Figure 5.3. Lighting the fire of oneness, from Nicolas de Locques, 1665. From Johannes Fabricius, Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and Their Royal Art, p. 60
We have been looking at poems and stories that portray the subtlest levels of the coniunctio as a traceless union referring to a seamless oneness. However, it is also vital that we not fall into an intellectual idealism and that we keep in mind the astute observations of Micklem, Edinger, and Hillman so that we do not bypass the more beastly aspects of the unconscious, of which clinical material is a constant reminder.
The strangeness and difficulty of engaging the monstrous comes in many different forms. Working with the darkness of the unconscious is exemplified in two very different but related examples; the first is of a psychologist who, in remarkable dreams, discovers an image of Sol niger:
I am home sitting in an armchair. I realize there's a pimple on the sole of my left foot. I flip my foot over in such a way that I can take a closer look at the pimple. I turn my sight away on my right-hand side to fetch a tissue to clean my foot, and when I look back again, the black liquid has gone back into the pimple. I'm thinking “Oh, that's odd,” so I press again and this time three black liquid traces come out of the pimple.... I quickly grab
them; they have an elastic texture. I try to pull them out, but they are more deeply and firmly rooted than I thought. I don't understand, so I look closer, bending my head as close as I can to my foot. The pimple is not a pimple anymore; it's a hole through which something is breathing, and there are several holes I had not noticed before. As I look closer at my foot, trying to understand where it goes, and as I follow the black web, my leg becomes transparent, it's in my whole leg too! I follow my leg and my whole body becomes transparent. I look at my hand, my arms, it has spread its thin web-tentacles everywhere inside me, like a thin wired network. I'm getting scared; I try to find the starting point of this spider-web. As I do this, the trunk of my body also becomes transparent. Now I can see it. The central starting point is in the middle of the trunk, on the plexus. It's a black head that looks like one of my childhood licorice sweets. I bend my head over my trunk to take an even closer look and realize that “thing” has eyes and it talks! I ask it “What are you doing here?”
“You called me,” he/she says. “I serve you (tu in French), and I don't serve you (vous in French).” He/she smiles at me and his/her eyes blink calmly, sweetly and gently. He/she falls asleep as I slowly put my head back in a straight position.
I'm both scared and also tell myself that there's no reason for being scared, for if it was dangerous, I'd already be dead since it's been there forever anyway.
Nevertheless, I'd better show this to a physician. I go to the general hospital, where I'm told by a doctor that he's not competent in this matter, and he gives me a tiny piece of paper with an address written on it where I shall find someone competent.
I go there, and it's the offi ce of my analyst. As I walk up the outside steps, I realize the plaque does not bear his name anymore. In fact, it says “Alchemist” instead. A man opens the door, and I recognize him. He really is The Alchemist, the one who once in my life introduced me to the “Black Land” and who died several years ago. I feel very touched seeing him again, and full of respect towards him. “What am I doing here?” I ask. “Well,” he says, “Don't you know? There are billions of human beings on this planet and yet only twelve will succeed in their journey and make it here to my place. You are here to see the silence.”
He leads me down a corridor. (At this point, and even when I write this dream, I have tears falling from my eyes in a form of ecstatic contentment/grace and joy. I feel like thanking God for this.)
He opens a door to a room in which from the ceiling hangs a mobile with two branches. Above the two branches stand two luminaries. On the left a sun; below the sun a double headed solar axe. On the right, a moon, and below it a Foucault pendulum.
The dream is complex, and it would take too much time to explore it fully. Still I would like to emphasize some of the dream narrative and language. In so doing, I stay close to the images as they present themselves in order to hear them speak in a phenomenological way, leaving aside most of the dreamer's personal associations.
The dreamer begins in an armchair in a somewhat relaxed and casual position. What at first appears to him is a little blemish on the sole/soul of his foot. The sound connection of sole and soul is often useful in entering into the inner meaning and site of the dream. What is going on is not simply in his literal foot but also in his dream or subtle body. Something is appearing in a critical place in the soul, a place that grounds and links him to Earth, to the place he stands on, his foundation. Although what's going on at this site seems just a small thing, the dream ego flips itself over to take a closer look. This gesture in dreams is quite common; a second look reflects a movement toward consciousness and shows something more to the dreamer than is available at a causal first glance. The dream ego applies some pressure to this blemish as if to squeeze out something that is under the surface. From this point, a black liquid like a filament starts to flow out. When the dream ego turns away with the intent of just wiping it away, the 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 firmly 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 say something that one is having a hard time expressing. The intensity of a conflict 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 stuff 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 filaments 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 first 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] work.”43 Edinger notes that the head also symbolizes the rotundum,the round, complete man. The separated head and symbolism of beheading reflect 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 reflects 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 prefiguration 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 signifier of the memento mori, the existential knowledge of our own death. Edinger states that it is “an emblem for the operation of mortificatio. It generates reflections on one's personal mortality and serves as a touchstone for true and false values. To reflect 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 difficult 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 indicates 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.Synaesthesiais 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 scientific 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 objectified body?
