt that the ultimate signi?cance of his death thoughts
was symbolic, for a long time he experienced the thought on a literal
level. It took the form of preoccupation with his actual death. “I don’t
know when that awareness [of the literal quality of these thoughts] began
to change, but it did. I think it changed a good deal in relationship
to the spiritual changes which eventually came” through a kind of
death/rebirth process. In studying the material on the tomb of Ramses
VI, he was struck by the following phrase: “the rebirth of the sun at
dawn after its night-time netherworld journey, the resurrection of the
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king after his dark and di?cult passage through the underworld following
his death, and the emergence of a higher level of consciousness
after the arduous and often terrifying examination.” He felt this well
described what he went through: “I think I have had to live with the
black sun for these past years to get ready to deal with the further
meaning. . . . There is work to be done, though. I think part of it will
be more precise thinking and ampli?cations regarding the black sun.
In other words, there is still unanswered somewhat the question, ‘Why
the black sun?’ ‘Why a black sun?’”
It was a question the pastor knew could never be fully answered
through analysis or therapy. He noted that his dark experiences, like
the sun, had an incredible, seemingly inexhaustible energy. Probably
the most signi?cant thing for him with regard to the whole experience
is that it eventually led him to convert to the Russian Orthodox Church.
He had previously been ordained as a Protestant minister for twentythree
years. He felt that because of the depth to which the whole experience of
the depression and the black sun took him, it ultimately
resulted in a spiritual revolution. Since becoming Russian Orthodox
seven years ago, he has continued to understand some things through
the spirituality of that tradition that continued the theme of the black
sun. He began to o?er a number of re?ections on the relationship of
the black sun and the dark side of God. He stated that,
In Orthodoxy, it is common to think about God both in terms of
“positive” and “negative” theology. This is not unique to Orthodoxy
either. The positive theology involves those clear a?rmations we are
willing to make about God; that God is love, that God
is omnipresent, etc. The negative theology proceeds in a different way
and basically is the encounter with God through the
experience of being stripped of our delusions and illusions about
God and ourselves. My sense is that this corresponds more to the
idea of the “essence” of God.
Now, with all said, the place I am coming to in regard to Sol
niger is to say that what it has of God in it is close to this dark,
mysterious aspect of God. One way that I have seen that has been
in terms of the change which I experienced in relation to the imThe Black
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age. Initially, it was terrifying and something that I wanted to ?ee
but could not.
Sol niger and the depression made him aware of things that had to
be faced and dealt with on the psychological level. At the same time,
however, he had come to see that all of these factors needed spiritual
work as well. In other words, what Sol niger and the depression revealed
to him about his soul, he had come to see in his relationship to God as
well. While this might sound strange, if the psychological and the
spiritual are di?erent but intimately related dimensions, then each will
need its own kind of work.
The pastor found that Orthodoxy o?ers a form of meditative prayer
known as hesycham, a term that means solitude or quietness and that
was ?rst used by St. Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century. It has
to do with what was described as an “uncreated light.” This form of
prayer uses the “Jesus Prayer,” which leads to the “direct perception” of
God and the things of God. The uncreated light is also called the
“Taborian light” because it is the light that shone forth from Christ at
his
trans?guration on Mount Tabor. It is a light that comes from God and
is not a created light like other light, such as that from the daytime
sun.
Other saints have reportedly actually shone forth with this light, which
is exceedingly brilliant. He sometimes wondered whether that uncreated
light might not in some way be connected with the dazzling light
that proceeds from Sol niger.
The pastor and I had discussed the work of Julia Kristeva, and he felt
that his idea is ampli?ed in her work when she says, “The ‘black sun’
again takes up the semantic ?eld of ‘saturnine,’ but pulls it inside out,
like a glove: darkness ?ashes as a solar light, which nevertheless
remains dazzling with black invisibility.”56 However, for Kristeva, Sol
niger seems to remain tied to states of depression. The pastor re?ected,
“In this is seen again the paradoxical notion of light (‘dazzling,’
‘?ashes’)
in the black darkness (‘black invisibility’). Ever since the Sol niger
began to take on some positive characteristics, this has been my
intuition
about it—that it is dark but light giving.”
For the pastor, the reconciliation of light and darkness is captured
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in The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware, who talks about negative theology:
And so it proves to be for each one who follows the spiritual Way.
We go out from the known into the unknown, we advance from
light into darkness. We do not simply proceed from the darkness of
ignorance to the light of knowledge, but we go forward from the
light of partial knowledge into a greater knowledge which is so
much more profound that it can only be described as the “darkness
of unknowing.” (emphasis added by the pastor)57
Though this is clearly a statement about spiritual awareness, it is
interesting that the darkness is actually seen as an “advance” over light
and a “greater knowledge” than the light of “partial knowledge.”
In re?ecting on the pastor’s experience, one might imagine an
individuation process and the spiritual telos of his depression, leading
to
an integration of both his personal and archetypal shadow. Such an
integration might be said to have constellated a well-integrated Self,
healing a split in his masculine consciousness and ultimately opening
him to an experience of a numinous, dark God image at the core of his
new faith. His process “ends” with the creation of an important image
relevant to our experience of Sol niger, with a darkness of unknowing,
which is strangely described as an advance over light and as a blinding,
divine darkness. This “image” of divine darkness is a well-known aspect
of mystical theology.
Mystical Theology
The theology of the ?fth- or sixth-century mystical philosopher
PseudoDionysius further ampli?es Sol niger in its luminescent aspect.
Many
have come to discern in his writing the hand of a brilliant
epistemologist, an early philosopher of language, a Socrates-like
teacher, and a
mystical theologian. Perhaps the best designation of Pseudo-Dionysius
is the one underlined by twentieth-century philosopher and theologian
Edith Stein: “Father of Mysticism.” For Stein, his theology represents
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the highest stage of “secret revelation,” and she notes that “the higher
the knowledge, the darker and more mysterious it is, the less it can be
put into words.” In short, “the ascent to God is an ascent into darkness
and silence.”58
In his letters, Pseudo-Dionysius writes “The divine darkness is that
‘unapproachable light’ where God is said to live.”59
In another place he writes, “The pure, absolute and immutable mysteries
of theology are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence,
outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their Darkness.”60
His Mystical Theology has been considered to exemplify the Dionysian
method and to be a key to the structure of the entire corpus.61
PseudoDionysius begins with the question What is Divine darkness? and
responds that Divine darkness “is made manifest only to those who travel
through foul and fair, who pass beyond the summit of every holy ascent,
who leave behind them every divine light, every voice, every word
from heaven, and who plunge into the darkness where . . . there dwells
the One who is beyond all things.”62
According to the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, what remains of
what can be known
is not soul or mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction,
speech, or understanding. Nor is it speech per se. It cannot be
spoken of and it cannot be grasped by understanding. It is not
number or order, greatness or smallness, equality or inequality,
similarity or dissimilarity. It is not immovable, moving, or at
rest. It has no power, it is not power, nor is it light. It does not live
nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time. It
cannot be grasped by the understanding since it is neither knowledge nor
truth. It is not kingship. It is not wisdom. It is neither
one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness. Nor is it a spirit, in the
sense in which we understand that term. It is not sonship or fatherhood
and it is nothing known to us or to any other being. It
falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being. Existing
beings do not know it as it actually is and it does not know
them as they are. There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowl-
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edge of it. Darkness and light, error and truth—it is none of
these. It is beyond assertion and denial.63
In such a litany, one gets the experience of the process of negative
theology, which has a tendency to reduce one both to silence and to a
darkness that one cannot even call darkness. So, in an attempt to
continue to express what the author is referring to, the image of Divine
Darkness stands in the place of having nothing left to say. Throughout
his text, we ?nd the metaphors of a darkness of unknowing that is
higher than knowledge: a cloud of unknowing; he who has made the
shadow his hiding place; a darkness hidden by light; a nakedness that
exceeds light; a brilliant darkness resplendent; a dazzling obscurity of
secret silence; a ray of Divine shadow that exceeds all existence; an
outshining of all brilliance with the intensity of darkness; a
supraessential
Divine Darkness, beyond a?rmation and negation; mystical ecstasy; a
transcendent energy that lifts up, beyond sense and intellect; and an
eclipse of consciousness that drives one out of one’s mind and leaves
one in silence.64
For Jung, such images are mad and monstrous, the height of paradox,
linking and transcending what we think of as opposites in such a
way that ordinary consciousness is radically challenged and subverted.
