Figure 5.7. Image of the coniunctio. From C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Transference,” in Practice of Psychotherapy, p. 249.
The deepening paradox of Sol niger as a point of conjunction between Hades and Pluto and as an expression of the mystical marriage is deepened in the passion of the mystic's exploration of erotic passion and black light. The passion of ecstatic love is prominent in Sufi mysticism. Henri Corbin links such erotic passion with what the Sufis called black light, considered the highest spiritual stage and the most perilous ini-tiatic step. “The ‘black light' is that of the attribute of Majesty which sets the mystic's being on fire; it is not contemplated; it attacks, invades, annihilates, then annihilates annihilation. It shatters . . . the apparatus of the human organism.”118
This light is considered by the Sufis as “a very delicate spiritual state into which the mystic enters just before the fana (annihilation) turns into baqa (survival)” and marks “a state shared by both.”119 At this moment, the inner eye of the mystic turns dark, and yet it is the point where darkness itself is supreme light.120 Blackness (Siyahi), according to Izutsu, in reality is the very light of “the Absolute-as-such” and “corresponds ... ontologically ... to the stage of Oneness (ahadiyah)” or “Supreme Blackness (sawad-e a‘ zam).” “ ‘The mystic,' Lahiji observes, ‘does not realize absolute existence unless and until [one] fully realizes absolute Nothingness Nothingness is in itself the very Existence-by-the-Absolute.' In short, nothingness (or darkness) is in reality existence (light), and light is in reality darkness.”121
Figure 5.7. Image of the coniunctio. From C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Transference,” in Practice of Psychotherapy, p. 249.
Finally, according to Lahiji, there is yet one further ultimate “stage” that can be described—called “annihilation after survival,” which Izutsu compares to what Hua Yen Buddhism considers the “ultimate of all ultimate ontological stages, the celebrated ji-ji-muge-hohkai ... [which] represents the extreme limit which our paradox of light and darkness can reach.”122
In Dancing Streams Flow in the Darkness, Shunryu Suzuki comments on a Chinese poem by Sekito Kisen in one of his Zen talks.123 The poem is called “Sandokai.” It is about twelve hundred years old and speaks of the relationship between light and darkness, noting that “In the light there is darkness, but don't take it as darkness. In the dark there is light, but don't see it as light.”124 For Suzuki, the absolute is beyond the limits of our thinking mind and cannot be known. In Invisible Light, Paul Murray captures this spirit in a poem titled “Canticle of the Void,” part of which follows:
Smaller than the small . . .
I am the seed of all that is known and unknown.
I am the root and stem of meaning, the ground
of wonder. Through me, each leading tendril of desire is drawn, and breathes in consciousness of Being.
And yet when you open your ears to my voice and listen with all your hearing and listen again, no subtle joining of notes and words, no vertical song is heard
but silence is singing.
And when you open your eyes to my appearance but cannot see me, or when you close your eyes and close your ears in concentration and look with your hands and turn back again the pages of sleep's dark scripture, no great or terrible sign awakes, no vision burns
but absence is shining.
Mine is the secret
that lies hidden
like the lustrous pearl
gleaming
within its oyster
the deepest secret
the secret
hidden within the secret.125
The following poem by T.S. Eliot expresses similar insights:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love for the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.. . .
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.126
In Corbin's terms, the invisible black light requires an unknowing that is also a knowing. This state of unknowing is synonymous with the mystical poverty that we attribute to the Sufi, who is said to be “poor in spirit.” It is a poverty in which we are reduced to Nothingness and God is no one who can be grasped. In a poem called simply “Psalm,” Paul Celan writes:
No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,
no one incants our dust. No one.
Blessed art thou, No One.
In thy sight would
we bloom.
In thy
spite.
A Nothing
we were, are now, and ever shall be, blooming: the Nothing-, the No-One's-Rose.
With
our pistil soul-bright,
our stamen heaven-waste,
our corona red from the purpleword we sang over, O over the thorn.127
The Sufi ideas of not knowing and of mystical poverty and black light find their counterparts in the kabbalistic and Chassidic notion of “bittul,” the nullification of the ego. In the Chassidic discourse Basi LeGani, the nullification of the ego is described as a folly of holiness and self-transcendence, in which the spiritual work of transforming darkness into light is done to the degree where the “darkness itself would be luminous.”128
Sanford Drob elaborates the kabbalistic recognition of a “darkness that is at the heart of light itself” and finds analogies to the black sun in three moments of negation: in Ayin (as Ein-sof), Tzimtzum, and She-virah.129 For Drob, the Ayin suggests “that nothingness is the source of all distinctiveness and difference, and thus of all light, meaning and sig-nificance.”130 The Ein-sof is referred to as the “light that does not exist in light,” and the Sefirot is spoken of as lights that are concealed or, as in the Zohar, as the light of blackness (Bozina di Kardinuta).131
Hasidic teacher Bitzalel Malamud explains that the study of Jewish mysticism involves various classic metaphors that describe supernal dynamics. The Sun is one such metaphor, referring to a nonapprehen-sible level of infinite light “which in its source is completely nullified and non-existent but which nevertheless emanates as a ray to create and enliven all creation, spiritual as well as the physical.” The metaphor, however, does not tell the whole story because we are thinking about an infinite “sun” that, if revealed as the direct source of the ray, would leave it and creation no room to exist with any independence. Malamud explains that in order to allow a place for separate existence, the infinite sun needs to be completely contracted. In the language of the kabbalist, this is called the Tzimtzum, which is basically the hiding of godliness.132
In other words, Tzimtzum refers to the contraction of God's infinite light in order to create a space or black void so that there is room for creation. Shevirah refers, on the other hand, to a brilliant spark that exists like a scintilla in the sea of darkness that can serve as a basis for redemption. In the kabbalistic universe, light and dark exist in an invisible interpenetration that, like Sol niger, might well be referred to as Divine Darkness.
A friend and colleague, Robert Romanyshyn, knew of my work on the black sun and had himself been working on a book of poems called Dark Light. He told me that he had no idea why the title had come to him, and he sent me the following dream of a black sun:
V. and I awaken in a hotel room. It is dark outside, and I am surprised because it feels as if it should be morning. It feels that we have slept and the night has passed. I call the hotel desk to ask the time and someone tells me it is 9 a.m. Then the person says, “Haven't you heard? Scientists are saying there's something wrong with the sun.”
In a half waking state, a kind of reverie, the dream seems to continue:
I have the sense that the world now will be lit by a dark light.
I also have the sense that these scientists have determined that there is much less hydrogen (fuel) and/or much less mass to the sun than they had previously expected. The world is going to become increasingly dark and cold.
But then the dark, nearly black light becomes blue/violet/purple. A blue sun, a beautiful aura of blue color bathes the world. I think of the color of the tail of the Peacock in alchemy.
