In the last two chapters we examined the primacy of light and the dark alchemy of descent, emphasizing the “blacker than black” aspects of the nigredo process in its most literal and destructive forms. This descent was an excruciating initiation into the most negative dimensions of Sol niger and an entrance into the domain of Hades and Ereshkigal, Dante's world of ice, and Kali's cremation grounds. Our king's ego has been spoiled, our virgin's milk has soured, and we have drunk the poison of Holbein's dance of death and seen the black sun of Splendor Solis. The sun has blackened, and we have met Jung's Dragon. Our dark eye is opened, and we have entered Edinger's “gate of blackness.” Hollowed out with Eliot, ranting with the philosopher Cioran, and lamenting with Job, one may wonder why we were ever born. In the face of such a devastating vision, analysis stands still—shocked. Salvationist fires are fanned but are held back; the heart is wrenched. Job's comforters are quieted, and no platitudes or new analytic techniques will do. Biological remedies, primal screams, and spiritual fantasies are hollow. There is no rush to cure; perhaps there is no cure at all. Silence is in the soul of patient and analyst alike: a quiet pair sitting in the grip of Sol niger, dark and light, burning and ice cold, standing on ground that is no ground, a self that is no self and that has been devoured by a green lion or a black hole.

We ended our last reflection with an image of Sol niger taken from Mylius's Philosophia Reformata. The image, which pictures a skeleton standing on a black sun, eerily echoes the culmination of our dark alchemy of descent. Standing in such a place signifies that the mortifi-catio has been achieved. In alchemy, putrefaction follows the mortifica-tio process. It is an aspect of the death experience and is thought to be the agent whereby change occurs. Only through the experience of dying and decomposition is new life possible. In this chapter we follow the potentially devastating consequences of an encounter with Sol niger. In so doing, we look first at depth psychology's idea of defense as a protective gesture and then beyond to a psychology of dying that is richly amplified in both alchemical art as well as the work of contemporary artists. Through depth psychology and art, we hope to gain an understanding of the meaning of a symbolic death in which dying and renewal together form the central mystery and paradox of the black sun.

Edinger speculates that “witnessing the putrefaction of a dead body ... was not an unusual experience in the Middle Ages [and] would have had a powerful psychological impact. The effects of this experience might then be projected into the alchemical processes.”¹Whether the phenomenology of such experiences are observed in outer life and then projected onto alchemical processes or whether, on the other hand, such experiences emerge from an attention to psyche's intrinsic movement toward decay and decomposition, they nevertheless reflect a process and a place in the psyche.²

a dark, often repugnant underworld . . . [as] an incipient process of rot, rot that is necessary to permit a stagnated process to reach a state of dissolution. A period of stench, disintegration, repulsion and depression . . . [of dissolution and decay.]... Things must rot thoroughly like garbage, before they can be reduced to ... rubble.... The future is dark and confused. It seems as

ever.... All energy drains out of consciousness. In this bottomless pit, one finds death, death as the only reality.... It is a bottomless pit.... In this realm there is no light, no possibility for

reflection. . . . The heart is heavy and in the lowest state of the ni-gredo, there are no images.³

Although I believe Bosnak is correct that at the “bottom” of this darkness there are “no images,” in another sense, as we have seen, the images of dying and dissolution are endlessly imagined in literature, poetry, painting, and psychology. Sol niger is one such image that is not an image in the conventional sense at all. The very nature of such extreme darkness seems to call forth an endless proliferation of attempts to describe this void, no matter how unsuccessfully. In Virgil's Aeneid, a Sibyl, or priestess of the sun god Apollo, who accompanies him on his journey to the underworld, says, “If I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths and a voice of iron, I still could not describe all the... varieties of punishment awaiting the dead,” yet Virgil describes Aeneas's encounter with a monstrous hydra—a beast with fifty heads—and a swarm of wilted, marooned spirits “wandering aimlessly along the marshes of the Styx,” spirits who have to wander for a hundred years—awaiting putrefaction.⁴ Many such visions of the underworld are widely disseminated across time and culture, from Egypt to Greece, in Homer's Odyssey and Plato's Gorgias, from the paintings of Bosch to fire-and-brimstone preachers who depict an image of the soul in the throws of the nigredo. Contemporary sources such as Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings continue to resonate with this image.

Given the repulsive and devastating impact of Sol niger, it is not surprising that there is a desire to escape its consequences and to move away from and out of its grip. Peter Tatham, a Jungian analyst, comments that it is best to avoid such experiences when possible (1984). He believes that in so doing we may enable ourselves and our patients to deal with their darkness in “acceptable doses, or to put it another way, we are helping them towards an incarnation of the death and rebirth process rather than being devoured by it.”⁵ However, he also acknowledges that there “will be times when the pull of the black hole is too great and our attempts to avoid it will be of no avail. Then we may have to be mere witnesses to a violent ending of physical” and/or psychological life. Then there is “no alternative but to submit to its embrace, knowing what it means and without hope. There are some experiences into which we can enter willingly, while into others we can only fall screaming.”⁶

The horror is exemplified in the Egyptian underworld by Ammut, the Egyptian “eater of the dead,” “the monster [that] is part crocodile, part lion, and part hippopotamus.” Ammut sits “at the feet of King Osiris in the Hall of Justice where the recently departed must face final judgment. As the soul gives an account of its life, Ammut tries to trick and confuse it, hoping to bring about an unfavorable ruling. If the soul is judged unworthy . . . Ammut devours it, sometimes with slow cru-elty.”⁷ Ammut has many brothers and sisters in the dark underworld of psyche. The bite of Ammut is much like the crocodile in figure 3.1, which appeared in the images drawn by a woman artist whose journey into the underworld we discuss in the next chapter.