In “Silver and White Earth,” Hillman speaks of such madness alchemically
as a process in which Solar brilliance and Moon madness are marvelously
conjoined. The mysterium coniunctionis then is illumined
lunacy.65 However, if, with Hillman, we have ended in being out of our
minds with lunacy, it is only fair to say that it is a higher kind of
lunacy,
a lunacy that is not simply deprivation and solely associated with the
moon, depression, or castration, but a lunacy of transcendence, perhaps
better associated with art and poetry than literal madness.
In Theodore Roethke’s poem “In a Dark Time,” he writes that “the
eye begins to see;” and in this darkness, he meets his shadow and the
darkness deepens. Here, in the dark, he ?nds both madness and “nobility
of soul,” an odd correspondence of opposites. Roethke also documents the
via longissama that leads to the death of the self, set in a
“blazing unnatural light,” the point where the “I” no longer recognizes
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itself but ?nds the mind of God and a sense of freedom in the pain of
loss.66 Indeed, the poem contains several images associated with Sol
niger: pure despair, death of the Self, dark light, the nobility of the
soul,
and madness, all of which form a complex web that may well constitute a
kind of lunacy.
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The theme of this debate has been taken up by transpersonal psychologist
Sean Kelly.74 He contributes to this debate, positing what he
calls “complex holism,” a view in part in?uenced by Hegel’s, Jung’s, and
Morin’s idea of a dialectic that is a “symbiotic combination of two [or
more] logics in a manner that is at once complementary and
antagonistic.”75 What’s important in Kelly’s position is not just the
idea of
bringing the two perspectives together in unity but also giving
importance to their di?erences. This gives his vision nuance and
complexity.
In other words, the doctrine that holds the Self (the Hindu Atman/
Brahman) as the supreme principle and the doctrine that holds the
No-Self (The Buddhist Annata) as a supreme principle are complementary
while at the same time remaining antagonistic. Kelly relativizes each
fundamental idea by noting that both principles “must
negate the truth of the other in order to point out its onesidedness and
its missing complement.”76
It appears that Kelly’s idea is parallel to Jung’s. Jung’s psychology was
originally called complex psychology, and later, as it developed, an
important component of it was the idea that the unconscious compensates
for the one-sided attitudes of the conscious mind with the intent
of achieving balance and wholeness. For Jung, the “Self ” was also a
complex (w)holism, a self-regulating and balancing principle, but what
is interesting in Kelly’s argument is that he applies the idea of
complementarity to the idea of the Self itself.77 He observes that the
concept of
the Self as Atman is prone to the kind of sterile hypostatization that
impedes rather than facilitates psychic life. On the other hand, without
the stability of the atmanic Self, the No-Self Annata doctrine is also
prone to a sterile nihilism that leaves psychic life adrift.
It is worth noting here that for each perspective, Hindu or Buddhist, the
idea of a complementarity principle can be accounted for
from within. The Atman/Brahman perspective has its own way of
understanding the ?ux of the No-Self, just as the No-Self perspective of
the Buddhists has its own way of understanding stability. Those who
are committed to one perspective or another are likely to feel that the
antagonistic other does not really understand its perspective, which
from within its own point of view the ideas of its critics are already
addressed. Those who hold to their own perspectives alone are tradi(180)
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tionally considered orthodox, whereas those who seek to break with
tradition may be seen as iconoclastic or even heretical, like Jung
himself. The history of ideas and cultures seems to move by virtue of
such
a dialectic, though ultimately this may be a too-limited way to imagine
the complexity of history.
Kelly’s perspective of complex holism embraces both perspectives,
Self and No-Self. To this dialogical complementarity he adds the either/
or of dialogic antagonism, which gives the debate a dynamic thrust
that both a?rms and relativizes at the same time. If we then imagine
Jung’s idea of the Self as being subject to a similar critique, the Self
would call for the complementarity principle of No-Self to keep it from
stagnating into an hypostasized and ?xed idea of order, as Hillman has
observed.
For Jung as well as Hillman, the Self as the archetype of meaning
requires the anima or archetype of life to keep it from stagnation.
Hillman, however, prefers not to speak of the Self at all because of its
tendency as a transcendental concept to lose connection with the body.
For him, the problem with Jung’s idea of the Self is that it moves toward
transcendence, both mathematical and geometric. Its analogies tend
to be drawn from the realm of spirit, abstract philosophy, and mystical
theology. Its principles tend to be expressed in terms such as
selfactualization, entelechy, the principle of individuation, the monad,
the totality, Atman, Brahman, and the Tao.78
For Hillman, all of this points to a vision of Self that is removed from
life, and so it enters psychology “through the back door, disguised as
synchronicity, magic, oracles, science ?ction, self-symbolism, mandalas,
tarot, astrology and other indiscriminations, equally prophetic,
ahistorical and humorless.”79 Here Hillman brings together a variety of
ideas and images sacred to the orthodox Jungians, which, while not well
di?erentiated, serves the purpose of painting a vision of the Self as an
unconscious, abstract structure that has lost touch with the dynamics
of the soul. This is a view of the Self that is not acceptable to the
orthodox Jungian, for whom the Self is both structural, dynamic, and
deeply
connected to life.
It is not surprising to ?nd that fundamental concepts such as the Self
are open to multiple interpretations. As noted, there are those who reThe
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gard Jung’s Self as anything but static and others for whom it too easily
loses itself in a hypostasized, outmoded, out of touch, and abstract
conception that calls out for revision. As I interpret Kelly’s
perspective of
“complex holism,” the importance of the tension is to reveal how every
fundamental concept has a shadow even when the concept is as wide
ranging as the Self. In this sense, the complementary/antagonistic idea
of the No-Self reveals the Self ’s shadow as an esoteric and invisible
other that is necessary to the animation of psychic life. Traditionally
the shadow is considered to be the counterpart of consciousness, but
the Self is said to embrace both the conscious and the unconscious
dimensions of psychic life.
However, if one follows Jung in the most radical sense while
simultaneously giving credence to the perspectives of Miller and Kelly
and
to the importance of the idea of the No-Self as being both complementary
and antagonistic to Jung’s idea of the Self, then it is reasonable
to imagine the Self as having a shadow, a dynamic and invisible Otherness
that is essential to it.
Often for alchemy, Sol is the most precious thing, while Sol niger as
its shadow is like Lacan’s “petite a.”80 This petite a is “more worthless
than seaweed.”81 Yet without Sol niger there is no ring to consciousness,
no dynamic Other that taints and tinctures the brilliance of the Sun.