In a letter to me he comments that he was left wondering whether the world were entering into a dark sun (apart, of course, from wondering about the personal meaning of the dream for his own life). Although it is not my intent to comment on this dream with regard to Romanyshyn's personal life, I would like to amplify it a bit by noting that in The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation,he discusses the tragic death of his wife.133Unflinchingly, he lived through a most profound darkness and emerged with a sense of gratitude and the renewal of life. Likewise, in this dream, the darkness of Sol niger transforms into an array of colors associated with an alchemical symbol of transformation, the peacock's tail, or cauda pavonis: The peacock's tail in traditional alchemy is said to occur “immediately after the deathly black stage” of the nigredo. “After the nigredo, the blackened body of the Stone is washed and purified by the mercurial water during the process of ablution. When the blackness of the nigredo is washed away, it is succeeded by the appearance of all the colours of the rainbow, which looks like a peacock displaying its luminescent tail.”134
This appearance is “a welcome sign that the dawning of the albedo is at hand, that the matter is now purified and ready for re-animation by the illuminated soul.”135Looking at this image in the light of our exploration of Sol niger, it is not the case that when the nearly black light becomes a blue violet and/or purple sun bathing the world in color, that blackness disappears any more than the loss of a loved one ever vanishes, but that “blue is ‘darkness made visible'.”136 This is an idea reminiscent of Jung's now famous saying that “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” For Hillman, “the transit from black to white via blue implies that blue always brings black with it.”137
The image in figure 5.8 emerged at the end of a long-term analysis of a woman artist. Suffering through the multiple mortifications that analysis requires to be successful allows a fuller flowering of the imagination, which shows itself here in a creative combination of peacock and owl feathers. The image emerged after a couple of dreams, the first about the end of a love affair and the second her “first flying dream ever.”
Resonant with the cauda pavonis of alchemy, the image's multicolored eyes are prominent. For my patient, the eyes were cat's eyes and represented a more independent way of seeing that emerged after deep disillusionment. The owl feathers reminded her of night vision, of being able to see in the dark of the transcendence of the starred heavens, and of the goddess Athena, to whom the owl was sacred. The owl's eyes were Athena's eyes and as such became related to nocturnal studies, to the academy, and to wisdom. The owl also has many other mythological references, including a relationship to the dead sun and to healing.138
For Hillman, before healing can take place and the blackness of the nigredo can be transformed into the terra alba,or white earth, one must be able to see through multiple eyes and from many perspectives. From one point of view, the emergence of the white earth leaves the blackness behind, but as we have seen in numerous ways, the terra alba and the darkness against which it defines itself form an intimate and indissoluble relationship so that the white earth “is not sheer white in the literal sense but a field of flowers, a peacock's tail, a coat of many colors.”139
Hillman explains that the multiple eyes of cauda pavonis reflect the full “flowering of imagination [that] shows itself as the qualitative spread of colors so that imagining is a coloring process, and if not in literal colors, then as the qualitative differentiation of intensities and hues which is essential to the art of imagination.”140
Ultimately, for Hillman, these colors are not the same as in the subjectivist philosophies of Newton and Locke or of Berkeley and Hume, where colors are considered as only secondary qualities brought about by the mind and senses of the observer. Here he reverses the history of
Figure 5.8. Variation of the peacock tail. Artwork by analysand. Used by permission.
philosophy. Color is now seen as a “primary quality” of the thing itself, not in a naturalistic sense but as “phainoumenon on display” at the heart of matter itself, prior to all abstraction.141
In my patient's image of cauda pavonis, the eyes become prominent. They look back at the dreamer, the artist, and us with an intensity that suggests we are living in an animated, conscious, living universe that not only we see but that also sees us. I remember Edinger once commenting that after years of analysis and looking at dreams, it occurred to him that the dreams also see us and that this is the awakening of what Jung meant by psychic reality. Hindu artists were well aware of this phenomenon as can be seen in the image of multiple perspectives and eyes we see in figure 5.9. It is with the constellation of psychic reality that psychological events come to life.
When my Jungian colleague Harry Wilmer heard I was working on a book on the black sun, he told me that he had been making yarn paintings and sewing on canvas since 1941 and that he had recently made one titled The Black Hole (color plate 17a). He sent me a picture of his image and stated that the band across the middle is the Milky Way and the large sphere in the right lower corner is the Earth. The row of lights are the aurora borealis, and the gray explosions are gases believed to be released at the event horizon.
Wilmer also commented that this image shows the ultimate black sun that we can expect when the end of time comes. He goes on: “At that time, theory tells us that the gigantic black hole will suck in the entire Milky Way, the Earth and our entire galaxy, including the Sun....
The red dot is the ‘singularity,' the most dense gravitational body pos-sible.”142
I imagine Wilmer's vision as an ultimate Sol niger image, not reducible to either psychological or physical reality. His description is ominous and black, but his image is filled with color and life. I remembered an article in the New York Times by James Glanz. In the article Glanz describes how black holes have been seen as “windowless cosmic dungeons, ultracompressed objects with gravity so powerful that anything that plummets through their trapdoors—surfaces called event horizons enshrouding each one—is forever lost to the rest of the
Figure 5.9. The multiple eyes of psychic reality. From author's personal collection.
universe. Scientists believe that not even light beams can escape once they are inside.”143
He goes on, however, to report a surprising, new find by astronomers who, using an X-ray observatory in orbit around the Earth, have discovered an intense glow, a glow with the intensity of ten billion suns, burning just outside the event horizon of a huge but very distant black hole (color plate 17b). In other words, for the first time, these astronomers have seen energy and light pouring out of a black hole and into the surrounding universe.
These observations have given rise to many speculations and probably will for the foreseeable future.144 The interpenetration of darkness and light in Wilmer's vision and the paradox of the enigma of the black hole is reminiscent of a dream of Jung's, which he reported in a letter to Father Victor White on December 18, 1946.145The letter was written sometime after Jung had a second heart attack. Jung writes:
It is a mightily lonely thing, when you are stripped of everything in the presence of God. One's wholeness is tested mercilessly....
I had to climb out of that mess and I am now whole again. Yesterday I had a marvelous dream: One bluish diamond, like a star high in heaven, reflected in a round quiet pool—heaven above, heaven below. The imago Deiin the darkness of the earth, this is myself. This dream meant a great consolation. I am no more a black and endless sea of misery and suffering but a certain amount thereof contained in a divine vessel.
In a similar fashion, at the end of his life
the French poet Victor Hugo at the age of eighty three had a stroke. Four days later, during his death struggles, he, like Goethe, spoke of light, saying, “Here is the battle of day against night.” Hugo's last words continued what in life he had always done: searching the darkest recesses of human nature for its brightest treasures. As he died he whispered, “I see black light.”146
I read Jung's dream and Hugo's comment in the spirit of Lao Tzu, who wrote that “mystery and manifestation arise from the same
source. This source is called darkness. . . . Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding.”147
I would like to end with a quote from Arthur ZaJonc, who wrote a book called Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind: “As we leave light's expansive dominions, the heavens dim and darkness quietly falls. Within that darkness there is a silent murmur, a still voice that whispers of yet another and unsuspected part to light, for even utter darkness shimmers with its force.”148
So our journey to the black sun ends with a whisper that began and ends in darkness, a darkness no longer light's contrary but a point of possibility in which light and dark both have their invisible origin, a simulacrum of substance in a world without foundations.