The horror of such experiences breaks down our rational ideas and naive visions of light and eternity. Saturnian time and scythe are the order of the night, and here we might imagine with Blake that

In stony sleep [Urizen has separated from Eternity and will be hatched as the body of the world:]

A vast spine writhed in torment upon the winds, shooting pain Ribs like a bending cavern, And bones of solidness froze Over all his nerves of joy⁸

In such instances, if death does not follow wounding, trauma often does. If Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched is right, the psyche has natural defenses against such trauma. In The Inner World of Trauma, he describes the psyche's response to “unbearable psychic pain and anxi-ety.”⁹ By “unbearable,” he means what comes into play when our or-

Figure 3.1. This picture, painted by an analysand, recalls Ereshkigal. Artwork by analysand. Used by permission.

dinary defenses fail. He goes on to describe how the psyche compensates for catastrophic and life-threatening experiences, what the psychoanalyst Winnicott calls “primitive agonies” and self psychologist Kohut refers to as “disintegration anxiety,” an unnamed dread that threatens a dissolution of a coherent self. For Kalsched, beyond our ordinary defenses postulated by Freud and others, “a second line of defenses comes into play to prevent the ‘unthinkable' from being experienced.” These defenses and their elaboration in unconscious fantasy are the focus of Kalsched's investigation. He shows how a spontaneous symbolic process holds the fragmenting pieces of psyche together in what he calls a traumatic organization. Because this protects the inner core of the Self, this process has been referred to as a defense of the Self and constitutes an interesting story of psychic organization beyond the ego.¹⁰

Kalsched describes a split between the vulnerable and shamefully hidden remainder of the “whole Self,” often portrayed as a child or animal, and “a powerful, benevolent or malevolent great being”¹¹ who protects the innocent being. What seems counterintuitive in his description is that this “protector” should show itself also as a malevolent force in the psyche, one that often persecutes the personal spirit and shows itself to the dream ego as a daemonic and terrifying force. He notes that most “contemporary writers tend to see this attacking figure as an internalized version of the actual perception of the trauma.”¹²However, for Kalsched, this is only half correct since “the internal figure is often even more sadistic and brutal than the actual ‘outer world perpetrator.'” For Kalsched, this indicates that we are dealing with something that is contributed from the psyche, a psychological factor and “an archetypal traumatogenic agency within the psyche itself.”¹³

It is strange to think of such a brutal force as a “protector.” Kalsched explains that the intention of this daemonic force is to prevent at all costs the reexperiencing of the horror at the genesis of the traumatogenic organization. The daemons of the inner world, like the temple lions at the entrance of sacred spaces, serve to keep away the unprepared. They will “disperse [the self] into fragments (dissociation) or encapsulate it and sooth it with fantasy (schizoid withdrawal) or numb it with intoxicating substances (addictions) or persecute it to keep it from hoping for life in this world (depression).”¹⁴ Hope would open the soul, leaving it vulnerable to what is imagined as an even more painful experience than that which the “protective daemon” enforces on the wounded “personal spirit.”

It is often the case, however, that the cure is worse than the “illness,” even if this cannot be seen from within the experience of the overwhelming threat that continues in the wake of trauma. The fact that the ego does not notice the problematic character of the cure sets the stage for the fact that “the primitive defense does not learn anything about realistic danger.... Each new life opportunity is mistakenly

seen as a dangerous threat of re-traumatization and is therefore attacked. In this way, the archaic defenses become anti-life forces which Freud understandably thought of as part of the death instinct.”¹⁵

This is not surprising since the “self-care system” will “go to any length to protect the Self” in spite of the continual masochistic suffering involved, “even to the point of killing the host personality in which this personal spirit is housed (suicide).”¹⁶ As a result, what was intended to be a defense against further trauma now becomes itself destructive in a variety of ways: “The person survives but cannot live creatively.”¹⁷

Such consequences also manifest themselves in the ravages of depression and melancholic affect “engineered by our self-care system.”¹⁸Kalsched cites Julia Kristeva, a Lacanian psychoanalyst who speaks of the black sun. Kalsched's interest is not in the archetypal image of the black sun per se but in contributing to a Jungian understanding of defense processes and to the operation of the psyche as a whole. For him, the image of the black sun via Kristeva remains a “pathological” product of the self-care system and a “primitive” expression and image of defense in the face of unbearable, unreachable, and even invisible narcissistic wounds.

For Kalsched and Kristeva, a person attaches to a thing that is intended to protect the personal spirit from the unthinkable. In so doing, the person is cut off from the “spontaneous expressions of self in the world.”¹⁹ Living in this devastation, the soul is in a suspension from life, a dark enclosure seemingly safe but isolated and stuck in terms of further individuation. In describing this process, Kalsched seems to equate the “personal spirit” with the inner core of the Self, and from this perspective he speaks of the Self as “coherent” and as the “total human personality.” He sees the child or animal images as reflecting the hidden remains of the “whole self.” In symbolic imagery Kalsched sees a larger operating dynamic of the psyche, not just of ego dynamics as such. In this way of imagining it, he gives a Jungian, archetypal basis to the psychoanalytic ideas of others such as Fairbairn, Guntrip, and Klein.