Following the alchemical tradition, Jung writes that “Consciousness
requires as its necessary counterpart a dark, latent, non-manifest side.
. . .
So much did the alchemists sense the duality of his unconscious
assumptions that, in the face of all astronomical evidence, he equipped
the sun with a shadow [and stated]: ‘The sun and its shadow bring the
work to perfection.’”82
Ultimately, I believe the notion of a shadow of the Self is supported
by the paradoxical play of opposites in alchemy.
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rates the postmodern practice of sous rapture, which has been translated
as “under erasure,” to mark the paradoxical play of “the absence
of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the
origin
that is the condition of thought and experience.”84
In Jungian terms, one might think of this with regard to the mysterious
core of an “archetype itself,” which can never be made fully present or
conscious. When we speak of God or Self, we are naming something whose
Being is never fully present and cannot be captured in any
signi?cation. Even to speak of it as having a core or as being something
is problematic. In Jungian language, we speak of images of the Self, but
what does it mean to speak of this Self as if it existed as a kind of
independent presence or transcendentally signi?ed object or being? We
have seen that, in negative theology, trying to name such transcendental
“objects” always falls short and that they can be referred to only
in terms such as Divine Darkness, which does not seem to refer to any
“thing” at all. If no word or sign can capture the transcendental notion
of God or Being or the Self and so on, then the words or signs that refer
to it must be put under erasure—or crossed out—since the word
is inaccurate. However, since all signs or words are necessary but also
share the same lack, the convention has been to print both the word or
sign and its deletion. Derrida gives this example: “[T]he sign is that
ill-named thing . . . that escapes the instituting question of
philosophy.”85
Likewise, if we speak of God, Being, or Self, the convention would
dictate that we express such ideas under erasure as God, Being, and
Self. That which is the absence of the signi?ed, Derrida calls a trace,
an
invisible, marked by a sign under erasure. For Derrida, this is an
experimental strategy of philosophizing in which what is being referred
to as the transcendental arche (origin) must make its necessity felt
before letting itself be erased (p. xviii, translator’s preface). This is
very
important from an analytic point of view because if erasure takes place
before there is any emotional connection with the other, erasure would
remain an intellectual game without analytic gravity.
It is interesting that Derrida uses the notion of arche-trace, which I
imagine as a philosophically sophisticated expression of what Jung
tried to express by archetype—a notion re?ective of Jung’s Kantian
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sion. I cannot here elaborate the complexity of this notion except to
say that to follow Derrida’s intent is to “change certain habits of mind,
rooted in our traditional metaphysics, in language, representation,
ideas of the origin and in our binary logic.” Using Derrida’s strategy of
sous rapture, the notion of the Self under erasure, rather than being
seen as a transcendental idea, essence, or substance, comes even closer
to Jung’s recognition of its mystery and unknown quality. Seen as a
trace, the Self ’s invisible presence is both marked yet e?aced, and its
shadow Otherness, seen otherwise, is both paradoxical and mysterious,
both light and dark, yet neither.
I believe Derrida’s sous rapture gets at the intention of Jung’s idea in
a new and highly original way. It also penetrates into the idea of
Nothingness beyond its literal and binary designations. Applying his
notion
to Jung’s concept of the Self adds a perspective that renews our
understanding of the Mysterium Coniunctionis and helps us resist turning
it into a simple conceptual unity or idealism, a danger pointed out by
Micklem, who emphasized the Mysterium Coniunctionis as a complexio
oppositorum of paradoxical and monstrous proportions. As we have
seen, Edinger also emphasizes the mysterious nature of the opposites
and traces it culturally in the development of science and materialism
placed like a cuckoo’s egg in the nest of the Christian vision.
Imagine Derrida’s sous rapture as another such cuckoo’s egg placed
in the nest of modernism and Jungian psychology. It is paradoxical; it
is monstrous, a foreign body that like the egg Edinger describes is also
likely to hatch something new. I imagine it as a complexio oppositorum,
continually hatching at the core of the mysterium coniunctionis,
now bringing into our science and materialism an original, philosophical
sensitivity to the paradox of language and continually deconstructing our
tendencies to logocentrism.
Applying Derrida’s idea of sous rapture to the notion of the Self in
Jung’s psychology opens a way of imagining the Self as under erasure.
Imagining such a Self psychologically is an attempt to think about
something that can never be simply identi?ed with any one side of a
binary pair—light or dark, black or white, spirit or matter, masculine
or feminine, imaginary or real, conscious or unconscious—or with
any hypothesized, transcendental notion that attempts to supersede or
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lift itself up above these oppositions as if language referred in some
nominalist or substantialist way to some literal “thing” or entity.
As we have seen, terms such as Self, Being, and God cannot be privileged
or given status outside the language system from which they
have been drawn. For Derrida, following twentieth-century linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure, these terms derive their meaning in a diacritical
way, each making sense only in relation to other signs in a synchronic
system of signi?ers and having meaning only in relationship
to other signs among which none is privileged. Nevertheless, philosophy,
psychology, and religion all have a long history of master tropes
or metaphors that appear and attempt to refer to something beyond
the ordinary images of familiar words, such as Being, God, and Self.
These “words” are like arche-traces that refer more to mystical than to
literal reality and, like Hermes, stand at the crossroads of “di?érance,”
a neologism that Derrida coined from the French word for “di?erence” and
which carries the meaning of both di?erence and deferral.86
What is continually deferred is the idea that a word arrives at a literal
destination, indicating a one-to-one correspondence and representation of
reality.
So, for example, the idea of the Self can never be separated from its
invisible counterpart, the No-Self, against which it derives its meaning.
Since an insight is marked by placing it under erasure, the line
drawn through the word Self indicates its negation, its shadow. This
ensures that an idea will not be taken literally and reminds us that
ideas
will continue to disseminate throughout time and culture. No concept,
master trope, or metaphor can ever ?nally complete the play or
totality of psyche, which, like Mercurius, always escapes our grasp. The
Self under erasure is always in a process of continual deconstruction,
and, like the philosopher’s stone of alchemy, it slips “that grip of
Begri?e that would capture it.”87 Hillman’s reading of alchemy imagines
the philosopher’s stone as soft and oily, countering both those images
that point to its strength, solidity, and unity and also our tendency to
crystallize the goal in terms of ?xed positions and doctrinal truth. For
him, the philosopher’s stone is waxy and can “receive endless
literalizations without being permanently impressed.”88 Perhaps it is
useful
to imagine the Self under erasure as a kind of contemporary philoso(186)
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pher’s stone marking a mystery that has long been sought and continues to
remain elusive.
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painful process in which the preanalytic or pre-deconstructive subject
must undergo both change and erasure. This erasure is not a simple
abstract process of thought but rather a powerful experience of negation
and morti?cation that wounds our narcissism and uncovers our
relationship with the Other and the world, which was the precondition
of any subjectivity to begin with. The negation and morti?cation of
the Self is symbolically expressed by the black sun and has been
indicated here by the crossing out of the Self. The blackness of the sun
crosses out the simple Western metaphysical notions of light and
consciousness. The Self under erasure is shorthand for a complex
transformation that has been described in di?erent ways, including as an
alchemical process of deconstruction and/or as an analysis.