The Black Sun (209)
We began our exploration of the black sun as an experiment in alchemical psychology. It begins and ends with an enigma, with a movement from the nigredo of light to the mystery of an illuminated darkness. Imagined in juxtaposition to light, darkness casts a shadow and sets the stage for a new Faustian bargain, not with the forces of darkness but with the forces of light. In so doing, the primacy of light is declared, and the values of science, technology, rational order, patriarchy, and progress lead the way into modernity with its astonishing contributions to the spread of civilization and to consciousness itself. We have noted, however, that if light and the sun have led us into the present, it has also led to a massive repression and devaluation of the dark side of psychic and cultural life and displayed a blind spot with regard to vision itself. Philosophical and cultural critics of our time have pointed to the shadows of phallocentrism, logocentrism, and heliopolitics, driven by the violence of light, a condition we have considered psychologically and symbolized by a one-sided identification with King/ego and the tyrannical power of an undifferentiated, unconscious shadow. We have noted that the despotic King as prima materia must be relativized, and we have examined the alchemical phenomenology of the mortificatio in which this primitive King is tortured, beaten, humiliated, poisoned, drowned, dissolved, calcined, and killed.
These alchemical operations lead to a nigredo, or descent into darkness, that ultimately empties the soul and leaves only skeletal remains and the infernal light of Sol niger. Sol niger has been a difficult image to throw light upon since, like a black hole, it sucks all light into itself. Thus, in alchemy and, following it, in the depth psychology of Jung, the black sun has been associated with darkness almost exclusively.
Our strategy has been to stick with this image and to resist any salvationist attempt to reach beyond it. Rather, our work has been to hesitate before the darkness, to pause and enter its realm, following it in alchemy, literature, art, and clinical expressions. Entering this world of darkness, we have encountered Sol niger in its blacker-than-black aspects and seen its most literal and destructive dimensions associated with narcissistic mortification, humiliation, delusion, despair, depression, physiological and psychological decay, cancer, psychosis, suicide, murder, trauma, and death.
In short, we have followed it into the heart of darkness, into the worlds of Hades and Ereshkigal, to Kali's cremation ground and Dante's world of ice, where puer visions of light and eternity give way to Saturnian time and the perils of night. Here, rational order breaks down, and traumatogenic defenses come into play to prevent the unthinkable, but the unthinkable itself presents us with a mystery, the mystery of a death that is not simply literal, but also symbolic. Alchemy portrays such mysteries in a strange and paradoxical confluence of images: corpses and coffins with sprouting grains and black suns that shine. It is a mystery that calls for more than defense and constellates a necessity that must be entered. As such, we have conceived of it as an ontological pivot point, marking a desubstantiation of the ego that exhibits both death and new life, light and darkness, presence and absence, the paradoxical play intrinsic to Sol niger as a black sun.
For the alchemists, the unrepresentable can be perceived only by the inward person and was considered a mystery at the heart of nature itself. Its odd light, the lumen naturae, was considered to be a divine spark buried in darkness and could be found in both the prime matter of the alchemist's art and in the soma pneumatikon,or subtle body. We have traced the images of the subtle body in many esoteric traditions as well as in the imagery of contemporary patients.
For all of the traditions we have explored, the subtle body is a microcosm of a larger universe and an image of the divine in human form. This form has shown itself in symbols of the primordial human being, who, understood psychologically, is an expression of the Self. For Jung, the Self is an idea that attempts to reflect the wholeness of the human psyche. It is intended to designate a structure that includes both consciousness and the unconscious, light and dark, and was considered a central, ordering principle at the core of psychic life. The Self as a transcendental and superordinate structure cannot be made totally conscious. At its core, it was always considered to be an unknown mystery that disseminated itself in multiple archetypal images across time and culture. We have seen how these archetypal images more or less adequately represent the wholeness of the archetypal structure that they attempt to express. For Jung, the Self is a psychological lens through which to consider these expressions. These images, perhaps by necessity, always fall short of full expression of the archetype of wholeness. We have considered that the same limitations may apply to the concept of the Self.
Concepts as well as symbols of wholeness and expressions of totality have a tendency to degenerate and move toward abstraction as idealized and rational conceptualizations that seduce us into forgetting that they fundamentally reflect an unknown. With regard to the psyche, Jung writes, “The concept of the unconscious posits nothing, it designates only my unknowing.” We have noted the importance of preserving this mystery that constitutes the strangeness and miracle of perception at the heart of the mysterium coniunctionis. We have concluded that if we speak of unity or wholeness, it is important not to lose sight of stubborn differences and the monstrous complexities that, if true to the phenomenon, lead to humor, astonishment, and at times divine awe. As noted, the idea of the Self is Jung's attempt to capture this complexity, but as his theories became assimilated and familiar, his concept is subject to the same fate as all fundamental ideas. That is, they soon lose their original profundity, mystery, and unknown quality.
In our attempt to speak the unspeakable, we have noticed that the Self, too, casts a shadow, and we have focused on this shadow, recognizing the unnamable, invisible, and unthinkable core of the idea, which some have referred to as a Divine Darkness while others have called it a non-Self. The non-Self is not another name for the Self but is founded in the recognition of the problematics involved in any representation of wholeness and a mark for the profound expression of this mystery. All of the attempts to name this mystery might be said to leave traces in the language in which we have attempted to speak it. No signifier proves to be adequate to capture the fullness of human experience. The idea of the Self, like a shooting star of darkness, leaves a trail of metaphor in a variety of images inscribed in the margins of our experience. One might imagine these images as traces of silence at the heart of what we have imagined as the Self.
In an attempt to speak about the Self, we have sought to find innovative ways to preserve its mystery, paradox, and unknown quality. Borrowing from postmodern philosophy, the Self has been imagined as a Self under erasure, as an idea and image that has the mortificatio and self-deconstruction at its heart. Such a Self is always a non-Self also. It is a darkness that is light and a light that is darkness, and in this way of imagining it we have a glimpse of Sol niger.
Experientially, these two poles of the archetype, light and dark, are in an eternal embrace, crossing one another in a dance that might look like the structure of DNA. It appears to me now that Sol niger might be considered an archetypal image of the non-Self, having two integrated poles and multiple differentiations. At one end, the non-Self can be seen in its most literal form locked into the nigredo and the mortification of the flesh. Here the non-Self leans toward physical annihilation and literal death. At its other pole, however, the archetypal image is no longer confined to the nigredo and reflects itself in a different light, where annihilation is linked to both the presence of the void understood as absence, Eros, and self-forgetting and a majesty that sets the soul on fire.
In all, there is an alchemy and art in darkness, an invisible design rendering and rending vision, calling it to its sourceless possibility. The light of Western metaphysics has obscured darkness; sedimented reason has thrown it to the shadows, naming it only as its inferior counterpart. But darkness is also the Other that likewise shines; it is illuminated not by light but by its own intrinsic luminosity. Its glow is that of the lumen naturae, the light of nature, whose sun is not the star of heaven but Sol niger, the black sun.