As we already noted, Kalsched's contemporary vision of Sol niger places it in the realm of pathology and of the defensive and traumatic organization of the psyche. Although his contribution reflects the working of the archetypal dimension, his focus is on the way archetypal dynamics protect and preserve the remaining fragments of what he calls the self or “personal spirit.” But can the archetypal image of Sol niger be adequately understood as the product of defense?²⁰ If understood strictly in this way, Sol niger can be imagined only as a kind of black hole whose gravity draws the vulnerable “ego” or Self into a fascination, a spider web that traps it into a doomed stasis.

My contention is that such a description is only part of the story and that it does not yet take into account a more fundamental, archetypal role played by Sol niger in the transformative dynamics of psychic life. One question here is the status of the ego or the self. Does Sol niger have an important role to play in breaking defensive bewitchment and in the deconstructing of the ego or the Self itself? Does the ego require a dying process, as the themes of myth and alchemy suggest? Kalsched's analysis is focused on the preservation and release of the fractured ego. This does not address those moments when the dissolution of the ego is required and constitutes a genuine possibility for a nondefensive initiation that aims at far more than self-preservation, fascination, and the return of the more integrated ego into the flow of life. As important as this process is—and Kalsched's contribution to our understanding of it—the emergence of Sol niger requires a reflection on that which is beyond the humanism of ego psychology and which attempts to take on questions of the death of the ego or perhaps even the Self as part of psychic possibility.

In the classical and developmental psychologies, the unity of the healthy ego is the essential structure of the psyche. The question of the dissolution of the ego or Self is almost always seen as regressive and detrimental, a fusion, or a return to the mother. Some analysts, however, have raised a different perspective, one that has challenged ego psychology and the humanistic position it requires. Such approaches lend themselves to a different understanding of Sol niger and to our interpretation of the “death instinct” as being beyond biological assumptions, or defensive operations of the psyche, or the death of the ego as a regression.

One such position is that of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who imagines the aggressive energy directed toward the ego not at all as a defense of an ideal unity of the Self, but rather as a rebellion against it.

For Lacan, this ideal unity is itself the problem, and the idea of the ego is a distortion of reality. The aggressive energy—the “brutal force”— directed against the ego is not, as Kalsched suggests, to preserve the Self but actually to break down its defensive function. Psyche's telos may not be to protect the ego from reexperiencing trauma but rather to push it toward the feared unthinkable—to the core of its voidness. The intention of the “death instinct” may be to move psychic organization beyond the interests of maternal or paternal preservation of the ego's survival and its humanistic concerns of health and wholeness.²¹

Jungian analyst David Rosen's work Transforming Depression contributes to our understanding of such a death process. In that book Rosen coins the term “egocide” to describe the symbolic death necessary to the transformative process, a process in which the psyche is pushed beyond its defenses. He states that symbolic death “leads to a... greater fall, which actually feels like death.”²² It is like entering an eternal void and requires a suffering through a death-rebirth experience. Rosen images the dying process alchemically, comparing it to a fertile ground—“the underground psychic soil”—in which the seeds of the true self are embedded ans from which they ultimately can ger-minate.”²³If the soul in depression is nurtured properly, the results will be new life for the psyche. This process is similar to what the alchemists understand as mortification. Figure 3.2 shows the relationship between life, death, and the soil as illustrated in the image of the sun in the shape of a black skull with a golden headdress. The figure—called the Lord of the Soil—is a sixteenth-century image from the Kye Monastery in Ladakh, India.

In another image (figure 3.3)from The Hermetic Museum, grain is seen to be growing out of the grave and “corresponds to the alchemical idea that death is the conception of the Philosopher's Stone,” the mystical goal of alchemy. For Rosen, this deep “organic” process sets in motion a kind of mourning for the now lost, dominant ego, and he gives examples of this kind of journey through the dark night of the soul, in which part of the individual psyche must die or be symbolically killed. Egocide makes possible a psychic transformation and constitutes a death-rebirth process. In that process, ego identity dies or is symbolically killed along with one's former perspectives of oneself and

Figure 3.2. “The Lord of the Soil,” photo by Madanjeet Singh.

From Madanjeet Singh, The Sun: Symbol of Power and Life, p. 132.

of life. Still, for Rosen, what Jung calls the Self is not destroyed. What is killed or analyzed to death is the negative (destructive) ego or false (inauthentic) Self. The primary Self as an archetypal image of the Supreme Being remains connected to the secondary, reconstituted ego and the true (authentic) self, which can be renewed and live its personal myth with joy.²⁴

In Rosen's study, egocide is thus closely tied to rebirth and creativity, and one can begin to reimagine what has been called the “death in-

Figure 3.3. Grain growing from the grave, symbolizing resurrection. From Edward Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, p. 163.

stinct” as something more than a biological drive toward physical death. For Kalsched, too, there is a death that breaks through sterility, bewitchment, and defensive mystical devotion. In his approach an analysis of defense helps the person to suffer through blockages, and in the best instances this can lead to a deep sense of compassion that mediates the experience of the “whole Self and its embodied incarnation.”²⁵What Kalsched does not consider is that the death instinct and the archetypal image of Sol niger might themselves lead toward a breakdown of the defensive stasis.