Archetypal Alchemy
In alchemy as in the literatures of deconstruction and analysis, the
shorthand of erasure is richly expanded and ampli?ed. It is part of a
series of complex and subtle processes of dissolutions and coagulations
(solve et coagula), negation and conjunction, and morti?cation and
revitalization. The idea of erasure lends itself to comparison with
certain
operations of alchemy that have to do with the processes of morti?cation,
calcination, and dissolution and entering into the blacker-thanblack
aspect of the nigredo, in which the self is ultimately reduced
to no-self. Such a focus emphasizes the death aspect of the opus and
the powerful reduction of narcissism. In alchemy, the nigredo is often
placed at the beginning of the work, and ultimately the blacker-thanblack
is thought to be surpassed as blackness lightens and yields to other
colors. The changes in coloration re?ect subtle changes in the soul.
One reading of this process is that it is linear, progressive, and
spiritual. It results in a literal salvational goal in which the lead of
the predeconstructed or analytic subject is thought to be changed into
the
gold of a resurrected self, forever beyond further dissolution or
morti?cation. For Hillman, this is a literalized reading of alchemy by
which
the stain of blackness is forever dispelled. His critique of such a
reading parallels the insights of a deconstructive reading in which
speaking
about a post-deconstructive and/or postanalytic subject is prob(188)
Chapter 5
lematic, as if such a self or subject is a ?xed outcome or product of
such proceedings. There is never simply an “after” of analysis or
deconstruction, and expressing it conceptually recreates the illusion of
a selfenclosed totality. No one is ever fully analyzed; no deconstruction
is
ever complete; the unconscious or blackness is never totally eliminated.
The alchemical work of James Hillman emphasizes the continuous process of
deconstruction while at the same time indicating a
transformative process that recognizes a potential for revitalization.
Hillman radicalizes our reading of alchemy and resists any allegorical or
salvationist reading of it. His has been an important voice critiquing
any reading of steps and stages, emphasizing instead a way
of seeing that regards each “phase” for itself. He stays true to alchemy
in organizing his work around colors as aesthetic materials re?ecting
qualities of the soul. In a series of papers he writes about the
“Seduction
of Black,” “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis,” “Silver and the
White Earth” (parts one and two), and “The Yellowing of the Work.”
In “Concerning the Stone: Alchemical Images of the Goal,” he writes
about the rubedo, the process of reddening. In all of the works
mentioned, he tries to see through the linear progression of a
unidirectional
model simply progressing through time.
One of the dangers of placing blackness into a process of development is
the tendency to move too quickly away from its radicality, its
blacker-than-black aspect, its depth, its severity, and the su?ering
associated with it. The unidirectional, spiritualized version of the
alchemical opus wants to move out and away from blackness. Its focus is
on the move from black to white, from nigredo to albedo, the classical
alchemical formula. Nevertheless, to focus on movement and transition
from one state or color to another, useful as this might be, runs the
risk of not seeing with that dark eye that sees blackness for itself and
not simply as a passage to whiteness, change, and generation.
The temptation to read alchemy in this way has textual support in
Edinger: “[T]hat which does not make black cannot make white, because
blackness is the beginning of whiteness.”95 “Putrefaction is of so
great e?cacy that it blots out the old nature and bears another fruit. .
. .
Putrefaction takes away the acridity from all corrosive spirits of salt,
renders them soft and sweet.”96
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Classic passages such as these may lead one to focus on whiteness,
the albedo of new form, and the soft sweetness of renewal. Such passages
describe important qualities of alchemical transformation, but
they can also lend themselves to readings that can reduce the dark
depth of the putrefaction process to a moment of negation in an
intellectual dialectic. It is useful to recall Edinger’s warnings that
the alchemical work is dangerous and requires torture, killing, and
death, as
well as Hillman’s caution that the morti?catio occurs not just once but
again and again. Blackness is not just a stage to be bypassed once and
for all, but a necessary component of psychological life. The black spot
is structurally part of the metaphoric eye itself, a potential inherent
in
the soul’s visual possibility.
Hillman emphasizes that blackness has a purpose: It teaches endurance,
warns, dissolves attachments, and “sophisticates the eye” so
that we may not only see blackness but actually see by means of it.97 To
see through blackness is to understand its continuous deconstructive
activity as necessary for psychological change.98 To read alchemy this
way suggests that its images are “psychic conditions [that are] always
available.”99 They do not disappear. Psychologically, it is easy to be
seduced. The colors catch our eye as they change from black to white to
yellow to red, indicating a movement out of despair to the highest states
of psychological renewal (color plate 16). In Hillman’s papers, too, one
can trace such a movement from the blackest morti?cations to where,
in blue beginnings, Venus collaborates with Saturn and transforms into
the pure whiteness of the albedo.100 The perfection of white rots but
only to yellow, opening the way for rubedo, the reddening, libidinal
activity of the soul as it resurrects and revivi?es matter, crowning it
in
beauty and pleasure. In fact, Hillman describes the alchemical process
in this way.101 If one stands back and abstracts his descriptions and
places them into a developmental vision, one could say this is in fact
what he describes as the alchemical process, however watered down.
Such a reading, however, would interpret Hillman precisely in the
way that he would not want to be read. It would impose and carry over
a spiritualizing and developmental tendency from the very readings he
critiques. To read him in this way would be to follow the linear pull of
his work into a banal cliché. It is always too easy to collapse
originality
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and complexity into facile formulations. A careful, serious reading of
his work means that, in spite of seeing and “moving beyond” the nigredo,
his texts resist any easy exit from blackness. As he moves from
color to color, the traces of blackness remain like a subtle body that
imbues the soul with its own ongoing essence. In short, he preserves
the luminous paradox of blackness.
Consider the following from “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis.”
Hillman writes, “The transit from black to white via blue . . . always
brings black with it. . . . Blue bears traces of the morti?catio into the
whitening.”102 In “Silver and the White Earth,” he states, “‘Putrefaction
extends and continues even unto whiteness’. . . . We must, therefore,
amend our notion of the white earth.”103 Likewise, in the transit from
white to yellow, the process is marked by putrefaction, rotting, decay,
and death: “Yellow signi?es a particular kind of change usually for the
worse.”104
Even in the “?nal stage” of the alchemical transformation—the reddening—
we witness the ?nal dissolution of sunlit consciousness. The
reddening of the goal likewise has darkness in its core. So, even while
Hillman indicates the soul’s movement through the color matrices of
alchemy, in each move the subtle essence of blackness works in such a
way that the essence of blackness is never left behind.
While Hillman critiques the idea of a literal spiritual and developmental
reading of alchemy, still he notes that success in the work depends on
the ordering of time, succession, and “stages.” The danger is
only in literalizing this ordering or totally ?xing the colors of
psychological experiences into rigid categories of exclusion that would
?atten,
deplete, and miss their richness and subtlety. When this happens, time,
order, succession, and stages are seen as ?xed phases—concrete steps
toward a literal goal. Such a view leaves us trapped in a linear,
historical
progression toward some metaphysical illusion stretched out in time
rather than grappling in the midst of di?erentiated, impelling images.