1. Zenkei Shibayama, Zen Comments on the Momonkan, p. 28.
2. C. G. Jung, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, vol. 2, ed. Claire Douglas, p. 1132.
1. C.G. Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, p. 228.
9. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works, p. 13, para. 14.
10. J. Hillman, “The Seduction of Black,” p. 45.
11. J. Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy,p. 251.
12. M. Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religions, p. 124.
13. Janet McCritchard, Eclipse of the Sun: An Investigation into the Sun and the Moon Myths.
14. Madronna Holden, “Light Who Loves Her Sister, Darkness,” Parabola (Spring-Summer, 2001): 38.
15. R. Moore and D. Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, p. 52.
16. D. Levin, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, p. 6.
17. Cf. J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 84.
18. E. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 150.
19. Ibid., p. 148.
20. Ibid.
21. Edinger, The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey through C. G. Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 20.
22. Stolcius, Vividarium Chymicumm, 1624.
23. Michael Maier, Atlanta Fugiens, 1618.
24. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 150.
25. Arthur Edward Waite, The Hermetic Museum (York Beach, Me.: Samuel Weiser, 1990), p. 278.
26. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 154.
27. Ibid.
28. Cf. Jung, “The Psychology of Transference.”
29. L. Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, p. 93.
30. Stanton Marlan, ed., Salt and the Alchemical Soul: Three Essays by Ernest Jones, C. G. Jung, and James Hillman, p. xxiv.
31. J. Hillman, “Silver and White Earth (Part Two),” p. 22.
32. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 156.
33. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, p. 52, para. 61, ftn. 2.
34. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Lawrence White, p. 1.
35. Edinger, Melville's Moby Dick: A Jungian Commentary, p. 21.
36. Ibid.
37. Excerpt from T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, 1963).
38. Johannes Fabricius, Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and Their Royal Art, p. 103.
1. Hillman, “The Seduction of Black,” p. 50.
2. W. Rubin, preface to Ad Reinhardt, p. 29.
3. Edinger, Melville's Moby Dick, p. 21.
4. Jung, Letters of C. G. Jung, vol. 1, 1906-1950, ed. Gerhard Adler; trans. R. F. C. Hull. Feb. 28, 1932, p. 89.
5. Edinger, Goethe's Faust: Notes for a Jungian Commentary, p. 8.
6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe, The Collected Works, vol. 2, Faust I & II, translated by Stuart Atkins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), lines 354-76, 298-405, 410-17, 640-46, 664-67.
7. Hillman, “The Imagination of Air and the Collapse of Alchemy,” p. 274.
8. Ibid.
9. Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 246d-e.
10. Samuel Hazo. “The Feast of Icarus.” The Rest Is Prose, p. 3.
11. Phillip Maverson, Classical Mythology in Literature, Art, and Music, p. 320.
12. Ibid.
13. Andrea De Pascalis, Alchemy, the Golden Art, p. 54, references Maier's 1617 text, Symbola aureae mensae for the same material.
14. Giles Clarke, “A Black Hole in Psyche,” p. 67.
15. Ibid., p. 69.
16. Ibid.
17. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self, p. 204.
18. Von Franz, M.-L., Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, pp. 156-57.
19. Laing, Divided Self, p. 205.
20. T. Folly and I. Zaczek, The Book of the Sun, p. 112.
21. Hillman, “The Seduction of Black,” p. 49.
22. G. Woolf, Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby, p. 174.
23. E. Germain, Shadows of the Sun: The Diaries of Harry Crosby, p. 7.
24. Woolf, Black Sun, 197.
25. Ibid., p. 197-98.
26. Ibid., p. 198.
27. Ibid.
28. Quoted in J. Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy, p. 141.
29. Ibid., p. 13.
30. Ibid., p. 12.
31. Ibid., p. 151.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 143.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 144.
36. Cf. Hillman, “On Senex Consciousness,” p. 24.
37. Cf. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self,p.911; Von Franz, Alchemy, p. 156.
38. Hillman, “On Senex Consciousness,” p. 20.
39. Ibid., p. 21.
40. Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold, p. 118.
41. Steven Lonsdale also richly amplifies the deep origins of dance in his books Animals and the Origins of Dance and Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion.
42. V. S. Gregorian, A. Azarian, M. B. Demaria, and L. D. McDonald, “Colors of Disaster: The Psychology of the ‘Black Sun,'” p. 1.
43. Ibid., p. 4.
44. Ibid.
45. Book of Joel 2:10 (Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version).
46. Revelations 6:12.
47. Gregorian, Azarian, Demaria, and McDonald, “Colors of Disaster,” p. 13.
48. Ibid.
49. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 144, para. 172.
50. Dieter Martinetz and Karl Kernz Lohs, Poison: Sorcery and Science, Friend and Foe, p. 136.
51. Outlines of Chinese Symbolism and Art Motives, C. A. S. Williams (Rutland, Vt., and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1974), p. 187.
52. Ibid.
53. Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, pp. 26-27.
54. Silvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess:A Way of Initiation for Woman, p. 24.
55. Ibid., pp. 24-25.
56. Ajit Mookerjee, Kali: The Feminine Force, p. 61.
57. E. Harding, Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar, p. 38.
58. Swami Vivekananda, In Search of God and Other Poems, p. 25.
59. R. F. McDermott, “The Western Kali,” p. 290.
60. Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 168.
61. Helen Luke, From Darkwood to White Rose Journey and Transformation in Dante's Divine Comedy, p. 41.
62. E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair. Note on back cover.
63. Ibid., p. 23-28.
64. Giegerich discusses the painful limitation in the chapter titled “No Admission” in The Soul's Logical Life.
65. Selection from Stephen Mitchell, trans., The Book of Job,p.13-14.
1. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 148.
2. In any case, for many alchemists, the boundaries between the images and overt reality were not so hard and fast as they are for modern consciousness.
3. R. Bosnak, A Little Course in Dreams: A Basic Handbook of Jungian Dream
work, pp. 60-68.
4. Miriam Van Scott, Encyclopedia of Hell, p. 6.
5. P. Tatham, “A Black Hole in Psyche: One Personal Reaction,” p.122.
6. Ibid., p.123.
7. Scott, Encyclopedia of Hell, p. 14.
8. William Blake, The Book of Urizen, from The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. by David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 74, 75.
9. D. Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit, p. 1.
10. Ibid, p.4, quotes L. Stein, “Introducing Not-Self,” Journal of Analytic Psy-chology12, no. 2 (1967): 97-113.
11. Ibid., p. 3.
12. Ibid., p.4.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p.5.
15. Ibid.
16. For Kalsched, the self-care system is an archetypal defense structure composed of mythological images of “the progressed and regressed aspects of the psyche” in conflict, but “maintaining an energetic organization” (3).