The work of psychologist Mark Welman lends itself to this conclusion. The death instinct has been “conspicuously absent in Jung's psy-chology.”²⁶ Welman notes that it is seldom recognized that Jung “saw death as the ontological pivot” point in the process of psychic unfolding. Welman, therefore, sets out to explicate a Jungian phenomenology of death. He sees Jung's thought as going beyond Freud's idea of the death instinct as a search for literal death. He suggests via Lacan and in resonance with Rosen that its intent is rather a “deconstruction” of the literalist ego in favor of a symbolic order. He points out that for Jung as well, “death” is already a psychological rather than a corporeal event.²⁷ He notes that from the point of view of the ego, death is a brutal and frightening reality, but “from the perspective of the Self death appears,” as it does for Rosen, as “a joyful event... a mysterium con-iunctionis [through which] the soul... achieves wholeness.”²⁸ For Wel-man, understanding the meaning of death in terms of the archetype of the Self offers a way of seeing it in a broader and more adequate way than Freud's conception of Thanatos. From the existential point of view, death is not some “actuality” outstretched in time to be experienced later, but rather, as Heidegger, Hillman, Lacan, the Buddhists, and others suggest, as something always already happening in the “now” as an “existential immediacy.”

For Jung, this “now” of death is an “imaginal reality: a dark and pervasive presence and a primordial abyss” that obliterates the light of consciousness even as it opens up and frees one for the symbolic life.²⁹ In short, the power of the death demon at an archetypal level aims at both the deconstruction of the ego and the creation of new life. In Welman's elaboration of Jung via philosopher Martin Heidegger and other existential thinkers, death fertilizes the imaginal and works to open a poetic space that brings depth and meaning to everyday life. Welman's ideas closely follow Heidegger's account of death as a “shrine of nothing,” by which Heidegger means a kind of ontological emptiness, an emptiness within which Being is grounded and through which Being may be recollected. For many analysts, this way of speaking is unfamiliar and difficult to understand within the traditional frameworks.

I believe, however, that what Welman, through Heidegger, is suggesting is not far from Jung's idea that the Self can be discovered and recollected through the nothingness of the mortificatio process. The mortificatio process eventually leads to “nothingness,” a nothingness that is not literal but existential, imaginal, symbolic, and poetic. For an analyst to speak in this way by no means bypasses the defensive processes or the horror of an analysand's terror of the unthinkable nothingness that Kalsched and others so well describe. The point is not to idealize the destructive potential of nothingness and death but to shift our focus toward the possibility that the psyche itself may call us to the “unthinkable” dissolution of the ego and that this is not always what we imagine. Therefore at times the job of an analyst may be not to collude with the restorative function of defense but rather to help the psyche dissolve them.

As we move from egocide toward the reevaluation of the ego and the death instinct, we move from a simply biological or traditional psychological understanding toward a symbolic and metaphoric one and from literal death to a deconstruction of the literalist ego, which is part of the teleological aspect of the psyche itself.

In Dreams and the Underworld, James Hillman moves us further in this direction and speaks of death as a metaphor, separating it from literal death and linking it more to what goes on in the subtle body and in the psychic life.³⁰ For him, “the death we speak of in our culture is a fantasy of the ego,” and from that perspective we lose touch with subtlety. “For us, pollution and decomposition and cancer have become physical only.”³¹ He notes that in the great art of other cultures there is a different kind of sensibility with respect to dying, one that has faded from our attention and become part of the modern unconsciousness and of the psychic underworld. For him, it is in the world of depth psychology “where today we find the initiatory mystery, the long journey of psychic learning, ancestor worship, the encounter with demons and shadows, the suffering of Hell.”³² He describes the experience of this underworld as a journey that “must be made.”³³ Describing one such journey, he says “it comes as violation, dragging one out of life and into the Kingdom that the Orphic Hymn to Pluto describes as ‘void of day.' So it often says on Greek epitaphs that entering Hades is ‘leaving the sweet sunlight.'”³⁴

In this instance, Hillman is describing the underworld of Hades against the mythic background of the Greek Demeter/Persephone mythologem and the psychological mysteries of Eleusis, which, he notes, we still experience today. He refers to our “sudden depressions, when we feel ourselves caught in hatefulness, cold, numbed, and drawn downward out of life by a force we cannot see...Wefeel invaded from below, assaulted, and we think of death.”³⁵

The world of Hades is an important focus for Hillman, but this, too, is only one way to imagine this metaphoric space of dying. Other mythologems help to constitute other experiences. Hillman's “underworld” is a “mythological style of describing a psychological cos-mos.”³⁶ For him, “underworld is psyche”; it is a world that can be seen when “one's entire mode of being has been desubstantialized, killed of natural life . . . and [is] devoid of life.” To know the psyche for Hillman, then, is to “die,” to make the “descent to Hades.”³⁷

For him, underworld images are ontological statements about the soul and how it “exists in and for itself beyond life.” In light of this, Hillman reads “all movement towards this realm of death, whether they be fantasies of decay, images of sickness in dreams, repetitive compulsions, or suicidal impulses, as movements towards a more psychological perspective.”³⁸ In this way he, too, takes up what Freud called the “death instinct” and reenvisions this dark side of the soul as a movement toward psychological depth and as an “invisible background that breaks us ‘out of life' as we know it.” In this way one might imagine the death of the “ego” as a death of the materialist perspective and of the humanism of a naturalistic psychology. For him, the idea is not to return a stronger ego to life or to the constellation of the “true self,” which is just as suspect. Rather, what is called for is a “shift in consciousness” and a descent to the underworld that “must be made.” This descent is necessary even for the most integrated egos. In dreams and psychic life there is for Hillman an inherent opposition within the psyche, and no amount of good-enough parental care should protect the soul from dying into psychological life. Ultimately, for Hillman, “death” is the most radical way of expressing a shift in consciousness.