For Merleau-Ponty, the “lived body” refers to something quite different 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 final 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 figure 5.3, opposite flames are held by the male and the female and merge in the alchemist's flask. The sun and the moon appear above the flask. Fabricius writes below the image, “Lighting the fire 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 reflected in the dual snakes entwined around the caduceus near the right knee of the kneeling figure. The sun and moon perspectives are further differentiated 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 final 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
Figure 5.3. Lighting the fire 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 reflected in the patient's dream.
Many of the themes that we have been discussing are expressed in this single dream. In it we find examples of the subtle-body process, the monstrous dark sun, the solar plexus, alchemical transformation, the nigredo, the mortificatio, 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 offered 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 first 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 (figure 5.4). In the drawing, there are two human figures; he is on the left, and a slightly larger figure of a cowboy is on right. The cowboy
Figure 5.4. Black sun image. Artwork by analysand. Used by permission.
had appeared in other active imaginations and played the role of a guide. The figures are looking out into the desert where there is a large golden pyramid with a bright yellow color surrounding it. Up above is a large black sun.
It is important to note that the image in figure 5.4 appeared roughly six months before he began to experience a deepening depression, which lasted for about three years. He felt that there was some link between his depression and the image of the black sun that appeared in his vision. Shortly after he had the experience of the image, things began to shift in his life.
He left the institution where he was doing chaplaincy work. He separated from his wife of seventeen years (a marriage that had longstanding problems) and was soon to leave his analysis as well. He was working and living alone for the first time in his life, and his depression continued to worsen. When he told this to his analyst, the analyst said, “No, you aren't getting worse; you're getting better.” Because he didn't believe that the analyst understood his angst over his depression, he left analysis. He felt that he had to get away from the analyst to literally save his life.
He struggled with the depression for another year and a half with help from another therapist, medication, and a group he was in but finally 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 first 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 difficult. 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 recognized 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 difficulties 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 off 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 reflected that in relation to the black sun, whatever its ultimate significance, 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 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 fist, a crowbar, a large black stake piercing his heart, and later a large black iron ball that later he had identified 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 final 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 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 horrified 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 reflected 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 difference 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 significance 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 king after his dark and difficult 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 amplifications 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 significant 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 twenty-three 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 offer a number of reflections 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 affirmations 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 image. Initially, it was terrifying and something that I wanted to flee 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 different but intimately related dimensions, then each will need its own kind of work.
The pastor found that Orthodoxy offers a form of meditative prayer known as hesycham, a term that means solitude or quietness and that was first 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 “Ta-borian light” because it is the light that shone forth from Christ at his transfiguration 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 amplified in her work when she says, “The ‘black sun' again takes up the semantic field of ‘saturnine,' but pulls it inside out, like a glove: darkness flashes 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 reflected, “In this is seen again the paradoxical notion of light (‘dazzling,' ‘flashes') 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 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 reflecting 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.
The theology of the fifth- or sixth-century mystical philosopher PseudoDionysius further amplifies Sol niger in its luminescent aspect. Many have come to discern in his writing the hand of a brilliant epistemolo-gist, 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 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 knowledge 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 find 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 affirmation 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 alchemi-cally 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 finds 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 itself but finds 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.