17. Ibid., p.4.
18. Ibid., p. 206
19. Ibid.
20. These considerations give rise to many compelling questions. For example, is the equation of the personal spirit with the Self in Jung's sense—something transcendent and partially beyond the psychic realm—an adequate one? Are the organizations of defenses protective of the Self or of the ego? Does the Self feel anxiety over trauma, or is anxiety, as Freud suggests, in the seat of the ego, which is then protected by archetypal processes of differing kinds? Does it make a difference who the “child” or “animal” is that's being attacked? Can the child at times reflect an innocence that must be killed, as alchemy would have it, or is the animal the kind that likewise must die? Is every child of the psyche a “divine child” and every animal a reflection of the Self? Can the Self be killed? Does it die when a person dies? In raising these questions, I am implicitly suggesting my uncertainty over what Kalsched has described (important contribution though it is) as an adequate basis for understanding the archetypal meaning of Sol niger seen only through the eyes of defense.
21. Cf. Richard Booth, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud.
22. Rosen, Transforming Depression, p. xxvi.
23. Ibid., p. 34.
24. Cf. Rosen, Transforming Depression, p. 65.
25. Kalsched, Inner World of Trauma, p. 215.
26. Mark Welman, “Thanatos and Existence: Towards a Jungian Phenomenology of the Death Instinct,” p. 123.
27. Ibid., p. 127.
28. Ibid., quoting Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.
29. Ibid., p. 128.
30. Cf. Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 64.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., p. 65.
33. Ibid., p. 49.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p. 46.
37. Ibid., p. 47.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., p. 67.
40. Jung, “Psychology of Transference,” p. 257.
41. Jung, “Psychology of Transference,” in Practice of Psychotherapy, p. 265.
42. Jeffrey Raff, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination, p. 82.
43. Ibid., p. 80.
44. Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century, p. 8.
45. Ibid.
46. Edward Kelly, “The Terrestrial Astronomy of Kelly series,” sixteen engravings, http://www.levity.com/alchemy/emblems.html (accessed May 7, 2004). The site author credits the image to Edward Kelly, Tractatus duo egregii, de Lapide Philosophorum, una cum Theatro astronomica terrestri, cum Figuris, in gratiam filiorum Hermetis nunc primum in lucem editi, curante J. L. M. C (Johanne Lange Medicin Candito), Hamburg, 1676.
47. Adam McLean, ed., The Hermetic Garden of Daniel Stolcius: Composed of Flowerlets of Philosophy Engraved in Copper and Explained in Short Verses Where Weary Students of Chemistry May Find a Treasure House and Refresh Themselves after Their Laboratory Work, emblem 99.
48. Ibid., p. 108.
49. Ibid.
50. Mona Sanqvist, “Alchemy and Interart,” p. 276.
51. Ibid.
52. J. Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism, p. 234.
53. Ibid.
54. Cf. ibid., p. 235.
55. Ibid., p. 236.
56. Ibid., p. 240.
57. M. E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth, p. 1.
58. Anna C. Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, p. 181.
59. Ibid., p. 184.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 196.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., p. 193.
65. Ibid.
66. Barbara Rose, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt.
67. Ibid., p. 81.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., p. 82.
70. R. Smith, “Paint in Black: Ad Reinhardt at Moca,” pp. 1, 9.
71. Naomi Vine. “Mandala and Cross: Ad Reinhardt's Black Paintings,”
73. D. Kuspit, “Negativity Sublime Identity: Pierre Soulages's Abstract Paintings.”
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., p. 17.
76. Robert Rauschenberg, “Black Painting,” p. 136.
77. Meir Ronnen, “Kiefer on Kiefer: The Impossibility of Making an Image.”
78. J. Flam, 1992, “The Alchemist.”
79. Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Anselm Kiefer: The Psychology of “After the Catastro-phe,”p. 79.
80. Ibid., p. 82.
81. Ibid., p. 87.
82. Janet Towbin, The Seduction of Black. Artist's statement.
1. Jung, Alchemical Studies, pp. 160-61.
2. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 20-21.
3. Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery,p. 5.
4. Indra Sinha, Tantra: The Cult of Ecstasy, p. 52.
5. Mookerjee, Kali: The Feminine Force, p. 64.
6. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 21, citing Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, paragraphs 484-85.
7. The process of the albedo is complex and has been the topic of many commentaries. See Edinger's Anatomy of the Psyche (40-41) for further elaboration. Also see Hillman's essays “Silver and White Earth,” parts one and two, and Abraham's Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery.
8. Hillman, “Silver and White Earth,” part two, p. 33.
9. Ibid., p. 34.
10. Jung, Alchemical Studies, p. 125.
11. Ibid., p. 126, citing Mylius, Philosophia reformata, p. 244.
12. Ibid., p. 131.
13. Derrida, Disseminations, p. 89.
14. Martin Jay, p. 510.
15. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 86. Derrida also cites Plato, The Republic, 508a-509.
16. Cf. Jung, Alchemical Studies, p. 125, paragraphs 161-63.
17. Corbin uses the term mundus imaginalis in his discussion of Sufi mysticism. Hillman picks it up in his elaboration of archetypal psychology. It refers to an intermediary kind of imagination not reducible to either nature or spirit but residing instead in between as an intermediary phenomenon of the imaginal.
18. In Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, Hillman credits Corbin, who was primarily known for his interpretations of Islamic thought, for also being the “second immediate father” of Archetypal Psychology(3). In his own work, Hillman goes on to elaborate the notion of the mundus imaginalis.
19. Jung, “On the Nature of the Psyche,” p. 195, quoting Liber de Caducis.
20. Kalsched, p. 64.
21. G. R. S. Mead, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in the Western Tradition, p. 11.
22. In addition to Jung's work on the subtle body, the writing of Nathan Schwartz-Salant particularly makes use of the concept with regard to clinical practice. Cf. Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of the Human Relationship: Alchemy and the Transformation of the Self.
23. James E. Siegel has put forth an interesting variation on the idea of the microcosm in “The Idea of the Microcosm: A New Interpretation.” He states, in contrast or complement to Jung, “Whether or not the collective unconscious is a microcosm, the psyche in its entirety is a microcosm with the body as the earth element,” and he feels that “this finding may have important consequences for our understanding of the human condition as well as for our appreciation of Jungian thought” (52). In that article he speaks of an inner sun and moon, inner weather and climate, inner oceanography, and so on and concludes that we reside in an inner world in which “the inner sun can be regulated to . . . access the unconscious and to influence if not control the inner weather. This article's microcosm concept is perhaps the opposite side of the same coin as analytical psychology, and it can perhaps help to further establish the reality of the psyche” (72).
24. Sanford Drob, Symbols of the Kabbalah: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, p. 186. Drob cites Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism,
p. 56.
25. Ibid., p. 187.
26. Ibid.
27. Ezekiel commentary, pp. 7-8.
28. Ibid., p. 188.
29. Since 1933 the Eranos meetings have been held annually in late August at the home of Olga Froebe-Kapteyn, at the northern end of Lago Maggiore near Ascona, Switzerland. In this setting scholars from around the globe present their work. Lectures are delivered in German, English, Italian, and other languages, and these lectures are published in the form of the Eranos Jahr-bucher [yearbooks]. Rudolf Otto suggested the Greek word eranos, which means a meal to which each person contributes a share. Jung was a regular and influential participant in these meetings. For more information, see the preface by Joseph Campbell in Spirit and Nature: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks(New York: Pantheon Books/Bollingen Press, 1954).