For most depth psychologists, the journey to the underworld is for the purpose of a return to life as, one hopes, a more integrated self, but for Hillman this does not go far enough. The return of the repressed still does not address the deeper meaning of “death itself ” and the underworld psyche.³⁹ Hades as a figure of his concern reflects a radical shift in our view of psychological life, which is qualitatively different from that of our modernist tradition; Hades does not represent a movement into life and wholeness but rather a movement out of life in which the literal ego loses its fixed substance. This is a difficult perspective for modern consciousness to understand. How it differs from the perspectives of Jung, Kalsched, Rosen, Welman, Lacan, and others remains to be further elaborated, but on the surface Hillman's vision seems to be one of a very different sense of psyche.

Whatever the differences and similarities between the positions we have outlined, all of us would agree that the “death experience” must be understood metaphorically and psychologically. We have already seen that alchemy has placed the death experience at the heart of the alchemical process. Without entering into the nigredo and undergoing the mortificatio experience, no transformation is possible. Alchemical literature is replete with descriptions, arcane as they may be, of the phenomenology and symbolism of dying, often illustrated with highly complex images and symbolic drawings.

The Art of Mortificatio

Symbolic images of the mortificatio have appeared throughout the ages, from the alchemists to the postmodern artists of today. The metaphor of death is richly elaborated in arcane graphics in which corpses, coffins, and graves are containers for the mysterious workings of the psyche. The Rosarium Philosophorum, for instance, contains a series of such images in which the coffin functions as a container for the process of transformation. Jung writes that in these images, the “vas hermeticeum ... [has] here become sarcophagus and tomb.”⁴⁰ This theme also appears in a series of drawings (figure 3.4) that began to appear in alchemical manuscripts during the Renaissance.

For Jung as well as for the alchemists, “death” is part of a process of transformation in which strange and symbolic events take place. It was important to the alchemists and for Jung to illustrate the process through images. Because the work of alchemy is concerned with the dying process and a linking of the ego and the unconscious, Jung felt that this experience could best “be expressed by means of symbols” or images “born of nature's own workings.”⁴¹ For Jung, a natural symbol is “far removed from all conscious intention.”

Jungian analyst Jeff Raff rightly points out that “alchemical pictures were not simply illustrations for a text, but attempts to communicate” complex realities and “were a profound expression of the alchemical imagination.”⁴² Alchemical emblems “represent the mysteries of

Figure 3.4. Image of the coniunctio from the Rosarium Philosophorum.

From Vladilav Zadrobilek, ed., Magnum Opus (Prague: Trigon), p. 72.

alchemy so powerfully and concisely that their study can lead to a profound understanding of its nature.”⁴³ Alchemical scholar Stanislas Klossowksi De Rola echoes this recognition in his study of alchemical engravings of the seventeenth century. Noting that these engravings “transcend both illustration and decoration,” he argues that they constitute an independent pictorial language that, in silence but not without eloquence, conveys the secrets of alchemy.⁴⁴ De Rola sees these images as a kind of alchemical language that “plays [on] . . . double meanings, natural analogies and hermetick interpretations of classical mythology.”⁴⁵ He calls this way of communicating “the Golden Game.” The Rosariumpictures illustrating the dying process are one grouping among several others. The death experience was pivotal, and Sol niger was often intimately linked to the nigredo and mortificatio aspects of the process.

The metaphoric expression of the dying process is also found in other alchemical manuscripts. For example, chapter two ends with an illustration from Mylius's Philosophia Reformata (1622), in which the image of a skeleton is standing on a glowing black orb marking the nigredo/putrefactio stage in the death-rebirth process. Other alchemical manuscripts likewise place images of the black sun in similar positions in the process. For instance, alchemist Edward Kelly, in his paper “The Theatre of Terrestrial Astronomy,” comments that “the beginning of our work is the black raven which, like all things that are to grow and receive life, must first putrefy. For putrefaction is a necessary condition of solution, as salvation is of birth and regeneration.”⁴⁶

In figure 3.5we see an image of conjunction in which a black sun is contained in an alchemical vessel. Behind the furnace is a field of green barely springing up out of the earth, again linking death with regeneration. This process is beautifully described in the alchemical manuscript Cabala Mineralis, in which Sol is described as undergoing “sophic calcinations, and putrefaction.” The common Sun is watered with new mercury and made “one body black and not porous.” Then germination takes place. The Sun is changed from its black color and becomes green and is spread out into the vegetation.

Figure 3.5. The black sun contained in an alchemical vessel, from “The Theater of Terrestrial Astronomy,” series of emblems by Edward Kelly, 1676. From Adam McLean, http://www.levity.com/alchemy/terrastr.htm.

Garden of Daniel Stolcius.⁴⁷ This is an essential, seventeenth-century sourcebook in the symbolic and meditative tradition in alchemy and one of its most important emblem books.⁴⁸

A translation of the Latin inscription accompanying the emblem reads as follows:

In these alchemical images, the symbology of dying is pivotal, complex, and closely linked to transformation. Images of Sol niger and death seem to bring what we think of as opposites into proximity. Black orbs glow with intense light, graves are filled with green barley, and death is linked to an increase in life. These alchemical images might be imagined to reflect what Welman calls an ontological “pivot point,” a perspective in which death is also jouissance and egocide is linked to

Figure 3.6. Image of Sol Niger, 1627. From Adam McLean, ed., The Hermetic Garden of Daniel Stolcius, emblem 99, p. 108.

creativity. Likewise for Hillman, death is also the death of a materialist viewpoint, freeing us for imaginal and poetic life, a life beyond life, and a movement into psychological depth.