In “Concerning the Stone: Alchemical Images of the Goal,” Hillman
gives an example of the complexity of an image in which he refuses to
separate into “positive and negative, dark and light, death and new
birth.” The “grit and the pearl, the lead and the diamond, the hammer
and the gold are inseparable.”105 For Hillman, “the pain is not prior to
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the goal, like cruci?xion before resurrection”; rather, pain and gold are
“co-terminous, co-dependent and co-relative.” “The pearl is also always
grit, an irritation, as well as a luster, the gilding also a
poisoning.”106 It is hard to keep these opposite dimensions of experience
in
consciousness, but, for Hillman, such a description ?ts with life, “for
we
are strangely disconsolate even in a moment of radiance.” Our golden
experience “again and again will press for testing in the ?re, ever new
blackness appearing, dark crows with the yellow sun.”107
On such a basis, I propose that the “light of darkness itself,” Sol
niger, is such a complex image and that the idea of regeneration is
better seen in a deeper consciousness of this paradox than in a moving
through and beyond it. The paradox holds the “opposites” of light/
dark, visible/invisible, and self and no-self together, and in so doing
there is a “light,” an e?ulgence, or a “shine” that is hard to de?ne or
capture in any metaphysical language. Taking Hillman’s lead, my
experience has been to imagine the luster of blackness itself in its
multiplicity
and, like Hillman and Lopez-Pedreza, to resist as much as possible going
to other colors to re?ect the complexity of experience. In this way
I have attempted to extract the “black” back from the array of colors in
order to give full acknowledgement to its subtle presence. While
blackness appears somewhat di?erent when seen through blue, white,
yellow, and red, its “essence” remains. Here, blackness need not be
understood only as a literal color but also as a “qualitative
di?erentiation of intensities and hues, which is essential to the act of
imagination.”108 In this way, black remains as a subtle body embracing
psyche
with its ongoing essence, repeating, deconstructing, tincturing, and
making itself felt in the very pigment of the soul. It is an essence of
multiple di?erentiations and layers of meaning. We have seen that
writers and painters have long known about the many qualities of
blackness. The following is a remark by the famous Japanese painter
and printmaker Hokusai: “There is a black which is old and a black
which is fresh. Lustrous (brilliant) black and matte black, black in
sunlight and black in shadow. For the old black one must use an admixture
of blue, for the matte black an admixture of white; for the lustrous
black gum (colle) must be added. Black in sunlight must have gray
re?ection.”109
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In The Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison states that “There’re ?ve or
six kinds of black. Some silky, some wooly. Some just empty. Some like
?ngers. And it don’t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of
black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying
something is green. What kind of green? . . . Well, night black is the
same
way. May as well be a rainbow.”110
Hillman, too, echoes the preceding statements: “There are blacks
that recede and absorb, those that dampen and soften, those that etch
and sharpen, and others that shine almost with the e?ulgence—a Sol
niger.”111
In addition to its multiple di?erentiations, the black essence is also
ubiquitous—as John Brozostoski well demonstrates in a piece he
wrote called “Tantra Art.”112 In it he demonstrates the all-pervasive
infusion of color in our speech. Beginning with black, he highlights its
presence in between our words, often invisible to eye and ear when we
focus only on the literalizing word or meaning. Here we have a section
from Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy treated to the same technique:
The (black) lapis (black) says (black) in (black) Hermes: (black)
‘Therefore (black) nothing (black) better (black) or (black) more
(black) worthy (black) of (black) veneration (black) can (black)
come (black) to (black) pass (black) in (black) the (black) world
(black) than (black) the (black) union (black) of (black) myself
(black) and (black) my (black) son.’ (black) The (black) Monogenes
(black) is (black) also (black) called (black) the (black) ‘dark
(black) light.’ (black) The (black) Rosarium (black) quotes (black)
a (black) saying (black) of (black) Hermes: (black) ‘I (black) the
(black) lapis (black) beget (black) the (black) light, (black) but
(black) the (black) darkness (black) too (black) is (black) of (black)
my (black) nature.’ (black) Similarly (black) alchemy (black) has
(black) the (black) idea (black) of (black) the (black) sol (black)
niger, (black) the (black) black (black) sun.
As one reads his description, the narrative force of meaning is
frustrated, interrupted, and begins to deconstruct. The ?ow of ideas is
interspersed by a black mantra, a morti?catio of narrative articulating
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Figure 5.5. Eclipse of the sun. © 1994 Martin Mutti. Used by permission.
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Figure 5.6. Through su?ering to the black sun. From S. Grof,
LSD Psychotherapy, p. 283. Used by permission of Stanislav Grof.
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Persephone, Ishtar and Dumuzi, all symbolize the overwhelming redemptive
power of passion and darkness.
In this spirit, the Hebrew Song of Songs resonates with St. John of
the Cross, who said:
O dark night, my guide
O Sweeter than anything sun rise can discover
Oh night, drawing side to side
The loved and the lover
The loved one wholly ensouling in the lover.
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Figure 5.7. Image of the coniunctio. From C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of
the Transference,” in Practice of Psychotherapy, p. 249.
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but absence is shining.
Mine is the secret
that lies hidden
like the lustrous pearl
gleaming
within its oyster
the deepest secret
the secret
hidden within the secret.125
The following poem by T. S. Eliot expresses similar insights:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love for the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.. . .
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.126
In Corbin’s terms, the invisible black light requires an unknowing
that is also a knowing. This state of unknowing is synonymous with
the mystical poverty that we attribute to the Su?, who is said to be
“poor in spirit.” It is a poverty in which we are reduced to Nothingness
(200)
Chapter 5
and God is no one who can be grasped. In a poem called simply
“Psalm,” Paul Célan writes:
No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,
no one incants our dust. No one.
Blessèd art thou, No One.
In thy sight would
we bloom.
In thy
spite.
A Nothing
we were, are now, and ever
shall be, blooming:
the Nothing-, the
No-One’s-Rose.
With
our pistil soul-bright,
our stamen heaven-waste,
our corona red
from the purpleword we sang
over, O over
the thorn.127
The Su? ideas of not knowing and of mystical poverty and black
light ?nd their counterparts in the kabbalistic and Chassidic notion of
“bittul,” the nulli?cation of the ego. In the Chassidic discourse Basi
LeGani, the nulli?cation of the ego is described as a folly of holiness
and self-transcendence, in which the spiritual work of transforming
darkness into light is done to the degree where the “darkness itself
would be luminous.”128
Sanford Drob elaborates the kabbalistic recognition of a “darkness
that is at the heart of light itself ” and ?nds analogies to the black
sun in
three moments of negation: in Ayin (as Ein-sof), Tzimtzum, and She-
(201)
virah.129 For Drob, the Ayin suggests “that nothingness is the source of
all distinctiveness and di?erence, and thus of all light, meaning and
signi?cance.”130 The Ein-sof is referred to as the “light that does not
exist
in light,” and the Se?rot is spoken of as lights that are concealed or,
as in
the Zohar, as the light of blackness (Bozina di Kardinuta).131
Hasidic teacher Bitzalel Malamud explains that the study of Jewish
mysticism involves various classic metaphors that describe supernal
dynamics. The Sun is one such metaphor, referring to a nonapprehensible
level of in?nite light “which in its source is completely nulli?ed
and non-existent but which nevertheless emanates as a ray to create
and enliven all creation, spiritual as well as the physical.” The
metaphor, however, does not tell the whole story because we are thinking
about an in?nite “sun” that, if revealed as the direct source of the ray,
would leave it and creation no room to exist with any independence.
Malamud explains that in order to allow a place for separate existence,
the in?nite sun needs to be completely contracted. In the language of
the kabbalist, this is called the Tzimtzum, which is basically the hiding
of godliness.132
In other words, Tzimtzum refers to the contraction of God’s in?nite
light in order to create a space or black void so that there is room for
creation. Shevirah refers, on the other hand, to a brilliant spark that
exists like a scintilla in the sea of darkness that can serve as a basis
for
redemption. In the kabbalistic universe, light and dark exist in an
invisible interpenetration that, like Sol niger, might well be referred
to as
Divine Darkness.