30. A great deal of uncertainty exists about the origins of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah. Gershom Scholem writes about this issue in his book Origins of the Kabbalah. He notes, “The question of the origin and early stages of the Kabbalah, that form of Jewish mysticism and theosophy that appears to have emerged suddenly in the thirteenth century, is indisputably one of the most difficult in the history of the Jewish religion after the destruction of the Second Temple” (3). Different traditions of Jewish mysticism have dated the origins to much earlier sources, but such attributions are difficult to authenticate.
31. Drob describes the sefirot as “the traits of God and the structural elements of the world” and notes that “they should be capable of providing us with insight into both God and the totality of the created world” (Kabbalistic Metaphors, p. 49).
32. Two sources for further elaboration of this theme are The Tree of Life; Chayyim Vital's Introduction to the Kabbalah of Issac; Luria's Palace of Adam Kadmon;and the Gates of Light, by Joseph Gikatilla.
33. From von Rosenroth, Kabbala de Nudate, Frankfurt, 1684; referenced by Kurt Seligman in The History of Magic.
34. Seligman, History of Magic, p. 352.
35. Drob, Symbols of the Kabbalah, p. 200.
36. Alex Grey, Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey,p.36.
37. Ibid.
38. David V. Tansley, Subtle Body: Essence and Shadow, p. 46.
39. “The halo is inscribed with signs of contemplation from six different paths: the symbols of Yin and Yang from Taoism; a description of the magnitude of Brahman from Hinduism; the watchword of the Jewish faith, ‘Hear Oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One'; the Tibetan Buddhist mantra, ‘Om Mani Padme Hum,' a prayer for the unfolding of the mind of enlightenment; Christ's words of the ‘Lord's Prayer' in Latin; and a description of Allah along with the Islamic prayer, ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his messenger'” (Gray, Sacred Mirrors,opposite plate of “Praying”). Grey says he attempted in his image to depict the spiritual core of light that transcends, unites, and manifests in the various religious paths.
40. Phillip Rawson, The Art of Tantra, p. 154.
41. Rawson, Art of Tantra, p. 168.
42. Erwin Rouselle, “Spiritual Guidance in Contemporary Taoism.”
43. Ibid., p. 75.
44. Little and Eichman, Taoism, p. 350.
45. Rousselle, “Spiritual Guidance,” p. 71.
46. Cf. ibid., p. 83, 82.
47. The White Cloud Daoist Temple, p. 2.
48. This description of my visit to China is recounted in my article, “Jung in China: The First International Conference of Jungian Psychology and Chinese Culture. A Personal Account.” The Round Table Review6, no. 4 (March-April 1999): 24.
49. Little and Eichman, Taoism, p. 348. I also appreciate the help extended to me by Heyong Shen, professor of psychology, and Fu Jian Pinga, a respected specialist in classical Chinese culture at South China Normal University in Guang Zhov China, as well as Donald Sutton, professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University.
50. The most important of these was Huang Zhijie, a Taoism master of the Zhongyee Temple. Ren Farong, from Louguam Temple in Shaanxi, China, has written a book on the I Chingand internal alchemy in which he summarizes a lifetime of practice.
51. Stanton Marlan, “The Metaphor of Light and Renewal in Taoist Alchemy and Jungian Analysis,” p. 266.
52. C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, p. 266, para. 337.
53. Rebekah Kenton, “A Kabbalistic View of the Chakras,” at http://www .kabbalahsociety.org/ (accessed May 9, 2004).
54. P. Tatham, “A Black Hole in the Psyche: One Personal Reaction,” p. 120.
55. G. Elder, The Body: An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism: The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, p. 411.
56. Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, p. 89.
57. Phillip Rawson and Laszlo Legeza, Tao: The Chinese Philosophy of Time and Change, p. 25.
58. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 211.
59. Ibid., p. 210.
60. Adam McClean discusses the important alchemical theme of bird symbolism in “The Birds in Alchemy.” Moreover, Lyndy Abraham writes:
Birds of all kinds appear in alchemical texts. The birth of the philosopher's stone from the union of the male and female substances at the chemical wedding is frequently compared to the birth of a bird or chick from the philosopher's egg or vessel. Some of the vessels in which this opus is carried out are named after birds: the pelican... , the cormorant and the stork.... The four main stages of the opus are like
wise symbolized by birds: The black nigredo by the crow or raven, the multi-coloured or rainbow stage by the argus, peacock or peacock's tail, the white albedo by the swan or dove, and the red rubedo by the phoenix.” (23)
61. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, p. 243, para. 357. The images are located on pp. 245 and 257, respectively.
62. Cf. ibid., p. 256.
63. Jung, Alchemical Studies, figures 26 and 28.
64. Eden Gray, A Complete Guide to the Tarot, p. 34.
65. Ad de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery.
66. Ibid., p. 319.
67. Ellen Frankel and Betsy Protkin-Teutsch, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Symbols, p. 98.
68. Ibid., p. 100.
69. Ibid.
70. Ananda Coomaraswamy, “The Inverted Tree.”
71. Jung, Alchemical Studies, pp. 313-14.
72. Ibid., p. 311.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid., p. 312. A similar resonance can be found in the pictograph of the Tao as pointed out in David Rosen's Tao of Jung: The Way of Integrity, pp. xvi-xvii: “On the right side [of the pictograph] is a head with hair which is associated with heaven and interpreted as the beginning or source.”
75. Ibid., p. 312n. 11, and 313.
76. From Prabhavananda and Isherwood, Bhagavad-Gita, p. 146. Quoted in Jung, Alchemical Studies, p. 313.
77. Hillman, “Senex and Puer” in Puer Papers, p. 30.
78. Cf. Mitchell Walker, “The Double: Same-Sex Inner Helper,” pp. 48-52; Lyn Cowan, “Dismantling the Animus”; Claire Douglas, The Woman in the Mirror: Analytical Psychology and the Feminine; Christine Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love; and Claudette Kulkarni, Lesbians and Lesbianism: A Post-Jungian Perspective.
79. Hillman, A Blue Fire: Selected Writings of James Hillman, p. 82.
1. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, p. 82, para. 112.
2. De Pascalis, Alchemy: The Golden Art,p. 32.
10. Ibid., p. 16.
11. Ibid., p. 19.
12. Ibid., p. 20.
13. Jung and Edinger both attempt to deal with this apparent paradox. Edinger quotes Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis:
I must point out to the reader that these remarks on the significance of the ego might easily prompt him to charge me with grossly contradicting myself. He will perhaps remember that he has come across a very similar argument in my other writings. Only there it was not a question of ego but of the self I have defined the self as the totality of the conscious and the unconscious psyche, and the ego as the central reference-point of consciousness. It is an essential part of the self, and can be used pars pro toto [part for the whole] when the significance of consciousness is borne in mind. But when we want to lay emphasis on the psychic totality it is better to use the term “self.” There is no question of a contradictory definition, but merely of a difference of standpoint. (Mysterium Lectures, 93, para. 133)
Edinger himself goes on to note the following: “So the sun as the symbol of consciousness represents both the ego and the Self. The reason for that double representation is that the Self cannot come into conscious, effective existence except through the agency of an ego. Needless to say it can come into plenty of effective existence without an ego but it can't come into consciously effective existence without the agency of an ego. That's why it is unavoidable that the symbolism of Sol, as the principle of consciousness, represents both the ego and the Self” (94).