We have seen that images have played an important role in the expression of complex psychological processes, processes that seem to exceed our traditional ways of speaking and imagining. The attempt to explore ontological “pivot points” and to penetrate paradoxes like Sol niger are aided not only by allegorical images but also by the study of artistic expression in general. How can we understand a death that means new life or a darkness that shines? Images such as these have long interested artists and writers, even “after alchemy itself had fallen into disrepute as a natural science.”⁵⁰ The death of the ego, blackness, and the transformation of the soul, which were so important in alchemy, were also concerns for a number of artists. Mona Sandqvist writes that “alchemy has been kept alive in art, music, and literature by a chain of masters: painters like Bosch, Brueghel the Elder, Max Ernst and Rene Magritte; musicians like Mozart, Scriabin, and Schonberg; and writers like E. T. A. Hoffman, Balzac, Gerard de Nerval, Mallorme, Autard, Yeats and Joyce.”⁵¹

The paradox of the black sun is that it is an image that simultaneously expresses what traditionally has been held to be a pair of incompatible and opposing phenomena: darkness and light, blackness and luminosity. Yet, in the image of Sol niger, they are intimately linked. This luminous paradox at the heart of the black sun has been a theme both explicit and implicit in the work of painters who have painted in black.

Explicitly, there have been a number of artists who have painted black suns, including Motherwell, Matisse, Ernst, Calder, and others. More implicitly, the theme of painting luminous blackness has been an important part of the history of painting and would require a booklength study in its own right. Malevich, Rothko, Reinhardt, Soulages, Stella, and Rauschenberg are well known for their focus on blackness and the dialectic of light and dark and have dedicated a part of their careers to exploring this theme.

Figure 3.7shows a primitive and powerful rendition of the black sun by Motherwell. Matisse expresses a very different aspect of the black sun. He thought of black as a luminous color and went on to experiment with the idea of black light, with black as luminosity. “The concept of black as a colour (not simply as a darkener) had been debated in painterly circles since the Renaissance, and had been more or less generally accepted by the close of the nineteenth century.”⁵² Still, as art historian John Gage points out, the notion of black as a light is “so paradoxical and so radical” that it invites a more careful examination.⁵³Gage's reflection on Matisse considers a number of possible influences on him, including that of the philosopher Henri Bergson and the mathematician Henri Poincare, who held that movement exists only by means of “the destruction and reconstitution of matter,” a provocative idea relevant to our exploration of Sol niger. Gustave LeBon, a nineteenth-century scientist, was also interested in the idea of the instability of matter and likewise began to develop a theory of black light as well.⁵⁴ Although the term “black light” was not generally accepted, it became clear that visible light accounted for less than one tenth of

Figure 3.7. Black Sun (1959), painting by Robert Motherwell. © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. Used by permission.

the spectrum and that the invisible portion constituted a far more “important portion of the light,” even though the human eye was not sensitive enough to perceive it directly.⁵⁵ “Black Light was not a concept which had any lasting [scientific] impact,” but “Matisse's ‘black light,' on the other hand, propelled partly by the inner turmoil brought about by illness and war, had a long life ahead of it.... What proved to

be contingent and provisional in science has revealed itself as enduring in art.”⁵⁶

The oddly titled “Black Sun” by Max Ernst (figure 3.8) was literally painted in blues and yellows. Ernst was a member of the surrealist movement for which the black sun was an important image. In the introduction to his book, Max Ernst and Alchemy, M. E. Warlick writes about the prime matter of the alchemist and notes that “it is composed of two essential properties, Philosophic Sulphur and Philosophic

Mercury, polarized masculine and feminine aspects of matter often pictured as King and Queen, or as the sun and the moon.”⁵⁷ In the laboratory, these two properties are separated, refined, and purified. Warlick describes how as the alchemical process unfolds, these opposites combine, and, through their sexual union, the birth of the philosophical child or philosopher's stone emerges.

I am uncertain what Ernst had in mind in his painting of Sol niger, but it is not hard to imagine in this image the conjunction of opposites in the lower plane and the rounded image of a transcendental possibility above. In this case, a black sun, which is a “union” of Sun and Moon, gives off a strange luminescence or dark light, perhaps emerging from a crossing of opposites that is difficult to describe.

The theme of “bridging opposites” and of dark light is also found in the art of Mark Rothko. Rothko is well known for his powerful black-on-black paintings (figure 3.9). In 1961, John de Menil and Dominique

Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

de Menil asked him to produce murals for a chapel in Houston, now named after him: the Rothko Chapel. While the black sun never became an explicit theme for him, the binary opposition between light and dark, subject and object, presence and absence, and life and death were fundamental to his art. Rothko's own reflections on this theme are of interest because for him the opposites are “neither synthesized, nor neutralized . . . but held in a confronted unity, which is a momentary stasis.”⁵⁸ This confrontation creates a “structure” not unlike Ernst's Black Sun in that it calls the very status of “opposition” into question by overlapping their “terms.” In essence, he finds a way to paint a “brink or border between” opposites and this was the focus of his subject.⁵⁹ In his so doing, Rothko's art expresses the “affective power of a state of irresolution or undecidability.”⁶⁰

The idea of undecidability helps to amplify what was earlier called an “ontological pivotal point,” a point that Rothko continued to approach as he broke away from surrealism and turned toward what has been called “abstract painting.” What he did in these paintings was to further what he had been struggling with all along. Art theorist Anna Chave describes this process as “at once inscribing and erasing... working with the structure of traces, constructing a play between presence and absence.”⁶¹ In his black-on-black paintings, however, “known pictorial conventions were more ‘under erasure' . . . than ever be-fore.”⁶² In both Rothko's paintings and Chave's Derridean critique are new ways of continuing to understand what the alchemists tried to express in their mortificatio process and in their paradoxical image of Sol niger. One might likewise see the black sun as an image under erasure, undecidable in terms of presence or absence. For Chave, Rothko's black-on-black paintings are “directed against the closure of metaphysics,” that is, the kind of thinking that binds one into binary hierarchies and ontological commitments to presence over absence. In Rothko's paintings, Chave concludes, “absence had come to the fore.”