A friend and colleague, Robert Romanyshyn, knew of my work on
the black sun and had himself been working on a book of poems called
Dark Light. He told me that he had no idea why the title had come to
him, and he sent me the following dream of a black sun:
V. and I awaken in a hotel room. It is dark outside, and I am surprised
because it feels as if it should be morning. It feels that we
have slept and the night has passed. I call the hotel desk to ask the
time and someone tells me it is 9 a.m. Then the person says,
“Haven’t you heard? Scientists are saying there’s something
wrong with the sun.”
(202) Chapter 5
In a half waking state, a kind of reverie, the dream seems to continue:
I have the sense that the world now will be lit by a dark light.
I also have the sense that these scientists have determined that
there is much less hydrogen (fuel) and/or much less mass to the
sun than they had previously expected. The world is going to become
increasingly dark and cold.
But then the dark, nearly black light becomes blue/violet/purple.
A blue sun, a beautiful aura of blue color bathes the world. I
think of the color of the tail of the Peacock in alchemy.
In a letter to me he comments that he was left wondering whether
the world were entering into a dark sun (apart, of course, from wondering
about the personal meaning of the dream for his own life). Although it is
not my intent to comment on this dream with regard to
Romanyshyn’s personal life, I would like to amplify it a bit by noting
that in The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation, he discusses
the tragic death of his wife.133 Un?inchingly, he lived through a most
profound darkness and emerged with a sense of gratitude and the renewal
of life. Likewise, in this dream, the darkness of Sol niger transforms
into an array of colors associated with an alchemical symbol of
transformation, the peacock’s tail, or cauda pavonis: The peacock’s tail
in traditional alchemy is said to occur “immediately after the deathly
black stage” of the nigredo. “After the nigredo, the blackened body of
the Stone is washed and puri?ed by the mercurial water during the
process of ablution. When the blackness of the nigredo is washed away,
it is succeeded by the appearance of all the colours of the rainbow,
which looks like a peacock displaying its luminescent tail.”134
This appearance is “a welcome sign that the dawning of the albedo
is at hand, that the matter is now puri?ed and ready for re-animation
by the illuminated soul.”135 Looking at this image in the light of our
exploration of Sol niger, it is not the case that when the nearly black
light
becomes a blue violet and/or purple sun bathing the world in color,
that blackness disappears any more than the loss of a loved one ever
vanishes, but that “blue is ‘darkness made visible’.”136 This is an idea
reminiscent of Jung’s now famous saying that “one does not become
The Black Sun
(203)
enlightened by imagining ?gures of light, but by making the darkness
conscious.” For Hillman, “the transit from black to white via blue
implies that blue always brings black with it.”137
The image in ?gure 5.8 emerged at the end of a long-term analysis
of a woman artist. Su?ering through the multiple morti?cations that
analysis requires to be successful allows a fuller ?owering of the
imagination, which shows itself here in a creative combination of peacock
and owl feathers. The image emerged after a couple of dreams, the ?rst
about the end of a love a?air and the second her “?rst ?ying dream
ever.”
Resonant with the cauda pavonis of alchemy, the image’s multicolored eyes
are prominent. For my patient, the eyes were cat’s eyes and represented a
more independent way of seeing that emerged after deep
disillusionment. The owl feathers reminded her of night vision, of being
able to see in the dark of the transcendence of the starred heavens, and
of the goddess Athena, to whom the owl was sacred. The owl’s eyes were
Athena’s eyes and as such became related to nocturnal studies, to the
academy, and to wisdom. The owl also has many other mythological
references, including a relationship to the dead sun and to healing.138
For Hillman, before healing can take place and the blackness of the
nigredo can be transformed into the terra alba, or white earth, one must
be able to see through multiple eyes and from many perspectives. From
one point of view, the emergence of the white earth leaves the blackness
behind, but as we have seen in numerous ways, the terra alba and the
darkness against which it de?nes itself form an intimate and indissoluble
relationship so that the white earth “is not sheer white in the literal
sense but a ?eld of ?owers, a peacock’s tail, a coat of many colors.”139
Hillman explains that the multiple eyes of cauda pavonis re?ect the
full “?owering of imagination [that] shows itself as the qualitative
spread of colors so that imagining is a coloring process, and if not in
literal colors, then as the qualitative di?erentiation of intensities and
hues which is essential to the art of imagination.”140
Ultimately, for Hillman, these colors are not the same as in the
subjectivist philosophies of Newton and Locke or of Berkeley and Hume,
where colors are considered as only secondary qualities brought about
by the mind and senses of the observer. Here he reverses the history of
(204) Chapter 5
Figure 5.8. Variation of the peacock tail. Artwork by analysand. Used by
permission.
philosophy. Color is now seen as a “primary quality” of the thing itself,
not in a naturalistic sense but as “phainoumenon on display” at the
heart of matter itself, prior to all abstraction.141
In my patient’s image of cauda pavonis, the eyes become prominent. They
look back at the dreamer, the artist, and us with an intensity
that suggests we are living in an animated, conscious, living universe
that not only we see but that also sees us. I remember Edinger once
commenting that after years of analysis and looking at dreams, it
occurred to him that the dreams also see us and that this is the
awakening of what Jung meant by psychic reality. Hindu artists were well
aware of this phenomenon as can be seen in the image of multiple
perspectives and eyes we see in ?gure 5.9. It is with the constellation
of
psychic reality that psychological events come to life.
When my Jungian colleague Harry Wilmer heard I was working on
a book on the black sun, he told me that he had been making yarn
paintings and sewing on canvas since 1941 and that he had recently
made one titled The Black Hole (color plate 17a). He sent me a picture
of his image and stated that the band across the middle is the Milky
Way and the large sphere in the right lower corner is the Earth. The row
of lights are the aurora borealis, and the gray explosions are gases
believed to be released at the event horizon.
Wilmer also commented that this image shows the ultimate black
sun that we can expect when the end of time comes. He goes on: “At
that time, theory tells us that the gigantic black hole will suck in the
entire Milky Way, the Earth and our entire galaxy, including the Sun. . .
.
The red dot is the ‘singularity,’ the most dense gravitational body
possible.”142
I imagine Wilmer’s vision as an ultimate Sol niger image, not reducible
to either psychological or physical reality. His description is
ominous and black, but his image is ?lled with color and life. I
remembered an article in the New York Times by James Glanz. In the
article Glanz describes how black holes have been seen as “windowless
cosmic dungeons, ultracompressed objects with gravity so powerful
that anything that plummets through their trapdoors—surfaces called
event horizons enshrouding each one—is forever lost to the rest of the
(206) Chapter 5
Figure 5.9. The multiple eyes of psychic reality. From author’s personal
collection.
universe. Scientists believe that not even light beams can escape once
they are inside.”143
He goes on, however, to report a surprising, new ?nd by astronomers who,
using an X-ray observatory in orbit around the Earth, have
discovered an intense glow, a glow with the intensity of ten billion
suns, burning just outside the event horizon of a huge but very distant
black hole (color plate 17b). In other words, for the ?rst time, these
astronomers have seen energy and light pouring out of a black hole and
into the surrounding universe.
These observations have given rise to many speculations and probably will
for the foreseeable future.144 The interpenetration of darkness
and light in Wilmer’s vision and the paradox of the enigma of the black
hole is reminiscent of a dream of Jung’s, which he reported in a letter
to Father Victor White on December 18, 1946.145 The letter was written
sometime after Jung had a second heart attack. Jung writes:
It is a mightily lonely thing, when you are stripped of everything
in the presence of God. One’s wholeness is tested mercilessly. . . .