It was such a higher lunacy that laid the ground for Jung's more rational, intellectual, and scientific ideas about the Self. Jungian analyst Murray Stein, in Jung's Map of the Soul, does a nice job of tracing Jung's primordial experience of the Self, and I quote only a small part that is relevant to our reflections here. He describes a point in Jung's life in 1916, when Jung had a strange visionary experience that led to his writing a Gnostic-like text called the “Seven Sermons to the Dead.” Jung heard the following words, which he transcribed: “Harken: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, as for instance white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or is it. This nothingness or fullness let us name the Pleroma.”67
This pleroma was a Gnostic name given to Jung's experiential prefiguration of what later became his hypothesis of the Self. This concept was elaborated throughout many of the Collected Works but most fully expressed in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self.68 According to Jung, the Self was a concept difficult to define, and, in spite of all of his warnings, it is often taken as a substantialized entity. Perhaps it would be of use to remind ourselves that Jung's Self is not a metaphysical entity. Psychologist and scholar Roger Brooke makes a useful contribution by asserting that to think of the Self as a “something” is less accurate than to understand it as a “no-thing,” “a fertile and hospitable emptiness within which the things of the world could shine forth.”69
In an article that has received too little attention, “Nothing Almost Sees Miracles!: Self and No-Self in Psychology and Religion,” scholar of religion and Jungian psychology David Miller writes what amounts to a deconstructive reading of Jung's idea of the Self. He claims that even though Jung ultimately rejects the idea of a No-Self doctrine, in essence what he means by the idea of the “Self ” “has the same ontological status as the desubstantialized and deconstructed notion of the ‘no-self ' in the apophatic religious traditions. ‘Self ' is no-self.'”70
Tu rning to the margins of Jung's ideas, beyond the formulations of his ideas as an empirical scientist, Miller recalls Jung's comment:
If you will contemplate [your nothingness,] your lack of fantasy, [lack] of inspiration, and [lack] of inner aliveness which you feel as sheer stagnation and a barren wilderness, and impregnate it with the interest born of alarm at your inner death, then something can take shape in you, for your inner emptiness conceals just as great a fullness, if you allow it to penetrate into you.71
An emptiness that is also a fullness resonates with figures such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Lao Tzu, and other masters of Asian or Western philosophies and religions that hold the concept of Nothingness at the core of psychological and religious life. In essence, this is true for Jung, too. For, beyond the scientific Jung, is the alchemical Jung, for whom the so-called Self is “in principle unknown and unknowable.”72 This Jung follows the alchemical dictum ignotium per ignotius (the unknown [is explained] by the more unknown). In short, for Jung the Self “is tantamount to religion's no-self.”73
The paradoxical tension between Self and No-Self that Miller describes is a point of philosophical debate and doctrinal complexity that reaches a high point in Asian philosophy and religion—in the dialogue between Hindu and Buddhist perspectives. The debate is relevant for understanding Jung's idea of the Self since this idea was modeled in part on the ancient Hindu notion of Atman/Brahman.
The Upanishadic perspective holds that beneath and/or above the flux of the empirical world is an unchanging and eternal Self at the core of the universe. Buddhist philosophy, on the other hand, rejects such an idea of an unchanging Self and considers any idea of the Self to be an impermanent construction that must be seen through. In the place of the Self/Atman, the Buddhists see Anatman (or No-Self) and Sunyata (Nothingness or Voidness) as a mark of the “real.”
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 influenced 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 antago-nistic.”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 differences. 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 flux 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 traditionally 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 affirms 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 fixed 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 fiction, 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 differentiated, 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 find that fundamental concepts such as the Self are open to multiple interpretations. As noted, there are those who regard 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.
From the beginning of this chapter, we have been grappling with the idea of antinomies, with the paradoxical play of light and dark, life and death, spirit and matter. The coincidentia oppositorum and mysterium coniunctionis are expressions of paradox and monstrosity, maddening negations and attempts at unifications or transcendence. In an attempt to understand Sol niger, we have explored the Divine Darkness of mystical theology, the tension between Hindu and Buddhist visions, and the idea of a complex holism that lends itself to a new way of imagining both the Jungian idea of the Self as well as of Sol niger.
As we have seen, the problem is how can we speak about whatever it is that is referred to in the preceding? How can we address that invisible or absent presence that we call the Self or no-Self, Divine Darkness, or Sol niger? It has been challenging for the ancient philosophers, religious mystics, and alchemists, as well as for contemporary poststructuralist philosophers and psychoanalysts to grapple with expressing what is often felt to be inexpressable.
For poststructuralist sensibilities, one difficulty that is often expressed is that in every attempt to name that absent presence, there remains a vestige of metaphysical speculation, a transcendental signified (for our purposes read as Self) that is not deconstructed.