Chave notes that postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida's terms for this gesture of effacing the presence of a thing is writing (ecriture) and that a “text, whether ‘literary,' ‘psychic,' ‘anthropological' or pictorial, is precisely ‘a play of presence and absence,'” a kind of artistic fort-da,“‘a play of the effaced trace.'”⁶³ Rothko's attempt to paint this pivotal point between presence and absence was also an attempt to paint the void. This led some of his critics to consider him a religious man or mystic, a description that he himself denied. One might also imagine Rothko struggling with the “death instinct,” as we have described it, as an urge toward the unthinkable. In 1958, while lecturing on his art, he declared that “tragic art . . . deals with the fact that a man is born to die.” For Chave, his art “engaged the emotions most subject to repression, those insufferable intimations of mortality and that invasive sense of nothingness that permeates modern experience.”⁶⁴Chave cites Adorno: “The greatness of works of art lies solely in their power to let those things be heard which ideology conceals.” Rothko's black paintings, rather than creating a hysterical defense or fascination, served as revelations of a kind—“less reassuring than troubling.”⁶⁵ As we have seen, engaging this realm of darkness can have tragic consequences, and so it was ultimately the case with Rothko. In February, 1970, he was found in a pool of blood on the floor of his studio, where he had committed suicide, and so he might be seen as yet another victim of the darkest side of Sol niger.

Another important painter who painted black-on-black paintings is Ad Reinhardt. For twelve years beginning in the early fifties, he painted only black paintings. He also wrote a good deal about his work, and a selection of his writing has been edited with commentary by prominent art critic Barbara Rose in a work called Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt.⁶⁶ Shortly before Reinhardt's death, he reflected on his painting and stated that his purpose was to “push painting beyond its thinkable, seeable, graspable, feelable limits.”⁶⁷ Reinhardt's idea was that his painting represented “both the end of the Western tradition and the beginning of a new mode of perception.”⁶⁸According to Reinhardt, his black paintings created perceptual demands radically different from those of Western painting because his images require both the time to see and an act of focusing so demanding that it changes the state of the viewer's consciousness. For him, “the black paintings are icons without iconography. They function like the hypnotic patterns of the abstract diagrams of tantric Buddhism: they induce a state of contemplation which may be defined as meditative The black paintings, although not specifically ‘religious,' are an effort to retrieve the dimension of the spiritual in a secular cul-ture.”⁶⁹

In the last ten years of Reinhardt's life, his paintings became “black, black, black, black, black.”⁷⁰ “Nothing in the painting: ‘No realism, no impressionism, no expressionism... no texture, no brushwork, no sketching or drawing, no forms, no designs, no calm, no light, no space, no time, no size or scale, no movement, no object, no subject.'”

For writer Richard Smith, Reinhardt's dozens of published statements like this one “burn on the page like a demonic chant.” Like the “neti neti” of the Hindus or the inability to name God in Christian mysticism, there seems to be no way to adequately capture any object of Reinhardt's paintings.

Ultimately, though, for Smith, “this endless chain of negations [does] not lead to nihilism” but actually reverse the negative association that the color black usually connotes. Although Reinhardt himself and many of his critics reject the religious intention of his paintings, writer Naomi Vine notes that, in his own jottings on the mandala, he wrote this of his paintings:⁷¹ “Holy ground, sacred space, fixed point, threshold, limit, entrance, ‘gate,' sign, ritual, pure region; holy of holies, breakthrough from plane to plane... no change, no exhaustion, recoverable, repeatable, starting over at the beginning, eternal return, repetition.”⁷²

For Vine, such statements indicate that Reinhardt saw his paintings as an entry point to an attainable, repeatable spiritual experience, an experience that went beyond nihilism.

Pierre Soulages, a twentieth-century French abstract artist, also painted black images, which art historian and critic Donald Kuspit has called “unsettling, undigestible, out of sight, unseeable, ironically in-visible.”⁷³ Like Rothko and Reinhardt, Soulages's paintings “do not submit to the usual process of perception” and have the effect of displacing and minimizing the ego subject. For philosopher Theodor Adorno, Soulages's images lead to an “emaciation” of the subject and constitute a “blackness that is too extreme to become the site of human fantasy.”⁷⁴Such statements bring to the fore the tension between a humanistic ego psychology and a psychology that could do justice to “postmodern sensibilities” of abstract art. The complexities of such a psychology must go beyond binary opposition and approach the kind of undecidability that opens the psyche to a process of creativity and the sacred.

Even though Kuspit finds it oversimplifying, he still characterizes Soulages's purpose as being to “find the light in the dark, more particularly the light that dwells in the darkness and that, at the moment of revelation, is secreted by it, as it were.”⁷⁵ Such a moment is reminiscent of the Elgonyi as noted in chapter 2, for whom such a moment is sacred. Kuspit goes on to suggest that what Soulages points to is the Self at its most extreme and “emaciated” point, desperate for the light that can transfigure it, a light that is always latent and concealed within blackness.