I had to climb out of that mess and I am now whole again. Yesterday I had
a marvelous dream: One bluish diamond, like a star
high in heaven, re?ected in a round quiet pool—heaven above,
heaven below. The imago Dei in the darkness of the earth, this is
myself. This dream meant a great consolation. I am no more
a black and endless sea of misery and su?ering but a certain
amount thereof contained in a divine vessel.
In a similar fashion, at the end of his life
the French poet Victor Hugo at the age of eighty three had a
stroke. Four days later, during his death struggles, he, like Goethe,
spoke of light, saying, “Here is the battle of day against night.”
Hugo’s last words continued what in life he had always done:
searching the darkest recesses of human nature for its brightest
treasures. As he died he whispered, “I see black light.”146
I read Jung’s dream and Hugo’s comment in the spirit of Lao Tzu,
who wrote that “mystery and manifestation arise from the same
(208) Chapter 5
source. This source is called darkness. . . . Darkness within darkness,
the gateway to all understanding.”147
I would like to end with a quote from Arthur ZaJonc, who wrote a
book called Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and
Mind: “As we leave light’s expansive dominions, the heavens dim and
darkness quietly falls. Within that darkness there is a silent murmur, a
still voice that whispers of yet another and unsuspected part to light,
for even utter darkness shimmers with its force.”148
So our journey to the black sun ends with a whisper that began and
ends in darkness, a darkness no longer light’s contrary but a point of
possibility in which light and dark both have their invisible origin, a
simulacrum of substance in a world without foundations.
(209)
epilo gue
(214) Epilogue
notes
Introduction
1.
2.
Chapter 1
1.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Ibid., p. 229.
4.
5.
6.
Ibid.
7.
Ibid., p. 269.
8.
Ibid.
9.
Janet McCritchard, Eclipse of the Sun: An Investigation into the Sun and
the
Moon Myths.
14. Madronna Holden, “Light Who Loves Her Sister, Darkness,” Parabola
(Spring–Summer, 2001): 38.
15.
Chapter 2
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe, The Collected Works, vol. 2, Faust I
&
8.
Ibid.
9.
12. Ibid.
13.
Ibid., p. 69.
16. Ibid.
17.
18. Von Franz, M.-L., Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the
Psychology, pp. 156–57.
19. Laing, Divided Self, p. 205.
20. T. Folly and I. Zaczek, The Book of the Sun, p. 112.
21. Hillman, “The Seduction of Black,” p. 49.
22. G. Woolf, Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry
Crosby,
p. 174.
23. E. Germain, Shadows of the Sun: The Diaries of Harry Crosby, p. 7.
24. Woolf, Black Sun, 197.
25. Ibid., p. 197–98.
26. Ibid., p. 198.
27. Ibid.
28. Quoted in J. Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy, p. 141.
29. Ibid., p. 13.
30. Ibid., p. 12.
31.
Ibid., p. 151.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 143.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 144.
36. Cf. Hillman, “On Senex Consciousness,” p. 24.
37. Cf. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, p.
911; Von
Franz, Alchemy, p. 156.
38. Hillman, “On Senex Consciousness,” p. 20.
Notes to Pages 30–45 (217)
39. Ibid., p. 21.
40. Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold, p. 118.
41. Steven Lonsdale also richly ampli?es the deep origins of dance in his
books
Animals and the Origins of Dance and Dance and Ritual Play in Greek
Religion.
42. V. S. Gregorian, A. Azarian, M. B. Demaria, and L. D. McDonald,
“Colors
of Disaster: The Psychology of the ‘Black Sun,’” p. 1.
43. Ibid., p. 4.
44. Ibid.
45. Book of Joel 2:10 (Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version).
46. Revelations 6:12.
47. Gregorian, Azarian, Demaria, and McDonald, “Colors of Disaster,” p.
13.
48. Ibid.
49. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 144, para. 172.
50. Dieter Martinetz and Karl Kernz Lohs, Poison: Sorcery and Science,
Friend
and Foe, p. 136.
51.
52. Ibid.
53. Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, pp. 26–27.
54. Silvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation
for Woman,
p. 24.
55. Ibid., pp. 24–25.
56. Ajit Mookerjee, Kali: The Feminine Force, p. 61.
57. E. Harding, Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar, p. 38.
58. Swami Vivekananda, In Search of God and Other Poems, p. 25.
59. R. F. McDermott, “The Western Kali,” p. 290.
60. Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 168.
61. Helen Luke, From Darkwood to White Rose Journey and Transformation in
Dante’s Divine Comedy, p. 41.
62. E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair. Note on back cover.
63. Ibid., p. 23–28.
64. Giegerich discusses the painful limitation in the chapter titled “No
Admission” in The Soul’s Logical Life.
65. Selection from Stephen Mitchell, trans., The Book of Job, p. 13–14.
2.
In any case, for many alchemists, the boundaries between the images and
overt reality were not so hard and fast as they are for modern
consciousness.
3.
4.
6.
Ibid., p. 123.
7.
8.
William Blake, The Book of Urizen, from The Complete Poetry and Prose of
William Blake, ed. by David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982), pp. 74, 75.
9.
Ibid., p. 3.
12. Ibid., p. 4.
13.
Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 5.
15.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 4.
Ibid.
Ibid.
52. J. Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism, p. 234.
53. Ibid.
54. Cf. ibid., p. 235.
55. Ibid., p. 236.
56. Ibid., p. 240.
57. M. E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth,
p. 1.
58. Anna C. Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, p. 181.
59. Ibid., p. 184.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 196.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., p. 193.
65. Ibid.
66. Barbara Rose, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt.
67. Ibid., p. 81.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., p. 82.
70. R. Smith, “Paint in Black: Ad Reinhardt at Moca,” pp. 1, 9.
71.
Chapter 4
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
The process of the albedo is complex and has been the topic of many com-
paragraphs 484–85.
mentaries. See Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche (40–41) for further
elaboration. Also see Hillman’s essays “Silver and White Earth,” parts
one and two,
and Abraham’s Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery.
8.
9.
Ibid., p. 34.
Derrida, Writing and Di?erence, p. 86. Derrida also cites Plato, The
Republic, 508a–509.
Drob describes the se?rot as “the traits of God and the structural
elements
of the world” and notes that “they should be capable of providing us with
insight into both God and the totality of the created world” (Kabbalistic
Metaphors, p. 49).
32. Two sources for further elaboration of this theme are The Tree of
Life;
Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of Issac; Luria’s Palace of
Adam
Kadmon; and the Gates of Light, by Joseph Gikatilla.
33. From von Rosenroth, Kabbala de Nudate, Frankfurt, 1684; referenced by
Kurt Seligman in The History of Magic.
34. Seligman, History of Magic, p. 352.
35. Drob, Symbols of the Kabbalah, p. 200.
36. Alex Grey, Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey, p. 36.
37. Ibid.
38. David V. Tansley, Subtle Body: Essence and Shadow, p. 46.
39. “The halo is inscribed with signs of contemplation from six di?erent
paths:
the symbols of Yin and Yang from Taoism; a description of the magnitude
of Brahman from Hinduism; the watchword of the Jewish faith, ‘Hear Oh
Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One’; the Tibetan Buddhist mantra,
Chapter 5
1.
2.
3.
Ibid.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Ibid.
9.
Ibid.