14. Niel Micklem, Jung's Concept of the Self: Its Relevance Today, papers from the public conference organized in May, 1990, by the Jungian Postgraduate Committee of the British Association of Psychotherapists.
15. Niel Micklem, “I Am Not Myself: A Paradox,” in Jung's Concept of the Self: Its Relevance Today, papers from the public conference organized in May, 1990, by the Jungian Postgraduate Committee of the British Association of Psychotherapists, p.7.
16. Ibid., p.8.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., pp.8-9.
20. Ibid., p. 10.
21. The coniunctio has been described as “an alchemical symbol of a union of unlike substances; a marrying of the opposites in an intercourse which has as its fruition the birth of a new element. . . . From Jung's point of view, the coniunctio was identified as the central idea of alchemical process. He himself saw it as an archetype of psychic functioning, symbolizing a pattern of relationships between two or more unconscious factors. Since such relationships are at first incomprehensible to the perceiving mind, the coniunc-tio is capable of innumerable symbolic projections (i.e., man and woman, king and queen, dog and bitch, cock and hen, Sol and Luna).” From A. Samuels, B. Shorter, and F. Plaut's Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, p. 35.
22. Micklem, “I Am Not Myself,” p. 11.
23. Cf. Edinger, Mysterium Lectures, p. 132.
24. Ibid., p. 134.
25. Ibid., pp. 134-35.
26. Jung, Alchemical Studies, caption below frontispiece.
27. Ibid.
28. Edinger, Mysterium Lectures, p. 135.
29. Ibid., p. 135.
30. Ibid., p. 136.
31. Hillman, “Silver and the White Earth (Part Two),” p. 56.
32. Hillman, “Peaks and Vales,” p. 57.
33. Hillman, “Silver and the White Earth (Part Two),” pp. 56-67.
34. Ibid., p. 57.
35. Ibid.
36. From “The Secret of Freedom,” verse 1, in The Secret of the Golden Flower: The Classic Chinese Book of Life, trans. by Thomas Cleary, p. 39.
37. Ross, Nancy Wilson, The World of Zen: An East-West Anthology, p. 259.
38. From poem, “Immortal Sisters,” by Sun Bu-er, in Cleary, Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 103.
39. Ibid., pp. 41-42.
40. Ibid., p. 101.
41. Oscar Mandel, Chi Po and the Sorcerer: A Chinese Tale for Children and Philosophers.
42. Ibid., pp. 25-27.
43. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, p. 165.
44. Ibid., p. 167.
45. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 546, para. 778.
46. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, 167.
47. Ibid., p. 168.
48. Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, p. 18.
49. Cf. Hillman, “The Seduction of Black,” p. 45. The word “alchemy” is said to derive from the root khem or chemia [black] and to refer to Egypt, the land of black soil.
50. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3d ed. (Boston, New York, and London: Houghton-Mifflin Press, 1992).
51. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 228.
52. Ibid., p. 229.
53. Fabricius, Alchemy, p. 60.
54. Ilan Chelners, Oxford Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art, p. 399.
55. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, pp. 247-48, para. 332.
56. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, p. 147.
57. From personal correspondence, although the pastor is quoting Kallistos Ware in The Orthodox Way.
58. E. Stein, Knowledge and Faith, p. 87.
59. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, p. 265.
60. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology and the Celestial Hierarchies, p. 9.
61. Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius, p. 132.
62. Ibid., p. 136, citing Bartholemew.
63. Pseudo-Dionysius, “The Mystical Theology,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, p. 141.
64. Even when the Divinity is not able to be called forth in manifestation and remains silent, the Divine essence is “present.” Jung notes, “Summoned and not summoned, God will be there” (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, illustration 13, p. xviii).
65. Cf. Hillman, “Silver and the White Earth,” part one, p. 21.
66. See Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, p. 31.
67. M. Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, p. 154, quoting Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.
68. C. G. Jung, Aion, Collected Works, vol. 9ii.
69. Roger Brooke, Jung and Phenomenology, p. 131.
70. D. Miller, “Nothing Almost Sees Miracles! Self and No-Self in Psychology and Religion,” p. 15.
71. Ibid., p. 14, quoting Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis,para. 190.
72. Cf. ibid., p. 13.
73. Ibid., p. 15.
74. Sean Kelly, “Atman, Anatta, and Transpersonal Psychology,” pp. 188-99.
75. Ibid., p. 197.
76. Ibid., p. 198.
77. Jung also uses the word “complementarity,” which for him was a bit too mechanical and functional and for which compensation is “a psychological refinement” (“On the Nature of the Psyche,” p. 287).
78. Cf. Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, pp. 207-208.
79. Hillman, “Peaks and Vales,” p. 67.
80. Lacan's “petite a” is a profoundly polyvalent concept and the subject of literally thousands of pages of exegesis in Lacan's work. That said, Bruce Fink discusses it in terms of “the residue of symbolization—the real that remains, insists, and ex-sists after or despite symbolization—as the traumatic cause, and as that which interrupts the smooth functioning of law and the automatic unfolding of the signifying chain” (Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, p. 83).
81. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 98, para. 117.
82. Ibid., p. 97, para. 117.
83. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, p. 4.
84. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. xvii.
85. Ibid., p. 19.
86. Cf. Stuart Sim, Derrida and the End of History.
87. Hillman, “Concerning the Stone: Alchemical Images of the Goal,” p. 256.
93. Cf. Critchely and Dews, Deconstructive Subjectivities, p. 26.
94. Levinas, for instance, criticizes Heidegger's transsubjective concept of Da-seinby noting that “Dasein is never hungry” (Critchely and Dews, p. 30), and Hillman chooses to rely on the word “soul” as opposed to Self because it retains a connection with the body, with physical and emotional concerns above love and loss, life and death. “It is experienced as a living force having a physical location” andis more easily expressed in psychological, metaphoric and poetic descriptions (Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, p. 207).
Both Levinas and Hillman share a number of overlapping concerns. Both are critical of the primacy of a theoretical model of consciousness in which the subject maintains an objectifiying relation to the world mediated through representation. Both support a movement toward a revisioned subject as an embodied being of flesh and blood, a subject who is fully sentient and in touch with sensation and who is “vulnerable” and “open to wounding” (E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, p. 15), filled with “jouissance and joie de vivre”(Critchely and Dews, p.29).