Finally, for Soulages, blackness is not the end but the starting point for a subtle, almost inexpressible, light. For the alchemist, I believe, this light was the lumen naturae, which, like Jung's scintillae, glows at the heart of matter itself. For Soulages, there remained a primitive and fundamental if not essential split in the psyche between light and dark, which Kuspit feels the painter could never quite resolve. It is as if at the core of the Self there is a primitive divide, a “cut,” an irresolvable binary state that has also become a theme for a number of painters. The idea has affected the material basis of painting itself. Artist Lucio Fontana pierced and sliced his canvasses, as if canvas was psyche, in an attempt to show what was going on in the “interior” of a painting.⁷⁶Other artists changed the way canvasses were constructed and the way they used material. The very matter of paintings was alchemically transformed, and, for some, alchemy itself became an inspiration to creative process.

The work of renowned German artist Anselm Kiefer is filled with obvious alchemical allusions. He broke a number of different conventions in the material base of his art, mixing painting, sculpture, and photography as well as using both “visual and verbal languages long considered an impure practice” in the art world. On his huge canvasses, he uses not only paint but also “straw, wax, lead, wood and human hair.”⁷⁷ In 1984, he painted The Nigredo, and in a critical commentary on his work, Jack Flam refers to him as “The Alchemist.”⁷⁸

Lopez-Pedraza, a Jungian analyst from Caracas, Venezuela, comments in his book on Kiefer that “the nigredo was called the darkness, darker than darkness.”⁷⁹ However, in the painting by this name, the “mortificatioof the Earth transformed suffering into psyche and art.”⁸⁰Here as in other paintings Kiefer goes to the margins of the darkest shadows of our history and our personal and cultural life. His art demands a confrontation with taboos, indigestible traumas, and the unhealed wounds of our age.

Such a conscious struggle with wounds affects the soul of the artist and stimulates the individuation process. In “The Starred Heaven” (1980) (figure 3.10), a photograph of Kiefer appears faded out, and a dark, stormy sky is painted all around him.

Standing on a snake, the figure has his hands on his hips. Written on the painting are words taken from Kant, “The starred heavens above [us]: The moral law within us.” For Lopez-Pedraza, Kiefer's self-image is an expression of the artist's individuation. He notes, as other commentators have, that in the center of the figure's chest, at the site of his heart, is the artist's pallet, marking the place from which creative expression comes. The starred heaven is then equated by Lopez-Pedraza with the alchemical scintillae, the first appearance of the soul, the

sparks of light in the dark sky that for Jung reflected the multiple centers of the psyche in the darkness of the unconscious.

Note that what has been seen as a palette in the heart area of a starred heaven also resembles a black sun—and with Sol niger, individuation leads to dying. If this is so, then it is not surprising that the body image is also fading, perhaps giving a visual register to what philosopher Theodor Adorno has earlier called the “emaciation of the subject.”

A second portrait, called “Broken Flowers and Grass” (figure 3.11), lends credence to this view, I believe.

In this image, Kiefer is lying on a bed, appearing to be asleep or dead. The entire picture is painted over with broken black-and-white flowers and grass. For Lopez-Pedraza, this image has a “hermetic, freakish touch, that of rehearsing one's own death.”⁸¹ In and through these images, Lopez-Pedraza links depression, death, the body, and feeling to individuation and the creative processes.

From this perspective, the image of dying is perhaps “freakish” in the same way that alchemical images are—in portraying those “ontological pivot points” in which opposites coalesce—life and death, creation and destruction, inner and outer, light and dark, microcosm and macrocosm. From this point of view, “The Starred Heaven” and “Broken Flowers and Grass” might be seen as an imaging of the relation between the Sol niger of the heart and the scintilla of the cosmos. The paradox continues to be a theme for contemporary artists.

Janet Towbin, who did a series of black paintings influenced by alchemists, writes:

[B]lack is the beginning of consciousness—you cannot have light without darkness or darkness without light. The dyad of black and white sets up a diurnal rhythm and the contrast is essential to consciousness. This is the symbol of Tao, the yin and yang.

In alchemy, the color black refers to the nigredo, a stage in alchemy where there is an inward turning toward creative and fecund activity. It is this level of the psyche's development that brings with it the beginning awareness of consciousness—a first

glimmer of light after the profound darkness of melancholia. Pattern and order begin to emerge out of chaos.

It is the paradox of the nigredothat I have painted—the conjunction of light and dark, growth and decay, mystery and revelation, the unconscious and conscious. These paintings are

visualizations of the void—a black abyss which contains everything and nothing.⁸²

Figure 3.12 is an example of Towbin's efforts to capture the luminous paradox at the heart of blackness itself, a blackness that glistens with light. The image of luminous blackness has appeared over the course of our reflections—in the black paintings of Rothko and Reinhardt, the black light of Matisse, the light that dwells in the darkness of Soulages, the illuminated black sky of Kiefer, the shining blackness of Kali, and the glowing orbs of alchemy. All of these reveal what Jung calls the light of darkness itself, an expression of the alchemist's lumen naturae.

As we have seen, if one explores Sol niger beyond the analysis of defense, one discovers an archetypal “intention” to drive the Self into unthinkable but transformative darkness. This is the darkness many artists have tried to render in their art, a rendering that demands a symbolic death, an egocide that is simultaneously blackness and luminescence, the central mystery of Sol niger. In the next chapter we explore the lumen naturae in order to deepen our understanding of this paradoxical luminescence.

ArtofDarkness

The Art of Mortificatio