Jung and Edinger both attempt to deal with this apparent paradox. Edinger
quotes Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis:
I must point out to the reader that these remarks on the signi?cance of
the ego might easily prompt him to charge me with grossly contradicting
myself. He will perhaps remember that he has come across a
very similar argument in my other writings. Only there it was not a
question of ego but of the self. . . . I have de?ned the self as the
totality
of the conscious and the unconscious psyche, and the ego as the central
reference-point of consciousness. It is an essential part of the self,
Notes to Pages 136–50 (227)
and can be used pars pro toto [part for the whole] when the signi?cance
of consciousness is borne in mind. But when we want to lay emphasis on
the psychic totality it is better to use the term “self.” There is
no question of a contradictory de?nition, but merely of a di?erence of
standpoint. (Mysterium Lectures, 93, para. 133)
Edinger himself goes on to note the following: “So the sun as the symbol
of
consciousness represents both the ego and the Self. The reason for that
double representation is that the Self cannot come into conscious,
e?ective
existence except through the agency of an ego. Needless to say it can
come
into plenty of e?ective existence without an ego but it can’t come into
consciously e?ective existence without the agency of an ego. That’s why
it is unavoidable that the symbolism of Sol, as the principle of
consciousness,
represents both the ego and the Self ” (94).
14. Niel Micklem, Jung’s Concept of the Self: Its Relevance Today, papers
from the
public conference organized in May, 1990, by the Jungian Postgraduate
Committee of the British Association of Psychotherapists.
15.
16. Ibid., p. 8.
17.
Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
20. Ibid., p. 10.
21. The coniunctio has been described as “an alchemical symbol of a union
of
unlike substances; a marrying of the opposites in an intercourse which
has
as its fruition the birth of a new element. . . . From Jung’s point of
view, the
coniunctio was identi?ed as the central idea of alchemical process. He
himself saw it as an archetype of psychic functioning, symbolizing a
pattern of
relationships between two or more unconscious factors. Since such
relationships are at ?rst incomprehensible to the perceiving mind, the
coniunctio is capable of innumerable symbolic projections (i.e., man and
woman,
king and queen, dog and bitch, cock and hen, Sol and Luna).” From A.
Samuels, B. Shorter, and F. Plaut’s Critical Dictionary of Jungian
Analysis, p. 35.
(228) Notes to Pages 150–51
22. Micklem, “I Am Not Myself,” p. 11.
23. Cf. Edinger, Mysterium Lectures, p. 132.
24. Ibid., p. 134.
25. Ibid., pp. 134–35.
26. Jung, Alchemical Studies, caption below frontispiece.
27. Ibid.
28. Edinger, Mysterium Lectures, p. 135.
29. Ibid., p. 135.
30. Ibid., p. 136.
31.
Epilogue
1.
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index
Italics indicate pages with images.
ablution phase, 203
Adorno, Theodor, 90
Aeneid (Virgil), 67
Ammut, 68
transformation of subjectivity
analysis (continued)
cases
132–35
blackening process, 17, 162–63. See also
nigredo
blacker-than-black, nigredo experi-
Athena, 204
(Kristeva), 43–44
aurum philosophicum, 9
Eve (Blake), 39
Bond, Stephenson, 14
Ayin, 202
Book of Lambspring, 19
Azarian, A., 48
Bhagavad-Gita, 136
(250)
Index
Buddhism, 4, 107, 179–81, 198
98, plate 2
Cabala Mineralis, 81
200
Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (ZaJonc), 209
plates 8–9
rience, 40–41
Cocytus—Traitor (Doré), 60
darkness, 201–2
16
complementarities in opposites relationship, 180–81, 182
di?erential conjunction
Man metaphor in, 103, 104–5; un-
191–92
coniunctio: alchemical image of, 80,
228n 21; and black sun imagery, 81,
Index (251)
coniunctio (continued )
Western tradition
41, 156–67, plate 12; sexual symbolism, 124–25, 198; vs. unity/sameness,
(Suzuki), 198
luminous darkness
DeMaria, M. B., 48
Dürer, Albrecht, 46
60–64
Index (253)
ego (continued)
Faust (Goethe), 24
in, 23
Fontana, Lucio, 91
The Forest (Doré), 28
Gage, John, 84
Ezekiel, 103
Heidegger, Martin, 76
82, 83
religions
Gregorian, V. S., 48
also Tantra
Hokusai, 192
Holbein, Hans, 19–20
Holden, Madronna, 15
Harvest (Clarke), 36
ness, 201–2
(Derrida), 183
Hazo, Sam, 32
abstract art, 90
Index (255)
illumination, 11, 12, 101, 148–49, 177–
?ight, 32
(Kalsched), 68–72
cine, 111
integration, psychic: coniunctio role in,
4 and 6
Kant, Immanuel, 91
Kohut, Heinz, 69
Kristeva, Julia, 43–44, 71, 174
Kuspit, Donald, 90
(256)
Index
Lacan, Jacques, 72–73, 187
Landerer, Ferdynand, 55
Lansdale, Steven, 48
LeBon, Gustave, 84
Levin, D., 16
Li Chun-Yin, 111
195, 214
regeneration/rebirth
McDonald, L. D., 48
Maimonides, 103
Malamud, Bitzalel, 202
Index (257)
materialist viewpoint, 83, 152, 195
Matisse, Henri, 84
107–8
Melchior, 99
12–13
Mumonkan, 4
165, 167
176–77
monstrum, 154
32n 94
33n 94
mythological expressions: biblical, 49–
50, 62–64, 103; Egyptian, 68, 172–73;
(258) Index
Greco-Roman, 32–33, 44–45, 67, 77–
?catio
62–64
non-Self: black-on-black paintings as
76–77
Index (259)
objecti?ed vs. lived body, 164–65
60–62
Perry, John, 14
pharmakon (elixir), 20
Ovid, 32–33
Paracelsus, 102
in creative process, 44
5, 109
183–87
175–79
psyche: activation center in solar
plexus, 115–18; as larger than ego,
(260) Index
163; as microcosm, 223n 23; protec-
ego; Self
plate 7
(Bond), 14
archetypal
Rinzai, 4
Ripley, George, 136
151
Rose, Barbara, 89
King, 17–19
Index (261)
Sandqvist, Mona, 83–84
Sarton, May, 59
also non-Self
trauma, 71
(Heemskerck), 44
195–96
“Seven Sermons to the Dead” (Jung),
178
Sayer, Dorothy, 60
40–41
Smith, Richard, 89
40, 42
(262) Index
solar plexus role in nigredo experience, 112–18, 119, 130–31, 160, 162
130, plate 2
darkness
Stevens, Petrus, 33
subject, transformation of, 187–88,
231–33n 94
Index (263)
subtle body: blackness as, 192; clinical
Thanatos concept, 76
Tractatus Aureus, 99
4–5
transcendence: and abandonment of
also wounding
Sunyata, 179
paradox, 164
necessary for, 79
Transforming Depression (Rosen), 73–
75
trauma, response to, 45–54, 68–72, 78–
79, 91, 212
112
plate 2
Tyrant, 14, 17
TzimTzum, 202
unity
16–17, 211
Virgil, 67
123, 137; and King as only light, 17;
trauma, 70
modernity
whitening in alchemy, 54, 97–99, 130,
189–90, 203–4
Index (265)
wholeness, 10, 76, 149, 150. See also integration; union of opposites
Williams, C. A. S., 55
128
(266)
niger, 4
Index
Other books in the Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series
in Analytical Psychology