In addition, both Levinas and Hillman share a unique, ethical sensibility. For Levinas, ethics is fundamental, and the entire thrust of his Otherwise than Beingis to “found ethical subjectivity in sensibility and to describe sensibility as a proximity to the other” (ibid., p.30). What this means for Levinas is very different from our usual understanding of ethics. For him, “Ethics is not an obligation toward the other mediated through” formal principles or “good conscience.” Moral consciousness is not an experience of values but an access to exterior being—to what he calls the Other. From a psychological point of view, this begins to sound like the capacity to see beyond our narcissistic self-enclosure and actually to have contact with something outside of our own egos. The subject is subject to something that exceeds us (ibid., p.26). The “deep structure of subjective experi-ence”—the responsibility or responsivity to the other—is what Levinas calls Psyche (ibid., p.31). Likewise, the thrust of Hillman's archetypal psychology is a movement beyond the narcissistic enclosure in which the aim is a “psychotherapeutic cure of ‘me',” in which all the me-ness has been cooked out of our emotions (Hillman, “Concerning the Stone,” p. 259).
This comparison of Levinas with Hillman is not meant in any way to equate their thought. A real comparison of their work would require an independent study of what each thinker means by terms they use in common. For instance, the subject for Levinas is an embodied “me” and nobody else, whereas, as we have seen, for Hillman the “me” is what is to be “cured” and “cooked.” This may or may not be more than a terminological difference since, for both, the “psyche” is not an instance of some general concept or genus of the human being: an ego, self-consciousness, or thinking thing, and “both move beyond a concept of an abstract and universal ‘I.'”
For Levinas, the subject is not hard and autonomous but soft, weak, passive, sensual, and fleshy. In Jungian terms, such a subject is one who has integrated the feminine, the anima, the soul. In The Myth of Analysis, Hillman puts it this way: “[P]sychotherapy achieves its ultimate goal in the wholeness of the conjunction [in the] incarnation of durable weakness and unheroic strength” (p. 293). For him this means an end to the “repudiation of femininity” and a termination of misogyny, when we “take Eve back into Adam's body, when we are no longer decided about what is... inferior, what superior, what exterior, what interior; when we have taken on and taken in all those qualities not per sefemale but which have been projected onto women and seen as inferior.” To take back this “inferiority” leads toward the therapeutic goal of the coniunctio, which would now be experienced as a weakening—rather than an increase—of consciousness. This means “the sacrifice of the mind's bright eye” and a “loss of what we have long considered to be our most precious human holding: Apollonian consciousness” (ibid., p. 295). Since women as well as men are subject to the influences of modernism, their consciousness can likewise be dominated by Apollonian identifications, and a similar integration of anima values can lead to a coniunctio that sacrifices the bright eye, which stands above its objects in a specular way. Hillman and others have stated that the anima is linked not only to the psyche of men (Hillman, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, pp.53-55).
“A therapy that would move toward this coniunctio would be obliged to stay always within the mess of ambivalence, the comings and goings of the libido, letting interior movement replace clarity, interior closeness replace objectivity, the child of psychic spontaneity replace literal right action” (Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 295).
In Hillman's emphasis on closeness, movement beyond objectivity, and spontaneity, his thought resonates with that of Levinas. The subject Hillman describes is resonant with Levinas's postdeconstructive subjectivity of a “subject afterdeconstruction” (Critchely and Dews, p.39).
95. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche,p.148, quoting The Lives of the Alchemysti-cal Philosophers, p. 145.
96. Ibid., p.149, quoting Paracelsus, Hermetic and Alchemical Writings, 1:153.
97. Hillman, “Seduction of Black,” p. 49.
98. Cf. ibid., pp. 49-52.
99. Hillman, “Concerning the Stone,” p. 243.
100. Hillman, “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis,” in C. Eshleman, ed., Sulfur I: A Literary Tri-Quarterly of the Whole Art,p.36.
101. Cf. Hillman, “Concerning the Stone,” pp. 261, 265.
102. Hillman, “Alchemical Blue,” p. 35.
103. Hillman, “Silver and the White Earth (Part Two),” pp. 33-34.
104. Hillman, “The Yellowing of the Work,” p. 78.
105. Hillman, “Concerning the Stone: Alchemical Images of the Goal,” p. 243.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid.
108. Hillman, “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis,” p. 41.
109. Gage, Color and Meaning, p. 239.
110. Toni Morrison, The Song of Solomon, p. 40.
111. Hillman, Seduction of Black, p. 51.
112. J. Brozostoski, “Tantra Art.”
113. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 105-106. Jung evaluates three printed editions of the Tractatus aureus and concludes that the proper translation of Hermes/Venus's comment is ‘I beget the light, and darkness is not my nature . . . therefore no thing is better or more worthy of veneration than the conjunction of myself and my brother.'
114. Stanislav Grof, LSD Psychotherapy,p. 283.
115. Cf. W. Giegerich, The Soul's Logical Life, p. 61.
116. Hillman, Dreams and the Underworld, p. 34.
117. Scheper, G., “Illumination and Darkness in the Song of Songs.”
118. Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism,p. 108.
119. Shikiko Izutsu, “The Paradox of Light and Darkness in the Garden of Mystery of Shabastori,” pp. 300-301.
120. A further elaboration of black light and luminous night has been written by Tom Cheetham in an article titled “Black Light: Hades, Lucifer, and the Secret of the Secret, a Contribution to the Differentiation of Darkness.”
121. Ibid., pp. 303-304.
122. Ibid., p. 304.
123. Shunryu Suzuki, Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness: Zen Talks on the Sandokai.
124. Ibid., p. 111.
125. Paul Murray, “Canticle of the Void,” pp. 25-27.
126. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets.
127. Paul Celan, “Psalm,” in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. My thanks go to Peter Thompson.
128. Josef V. Schneersohn and Uri Menachem Schneersohn, Basi LeGani: Cha-sidic Discourses, p. 24.
129. Personal correspondence, April 11-15, 2001.
130. Personal correspondence, April 11-15, 2001.
131. Personal correspondence, April 11-15, 2001.
132. Personal communication. Bitzalel Malamud is a Hasid who specialized in the study of an untranslatable Chasidic work titled The Mitzava Is a Candle and the Tora Is a Light, subtitled The Gate of Unity by Mittler Rebbe (Dov Ber of Lubavitch). This text has an extensive commentary by Reb Hillel.
133. Robert Romanyshyn, The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation.
134. Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery,pp. 141-42.
135. Ibid.
136. Hillman, “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis,” p. 37.
137. Ibid., p.35.
138. Ad de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, pp. 353-54.
139. Hillman, “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis,” p. 41.
140. Ibid.
141. Ibid.
142. Personal letter from Harry Wilmer, Dec. 24, 2002. He references Kip Thorn in his book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy.
143. James Glanz, “Bright Glow May Change Dark Reputation of Black Hole.”
144. This image is an artist's rendition of recent observations. “Artist's View of Black Hole and Companion Star GRO J1655-40,” at http://hubblesite.org/ newscenter/archive/2002/30/image/a (accessed May 10, 2004).
145. Jung, C. J. Jung Letters,vol. 1, 1906-1950,pp. 449-50.
146. Arthur ZaJouc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind, pp. 325-26.
147. Ibid., p.325.
148. Ibid.
1. Jung to Max Frischknect, Feb. 8, 1946, in Letters of C. G. Jung, p. 411.