The French poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida, for example, finds this to be the case with regard to negative theology, which his thought resembles but from which he insists it differs. In his “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” he takes up his relationship with negative theology:
This which is called X... “is” neither this nor that, neither sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither inside nor outside, neither superior nor inferior, neither active nor passive, neither present nor absent, not even neutral, not even subject to a dialectic with a third movement, without any possible sublation (“Aufhebung”). Despite appearances, then, this X is neither a concept nor even a name; it does lend itself to a series of names, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even the order and the structure of predictive discourse. It “is” not and does not say what “is.” It is written completely otherwise.83
While mimicking Pseudo-Dionysius, Derrida might be said to write negative theology “otherwise,” in a way that does not assume a supreme being beyond the categories of being. Following Heidegger, he elaborates 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 signification. 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 signified 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 philos-ophy.”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 signified, 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 reflective of Jung's Kantian vision. 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 effaced, 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 opposito-rum, 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 identified 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 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 signifiers 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 “difference,” a neologism that Derrida coined from the French word for “difference” and which carries the meaning of both difference 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 finally complete the play or totality of psyche, which, like Mercurius, always escapes our grasp. The Selfunder erasure is always in a process of continual deconstruction, and, like the philosopher's stone of alchemy, it slips “that grip of Be-griffe 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 fixed positions and doctrinal truth. For him, the philosopher's stone is waxy and can “receive endless literal-izations without being permanently impressed.”88 Perhaps it is useful to imagine the Selfunder erasure as a kind of contemporary philosopher's stone marking a mystery that has long been sought and continues to remain elusive.
Contemporary poststructuralist thought has proceeded toward “if not a liquidation [or solutio], then at least a displacement of the subject from the center of philosophical and theoretical activity.”89 Lacan and philosopher Paul Ricaur speak of decentering the subject and Foucault of the “erasure of man like a figure drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”90 The removal of the subject from the center of psychic life also resonates with Jung's displacement and relativization of the ego. For Jung, the structures of the Self likewise transcend the individual, and its essence “lies beyond the subjective realm.”91
Just as for Derrida the subject is an effect of language, so for Jung the ego is the product of an all-embracing totality. In short, the “Self is paradoxically not oneself.”92 However, insofar as Jung's Self as a totality rises above and beyond the psychic and subjective realm and is seen as constituted by impersonal, collective forces, it is consistent with the poststructuralist contention that the subject is likewise primarily an effect of larger collective forces: historic, economic, or linguistic.93The poststructuralist view of such forces is quite different from the more mysterious idea about archetypes and the collective unconscious, but for some philosophers (e.g., Levinas) and some post-Jungian psychoanalysts (e.g., Hillman), the distancing from subjectivity has become problematic. The question remains as to what extent such a subject is dissolved in structure and function, with a loss of body and ethical sensibility. In both Levinas and Hillman, the problem of the body/ sensibility and ethics becomes an important theme in the constitution of the Self/soul, which resists abstraction.94Both Hillman and Levinas attempt to maintain a subject that is both fleshy and human while, at the same time, paradoxically, it moves beyond the idea of a reified subject and/or an abstract transcendence.
The “subject” Hillman describes is an outcome of having undergone an alchemical process and/or the successful termination of an analysis. The transformation of subjectivity is bodily a difficult and 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 mortification 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 mortification 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 different ways, including as an alchemical process of deconstruction and/or as an analysis.
In alchemy as in the literatures of deconstruction and analysis, the shorthand of erasure is richly expanded and amplified. It is part of a series of complex and subtle processes of dissolutions and coagulations (solve et coagula), negation and conjunction, and mortification and revitalization. The idea of erasure lends itself to comparison with certain operations of alchemy that have to do with the processes of mortification, calcination, and dissolution and entering into the blacker-than-black 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-than-black is thought to be surpassed as blackness lightens and yields to other colors. The changes in coloration reflect 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 mortification. 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-
lematic, as if such a self or subject is a fixed 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 reflecting 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 suffering 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 efficacy 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
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 mortificatio 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 mortifications 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 revivifies 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 cliche. It is always too easy to collapse originality and complexity into facile formulations. A careful, serious reading of his work means that, in spite of seeing and “moving beyond” the ni-gredo, 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 Men-talis.” Hillman writes, “The transit from black to white via blue...always brings black with it. . . . Blue bears traces of the mortificatio 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 signifies a particular kind of change usually for the worse.”104
Even in the “final stage” of the alchemical transformation—the red-dening—we witness the final 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 fixing the colors of psychological experiences into rigid categories of exclusion that would flatten, deplete, and miss their richness and subtlety. When this happens, time, order, succession, and stages are seen as fixed 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 differentiated, 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 the goal, like crucifixion 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 poison-ing.”106 It is hard to keep these opposite dimensions of experience in consciousness, but, for Hillman, such a description fits 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 fire, 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 effulgence, or a “shine” that is hard to define 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 reflect 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 different 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 differentiation of intensities and hues, which is essential to the act of imagina-tion.”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 differentiations 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 reflection.”109
In The Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison states that “There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some wooly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. 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 effulgence—a Sol niger.”111
In addition to its multiple differentiations, the black essence is also ubiquitous—as John Brozostoski well demonstrates in a piece he wrote called “Tantra Art.”112In 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 flow of ideas is interspersed by a black mantra, a mortificatio of narrative articulating
Figure 5.5. Eclipse of the sun. © 1994 Martin Mutti. Used by permission.
the invisible spaces, which then resists any simple logocentric expression and our ordinary ego desire for clarity. This invisible blackness is not only present in artistic constructions but is also an unconscious dimension of our daily life. Like the musical form of an Indian raga, the drone in the background is all important to the articulation of the individual notes.
If we ignore the black essence by leaving all the blacks out, the narrative becomes clear and distinct. Here is the description without the word “black” interspersed before each word of the narrative: “The lapis says in Hermes: ‘Therefore nothing better or more worthy of veneration can come to pass in the world than the union of myself and my son.' The Monogenes is also called the ‘dark light.' The Rosarium quotes a saying of Hermes: ‘I the lapis beget the light, but the darkness too is of my nature.' Similarly, alchemy has the idea of sol niger, the black sun.”113
In the first mantra reading, which includes the blackness, one gets the experience of what is being written about in the narrative expres-sion—and more. There is a felt connection between the subtle essence and multiplicity of blackness as it interrupts and tinctures our ordinary discourse through a mortificatio of narrative that then begins to give us a sense of what we might imagine as the dark light itself, formless and animating, producing a deepening pleasure (jouissance) as the demands of linear thought and narrative relativize and diminish.
In this moment, black begins to shine, no longer simply confined in the nigredo, and joy is oddly linked to blackening and deconstruction, or, as Lacan might have said, the lack is linked to jouissance. This black joy is also recognized in the sublime beauty of Hades, where, Jung and Hillman tell us, everything becomes deeper, moving from visible connection to invisible one, and the invisible glows with the presence of the void.
The link between jouissance and blackness is also made by Stanislov Grof and captured in a series of paintings described in LSD Psychotherapy. About these images, one of which is presented in figure 5.6 in grayscale, Grof states that through suffering one reaches the Black Sun, “the manifestation of the innermost core of the human being, the divine Self,” which he associates with “transcendental bliss,” not unlike the descriptions of the Tantric tradition.114
The patient whom Grof describes had experienced the destructive power of volcanoes but had come to appreciate the creative aspect of the glowing magma. Giegerich reminds us that this creative fire—a fire that also contains the volcanic metaphor of the stream of lava, the incandescent matter—is at the core of Jung's work.115 It is an image important to Jung in his vision of the psyche. Even though Grof is aware of both the destructive and creative dimensions of this primordial process, he separates Sol niger, the “destructive” part, from the transcendent black sun. I believe this runs the risk of splitting the archetype apart. As I see it, both experiences are intimately intertwined and present in the blackness of Sol niger as an archetypal image.
For Jung, Hillman, and Giegerich the price of admission to this vision of the soul is the loss of the materialist viewpoint. Only then can the soul show itself as both Hades and Pluto, the dark underworld with its fruitful and shining possibilities. Hillman notes that from one perspective the blackness of night is “the source of all evil,” but that from the viewpoint of the Orphics, “Night was a depth of love (Eros) and light (Phanes).”116
Figure 5.6. Through suffering to the black sun. From S. Grof,
LSD Psychotherapy, p. 283. Used by permission of Stanislav Grof.
This mystical love is well described in a study by philosopher George Scheper.117 Hillman resists proponents of religious darkness and their mystical language, but for Scheper and others, these mystics become our most reliable phenomenologists of a dazzling darkness, of Eros and self-forgetting. In the ancient Hebrew Song of Songs, for example, the Shulammite's night quest for her lover reads like a mystic desendu ad inferno and, in terms of the poetics of love, the mystic descent into darkness. Whether in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Demeter and 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.